Hatred and fantasy.(The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust)(Book review)

Jeffrey Herf The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II & the Holocaust. Harvard University Press, 416 pages, $29.95

Which of the major findings of this excellent study is more disturbing: that human beings are capable of inventing and believing the kind of vicious nonsense the Nazis believed about Jews, or that such profoundly irrational beliefs can become the basis of a meticulously devised and implemented program of industrial mass murder? It is indeed the case, to say the least, that "an examination of modern political culture draws attention to the causal significance of many irrational and illusory ideological perspectives."

It is among the Nazis' claims to distinction that they triumphantly united political belief and action, thereby confounding modern Western convictions about the divergence between appearance and reality, prompting the pursuit of hidden meanings and motives. But the Nazis believed what they said, and did what they promised to do: to exterminate people they considered the uniquely threatening embodiments of evil.

The Nazis themselves were susceptible to the unmasking, demythologizing impulse as far as the great Jewish world conspiracy was concerned: "Nazi propagandists convinced themselves and their followers that commonsense explanations for developments were deceptive and illusory.... The truth was that a small number of unseen conspirators controlled the national and international events from the shadows." The Nazi leaders and propagandists were "modernists ... who believed that they had discovered the real truth lurking hidden behind the scenes." Unmasking the timeless Jewish conspiracy designed to control the entire world was the central mission of Nazi propaganda.

The Nazis also shared with Marxists (and more recently with Islamic fundamentalists) the conviction that appearances and realities diverged sharply and dramatically--the foundation of the conspirational mindset. These three political entities also had in common a confidence that their ideologies and beliefs would provide a solution for all the existential riddles that human beings confront, and would thereby eliminate historical contingencies and make everything fully explicable--especially injustice, suffering, and pain.

The Jewish Enemy is both a revealing, carefully documented historical study and a reminder of the timeless and astonishing human capacity for demented belief, bottomless hatred, and a correspondingly stunning readiness to act upon bizarre convictions and fantasies. At the present time, Islamic terrorists, and especially the suicide bombers among them, come closest to the Nazi true believers, especially in regard to the obsession with identifying, exposing, and destroying evil. Islamic fundamentalists and terrorists and the Nazis also share the conviction that the evil thus identified is unique, and its human incarnations possessed of limitless and unprecedented depravity and determination to harm the innocent. For the Nazis the final solution was a world purified of Jews, for the Islamic fanatics a world without "infidels." The parallels ate especially close given the shared preoccupation with Jews as the major source of evil and corruption.

Most striking was the Nazi conviction (richly documented in this volume) that the Jews were not merely morally and physically repugnant and repositories of every despicable human trait but an imminent, mortal threat to Germany, indeed to the whole civilized world. It was this conviction that replaced traditional anti-Semitism and mutated into the radical, genocidal one that logically demanded the extermination of all Jews. Nazi propaganda played a key part in this by "transform[ing] ancient hatreds of anti-Semitism into a public ...