The road to genocide
KEITH LOWE is impressed by a powerful new analysis of the strategies employed by the Nazis to fuel antisemitism in Germany and achieve their murderous objectives
In 2010, television documentary producer Martin Davidson wrote a moving and insightful book about his German grandfather, an early convert to Nazism. How, he asked, had this seemingly intelligent man fallen so completely under Hitler’s spell? Now, a decade later, Davidson has returned with the same passionate curiosity to examine Nazi Germany as a whole, and the single force that defined it: antisemitism.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Hitler made a series of increasingly wild claims about Jews. He blamed them for both the imaginary “stab in the back” that lost Germany the First World War, and the Treaty of Versailles that humiliated the country afterwards. He accused them, somewhat illogically, of being both communists and plutocrats, making them responsible for both the Russian Revolution and the Wall Street crash. Logic was never the point; antisemitism was merely a conduit for popular resentment of any and every flavour. According to Hitler’s vision, the only cure for such resentments was to rid the world of their root cause: Jews.
How does a society go from casual antisemitism to genocide? As Davidson shows, this was a much subtler and more sophisticated process than we generally accept. Coaxing hooligans into violence was never the hard part. It was much more difficult to teach everyone else either not to care, or to turn a blind eye. Goebbels deliberately cultivated the idea of “hardness” as a virtue. He argued that, when it came to the Jewish question, a good citizen should be prepared to give up his own moral squeamishness if it was for the greater good. Nazi magazines such as Neues Volk concentrated on depicting the promised land – a beautiful, pure Aryan world – without dwelling on the darker “sacrifices” that would be needed to reach it. Such ideas were propagated ad infinitum; by the late 1930s, the German media was saturated with antisemitism.
War provided the opportunity to take Hitler’s plans to the next stage. Anything could be justified in the name of Total Victory – even the massacre of whole communities that “threatened” the ideal of Aryan purity. Yet still the Nazis managed to convince themselves that they were acting virtuously. SS Einsatzgruppen units in eastern Europe sometimes encouraged Jewish mothers to hold their babies while they were being shot – a supposedly generous act of “mercy”.
Back in Germany, meanwhile, the knowledge of such atrocities, as well as the horrors of the concentration camps, was never as limited as most Germans subsequently pretended. As diaries of the time show, soldiers on leave openly talked about what was going on in eastern Europe.
This is not a new subject, but Davidson’s treatment of it is different from that of most historians. He is less concerned with the meticulous cataloguing of events than he is with describing how those events were first justified and then covered up. As a consequence some of his chapters, especially early on, are big on polemic and short on concrete examples. But his ideas draw on 70 years of sound Holocaust research, and they are passionately and eloquently argued. His conclusion – that similar methods of desensitisation are again being used by populists today – should act as a warning to us all.
Keith Lowe is the author of Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (Viking, 2012)
Nazi magazines depicted a beautiful, pure Aryan world without dwelling on the darker ‘sacrifices’ needed to reach it