"The Jewish Enemy"--Anti-Semitism and Nazi Propaganda

Anti-Semitism is back in the news. First the Walt and Mearsheimer essay in the London Review of Books sent shock waves throughout academia (and the wider world) with its claim that American support for Israel is justified by neither strategic nor moral concerns, but continues nonetheless due to the power exerted by the "Israel lobby"--"the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction." While the essay was applauded in many circles as a courageous statement, others were inclined to see it as just another manifestation of a long tradition of anti-Semitism couched in the trappings of scholarship.

More recently, it's been asserted that criticism of Israel's actions in Lebanon amounts to anti-Semitism. And most bizarrely, actor Mel Gibson (director of The Passion of the Christ, "the most virulently anti-Semitic movie since the German propaganda films of World War Two," according to one prominent critic) erupted into an anti-Semitic tantrum after being pulled over for drunk driving in Malibu.

While the accusations fly, it might be worth taking a look back at something we can all agree was genuinely "anti-Semitic"--namely, the Nazi "war against the Jews." Ever since Germany's defeat in World War Two and the total exposure of the extent of this "war," historians have struggled with a fundamental question--why then? After centuries of lower-level anti-Semitic persecution in Europe, why, in Germany, during this period, did anti-Semitism explode into a full-fledged campaign to eliminate Jews from the population--the so-called "Final Solution?"

For a long time the conventional explanation for this development has focused on the emergence during the nineteenth century of racial "science," which was often used as evidence that Jews were something less than human. This theory is most prominently associated with the late George Mosse, who can fairly be said to tower over the field when it comes to explaining this phenomenon. One of Mosse's main achievements was to realize that contrary to previous assumptions that the Nazis had used anti-Semitic propaganda cynically, as a method of stoking the passions of the non-Jewish population, the Nazis needed to be taken at their word when they claimed to hate Jews. In short, they really were "true believers." If anything, this realization makes the Nazi's actions even more frightening.

Jeffrey Herf is one of Mosse's most influential students. In his latest book, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, Herf continues the tradition of taking the Nazis at their word, but diverges from Mosse's thesis in an intriguing way. Having dug through hundreds of thousands of pages of archives, including Hitler's speeches, Goebbels' diaries, and countless propaganda items (posters, etc.) Herf has come to see the Nazi persecution of Jews as more of a political problem than a "racial" one. This point is the subject of Noah Strote's excellent review in the Forward:

But in "The Jewish Enemy," Herf's fourth book, the student has surpassed the teacher. Mosse always held that the crucial development — what finally armed German antisemites with rationale for extermination — took place in the late 19th century with the birth of race science, according to which Jews were barely human. Herf shows that such an interpretation does not fit the evidence of how Hitler, Goebbels and other Nazi elites justified genocide. As horrible as racial stereotyping was, ultimately, Jews were not killed en masse because they tainted the purity of Aryan bodies. Jews were eliminated because Nazi leaders considered them Germany's most powerful and dangerous political foe. Working together as a collective political actor called "international Jewry," Jews allegedly controlled the governments of the United States, England and the Soviet Union, and therefore bore responsibility for all attacks on Germany. Conspiracy theory, not race science, proves to be the real ideological culprit of the Holocaust.

If they concealed from the public the mechanics of murder, Nazi propagandists made no secret about why the Jews deserved it. For source material, Herf looked to what the Nazis themselves said about the Jewish enemy — in the speeches of Adolf Hitler, the diaries of Joseph Goebbels (comprising more than 40 volumes of 600 pages each), the thousands of daily and weekly press directives the Nazi party issued to German periodicals, and the antisemitic wall newspapers and posters that dominated the visual landscape of ordinary Germans. He finds that the Nazis' threats to annihilate Jewry were almost always accompanied by the claim that Jewry intended to annihilate them. This was the perverse but sincere logic of paranoid politics.

As Herf put it himself in an interview with the Baltimore Sun's Michael Hill: "Most importantly, Nazi anti-Semitism was not only a set of prejudices and hatreds; it was also an interpretive framework, a way of understanding the world."

For Hitler, Goebbels, Otto Reich and the other architects of the propaganda regime, the shadowy hand of "international Jewry" was the only way to explain a partnership as strange as that between the United States and the Soviet Union. This "narrative of projection and paranoia," as Herf puts it, turns out to be the primary impetus behind the Nazi regime's campaign to eliminate the Jews. For them, the "war against the Jews" became synonymous with the war itself in its wider geopolitical context. "Jew" and "enemy" became one and the same. By this logic, the Jews "had" to be eliminated. The Jewish Enemy is a harrowing account of how this logic developed in the Third Reich penned by one of the most original thinkers studying the period.