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Loading... The Nazi Conscience (2003)by Claudia Koonz
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. An examination of how, in the process of downplaying their most raucous displays of racism, Hitler and the Nazi Party managed to achieve a wider spread of their implicit principles of racial combat then they might otherwise have done. Much of this being due to playing up positive messages of social unification in tandem with apparently authoritative justifications of strong action against "The Other." In the end, Koonz argues that the Nazi experience needs to be regarded not as being a bizarre throwback to a more tribalistic time, but as an exercise in the politics of ethnic fundamentalism that is still grimly relevant. That I don't rate this book higher is due to a somewhat scatter-shot feel in places. no reviews | add a review
References to this work on external resources. Wikipedia in English (21)"The Nazi conscience is not an oxymoron. In fact, the perpetrators of genocide had a powerful sense of right and wrong, based on civic values that exalted the moral righteousness of the ethnic community and denounced outsiders." "Claudia Koonz's latest work reveals how racial popularizers developed the infrastructure and rationale for genocide during the so-called normal years before World War II. Her careful reading of the voluminous Nazi writings on race traces the transformation of longtime Nazis' vulgar antisemitism into a racial ideology that seemed credible to the vast majority of ordinary Germans who never joined the Nazi Party. Challenging conventional assumptions about Hitler, Koonz locates the source of his charisma not in his summons to hate but in his appeal to the collective virtue of his people, the Volk."--Jacket. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)943.086019History and Geography Europe Germany and central Europe Historical periods of Germany Germany 1866- Third Reich 1933-1945LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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This book analyzes the years leading up to the holocaust. How did Germany go from a country where Jews were usually fully integrated in the nation to a country where all civil rights of any Jewish person were extinguished and most people were ok with this state of affairs? This is an excellent question and one that deserves be answered and understood by educated people so society can be guarded from slipping down a path where the little things that were done to position society for the holocaust cannot be countenanced in modern civilized society. The change was not abrupt. While Hitler wrote his racist views into his book once he came to power for several years he said very little in public about the subject, content to have others speak and build enough consensus on the subject so when he finally spoke out against the Jews his views would be heard by a nation that already was predisposed to view the Jews as a lesser race scientifically and a threat to the German community. Towards the end of the book as Professor Koonz was summing up, she wrote: "Germans' readiness to expel Jews from their universe of moral obligation evolved as a consequence of their acceptance of knowledge disseminated by institutions they respected. Like citizens in other modern societies, residents of the Reich believed the facts conveyed by experts, documentary films, educational materials, and exhibitions. What haunts us is not only the ease with which soldiers slaughtered helpless civilians in occupied territories, but the specter of a state so popular that that it could mobilize the individual consciences of a broad cross-section of citizens in the service of moral catastrophe. This persuasive process has little in common with brain washing, which aims at turning it's subjects into mindless automatons. In Nazi Germany, faith in a virtuous Fuhrer and joy at belonging to a virtuous Volk (community) cultivated grassroots initiative and allowed for a margin of choice." "Despite having been raised to believe in the Golden Rule and probably more or less honoring it in their private lives, citizens of the Third Reich were shaped by a public culture so compelling that even those that who objected to one or more aspect of National Socialism came to accept the existence of a hierarchy of racially based human worth, the cult of the Fuhrer, and the desirability of territorial conquest. The Final Solution did not develop as evil incarnate, but rather as the dark side of ethnic righteousness. Conscience, originally seen to protect the integrity of the individual from the inhumane demands of the group, in the Third Reich became a means of underwriting the attack by the strong against the weak. To Germans caught up in a simulacrum of high moral purpose, purification of racial aliens became a difficult but necessary duty." ( )