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The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust

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Herf's materials are powerful and unsettling, even to readers who are well acquainted with the literature on Nazism. He shows, in detail that has not previously been seen, how the Nazi war-time hate propaganda combined verbal attacks against Jews with attacks against the Allies. To these Nazi propagandists, the Jews were the overall enemy, standing behind and stage-managing the Allies.

Herf's interpretation differs in some respects from previous work by others. He holds that the Nazis' anti-Semitic propaganda in wartime was essentially different from what they had done in the pre-war period: this war-time propaganda was, in his view, a deliberate incitement to commit the Holocaust, while previous campaigns had been no more than "traditional" anti-Semitism.

Since the Nazis were never explicit in their propaganda about the mass killing of Jews, Herf's assertions about their intentions in this propaganda cannot be proven. Nevertheless, I find his interpretations highly suggestive, if not conclusive.

Other aspects of Herf's interpretations of the war-time Nazi materials can be checked systematically. For at least fifty years, scholars have practiced and developed methods of content analysis, which, unfortunately, Herf does not use in this work. At least two of his claims should have been subjected to such analysis:

1) The relative prominence of anti-Semitic themes as compared to other themes, in the period in question, is a textbook example of the kind of problem for which content analysis is appropriate.

2) The periodization that Herf proposes -- the new themes that he sees in the wartime period -- can and should be tested by systematic methods.

Despite these shortcomings, the book is highly suggestive. It will no doubt influence the scholarly work of the future.

There are so many interesting and revealing facts and analyses in this work that it is hard to approach a review without leaving large chunks of information aside. On a personal note I found this one of the most interesting books I have read on the anti-semitism of the period. Moreover, many of the illustrative examples dredged up by Herf still echo sharply today.

The book charts a gradual adaptation of anti-semitism to lubricate the goals of Naziism. Traditional charges of racial impurity and economic shiftiness were reshaped to meet eugenic and planned economy policies. What comes across very strikingly is the sheer amount of anti-semitic propaganda produced by the Nazis. Jews were aligned with Bolshevism, the Allies, International Banking, etc. Typically the enemy was associated directly with any threat to Nazi hegemony.

Herf's very careful annontation of instances was disturbing at times, and as a reader rather than a professional historian of the period, it was hard to set aside one's emotional and ontological revulsion. Very troubling, in the light of Israel's modern travails, is Herf's extended acount of the propagandistic support given by Grand Mufti al-Husseini for the Nazi machine. Herf cites his address at the opening of the Islamic Institute in Berlin in December 1942. The Mufti, consistent with his Nazi hosts' anti-semitism, lays the blame for all evils at the door of Jews. In 1944, Goebbels, having noted the Grand Mufti's "absolutely Nordic appearance", was puzzling over how to the get the "right" propaganda into the Mufti's hands. While the Mufti's intimate collaboration with the Nazis is despicable and shocking it is worthwhile recording that the vast majority of those staffing the extermination programmes were of Christian origin.

After Stalingrad, anti-semitic propaganda ratcheted up a gear - hard to imagine - and Jews were routinely blamed fro the war (even though at this point the Nazis had eliminated half their final total of Jewish victims).

In the end, Herf concurs with other historians that the true extent of knowledge in German society of the Holocasut will probably never be known. It seems that most Germans were indifferent to the fate of Jews, and presumably as the reich fell in on itself that indifference increased. One can't however leave this book without the nagging suspicion that all too often people failed to ask the right questions.

There are a lot of films, books, essays, and other stuff centered in World War II and, of course, the Holocaust. But many of these works talk about how it happened, the deportation, the guettos, the concentration camps. How the nazis took charge of "The Final Solution" and to make sure it happened.

But there is one question that is disturbing: why the german people, an educated people, lover of classic music, arts and discipline, could be indifferent and not move one finger while all these atrocities were happening? How the german volk could just accept and even justify the slaughter against the jewish people?

It looks incredible, but the nazi propaganda insisted that Germany was attacked by a "jewish plot". In a few words, Hitler, Goebbels and their propaganda put the whole situation in a position that "if we don't destroy the jews, they will destroy Germany". This was a sistematic brainwash that operate consistently but only reflects the hatred and the paranoia of the fuhrer and his followers.

This book answers all this questions and gives a real idea of how the propaganda works. It contains images of antisemite propaganda including attacks against Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, calling them "puppets of the jews". Hitler never accepts his responsability of the war, he even blames the british, americans and russians, but most of all, the jews for it as "warmongers" all the time.
There are also, extracts of Goebbels' journals and the strategies that he and his people use to make propaganda work.

