Dear Colleague,

You may (or may not) have seen this Newsletter before--about Jeffrey Herf's book, The Jewish Enemy. It was sent out to our entire mailing list of 7577 people.

Now I'm sending it out only to those people who are in the process of helping to develop a consortium or think-tank on political forms of violence.

I hope you will read it...and read the other Newsletters that I'm about to send out...and perhaps develop a notebook of Newsletters authored by those of us who will be working together.

Eventually, we'll develop ways of interacting and discussing these essays/Newsletters.

Best regards,

Richard K.

PS: Herf's The Jewish Enemy is one of the most accurate books written on Hitler and the development of Nazism (I have a bibliography of over 1000 items). The pursuit of truth is my passion. We need to continue to explore the ideas in this book more deeply. 

 

 

"The Holocaust & World War II: A Single Life against Death Struggle"
Reflections on Jeffrey Herf's
 The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust
Herf's book on the relationship between Nazi anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and Germany's war against the Soviet Union is perhaps the most accurate and insightful study I've come across (and my bibliography on these topics consists of 800+ items).

Based on Herf's research--and that of a several other scholars--we are moving toward understanding that the Holocaust and Germany's war against the Soviet Union were not separate events.

Hitler's fundamental aspiration was to destroy (kill) Jews or "Jewish-Bolsheviks." The Holocaust is the term we use to describe the extermination of Jews in Europe.  The Nazis described their struggle against  the Soviet Union as a "war of extermination." The objective of this war was identical to the objective of the Holocaust: to kill Jews wherever they could be found. 

We are moving toward understanding that from Hitler's point of view, the Holocaust and the war against the Soviet Union were two sides of the same coin: to kill Jews anywhere and everywhere. For Hitler, genocide and warfare were not separate forms of political action.

Richard Koenigsberg

Abstract: Ostensibly a war of aggression and conquest, the Nazi narrative from the months preceding the beginning of the war in September 1939 until Hitler’s last days in the Bunker in Berlin, presented the war and intent to exterminate European Jewry as a “war of defense against an act of aggression launched by an immensely powerful international Jewish conspiracy.” According to this narrative, Jewry was all powerful; Germany the innocent victim. Hitler imagined that he was engaged in a “life against death struggle:” either Germany would exterminate the Jews or the Jews would exterminate Germany.
Jeffrey Herf is professor of Modern European History at the University of Maryland.
The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust

Jeffrey Herf

For information on purchasing this book through Amazon, click here.
Jeffrey Herf observes that with the explosion of scholarship after World War II, two scholarly communities emerged. One, composed of Military historians, focused on the battlefield narratives of World War II; while the second examined the history of the Holocaust.

Herf documents that Holocaust and World War II were not separate events. When the Nazi leadership, in private conversations, office memos, or public statements, drew a connection between the Jews and World War II, they were referring to the Holocaust and the war “taken together as one apocalyptic battle.”

The Final Solution was described by Lucy Dawidowicz (2010) as a “war against the Jews.” However, Herf notes, the Nazis did not limit the meaning of their war against “International Jewry” to the Final Solution. Rather, they viewed the Final Solution as a “necessary campaign of retaliation" in the context of a broader war of defense waged against international Jewry, world Jewry, and ‘the Jews’.”

In the minds and public assertions of the Nazi leaders, they were fighting a single war that pitted Germany and its allies "against a colossal, international conspiracy” driven by “Jewish figures working behind the scenes.” The Allies were the “public facade” of this Jewish enemy.

The Nazi’s narrative attributed enormous autonomy and power to the Jews, while “denying autonomy and power to the nominal leaders of the most powerful nations in the world”-- Franklin Roosevelt. Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin--who were identifies as the Jews’ “puppets, accomplices, stooges and servants.”

Saul Friedlander (2010) discusses Hitler’s “redemptive anti-Semitism,” which combined “paranoid fantasy about an all-powerful international Jewry" with the promise of "redeeming and saving Germany from that pernicious influence.” The war against the Jews, in short, constituted a rescue fantasy: if Germany was to live, Jews had to die.

Accounts of the power and influence wielded by Jews has been grossly misleading. According to the census of June 16, 1933, the Jewish population of Germany was approximately 505,000 people out of a total population of 67 million, less than 0.75 percent.

In the central forum of political representation, the Reichstag, Jews were significantly under-represented. Of the 577 members of parliament elected in September 14, 1930, 17 were of Jews origin; of the 608 members elected on July 31, 1932, 14 were of Jewish origin. The conspiratorial notion of vast Jewish power, Herf concludes, had “no factual basis.”

Radical anti-Semitism rested on the belief that the Jews were a “cohesive, politically active subject,” a group united on a global scale by racial bonds that “transcended any allegiance to nation-states.”

In the Nazi view, this powerful and autonomous entity, international Jewry, “controlled assorted stooges and accomplices who served its evil interest.” If not identified and destroyed, the Nazis feared, “Jewry would annihilate the German people.”

This was the paradox of the World War waged by Hitler and the Nazis. Ostensibly a war of aggression and conquest, the Nazi narrative from the months preceding the beginning of the war in September 1939 up until Hitler’s last days in the Bunker in Berlin, presented the war and intent to exterminate European Jewry as a “war of defense against an act of aggression launched by an immensely powerful international Jewish conspiracy.”

According to this narrative, Jewry was all powerful; Germany  the innocent victim. Hitler imagined that he was engaged in a “life against death struggle:” either Germany would exterminate the Jews or the Jews would exterminate Germany.