One Volk, One Reich, Many Fredericks: The “Great” Frederick the Second during the Third Reich

The Nazi regime politicized history by mobilizing Germany’s past for their present purposes. This article examines they ways in which the Nazis instrumentalized the public image of Frederick II—“the Great” eighteenth-century Prussian monarch—across the existence of their political movement. It argues that the Nazis mustered his legacy when they felt insecure with their own legitimacy, but they launched past him when they felt able to soar on their own. At stake was the Nazi sense of self-confidence in their public support: more appeals to Frederick at the start and finish of their reign meant the German people needed convincing to follow the Nazis to whatever ends. Fewer appeals from 1935 to 1937, during the middle of the Nazi reign, meant their regime felt most secure after they had consolidated power at home but before they launched their racial war of extermination abroad. From this case study, we not only understand the instrumentalization of history for political purposes in one of modern history’s most infamous dictatorships, but we also forge a new mechanism for measuring how political regimes express self-doubt and self-security about their own popular legitimacy.