
Jacob L. Hamric |
Review of Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy:
Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2006. Pp. ix, 390. ISBN
978-0-674-02175-4. |
In his latest book, Jeffrey Herf, professor of
history at the University of Maryland and a recognized scholar of
modern German and Jewish history, adds to the extensive
historiography of the Holocaust. His three previous books,
Reactionary Modernism, War by Other Means, and Divided
Memory,[1]
are classics in the field and demonstrate the scope of his interests
and abilities. In The Jewish Enemy, Herf examines the use of
anti-Semitic propaganda by the National Socialist regime to make
several bold claims about Adolf Hitler, the Nazi leadership, and the
Holocaust: "the radical anti-Semitic ideology that justified and
accompanied the mass murder of European Jewry was first and foremost
a paranoid political, rather than biological, conviction and
narrative" (150-1). He points out that, since anti-Semitism was
not new to Germany, scholars need to ask what change in the nature
of anti-Semitism allowed the Nazis to go from persecution to
genocide. He surmises that a close investigation of anti-Semitic
media explains the temporal framework of the Holocaust. Herf studies
the speeches of Hitler, the speeches and diaries of the Nazi
propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, the headlines in the official
Nazi newspaper, the Völkische Beobachter, and a plethora of
propaganda leaflets to support his assertions. According to Nazi
propaganda, a small group of powerful actors, referred to
collectively as "international Jewry," having come to power behind
the scenes in the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United
States, started and later expanded the war against Nazi Germany in
order to exterminate the German people. Herf assigns particular
importance to Hitler's response to the so-called threat of political
Jewry, widely known as the "prophecy," in which Hitler proclaimed,
frequently for public consumption, that if the Jews started a world
war, it would not lead to the end of the German people but rather to
the extermination of the Jewish race. Consequently, Hitler's
prophecy not only provided National Socialism with a historical
narrative of the danger of international Jewry, but, Herf suggests,
demonstrates that Hitler and other Nazis actually believed in their
fanatical ideology.
Herf employs a chronological approach, discussing
first how the Nazi leadership portrayed a Jewish conspiracy as the
driving force of political events in the 1920s and 1930s. He
stresses that Goebbels and Otto Dietrich, Chief of the Reich Press
Office, played key roles in disseminating Hitler's anti-Semitic
ideology at the Gau (regional), Kreis (city), and
Ort (local) levels throughout Germany, especially via newspapers
and walled posters such as the Parole der Woche (Word of the
Week). The widespread distribution of such propaganda, Herf argues,
gave Hitler and the Nazi elite an anti-Semitic "consensus" that made
possible the Führer's first prophecy speech during his 30 January
1939 address to the Reichstag.
Herf then analyzes the continuation of the Nazis'
historical narrative during the opening years of the Second World
War, when Hitler, Goebbels, Dietrich, and other Nazi leaders saw no
contradiction between their belief in a pervasive Jewish conspiracy
controlling the governments of the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and
America, and the fact that Hitler and Joseph Stalin had signed a
nonaggression pact in August 1939. As Herf notes repeatedly, the
Nazi propaganda machine always had a justification for Hitler's
provocative actions. In this case, Great Britain's refusal to
surrender to Nazi Germany despite its precarious strategic position
and America's economic support for Britain testified to the
political power of international Jewry in the two western countries.
Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in particular became
frequent targets of Nazi propaganda attacks, usually as stooges or
puppets of the Jewish "wire-pullers" (Drahtzieher). At the
same time, the Nazi-Soviet Pact demonstrated that even though the
Jews were a formidable opponent, Hitler was able to outsmart and
defeat them.
Herf then focuses on Nazi propaganda during the
turning point of the war (1941-1943), when the regime was fighting
against Great Britain, America, and the Soviet Union, and carrying
out its genocide against the Jews. Operation Barbarossa, Germany's
invasion of the Soviet Union, beginning 22 June 1941, signified a
return to Nazi orthodoxy, as claims of close bonds between
Bolshevism and international Jewry once again became a hallmark of
German propaganda; in this regard, the German-Soviet war actually
clarified events and legitimized the Nazi elite's interpretation of
history. First and foremost, the link between Bolshevism and
international Jewry meant that any long-term alliance between
Germany and the USSR was implausible; therefore, the Nazi offensive
was necessary since international Jewry within Russia had been
planning for the Red Army to launch a full-scale attack against
Germany anyway. Hitler had simply carried out a preemptive war to
save the German nation. In addition, Britain's continued
stubbornness and America's entry into the war validated Hitler's
conspiracy theory--Britain and America had allied with Stalin
because international Jewry was controlling both countries.
Hitler and Goebbels also used the idea of an
international Jewish conspiracy to justify the mass murder of the
Jews. As both the carnage of the military conflict and the
radicalization of Jewish policy intensified, according to Herf, so
too did Nazi propaganda. From 1941 to 1943, public speeches by
Hitler and Goebbels, private writings by Goebbels, and numerous
propaganda posters included stark references to "annihilation" and
"extermination" of Jews, which the author argues should be taken
literally. When Hitler and Goebbels spoke of Hitler's prophecy, the
audience knew what they meant; when millions of ordinary Germans
walked by and presumably looked at walled posters which stated "The
Jews will stop laughing," the message was clear. At the same time,
the Nazi leadership carefully hid the details of the genocide from
the German public, allowing for what Herf calls "plausible
deniability," meaning the German public was able to interpret Nazi
propaganda however it wished. Moreover, Hitler repeatedly painted a
picture of the war as an act of Jewish aggression, and thus all Nazi
actions as "preventive" or "defensive" in nature. He even blamed the
Jews for the Allied bombing of German cities beginning in force by
1943. It may seem laughable that Germans should have been
susceptible to such propaganda, but Herf reminds us that they
received no alternative explanation for the hardships and
brutalities of the war.
