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 discrete phenomena. As war was being waged, something else was happening: the Nazis were working to exterminate the Jews. Waging war and executing the Final Solution were usually conceived as unrelated events.

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 Jeffrey Herf's The Jewish Enemy, we move toward a different conceptualization of Nazi mass murder. Herf demonstrates that World War II and the Holocaust were not discrete phenomena, but rather two sides of the same coin. Both were generated by a common motive: the desire to destroy the “evil enemy,” an enemy 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, he said, 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”--as Germany sought to defend itself against the Jewish enemy. Walker discusses the war in terms of a “conspiracy theory.” I have written (in Hitler’s Ideology) that in waging war, Hitler believed he was fighting for Germany’s survival. It was a question of “to be or not to be.”

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 Germany 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.

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. 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.