This is a revealing and interesting book. I highly recommend it.

Jeffrey Herf's THE JEWISH ENEMY is a masterpiece. It is meticulously researched, beautifully written and solidly argued. Above all, it is a true original in that it tells us something genuinely new about the much-researched world of National Socialism and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. To be sure, age-old anti-Semitism DID play a major role in framing the Nazis' singular crime. But as Herf shows irrefutably, the REAL reason for the Nazis' decision to commit what has come to be known as the Holocaust and/or the Shoah, had less to do with their being part of a Europe-wide anti-Semitism, and everything with their viewing the Jews as their number one enemy that had to be destroyed. This is a great book. Kudos to its author.

Herf demonstrates in this important book that Hitler and Goebbels and Himmler and other Nazi leaders truly BELIEVED in their anti-Semitic propaganda. The idea or fantasy of the Jew lay at the heart of Nazi ideology. Yet this conclusion had been established in my book, HITLER'S IDEOLOGY. Please see: Hitler's Ideology: Embodied Metaphor, Fantasy, and History (PB)

What is original about this book is Herf's documentation of how the Nazi fantasy about the Jew was a significant SOURCE OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR as well. Hitler and Goebbels believed that what united the United States and the Soviet Union in their war against National Socialism was that BOTH OF THESE NATIONS WERE CONTROLLED BY THE JEWS.

The Nazis were dominated by a paranoid fantasy. This paranoid fantasy was the source of the World War. Herf hesitantly reaches the conclusion--but does reach it--that the Nazis believed their anti-Semitic ideology. However, I recently lectured with him at a conference and when I told him that the Nazi's belief system was psychotic, he became very disturbed.

He knew that their belief system was insane, but couldn't acknowledge the psychotic dimension of Nazi ideology. I wasn't saying that Hitler and Goebbels were psychotic, but that an ENTIRE SOCIETY MAY BE DOMINATED BY PSYCHOTIC THOUGHT PROCESSES.

To read about how the Nazi fantasy about the Jew led to the Holocaust, please see my recently published NATIONS HAVE THE RIGHT TO KILL:Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War

This book should be required reading for all antisemites and deniers as well as doubters of the NAZI HOLOCAUST.It's development of information concerrning both the overt and insidious state-controlled propaganda machine which was used to both dehumanize and desensity the greater German population is an excellent study of how this could happen in any state, obviously more pronounced in a totalitarian environment such as Hitler,s Germany, leaading to the inevitable conclusion, GENOCIDE. This is precisely why these people think as they do. They only need to learn why!

My perspective is as a reader who's not an expert on the Holocaust, the Nazi regime or the Second World War generally. Many details in the book were quite fresh and surprising -- for example, the tens of thousands of slide shows conducted by Nazi propagandists, and the use of the "Word of the Week" (Parole der Woche) poster series, several examples of which are reproduced in color. But from somewhere near the middle of the book a sort of numbness set in, due to the author's unrelenting rapid-fire, more or less chronological jog through the work product of Goebbels and other propagandists; after a while, much of it starts to sound alike. Prof. Herf does include some content-related comments here and there and in the conclusion. But I felt that the book would have been a more satisfying read if the political archivalist approach taken in most of the book had been blended occasionally with techniques of literary criticism and/or art history, so that the reader could catch his or her breath and focus more on what made some of this propaganda tick. An exploration of some of the connections between the Nazi output and prior or subsequent anti-Jewish, or other racist, propaganda might have been another way to make the book more interesting for the general reader.

A minor criticism is that the first chapter seems a bit disorganized and includes many repetitions; subsequent chapters are somewhat easier to parse out. Also (and more minor), I was puzzled that the author several times faults the Nazis for emphasizing the Jewishness of NY mayor Fiorello La Guardia (whom Prof. Herf tells us twice on the same page was Italian Catholic, @40). La Guardia's mother was Jewish, and so although the Nazis called him a "half-Jew" (Halbjude), the mayor was halachically all Jewish, at least by birth if not upbringing. A worthwhile book, but less engaging to read than I'd hoped.

This book fills some big gaps in our knowledge of how Hitler's Reich operated. A useful piece of work.

Although I haven't as of yet read the book(due to being a Finailst at Uni.), it arrived in an immaculate condition, just like it's brand new!
Only problem is cost of having to pay shipping when buying from abroad!If, however you're like me and don't mind paying that little extra as long as you get that book you really want, then this isn't that much of a problem!