Nazi Morals

...came to support a leadership that sought to annihilate European Jewry...

...She notes that in his effort to attain respectability before 1933, Hitler downplayed virulent anti-Semitism and preparation for war—stressing instead such themes as ethnic revival, individual sacrifice, and a cleansing of the nation's cultural life...

...As Koonz notes, the indoctrination was successful because there was little reason to question the facts conveyed by experts, documentary films, educational materials, and popular science...

...The readiness of many Germans to acquiesce evolved as a consequence of their internalization of the knowledge that was disseminated apparently by legitimate institutions of the state...

...The Nazi conscience, as described by Koonz, was the product of an all-encompassing propaganda assault, which included Walter Gross's Office of Racial Politics, Julius Streicher's vicious newspaper Der Sturmer, Joseph Goebbels's propaganda network, the scientific community, the academy, the Hitler Youth, and public intellectuals...

...The result, Koonz writes, was that "despite having been raised to believe in the Golden Rule and probably more or less honoring it in their private lives, citizens of the Third Reich were shaped by a public culture . . . so compelling that even those who objected to one or another aspect of Nazism came to accept the existence of a hierarchy of racially based human worth...

...Despite the fact that by the mid-1930s Nazi ethnologists failed to find a basis for distinguishing Aryans from Jews, they blamed their failure on the Jewish capacity for duplicity and attributed Jewish differences to "deeper" qualities that had been implanted by their nomadic tradition...

...The German public was reeducated to support the elimination of Jews, Gypsies, the chronically ill, and other categories of the "unfit"—all as a moral good, consistent with the dictates of conscience...

...Koonz's prodigious work is a major contribution to our understanding of the social and ideological history of the Third Reich...

...Conscience in the Third Reich was transformed into an ethos of high moral purpose wherein the Aryan majority rationalized the elimination of the defenseless Jews as a difficult but necessary duty...

...Placing a priority on racial research that depicted Jews as a threat to the nation's ethnic purity, Nazi scholarship permeated every sphere of German life and was incorporated in the textbooks that educated millions of German students...

...And the Nazis were able to accomplish this with the support of a substantial number of intellectuals, religious leaders, genetic experts, and other professional elites who promoted Germany's ethnic revival...

...Koonz concludes that the Final Solution did not develop as evil incarnate but "as the dark side of ethnic righteousness...

...Although these scholars represented a minority in their respective fields, they received official support from the government, who promoted their scholarship among the population...

...Koonz describes how some academics skewed their data to reach conclusions that reinforced Nazi ideology...

...BY JACK FISCHEL Claudia Koonz, a professor at Duke University and the author of the 1987 Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics, explains in her insightful new book how Germans, who were among Europe's least anti-Semitic people, Jack Fischel is author of The Holocaust and Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust...

...At the same time, he distanced himself from the storm troopers who attacked Jews and others the Nazis considered their enemies...

...Once in power, however, the Nazi regime carefully engineered a cultural strategy that by 1939 had entirely excluded Jews from any moral consideration...