In his review essay of Jeffrey Herf’s The Jewish Enemy, David Walker observes that after World War II, “the war on the battlefields, strategy, and even the politics of the war became separated from the Holocaust.” Historians fell into two camps: those who studied the war itself (who viewed the Holocaust as a side-issue or “appendix” to the war), and those who focused on documenting and understanding that unique, astonishing, “incomprehensible” event that came to be known as the Holocaust.

The public, Walker says, understood the Holocaust as proof of Nazi “crimes and malevolence,” but “separate from war aims and strategies.” It was as if World War II and the Holocaust were separate phenomena. As the war was waged, something else was happening: the Nazis were working to exterminate the Jews. Waging war and executing the Final Solution were conceived as unrelated events.

David Walker’s complete review essay of The Jewish Enemy appears on our website.

Click here to read the complete review essay.

We would appreciate your comments on this Newsletter — or the entire review essay. Leave your reflections and commentary below.

Standard histories assume that World War II was pursued in the name of more or less “conventional” aims, such as territorial conquest, wealth or power acquisition. According to this view, the Holocaust was a “diversion” from the primary objective: winning the war. Still, historians often wondered: Why did the Germans waste so much of their resources on exterminating the Jews “when they had a world war to fight?”

With The Jewish Enemy, we move toward a different conceptualization of Nazi violence and mass murder. Herf demonstrates that World War II and the Holocaust were not separate, but rather two sides of the same coin. Both were generated by a common motive: the desire to destroy the “evil enemy.” This evil enemy was identified as “the Jew”, or “Jewish Bolshevism”, or “international Jewry.”

As the war heated up, Hitler declared that Germany was now experiencing “on an international scale what we have been experiencing inside Germany in the past.” When National Socialism was striving for power, its opponents “clamored for the compulsory dissolution of the National Socialist party.” Now, in a similar way, the powers waging war against Germany were striving to “dissolve the German nation.”

Herf states that the war was based on a “paranoiac fantasy”: Germany sought to defend itself against the Jewish enemy. Walker discusses the war in terms of a “conspiracy theory.” I have written about Hitler’s belief (in Hitler’s Ideology ) that in waging war he was fighting for Germany’s survival. It was a question of “to be or not to be”–of “life against death.”

In his speeches, Hitler stated that the war was a “life and death struggle.” The German people were faced with a struggle for their “existence or their annihilation.” The question was whether Germany had the will to “remain in existence or whether she will be destroyed.” Waging war was an “exact replication of what happened in the Party” as the Nazis strove to achieve and consolidate power.

Having succeeded in defeating enemies within Germany, Hitler now turned to defeating Germany’s external enemies. Each, however, was part of the same struggle of “life against death” or “to be or not to be.” Hitler and the Nazis had no other choice than to fight the Jewish enemy, which was working to cause the “disintegration” of Germany and of Western civilization.

David Walker’s complete review essay of The Jewish Enemy appears on our website.

Click here to read the complete review essay.

We would appreciate your comments on this Newsletter — or the entire review essay. Leave your reflections and commentary below.

On July 21, 1944, the party Reich Propaganda Directorate (RPL) distributed a pamphlet entitled, Germany Has Entered the Fight to the Death with the Jewish-Bolshevik System of Murder, to guide local Nazi party speakers, propagandists and officials. The invasion of the Soviet Union had brought “clarity.” Now, we “recognize our old enemy, world Jewry.” After being defeated within Germany, Jewry was embodied in “Anglo-Saxon plutocracy and Bolshevik state capitalism” that strove to “attain its goal from abroad.”

Echoing Hitler’s view, the pamphlet asserted that World War was an extension of the war that National Socialism had waged against its internal enemies. The social democrats and communists against which the Nazis had struggled in their rise to power now were manifest as Soviet Bolshevism and Anglo-Saxon plutocracy, each ruled by Jews who sought “world domination.” Only the Nazis understood the critical nature of the threat and had the courage to confront it.

Nazism grew out of a vast paranoid fantasy about Jewish destructiveness. Germany rose up to defend itself—and Western civilization—against the cosmic threat posed by Jews. The Holocaust was undertaken in order to exterminate the Jews. Similarly, Operation Barbarossa was undertaken as a “war of extermination.” Additionally, Germany had to fight against the United States and Great Britain—because these nations too were controlled by the evil enemy, world Jewry.

