Paranoid Delusion as the Source of World War II: Reflections on Jeffrey Herf and David M. Walker

Developmental Time, Cultural Space

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Author: Jeffrey Herf

Format: Paperback
Published on: May, 2010
ISBN-10: 0674027388
Language: English
Pages: 400

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The Jewish Enemy is the first extensive study of how anti-Semitism pervaded and shaped Nazi propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, and how it pulled together the diverse elements of a delusionary Nazi worldview. In an era when both anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories continue to influence world politics, Herf offers a timely reminder of their dangers along with a fresh interpretation of the paranoia underlying the ideology of the Third Reich.

Jeffrey Herf is professor of Modern European History at the University of Maryland.


About the Reviewer

David M. Walker, PhD is professor of History at Boise State University. Dr. Walker teaches classes in military and diplomatic history, specializing in US Military history, World War II, the History of Firearms and Tactics, and the History of US Foreign Relations.

Dr. Walker’s publications include: “The Early Nuclear Age and Visions of Future War” (2009), part of the anthology The Atomic Bomb and American Society: New Perspectives.

A video interview with him can be accessed here.


The Atomic Bomb and American Society: New Perspectives

Editors: Rosemary B. Mariner and G. Kurt Piehler

Publisher: U. of Tennessee Press
Format: Hardcover
Published: 2009
ISBN-10: 157233648X
Language: English
Pages: 470

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Drawing on the latest research on the atomic bomb and its history, the contributors to this provocative collection of eighteen essays set out to answer two key questions: First, how did the atomic bomb shape U.S. foreign policy and society as a whole? And second, how has American society’s perception of the bomb evolved under the influence of mass media, scientists, public intellectuals, and the entertainment industry?

This is the second in a series of essays in the LSS Newsletter exploring the Holocaust and Second World War as enactment of a paranoid fantasy.

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