The Nazi Conscience - Hardcover

Koonz, Claudia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674011724 ISBN 13: 9780674011724

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2003

Synopsis

The Nazi conscience is not an oxymoron. In fact, the perpetrators of genocide had a powerful sense of right and wrong, based on civic values that exalted the moral righteousness of the ethnic community and denounced outsiders. Claudia Koonz's work reveals how racial popularizers developed the infrastructure and rationale for genocide during the so-called normal years before World War II. Her reading of the voluminous Nazi writings on race traces the transformation of longtime Nazis' vulgar anti-Semitism into a racial ideology that seemed credible to the vast majority of ordinary Germans who never joined the Nazi Party. Challenging conventional assumptions about Hitler, Koonz locates the source of his charisma not in his summons to hate but in his appeal to the collective virtue of his people, the Volk. From 1933 to 1939, Nazi public culture was saturated with a blend of racial fear and ethnic pride that Koonz calls ethnic fundamentalism. Ordinary Germans were prepared for wartime atrocities by racial concepts, widely disseminated in media not perceived as political: academic research, documentary films, mass-market magazines, racial hygiene and art exhibits, slide lectures, textbooks and humour. By showing how Germans learned to countenance the everyday persecution of fellow citizens labelled as alien, Koonz aims to make a major contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust. "The Nazi Conscience" chronicles the chilling saga of a modern state so powerful that it extinguished neighbourliness, respect and, ultimately, compassion for all those banished from the ethnic majority.

About this title

Review:

Koonz does not deny the existence of extremist and violent anti-Semites in the Nazi leadership. But her stress on the moderate way their ultimately genocidal plans were presented as necessary cruelties adds an important dimension in our understanding of the Nazi regime and its crime.--Antony Polonsky"Boston Globe" (12/21/2003)

Synopsis:

The Nazi conscience is not an oxymoron. In fact, the perpetrators of genocide had a powerful sense of right and wrong, based on civic values that exalted the moral righteousness of the ethnic community and denounced outsiders.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0674011724
• ISBN 13: 9780674011724
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336