Jeffrey Herf
The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust.
Harvard University Press, 416 pages, $29.95
reviewed by Paul Hollander
Which of the major findings of this excellent study is more disturbing: that human beings are capable of inventing and believing the kind of vicious nonsense the Nazis believed about Jews, or that such profoundly irrational beliefs can become the basis of a meticulously devised and implemented program of industrial mass murder? It is indeed the case, to say the least, that “an examination of modern political culture draws attention to the causal significance of many irrational and illusory ideological perspectives.”
It is among the Nazis’ claims to distinction that they triumphantly united political belief and action, thereby confounding modern Western convictions about the divergence between appearance and reality, prompting the pursuit of hidden meanings and motives. But the Nazis believed what they said, and did what they promised to do: to exterminate people they considered the uniquely threatening embodiments of evil.
The Nazis themselves were susceptible to the unmasking, demythologizing impulse as far as the great Jewish world conspiracy was concerned: “Nazi propagandists convinced themselves and their followers that commonsense explanations for developments were deceptive and illusory… . The truth was that a small number of unseen conspirators controlled the national and international events from the shadows.” The Nazi leaders and propagandists were “modernists … who believed that they had discovered the real truth lurking hidden behind the scenes.” Unmasking
