Profs and Pints Online presents: “How the Nazis Stole Christmas,” on German fascists’ attempts to remake the holiday to promote their agenda, with Joe Perry, associate professor of history at Georgia State University and author of Christmas in Germany: A Cultural History.

[This talk will remain available in recorded form at the link given here for tickets and access.]

Christmas has long been Germany’s favorite holiday, and thus it represented a tantalizing target for Nazi propagandists who sought to turn German society into a fascist “Peoples Community.”  Beginning with the founding of the Nazi party in the early 1920s, and with increasing fervor one they took power in 1933, committed party members strove to remake the holiday to express the basic precepts of National Socialism.

Learn about this dark chapter in the history of the holiday with Joe Perry, a scholar of German history who has extensively researched how that nation celebrated Christmas over time.

He’ll describe how Nazi ethnographers, poets, schoolteachers and propagandists sought to twist the meanings of German Christmas to legitimize the racial policies at the core of the Nazi program. Drawing on familiar assumptions that Christmas originated in pagan celebrations of the winter solstice, such ideologues championed supposedly Nordic-Germanic traditions to de-Christianize Christmas and turn the holiday into a celebration of a German racial community rooted in “blood and soil.”

This ideological apparatus informed both public holiday observances and private family celebrations of Christmas in the Third Reich, and ideology met practice in the popular “People’s Christmas” charity campaigns, organized by party members each December. When Germany went to war in 1939, Nazi propagandists went into full gear to celebrate a radicalized “War Christmas” modelled on the experience of World War I. Such efforts grew increasingly hollow until they revealed the contradictions and ultimate failure of this colonizing project.

The Nazification of Christmas offers insight into one of the central questions in the history of National Socialism: Why, and to what extent, did ordinary Germans support the regime? The answers remain tentative, but the evidence shows that the Nazi appropriation of Christmas generated both consensus and conflict, and both loyalty and distrust. (Ticket: $12)

Profs & Pints Online: How the Nazis Stole Christmas