Bremen Abitur History cheat sheet

Identify provenance, audience, genre and transmission before judging evidentiary value.

A normative text does not by itself establish actual compliance.

Chronological sequence alone does not prove a causal mechanism.

Periodization is an interpretation with explicit criteria.

Different perspectives remain subject to evidence and contextual evaluation.

Distinguish Weimar crises, stabilization and later collapse.

Versailles is part of a multicausal explanation, not an automatic outcome.

Legal proceedings, historical scholarship and commemoration serve different functions.

Public memory reflects later institutions and audiences as well as the past represented.

Interpretations remain accountable to evidence and explicit criteria.

Key distinctions: Fire Decree 28 February 1933; Enabling Act adopted 23 March and promulgated 24 March 1933; Nuremberg Laws 1935; November pogrom 1938.

Wannsee, 20 Jan 1942, coordinates an ongoing genocide; it is not its starting point.

The invasion of the Soviet Union inJune 1941 was followed by a major expansion of systematic mass shootings; shooting was itself a method of murder.

Intentionalism vs. functionalism and Goldhagen vs. Browning must be named as positions.

Always link provenance, euphemistic language and context when analysing perpetrator documents.

Compete the theories: Hobson/Lenin, Schumpeter, Cain and Hopkins; don't blend them.

Versailles detail: Article 231, 100,000-man army, 132 bn gold marks under the 1921 London Schedule.

Weimar stabilisation (1924–29) and collapse (after 1929) must be explained separately.

Fischer's war-guilt thesis and the centenary July-crisis debate are positions, not settled facts.

Separate the material from the symbolic effects of the peace treaty in any judgement.