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THE HOLOCAUST AND WORLD WAR II WERE TWO SIDES OF THE SAME LIFE-AGAINST-DEATH STRUGGLE AGAINST JEWISH-BOLSHEVISM
Nazism grew out of a vast paranoid fantasy: Hitler's belief that "Jews" sought to destroy the German people. Germany rose up to defend itself—and Western civilization—against a cosmic threat. The Holocaust and Operation Barbarossa were two sides of the same war: to prevent Germany from being exterminated by the Jews. Each was a defensive war: Destroy Jewish-Bolshevism before Jewish-Bolshevism destroyed Germany.
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In his review essay of Jeffrey Herf’s The Jewish Enemy, David Walker observes that in the aftermath of World War II, scholars often viewed the Holocaust and the War as separate events. Historians fell into two camps: those who studied the war itself (who viewed the Holocaust as a separate issue); and those who documented that unique, “incomprehensible” event that came to be called the Holocaust.
The public 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 World War II was being waged, something else was happening: the extermination the Jews.
Most historians still assume that World War II was pursued in the name of more or less conventional aims, such as conquest, territorial expansion, wealth or power. From this perspective, war 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 more different conceptualization of the Holocaust and the Second World War. Herf documents that World War II and the Holocaust were not discrete phenomena, but rather two sides of the same coin, each generated by a common desire to destroy the “evil enemy:” “the Jew” or “Jewish Bolshevism” or “international Jewry.”
As the war heated up, Hitler said that Germany was now experiencing “on an international scale what we had been experiencing inside Germany in the past.” When National Socialism was striving for power, he said, its opponents “clamored for the dissolution of the National Socialist party.” Now, similarly, the great powers were striving to “dissolve the German nation.”
Warfare, Herf says, was based on a “paranoiac fantasy. In Hitler’s Ideology, I observed that Hitler believed he was fighting for Germany’s survival. It was a question of “to be or not to be.” Both the Holocaust and World War II constituted parts of the “life and death struggle” for Germany's “existence or annihilation.” Did Germany have the will to “remain in existence?"
Having succeeded in defeating enemies within Germany, Hitler now turned to defeating Germany’s external enemies. Each was part of the same struggle of “life against death;” “to be or not to be.” Hitler and the Nazis had no choice: to fight the Jewish enemy that which was working “disintegrate” Germany and Western civilization.
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