WHILE EVERY POEM HAS A cultural and a social history that includes the biography of its author, poems from the Third Reich present critics with a number of peculiar historical and social issues. Poems written by Nazis and their sympathizers are tainted with the cataclysmic history of the National Socialist regime and its genocidal campaigns. This is particularly the case for poems that praise Hitler and his regime, but it is true as well of poems whose concern does not seem directly related to Nazi ideology. Such poems are morally bankrupt, but this does not mean that they should not be analyzed. We read them necessarily from a perspective of hindsight that precludes a sympathetic reading. However, an analysis of Nazi poetry gives us insight into stylistic and thematic tendencies of the time and shows that the particular combination of aesthetics and politics promoted by the Nazis had multiple effects on the literature of the time. This includes the fact that seemingly harmless poems are permeated by Nazi ideology, for example, insofar as they subscribe to the notion, useful to the Nazi regime, that the “private” was a realm detached from politics. Read in conjunction with poetry written in the concentration camps, such poems make problematic any theoretical stance that draws an absolute separation between Nazi society and the concentrationary universe that this society had created. At the same time a comparison between these sets of poems brings to the foreground the difference in individual experience signified by the “barbed wire” and an author's position relative to it.