2014/10/06 by Peter Black · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghu103
openalex publication_date 2014/10/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Despite errors of fact and concept, this volume offers nuanced, readable interpretations appropriate for an introduction to why and how Nazi Germany implemented the Holocaust, which Peter Kenez explains within four contexts: first, modern European antisemitism; second, Nazi fear and hatred of Jews; third, Nazi control over a modern state; and fourth, total war as justification for extreme measures (p. 4). He could have added a fifth: World War I and its consequences. Kenez dates modern antisemitism from the French Revolution and Europe’s political modernization, including Jewish emancipation. He demonstrates how pre-emancipatory regulation of interaction between Jews and non-Jews, corporate connections of Jewish communities to aristocratic rulers, and restriction of Jews to occupations in commerce, estate management and revenue collection all combined to reinforce anti-Jewish stereotypes into the nineteenth century. His narrative clarifies an otherwise puzzling juxtaposition of scriptural and Nazi antisemitism common to introductory works on the Holocaust. Moreover, absence of Jews from ‘noble’ professions—soldiering, state service and food production—contributed to non-Jewish, middle-class perceptions of the post-emancipation influx of Jews into military and civil service positions as suspect outsiders infiltrating sensitive areas of the nation. Fantasies of an international ‘Jewry’ emerged, born of a fusion of perceptions that Jews controlled international finance and media with the dynamism of racist social Darwinism: Jews—rich yet Marxist—mobilized ‘inferior’ masses to drown ‘superior’, ‘Nordic’ peoples in exploitative, murderous chaos. Such fantasies anchored nineteenth-century völkisch (race-based) nationalism, an ideology that National Socialists adapted to defeated German society after World War I. Emphasizing the Great Depression as a key juncture on the road to the Holocaust, Kenez misses the significance of national trauma associated with loss of World War I and fails to mention the misguided 1930 decision of German bourgeois elites, led by Catholic Centre politicians Brüning and von Papen, to exploit the economic crisis and govern by presidential decree, eroding the essence of parliamentary democracy years before Hitler. Antisemitism was surely a defining feature of the Nazi regime, but concluding that Nazi propaganda worked because its purveyors believed what they preached (p. 94) to targets indifferent to Jews obscures the power of language of emergency and national security to justify persecution, aggression and murder. Failure to ‘see’ Jews behind enforcement of Versailles Treaty provisions did not dim hostility to those provisions; scepticism about Jewish leadership of an alliance to destroy Germany could not blind non-Nazis to the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance or immunize them against fears that German defeat meant cultural/physical annihilation under Soviet occupation. Nor could there be—in 1942—any illusions that Jews in Germany or anywhere else hoped for a German victory in what for Germans had become a war of survival. Kenez helpfully characterizes flagellation of other countries for excluding Jewish refugees before 1939 as ‘unfair’ (p. 115), given failure to comprehend the lethal threat to German Jews, and astutely refers to the impact that awareness of larger numbers of Jews seeking emigration from Poland, Romania and the Soviet Union had on Western responsiveness to the German-Jewish plight. He appropriately questions commonly portrayed but no less dubious constructions of consensus between Nazis and Arabs who opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine. Though both, after 1939, hated the British, Nazi racist antisemitism and Arab anticolonialism had little else in common (p. 118). Kenez rightly stresses war as the context for implementing the Holocaust. The narrative structure of the Nazi ‘final solution’ policy is generally reliable and well-written. The author, however, draws too direct a connection between establishing ghettos and systematic mass murder in Poland: ghettoization of Jews was haphazard in 1939–41, often inspired by civilian authorities aiming to monitor, expropriate property and exploit labour. Chronicling Romanian initiatives to kill Jews in Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria, he perceptively presents a curious consequence of Romanian dictator Marshall Antonescu’s realization that the Axis might not win the war: reorientation of Romanian policy towards preserving rather than destroying Jewish lives. Kenez also provides a helpful perspective on German reluctance to intervene in Denmark’s internal affairs during the rescue of Danish Jews, though he too generously ascribes humanitarian motives to the German leadership in Copenhagen (pp. 207–14). There are many (correctable) errors in an otherwise useful introduction to Holocaust history. Kenez refers to all German-annexed Polish territory as the ‘Wartheland’ (p. 130) and to the German conquest of Western Europe as the ‘phony war’ (p. 133). He overemphasizes resources available to Einsatzgruppen for killing operations in the USSR, unwittingly granting Order Police units, Waffen SS units and military detachments relief from responsibility for mass murder (p. 171). Other puzzling errors include: 4,000 German Jews going through Theresienstadt (actually nearly 43,000); the Ustaša regime in Croatia murdered 60,000 Jews (40,000 Jews resided in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1941); identification of cold water experiments on camp prisoners at Auschwitz; and Soviet troops liberating Auschwitz on 24 January 1945 (pp. 198, 206, 281, 284). Finally, the myth of a German Army ‘reluctant’ to sully its honour and violate international law (pp. 161–162) has been decisively debunked by scholars from Hans-Adolf Jacobsen in the 1960s to Dieter Pohl and David Stahel in the 2000s. Kenez’s conclusion that fear inspired by post-emancipatory Jewish success generated the image of a lethally destructive ‘Jewish power’ that explains ‘the vehemence of the Nazi desire to kill [Jews]’ (p. 290) seems valid. Even if such success was not as universal as Kenez suggests, those inclined to believe did not need much evidence to see Jewish ‘success’ as the consequence of Jewish conspiracy. Identifying a need to assuage guilt about mistreating Jews propelling Nazis—or Germans—to kill (p. 291, also 109–110) is less persuasive. The context of a war of survival, opportunities for a ‘final’ and perpetual security that the conquest of Europe offered the Nazi true believer and the chance forever to rid the Nordic race of its most dangerous and adept enemy seems to have been sufficient. One might wonder too whether the conclusion that ‘mass murder requires sophisticated, complex organization and coordination, which ... can only happen within the framework of the state’ holds true for post-1945 genocides in states that have failed (Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan, Congo).