Inventing ‘Paganists’: a Close Reading of Richard Steigmann-Gall's the Holy Reich
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article questions Richard Steigmann-Gall's claim that leading National Socialists were essentially ‘Christian’ and that neo-pagan ideas played an insignificant role in the ideology of nazism. This is done by examining the argument of Dr Goebbels' novel Michael. Ein deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblättern (1929) to reveal its anti-Christian structure. Speeches and other statements by and about Goebbels are then looked at to show that his work is consistent with German neo-pagan thought. The role of Alfred Rosenberg is then re-examined, demonstrating that, contrary to the claims of Steigmann-Gall and many other writers, his work was highly regarded by Hitler and other nazi leaders and played a prominent role in promoting the National Socialist Weltanschauung. Finally, the argument is reviewed in terms of historical method, the problem of using literature to illustrate an author's ideas, and the researcher's encounter with a totally alien outlook.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".