Of course, none of this makes any sense at all. David Walker, without wishing to put “too light a touch on things,” says that the National Socialists were “weird.” Indeed, one would be justified in saying that Nazi beliefs about the Jew were nonsense. However, when one is possessed by paranoid fantasies and anxiety, reality goes by the board. The Nazi war against the Jews—both the Holocaust and the Second World War—was generated by the same paranoid delusion.

David Walker’s complete review essay of The Jewish Enemy appears on our website.

Click here to read the complete review essay.

We would appreciate your comments on this Newsletter — or the entire review essay. Leave your reflections and commentary below.

Richard A. Koenigsberg, Ph.D
Director, LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
Telephone: 718-393-1081
Fax: 413-832-8145
rak@libraryofsocialscience.com

Following the Second World War, with the ensuring “explosion of scholarship,” Jeffrey Herf observes in The Jewish Enemy, two distinct scholarly communities emerged. One focused on the “battlefield narratives of World War II”; the second on the history of the Holocaust. As David Walker states in his review essay, the public began to understand the Holocaust as “proof of Nazi crimes and malevolence,” but as separate from “war aims and strategy.”

The phrase, “the war against the Jews” (title of Lucy Dawidowicz’s 1986 book), still evokes the mass murder of European Jews. Now, however, Herf believes the time has come to reach a “more inclusive understanding of the war against the Jews,” one in which “World War II plays a critical role.” When Nazi leaders—in private conversation, office memos or public statements—drew a connection between the Jews and World War II, they were referring to the war and the Holocaust as “taken together as one apocalyptic battle.” They did not limit the war against “International Jewry” to the Final Solution.

David Walker’s complete review essay of The Jewish Enemy appears on our website.

Click here to read the complete review essay.

We would appreciate your comments on this Newsletter — or the entire review essay. Leave your reflections and commentary below.

Instead, they viewed the Final Solution in the context of a broader war of defense that pitted Germany and its allies against a “colossal international conspiracy of Jewish figures working behind the scenes.” We know the Final Solution’s purpose was the extermination of the Jews. Yet, attacking the Soviet Union, Hitler spoke of a “war of extermination.” Thus, both the Final Solution and war on the Eastern Front were generated by a single motive: the desire to free the world of—eliminate—“International Jewry.”

What was the nature of the Jewish threat? What had the Jews done to warrant the Final Solution and the waging of a World War? Researching and writing about Hitler and Nazism for many years, I have conceived Nazi anti-Semitism as a fantasy put forth by Hitler, one that came to be shared by the Nazis and many Germans. This Nazi fantasy about the Jews—embodied in their ideology—was enacted upon the stage of history.

According to Herf, a “gigantic persecution mania” or “paranoiac myth” lay at the heart of the Nazi worldview. This paranoid fantasy about the Jews gave rise to both the Final Solution and the Second World War. David Walker conceptualizes what occurred in Nazi Germany as the result of a “conspiracy theory.” Examining Herf’s documentation, one feels the appropriateness of this term.

On December 11, 1941, Hitler declared war on the United States in a speech to the Reichstag broadcast over German radio and printed in the German press. Hitler spoke for almost 90 minutes. His speech reached a “crescendo of hatred,” Herf says, in his “attack on Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Jews around him.” The war was a matter of the “existence or non-existence of nations.” If given the opportunity, Roosevelt and the Jews would “exterminate National Socialist Germany.” Hitler’s central point, Herf says, was that a “single man”–Roosevelt—and the “forces around him” were the cause of World War II. The “brain trust the American President must serve,” Hitler said, consisted of the “same people we fought in Germany as a parasitic appearance of humanity.”

David Walker’s complete review essay of The Jewish Enemy appears on our website.

Click here to read the complete review essay.

We would appreciate your comments on this Newsletter — or the entire review essay. Leave your reflections and commentary below.

According to the Nazi fantasy that generated the Final Solution, Jews were “parasites on the body of the German people.” In order for the German body politic to survive, Jewish parasites had to be eliminated.

