Eberhard Jäckel
| Eberhard Jäckel | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
June 29, 1929 Wesermünde, Hanover |
| Nationality | German |
| Fields | Historian |
| Institutions |
University of Kiel University of Stuttgart |
| Alma mater |
University of Freiburg University of Florida |
| Notable awards | Awarded the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis |
Eberhard Jäckel (born June 29, 1929) is a Social Democratic German historian, noted for his studies of Adolf Hitler's role in German history. Jäckel sees Hitler as being the historical equivalent to the Chernobyl disaster.
Born in Wesermünde, Hanover, Jäckel studied history at Göttingen, Tübingen, Freiburg, Gainesville, and Paris after World War II. After serving as an assistant and docent at Kiel until 1966, he taught from 1967, following Golo Mann, as Professor for Modern History at the University of Stuttgart and remained loyal to this university.
Jäckel's PhD dissertation was turned into his first book, 1966's Frankreich in Hitlers Europa (France In Hitler's Europe), a study of German policy towards France from 1933 to 1945. Jäckel first rose to fame through his 1969 book Hitlers Weltanschauung (Hitler's Worldview), which was an examination of Hitler's worldview and beliefs. Jäckel argued that far from being an opportunist with no beliefs as had been argued by Alan Bullock, Hitler held to a rigid set of fixed beliefs and he had consistently acted from his "race and space" philosophy throughout his career. In Jäckel's opinion, the core of Hitler's world-view was his belief in what Hitler saw as the merciless struggle for survival between the "Aryan race" and the "Jewish race" and in his belief that stronger "races" possessed large amounts of Lebensraum (living space). In Jäckel's view, everything that Hitler did throughout his life stemmed from the beliefs he had adopted in the 1920s. Jäckel has argued that Hitler felt there were three factors that determined a people's "racial value", namely its awareness of itself, the type of leadership it had, and its ability to make war. According to Jäckel, for Germany these meant ultra-nationalism, the Führerprinzip (Führer principle), and militarism, and all three were the constants throughout Hitler's beliefs throughout his life. In Jäckel's opinion, Mein Kampf is a long rant against the three principles that Hitler saw as the antithesis of his three sacred principles, namely internationalism, democracy and pacifism. Jäckel asserts that for Hitler "the originators and bearers of all three counterpositions are the Jews". In Jäckel's view, in the Zweites Buch of 1928, Hitler:
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