THE FANTASY OF RATIONALITY

Jeffrey Herf sums up his understanding of Nazi mass-murder (the Holocaust and World War II) by observing that the Nazi leadership "pushed to the extreme the widespread capacity for delusion." The assumption that these men "did not believe their fantasies" relies on an "optimistic view of the power of human rationality."

The belief in the "power of rationality" as a force dominating political thought--is beginning to appear to be another kind of delusion. This is what Donald Trump has done for us. He has built a political movement based on delusions.

The fact that so many people believe and embrace his delusions--provides a clue to how episodes of violent political extremism--like warfare and genocide--can take hold and take off in a society.

Perhaps politics is that realm of human history that is governed by delusion and fantasy. The history of the 20th Century suggests that this is the case. 

Richard Koenigsberg
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Jeffrey Herf concludes (The Jewish Enemy): In spite of the Holocaust and World War II, the rationalist bias about human motivation has persisted, reinforced by the positivism of the social sciences and challenges to intellectual and cultural history within the discipline of history. Resistance to grasping the power and impact of nonrational and irrational currents in Nazis Germany has been considerable.

The Nazis leadership pushed to the extreme the widespread human capacity for delusion. The assumption that these men did not believe these fantasies relies on an optimistic view of the power of human rationality.

The weight of evidence leads to the conclusion that members of the Nazis leadership viewed the world in the way that they said they did, and supplied a narrative of events that offered an iron-clad explanation as well as justification for uniting ideology and practice in war and mass murder.

If sheer repetition, in public and private contexts, can be taken as proof of belief, then it appears that Hitler, Goebbels, Dietrich, their staffs, and an undetermined percentage of German listeners and readers believed that an international Jewish conspiracy was the driving force behind the anti-Hitler coalition in World War II.

If they regarded their own propaganda with cynicism, they did not leave much trace of that skepticism behind. The sources point to the presence of true believers. who acted as if the Final Solution was Nazi Germany's punishment of the Jews, whom the Nazis found guilty of starting and prolonging World War II.