Apparently, the same fantasy or paranoid myth that was enacted to create the Holocaust was the source of the Second World War. Hitler and the Nazis imagined that “International Jewry” threatened the existence not only of the German nation, but of the entire world.

According to this paranoid fantasy, International Jewry sought to annihilate the German people. This being the case, it was necessary for Germany to wage a struggle of “life against death,” of “to be or not to be”—in order to exterminate the Jews before the Jews could exterminate Germany.

Soviet Bolshevism was conceived as waging a “battle against Western culture” in the interest of “International Jewry.” But so, apparently, was the United States and Great Britain waging such a war. In his declaration of war against the United States, Hitler declared that the power that stood behind Roosevelt was the “eternal Jew.”

The United States under Roosevelt was striving for “unlimited world domination.” Roosevelt and the Jews sought to “exterminate National Socialist Germany.” For the National Socialist, Hitler continued, it was “no surprise that the Anglo-Saxon Jewish capitalist world” found itself in a “common front with Bolshevism.”

On July 21, 1941 (after the attack on the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, that began on June 22), the party Reich Propaganda Directive (RPL), Herf tells us, distributed a pamphlet to explain the invasion. This pamphlet was entitled Germany has Entered the Fight to the Finish with the Jewish Bolshevik System of Murder—to guide local Nazi speakers, propagandists and officials.

Propagandists were to stress the “secret cooperation” between England and the Bolsheviks. Officials and party speakers were to present the war as part of Germany’s “great struggle for freedom,” which must destroy a “conspiracy among Jews, democrats, Bolsheviks, and reactionaries.”

“Now,” the pamphlet explained, we “recognize our old enemy, world Jewry.” After being defeated within Germany, it now was embodied in “Anglo-Saxon plutocracy and Bolshevik state capitalism,” and was trying to “attain its goal from abroad.”

David Walker’s complete review essay of The Jewish Enemy appears on our website.

Click here to read the complete review essay.

We would appreciate your comments on this Newsletter — or the entire review essay. Leave your reflections and commentary below.

The pamphlet renewed Nazism’s long-standing hatred of “Jewish Bolshevism.” Bolshevism was described as a “system of Jewish criminals and their accomplices” whose purpose was the “exploitation and enslavement of humanity.” England’s decision to ally itself with the Soviet Union was a “new piece of evidence of the absolute identity of plutocracy and Bolshevism.”

Speakers needed to answer the “oft-posed question”: How is it possible that “very wealthy plutocrats and the moneybag dynasties of America are going hand in hand with the (supposedly) anti-capitalist power holders?” Nazi propaganda directly addressed this central paradox with the assertion, “plutocracy and Bolshevism have one master, the Jews.”

Richard A. Koenigsberg, Ph.D
Director, LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
Telephone: 718-393-1081
Fax: 413-832-8145
rak@libraryofsocialscience.com

Dear Colleague,

In his review essay on A Century of Genocide, Murray Schwartz focuses on the “primacy of race.” From this idea of race, many other terms follow, including “lives unfit to live,” “elimination,” “purification,” etc. The Nazis, Schwartz says, sought “perfection” that could be attained only through “perpetual war against lesser races.” Unrestrained violence grew out of “racial categorization.”

However, what precisely did “race” mean to Nazi ideologues such as Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels—whose ideas generated mass murder? Contrary to popular conceptions, there is no evidence that these men associated race with physical characteristics. Rather, the “Jewish race” was conceived in terms of certain psychological characteristics that were believed to be inborn.

The essence of the “Aryan,” according to Hitler (see the LSS Newsletter of January 2), was the extent of his willingness to sacrifice for the community. The Aryan was “not greatest in his mental abilities” (Mein Kampf, 1925), but in his self-sacrificing will to “give his personal labor and if necessary his own life for others.”

The Jew, by contrast, Hitler said, represented the “mightiest counterpart to the Aryan.” Whereas the Aryan “willingly sacrificed himself for the community,” Jews lacked the “most essential requirement for a cultured people, the ‘idealistic attitude.’” What characterized Jews was the “absolute absence of all sense of sacrifice.”