The remainder the book investigates Nazi
propaganda from the German defeat at Stalingrad until the end of the
Second World War. Herf notes that in this phase the propaganda
emphasized the specter of a Jewish conspiracy to galvanize the
German population to continue prosecuting the war long after victory
was out of reach. Hitler, Goebbels, and other Nazi leaders warned
that if Germany were to be defeated by the Bolsheviks and the
western powers, international Jewry would not only punish the Nazi
regime, but exterminate the entire German nation. Ironically, the
National Socialist government maintained that international Jewry
was responsible for Germany's defeat; thus Hitler's conspiracy
theory simultaneously characterized it as an omnipotent force and
yet able to be resisted and overcome. Herf concludes by urging
scholars to think about the Second World War and the Holocaust as
the Nazi leaders themselves viewed them--as together constituting
the single seminal event of the era, and to recognize that such a
perception arose from a fanatical ideology that targeted the
supposed danger of international Jewry.
The Jewish Enemy will rekindle the well
known functionalist-intentionalist debate among Holocaust scholars.
Herf is clearly an intentionalist, arguing that Hitler played the
central role in the Holocaust and had consistently, albeit
infrequently, spoken about the Jewish problem in apocalyptic terms
during the 1920s and 1930s, long before the Nazi genocide occurred.
He uses commonly cited speeches and writings of Hitler and Goebbels
to support his contentions, but he strengthens his argument by
stressing the importance of Dietrich, who, unlike Goebbels,
interacted with Hitler on a regular basis throughout much of the war
(22-6, 160-1). Hitler conveyed all his orders regarding propaganda
to Dietrich, who in turn passed them along to the press staff. In
addition, Herf surmises that the Nazi propaganda organizations
functioned as a well-oiled machine, due largely to the anti-Semitic
consensus among the Nazi elite and the hands-on approach of Hitler
and Dietrich. He connects the seriousness with which Hitler treated
propaganda to his pivotal role in the extermination of the Jews. In
general, Herf's analysis of propaganda offers scholars an additional
lens for examining the origins of the Holocaust.
The book does contain some weaknesses. First,
many of Herf's arguments are not as novel as he claims. It is now
commonplace among scholars to conceptualize the German military
conflict and the Holocaust as part of the same goal, the realization
of Hitler's fanatical ideology. Furthermore, the author is obsessed
with proving that the Nazi propaganda was false--as if he must take
it seriously because he believes the Nazis themselves did. Herf
often devotes entire pages to refuting Nazi conspiracy theories. To
cite just one, he states that Churchill and Roosevelt sided with
Stalin for geopolitical reasons, not because they were Jewish
puppets, as if that needed reaffirming. This not only makes the book
extremely repetitive, but results in missed opportunities to
solidify some of its other contentions. For instance, Herf asserts
that the Nazi leaders genuinely believed their anti-Semitic
propaganda, referencing, like other intentionalist scholars, the
writings of Hitler and Goebbels as evidence. But these writings do
not prove what other Nazi elites believed. In fact, besides
occasional references to Robert Ley, leader of the German Labor
Front, the author focuses narrowly on the aims and actions of
Hitler, Goebbels, and Dietrich. A more systematic investigation of
how others in the leadership used propaganda would have strengthened
this strand of the overall argument.
Most controversial, however, is Herf's thesis
itself--the primacy of politics over race in the Nazis' construction
of their fanatical anti-Semitic ideology. It is doubtful that
hundreds of scholars studying German history and the Holocaust have,
unlike Herf, misread the Nazis' motivations for persecuting and then
carrying out genocide against the Jews. At best, Herf is erroneously
distinguishing between politics and race; even scholars who
accentuate the role of ideology regarding Nazi atrocities realize
that Hitler believed politics and race to be intertwined. Herf
intentionally downplays race to bolster the credibility of his
sources. He is right that scholars should take propaganda very
seriously, but walled posters and bellicose speeches do not
adequately explain why Hitler and the Nazis tried to exterminate the
Jewish people: why not formulate and promote a conspiracy about the
French, the British, or the Russians? Politics certainly contributed
to, but does not fully explain, Nazi conspiracy theories against the
Jews.
In the end, Herf's study is one of unfulfilled
potential. On the one hand, his concentration on propaganda will
open many avenues for future research on the Holocaust and likely
revive the functionalist-intentionalist debate. On the other, his
eschewing of nuanced arguments in favor of extremely bold assertions
leaves many questions unanswered. Despite the abundance of
literature on the topic, scholars still cannot find a common ground
and accept that perhaps several causal factors drove the Nazi
implementation of mass murder.
The University of Tennessee
jhamric@utk.edu
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