As one of the world's busiest rivers the Rhine carries about 300 million tons of freight annually, upriver and down, between Switzerland and the Dutch ports on the North Sea. Heavy shipping traffic on the Rhine, including ocean vessels reaching Mannheim and barges reaching Basel, has been an integral part of the Rhine valley landscape for the past 150 years. But a bounty of commercial shipping on the Rhine has not always been part of the river's history. Despite the Rhineland's growing population and increasingly productive economy at the end of the early modern period, long-distance shipping activity along the river gradually declined during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. River commerce revived and expanded only in the early nineteenth century, stimulated in part by new developments in transportation technology, business organization, industrial development, and an unprecedented civil engineering assault on the river's natural contours. These material components of the nineteenth century transportation revolution as it unfolded along the Rhine are generally well known.

The morning of May 23, 1912, witnessed the christening of a new German icon. For many Germans, it was a wonder of the modern age, a powerful symbol of the nation's achievements in industry, engineering, and technology. For others, it was the embodiment of all the evils wrought by political, social, and cultural transformation. Some said it expressed the character of the German people, in a manner similar to Cologne Cathedral and Sanssouci, the palace of Frederick the Great. But there were those who thought it “appeared as a typical manifestation of the new Germany, with its huckstering and obtrusive manners, more a snobbism than a symbol of German competence.” The Kaiser was fascinated by this expression of the ambition, ingenuity, and might of an Empire in which he believed power rested with himself, the Prussian nobility, and a powerful military complex. And yet Hamburg's mayor, Johann Heinrich Burchard, echoed the feelings of many when he described this new wonder as “above all … the product of a flourishing, self-conscious German middle class.” Although extolled as a symbol of German unity, Social Democrats denounced the modern leviathan as an expression of class inequality and lamented that ten men were killed and one hundred injured while constructing it. With this in mind, how could Germany be proud of what it had achieved?

In May 1917 twenty-seven residents of Landau (Württemberg) sent a long petition to the German Reichstag. The group, which included doctors, pastors, teachers, and industrialists, demanded that the state put an end to the “immoral” behavior of women who had romantic relationships with foreign prisoners of war. The petition included more than one hundred examples of such affairs, gleaned from newspapers, court records, and eyewitness accounts. The petitioners lamented the “sinking morality” of the countryside and the damaged reputation of German women. They also had more immediate concerns. These affairs were threatening the happiness of families, “complicating” the feeding of the nation, weakening the strength of the people, and heightening the fear of espionage. The petitioners went on to warn the Reichstag deputies that “good German citizens are full of anger at such events,” and that the common person's “sense of sacrifice” was dwindling now, in the third year of the war.

The nature and intentions of Nazi economic policy are once again being hotly contested, although on a new set of terms. No longer is the German bourgeoisie's complicity in the Nazi “seizure of power” or the capitalist underpinnings of Hitler's subsequent aggressions at the center of the discussion. Rather, recent scholarship has chosen to grapple more carefully with the dynamic interplay between economics, race, and social policy in the Third Reich. As David Schoenbaum contended forty years ago, the Third Reich's apotheosization of “national community [Volksgemeinschaft]” led to an array of welfare programs, educational reforms, and “meritocratic” values that may in fact have produced a modern “social revolution.” To be sure, a number of subsequent studies have highlighted longer-term continuities, suggesting that the Nazi Sozialstaat was indebted in some part to the legacy of the Weimar Republic and in other respects presaged the social policies of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Historians likewise continue to debate the relative improvement in living standards experienced by the average German under Hitler. Virtually all scholars agree, however, that, regardless of its efficacy, the underpinnings of Nazi social policy are to be located in the Third Reich's drive to construct a racial utopia at home while securing popular support for wars of conquest abroad.

On October 10, 1941, the soldiers of the 3rd Company, 691st Infantry Regiment were uneasy. The task ahead of them was something new. They were to kill the entire Jewish population of Krucha, a town in central Belarus. A few hours later, Private Wilhelm Magel stood with another soldier in front of four Jewish women and an old man with a long, white beard. The company First Sergeant, Emil Zimber, ordered the Jews to turn away from the shooters, but they remained facing the German soldiers. Zimber gave the order to fire but Magel and his colleague, a former divinity student, did not aim at their targets. They requested to be relieved from the execution detail and were assigned to guard the remaining Jews who were waiting in the village square for their turn. This German Army unit without assistance of any other organization murdered a minimum of 150 Jewish men, women, and children in Krucha that day.