Key to understanding the genocidal process, Schwartz suggests, is the idea of “the individual.” Genocidal regimes insist that “individuality must be eliminated.” Hitler’s Official Programme (1920) put forth the Nazis’ central complaint: “The leaders of our public life all worship the same god—Individualism. Personal interest is the sole incentive.” The central plank of the Nazi program was “The Common Interest before Self Interest.”

The Nazis considered individualism a “sin” because it was conceived as opposing devotion to the community—willingness to sacrifice. For Hitler, the Jews’ tendency toward “selfish individualism,” meant they were incapable of assimilating into a national community.

Since Hitler believed that willingness to sacrifice was the “first premise for every truly human community,” Jews were therefore inferior—inhuman—because they lacked this capacity for sacrifice. According to Hitler, the Jewish inability to “renounce putting forward personal opinions and interests” and to “sacrifice both in favor of the large group” was a biologically given character trait.

The following judgment by the Cologne Labor Court (January 21, 1941) denied the claim of Jewish employees to a vacation (in Noakes & Pridham, 2001):

The precondition for the claim to a vacation—membership of the plant community—does not exist. A Jew cannot be a member of the plant community on account of his whole racial tendency, which is geared to forwarding his personal interests and securing economic advantages.

This crucial passage states that—because of the Jew’s proclivity toward pursuing personal interests and economic advantages (which was a “racial tendency”)—they could not be a member of the community.

Hitler called Jews the “ferment of decomposition” in peoples. Since the Jew “destroys and must destroy,” Hitler said, it was “beside the point whether the individual Jew is ‘decent’ or not.” In himself he “carries those characteristics which Nature has given him.”

According to Hitler, the Jew could not be other than who he was—because he possessed certain characteristics that Nature had given him. By virtue of his race—his biologically given nature—the Jew “lacked completely a conception of an activity which builds up the life of the community.”

Nazi scholarship declared that the peculiar characteristic of Judaism was its “hostility to human society” (Weinreich, 1999) — which is why there could be “no solution to the Jewish question.” A true understanding of Jews and Judaism insisted on their “total annihilation.”

Schwartz analyzes the Cambodian genocide, which, he says, “exceeded even Nazi Germany and their Chinese predecessors in the destruction of traditional forms of life.” He cites a survivor, Rithy Panh, writing in The Elimination (2013) about the infamous Tuol Sleng prison and torture house:

Everything was subordinated to the Angkar, the mysterious, all-powerful “Organization.” I know of no other example in history of such dominion, of a sovereignty almost abstract by virtue of being absolute. In that world, I’m not an individual. I have no freedom, no thoughts, no origin, no inheritance, no rights: I have no more body. All I have is a duty, namely to dissolve myself in the Organization.

The phrase “dissolve oneself in the Organization” contains the essence of totalitarianism. Hitler explained to his German people, “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” Hitler aspired to throw men into the “great melting pot, the nation,” so that they could be “welded one to another.”

People who are melted together—welded to one another—naturally lose their individuality and freedom. The totalitarian dream conceives of human beings as “cells” that are capable of uniting in order to create a single, omnipotent body (politic).

Working to build up his Nazi state, Hitler believed the German people had been won over by the “eternal national and social ideal” he put forth—persuading them to “subordinate their own interests to the interest of the whole society.” Nonetheless, Hitler said, there were still a few “incurables” who did not understand “the happiness of belonging to this great, inspiring community.”

Jews specifically, for Hitler, symbolized people who were “incurable”: unable to assimilate into a national community. Jews, according to Hitler—in any society—represented a “force of disintegration” acting to tear nations apart. By virtue of their biologically given nature, Jews caused nations to “break into pieces.”

“Racism,” it turns out, had little to do with physical characteristics . Rather, Nazi racism was a complex psychological—even metaphysical—conception. Jews represented an idea in the mind of Hitler and other Nazis, symbolizing individualism and separation—tendencies acting to destroy national unity.

Jews, according to National Socialism, did not have the capacity to abandon individuality in order to fuse with a national community. The Jewish inability to bind to a body politic, Hitler believed, was biologically given—which is why there could be no “solution to the Jewish problem” other than the Final Solution.

Richard A. Koenigsberg, Ph.D
Director, LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
Telephone: 718-393-1081
Fax: 413-832-8145
rak@libraryofsocialscience.com