Jewish Enemy by Jeffrey Herf - Book Report/Review Example

Review of the Book Jewish Enemy by Jeffrey Herf Sixty years have passed but still there are numerous debates on the magnitude of the Holocaust. However, the huge atrocities committed have surpassed the techniques the Nazis employed to rationalize their needs. A study of the Holocaust reveals very intriguing result: that human beings have a capacity to devise and trust the kind of sadistic nonsense the Nazis held about Jews or these insightful absurd beliefs can lead to scrupulously formulated and executed plans for industrial mass murder?

In probing the political mores in today’s era, there is a quite significance in a number of illogical and deceptive ideological perceptions. The Jewish Enemy is an illuminating, cautiously documented historical study and a prompt of the undying and astounding human aptitude for wild belief, unending abhorrence, and an equivalent striking speediness to act upon peculiar certainty and fantasies. This study also shows the ways and schemes of Nazi propaganda. There is great importance of learning how historical actors translate beliefs and ideologies into the narrative of events.

No term better captures the translation of ideological fanaticism into the political decisions that produced the Holocaust or helps to explain why Europe’s longest hatred, anti-Semitism, produced mass murder in place of customary centuries of persecution. Hitler and his fellow propagandists devised mechanisms to translate this hatred into an interpretive framework that served to make sense and nonsense of ongoing events. The anti-Semitic narrative of the Nazism was totalitarian since projection and paranoia were the key concepts for mass murder and belligerence (Herf 1-9).

The author uses various sources such as speeches by Nazi leaders in editorials and articles from the government press, ubiquitous wall posters, propaganda pamphlets, radio broadcasts, journal entries, newsreels and from Goebbel’s diaries. These sources enable the author to draw the conclusion that Nazis held the belief that the Jews actually had intentions to destroy Germany. They strongly believed that Jews had control over the Bolsheviks to the east as well as the capitalists to the west.

To prove these findings the author starts by answering the question as to why the anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime led to genocide between 1941 and 1945 instead of an era of persecution. These show that the genocides and various atrocities committed by the Nazi regime were based on reprehensible racial biology which is the main focus of researchers. Rather it was due to its paranoia, political allegation that a historical actor known as “international Jewry” was the major enemy of Germany.

Thus, retaliation measures like the murder and attacks on Jews were the absurdly logical corollary of this assumption (Meade 160-162). Herf research approach can be termed as “modified internationalism” due to the following reasons. First, the Nazi ideology is given substantial weight and ideas are portrayed in chronological events and circumstances that are plans of Hitler to cause the Second World War; second, its aim is on the radicalization and changes between 1939 and 1941 of the Nazi anti-Semitism and on how and why it was different from previous outlooks; and third it emphasizes that the connection between the Holocaust and the war was due to the inherency of the Nazi leaders radical anti-Semitism and was not caused by the geography, timing and by chance.

The use of biological racism by the regime was primarily important since it pointed out a bond which is said to exist among all Jews. Herf emphasizes that the Nazi anti-Semitic narrative was immune to refutation, closed and falsification (Herf, 66). Herf seems to portray that the Nazi leaders actually believed this, but it is arguable that they only stated this so as to keep the notion of international Jewry alive. Their propaganda seemed to have a hidden objective, hence used the concept of international Jewry to justify their actions.

This anti-Semitism propaganda bore fruit in getting other countries as allies especially in the Arab world. Although Herf assertion of the Nazi propaganda can be debatable, it is important to acknowledge that the propaganda was a driving force for the Holocaust and war. The Nazi leaders had control over the media to propagate their hatred of Jews, justify the murder of Jews and prevent any factual information on the atrocities committed from reaching the press. Thus if the democratic institutions could not have been eliminated the genocides could not have happened.

Hence the Jewish enemy reveals the importance of an independent and fair press and the severe consequences which can result on its absence. The Holocaust and the reasons of justification of the propaganda teach an important aspect that hatred and fantasies of humans not related to material acquisition or tangible group interest can cause immense anguish and annihilation. Also, political leaders usually act on the basis of their ideas, and in the event that power is absolute, and the ideas become deranged, this may as well lead to atrocious actions.

Works Cited Herf, Jeffrey. The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ( 2006): 400. Meade, Colin. "Wartime Machinations." Jewish Political Studies Review 19.1 (2007): 160-162.