Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany

How could one of the most "civilized" of Western nations kill millions of innocent people? Weiss (The Facist Tradition, 1967) rejects the claim of "No Hitler, no Holocaust." Instead, he argues that anti-Semitism was a strong trait in every class in Germany; the anti-Semitism of "tens of thousands" of upper-class Germans was not "all that different from that of the Nazis themselves." Weiss traces anti-Semitism in western Europe and shows why it was so strong in Germany. He demolishes the old argument that most Germans knew nothing about the mass murders and were shocked when they learned the truth. He suggests that if the masses truly did not know and were as horrified as they claimed, "an outburst of patriotic indignation and revulsion and unstoppable desire to punish the guilty would have been inevitable. The opposite occurred." Weiss's clear and lucid style makes his book an excellent choice for classes or discussion groups on the Holocaust.

The Holocaust happened in Germany, historian Weiss argues, because "the special nature of German and Austrian history" gave an utterly racist form of anti-Semitism "immense power." Weiss examines anti-Semitism's "Christian legacy" in Europe; the role of Martin Luther; the weakness of countervailing Enlightenment ideas in Germany and Austria-Hungary; and the central fact that, throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "racism was increasingly used by upper-class reactionaries,...

Why the Holocaust happened in Germany is the subject of this stunning and disturbing exploration of the unique nature of German history and its culture of racism and anti-Semitism.