The Jewish Enemy

Here, practically for the first time, we can see how Germans before and during World War II were at all times in their daily lives confronted with a carefully designed view of the world in which a mythical Jewish enemy was portrayed as threatening Germans and hence had to be killed. No prior study has shown as clearly as this one how central this theme was to German wartime propaganda in all its forms. -- Gerhard L. Weinberg, University of North Carolina Jeffrey Herf has written a brilliant book that reorients our understanding of the Holocaust. Arguing that racial antisemitism, however vicious, was an insufficient basis for genocide, Herf demonstrates that a major shift occurred in Nazi propaganda during the war: Jews were now presented as a political threat to the German nation, and as the instigators, through their puppets, America, England, and the Soviet Union, of a deadly world war against Germany. -- Susannah Heschel, author of <i>Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus</i> A commendable and compelling elucidation of the Nazi propaganda which accompanied the Holocaust, indispensable for both students of the Third Reich and general readers. -- Jay W. Baird, author of <i>The Mythical World of Nazi Propaganda, 1939-1945</i> In this impressive book, Jeffrey Herf shows that the omnipresent image of the 'international Jew' as the source of Germany's victimhood was central to the propaganda and political imagination of the Nazi leadership, which made no secret of its intention to destroy European Jewry. -- Anson Rabinbach, Princeton University With the market so saturated with books that have "Nazi" in their titles, when a path-breaking new work does appear, one that explains the "why"--not just another documentation of the "how"--there is a chance it will slip under many readers' radar. One can only hope that such a fate will not befall Jeffrey Herf's incredibly important The Jewish Enemy, one of those rare works of Holocaust history that poses the most essential question: "Why did European, especially German, antisemitism, which had never led to an effort to murder all of Europe's Jews before, do so between 1941 and 1945 in the midst of World War II? What changed to make anti-Semitism a rationale for mass murder rather than for a continuation of centuries old patterns of persecution?"...[Herf is] the legitimate intellectual heir to [George] Mosse. -- Noah Strote * Forward * Jeffrey Herf's latest book, The Jewish Enemy--dealing with Nazi propaganda during the Holocaust--sheds new light on what happened then in Europe and is a trenchant refutation of those who try to make us believe that antisemitic hate speech is merely a cynical tool employed by politicians...At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the demented discourse of radical antisemitism has resurfaced in different idioms and cultural contexts. It would be complacent to assume that variants on the narrative explored in Jeffrey Herf's brilliant work will not play a part in the future as well...This is a book that should be read widely. -- Karl Pfeifer * Searchlight * What may be the most important book on the Holocaust in a generation...In The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, [Herf] concedes that hatred and racism were important, but he argues that they don't explain Germany's unique efforts to destroy the Jews...The real answer isn't hate, but fear. Poring through miles of speeches, private comments, journal entries, party memoranda and all 24,000 pages of Goebbel's diaries, Herf concludes that the Nazis really believed that the Jews ran the world and wanted to destroy Germany. They believed that Jews controlled not only the Bolsheviks to the east but the capitalists to the west. -- Jonah Goldberg * Los Angeles Times * Many historians who have tackled Hitler and the Third Reich have found it impossible to tak

Jeffrey Herf is Professor of History at the University of Maryland. Among his books is Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich.

Preface 1. The Jews, the War, and the Holocaust 2. Building the Anti-Semitic Consensus 3. "International Jewry" and the Origins of World War II 4. At War against the Alliance of Bolshevism and Plutocracy 5. Propaganda in the Shadow of the Death Camps 6. "The Jews Are Guilty of Everything" 7. "Victory or Extermination" Conclusion Appendix: The Anti-Semitic Campaigns of the Nazi Regime, as Reflected in Lead Front-Page Stories in Der V&omul;lkische Beobachter List of Abbreviations Notes Acknowledgments Bibliography Bibliographical Essay Index