To Die for Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon

Jay Baird reviews the nazi martyrs, such as Horst Wessel and Herbert Norkus, and uses them to explain how the concept of immolation and self sacrifice was so central to the Hitler era. Poets such as Gerhard Schumann are also treated, though there is little on art, sculpture and architecture. Nazi heroes themselves owed much to Germany's mythical past (the Teutonic forests and all) which was especially loved by Himmler who saw himself as a reincarnation of the medieval ruler Henry The Fowler. There is an insightful concluding chaper on the myth of death in the second world war. As the Reich crashed into ruins, Goebbels was still proudly glorifying self sacrifice in his movie epic Kolberg. In this way, nazism sought to equate noble death as the moral equivalent of victory. However, to what extent all this propaganda really influenced the man in the street would make another and equally interesting book.