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Reviewed by:
  • The Nazi Conscience
  • Richard A. Leiby
The Nazi Conscience, Claudia Koonz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 368 pp., cloth $29.95, pbk. $16.95.

In our attempts to understand why the Holocaust, the euthanasia program, and other such atrocities took place, we tend to describe Nazism as antisemitic, anti-modern, and anti-liberal. While it is often convenient to define Nazism by what it was "against," our knowledge is incomplete unless we also consider what Nazism stood "for."1 Professor Koonz's work The Nazi Conscience does precisely that. The author argues that the regime's intolerance was the by-product of a distinct moral philosophy. The volume is a fascinating new look into the Nazi ethos and the methods the party used to convince the German people of the "righteousness" of its cause.

The central theme of the book is the transformation German culture experienced at the hands of the Nazis. What had once been a society inspired by an ethic of universal human rights became one that defined morality as doing what was best for [End Page 126] the Volk alone. Koonz calls this "ethnic fundamentalism" and describes how the Nazis fashioned a new national consensus based on the "positive" values of community and ethnic purity. It is admittedly hard to think of Adolf Hitler as a "practitioner of virtue," but Koonz demonstrates that der Führer's public persona was crafted along just such lines. Long before the party achieved electoral success, Hitler preferred to portray himself not as a Jew-baiter, but as a man dedicated to the protection and promotion of the Aryan race. In speeches, he often avoided spewing the hate-filled invective used by other antisemites, opting instead to urge upon his listeners their duty to protect German "blood" from "corruption." On the surface, this may seem a minor distinction. However, by posing a negative (hatred of Jews) as a virtue (protection and revival of the Volk), Hitler could persuade those who might ordinarily be put off by overt bigotry into acquiescing in his antisemitic policies. Thus the Nazis turned a social evil into a civic virtue, an alteration that was to be the cornerstone of the spiritual reawakening of the German nation.

The push to create this new consensus intensified following the seizure of power in 1933. Suddenly—to borrow a phrase from Peter Gay—the outsider became insider, and if the movement was to survive it had to convince ordinary Germans that there was more to Nazism than street brawls and bellicose speeches. Koonz describes how Nazi propaganda functionaries, university professors, and German youth worked together to promote ethnic fundamentalism. They defined "race" in terms of rational and clearly ascertainable "truths," thereby lending an air of scientific certitude to what otherwise might have been seen as irrational and emotional. The Nazis first turned to biologists for proofs of Aryan superiority. However, science could provide no way of identifying "Jewishness" beyond the shadowy areas of biometrics and racial stereotyping. The onus then fell on social scientists, including historians and philosophers, to identify Judaic intellectual and social traits that had infiltrated Aryan society. Once such "faults" were identified, the Nazi propaganda establishment disseminated their "exposure," bombarding the public with "evidence" of racial corruption. Eventually popular culture became saturated with the message that Jews were different from Aryans and therefore should be excluded from German society. Put simply, intellectuals and politicians conspired to transform prejudice into a value that "decent folks with a new feeling for justice [and] a love of truth"2 would accept.

These valuable insights inform our understanding of the preconditions for the Holocaust. Chapter VII is particularly useful, extending the discussion into the legal sphere and showing that even hideous corruptions of justice derived from a sense of moral duty. Koonz cites minutes from the June 1934 Criminal Law Commission that met to devise legal codes supporting disenfranchisement, to show that the participants (including such high-ranking officials as Minister of Justice Hans Gürtner and Bernhardt Lösener from the Ministry of the Interior) were not all rabid antisemites. Indeed, they couldn't even agree on what constituted "Jewishness," and in one [End Page 127] instance...

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