Raz - Month #1

Taken together, Herf’s The Jewish Enemy and Wildt’s An Uncompromising Generation coincide in one important point: they both point to the importance of ideological convictions in the eyes of the people who played central roles in the persecution and mass murder of Jews as well as other groups in Nazi-dominated Europe during World War II. The two books also point to the significant place of antisemitic intellectuals in the Nazi murder apparatus.

Herf has put much emphasis on antisemitism, elucidating the conspiratorial character of Nazi hatred against Jews. Although Herf’s insistence on the uniqueness of the Holocaust ignores current scholarship in the field of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, his assertion about the unique quality and place of Nazi antisemitism is well-based. Indeed, no other component of Nazi ideology and policies assumed such obsessive totality as “the Jewish question.” Herf has also elucidated the formation of the antisemitic consensus in Nazi Germany, at least among those involved in the various aspects related to the persecution and annihilation of Jews and other groups. This consensus, framed around irrational elements, created cooperation among various state and Nazi party offices involved in the “final solution.” As these bodies tended to indulge in numerous struggles, the instances of genocide-oriented agreements shed light on the force of Nazi ideology. In addition, Herf has revealed the central place of Hitler in the formation and direction of Nazi propaganda, putting another nail in the coffin of the argument that Hitler functioned as a weak dictator. At the same time, however, Herf has exaggerated the role of the different Nazi mass media as facilitators of genocide, the murderous explicitness communicated through them notwithstanding. And finally, Herf has pointed to the vital connection between World War II and the genocidal policies planned and carried out by the Nazi state, a combination all too often marginalized.  

Unfortunately, Herf has over-politicized his research by referring disproportionately to the connections between the Nazi leadership and the Jerusalem Mufti. Trying to draw connections and parallels between one World War II Palestinian leader and present-day Islamic fundamentalisms, Herf threw history out the window, writing as if the political, social, economic, and ideological contexts of World War II and the early 21^st century matter not at all. This attempt forms part of a dangerous academic effort to show that Islamic extremists are, in effect, Fascists, heirs to the ideological essence of Fascisms, Nazism, and Totalitarianisms that once laid claim to global hegemony. An argument meant to support the distorted division of good and evil that collapsed in 1989, it contains numerous shortcomings glossed over in the name of American desires to establish international domination.    

In one specific statement, on page 75, Herf even created an imaginary division and “convergence” between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, which had never existed in Nazis minds! This obviously alludes to Israeli as well as some Jewish scholars and public figures, who in the last few decades have labored to depict these phenomena as synonymous. A non-issue for Nazi ideology, much criticism on Israel today (not necessarily anti-Zionist) by no means allies itself with antisemitim.

Wildt has offered a compelling analysis that makes hash of the theories connecting the Holocaust (or, more broadly, genocide in the last century or so) to modernism. Like Herf but in a different way, Wildt has shown the importance of World War II to the murderous dynamics of the RSHA, highlighting the planned and coordinated acts of the Einsatzgruppen from the beginning of the war in 1939. Also like Herf but not as a focus, Wildt has shown the central place that Jews occupied in the Nazi worldview, particularly among the educated elite of the Nazi state. Wildt has also undermined those who have claimed that opportunism motivated individuals to take part in mass murder, emphasizing instead the ideological commitment that characterized the Nazi leadership. Lastly, Wildt has revived the unjustly discredited intentionalist paradigm in Holocaust Studies, by emphasizing time and again that Nazi reality was intended and that, in order to achieve it, the necessary institutions that were meant to function in a certain way (i.e., unbound to conventional political norms and pursuing their goals uncompromisingly) came into being. NOT the other way around.

While Wildt’s findings and observations point to possible revisions in the received wisdom concerning the origins and implementation of the “final solution,” he preferred to stick to the view set forth by Browning, thereby strengthening a highly problematic division between systematic mass murder (from the beginning of the Soviet campaign) and total genocide (from the fall of 1941 onwards). While such a thesis might help establish Wildt’s focus on “radicalization,” he has somewhat minimized the effect of escalation on the implementation of Nazi designs once a principal decision had already taken place, possibly in the spring of 1941 (as Breitmann has argued).