ABSTRACT
In 1944, when the ‘Thousand Year Reich’ was already approaching its premature end, Friedrich Alfred Beck published Der Aufgang des Germanischen Weltalters (The rise of the Germanic world-age), which presents the racial, philosophical, and historical theories underlying National Socialism in often turgid detail.1 What Beck saw as the meaning and historical and racial background of Germanentum is here set in the context of other views expressed in Germany during National Socialist rule. (Germanentum or ‘Germanic-ness’ is difficult to translate precisely: it means what is of the essence of the Germanic peoples, or their ethos.) A number of these ideas did not originate in Nazi thought, or even in the 20th century; what is interesting in this context is the application of a whole state apparatus to their propagation.
