Two British journalists who lived and worked in Eastern Europe, LeBor (Hitler's Secret Bankers) and Boyes (The Naked President) are sensitive to the myriad moral choices made by ordinary and extraordinary Germans in the face of evil. As the authors and others have pointed out, "few knew everything, millions knew something" about the vast project to exterminate the Jews. Although their theory of seduction is neither new nor original, LeBor and Boyes do offer (without crediting him) a Gramscian model of hegemony: that power is never only the simple threat of force, but a combination of the threat of force along with consensus. It is the consensus that concerns them more than the violence per se of National Socialism. In short, they explain, there were choices to be made and most people made the "wrong" ones, for various reasons (fear, greed, etc.). Although the book opens up new avenues of inquiry and questions, it diminishes somewhat the role of ideology and anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe. Small vignettes embedded in each chapter are revealing: jokes, miniature biographies, micro-episodes of the Reich. LeBor and Boyes's claim that "historians have mainly constructed a world inhabited only by victims and criminals" demonstrates a lack of familiarity with some recent work in the field, such as Tzvetan Todorov's Facing the Extreme: Life in the Concentration Camps. Undeniably, Hitler and his propaganda machine were masters at mass, public seduction. But this is only one facet of a dark era in history.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
This is a macabrely fascinating work on the flexibility of human morality when people are faced with sinister and seductive alternatives. The authors not only explore how great numbers of people accommodated the horrors of the Third Reich but also how others worked to resist its bloody machinations. Much of the German middle class seemed to be bought off cheaply through buying Jewish property that was seized by the Nazis and then sold at cut-rate prices. They were also given inexpensive vacations that had previously only been available to the wealthy. Among those who worked to thwart Hitler's Final Solution was Albert Goring, the brother of Reichsmarschal Hermann Goring. Albert worked openly to assist Jews in escaping Germany. Perhaps the most curious of those who assisted Hitler were the Judenraete: local Jewish civic leaders who either were coerced or volunteered to keep Jewish civilians under control. Although this book is informative and thought-provoking, it is also curiously ill focused and disorganized. But recommended, nevertheless, for the information it contains. Eric Robbins
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