By
– January 10, 2012
This book, a culmination of more than three decades of research on Nazi Germany by one of the period’s most distinguished and prolific historians, Ian Kershaw, brings together some of his most important and seminal scholarship for the first time. Kershaw was one of the first historians, as early as the 1970’s, to work on the social history of the Third Reich and this perspective is reflected in this wonderful volume. The writings are arranged in four sections — Hitler and the Final Solution, popular opinion and the Jews in Nazi Germany, the Final Solution in Historiography, and reflections in the essential singularity of Nazism. As a social historian, Kershaw explores how German society reacted to Nazism, what the attitude of “ordinary” Germans was under the Hitler dictatorship, and what shaped their behavior. Within this general framework, he attempts to understand how the majority German population responded to the increasingly brutal persecution, then extermination of the Jews. He concludes that moral indifference toward the fate of the Jews had characterized the stance of the majority of Germans. His interpretation can be summed up in one of his much quoted insights: “The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference.”
Kershaw also includes reflections on the role of Hitler in the power structures of the Third Reich as ideologue and propagandist, as architect of the “Final Solution,” as a principal mover of domestic affairs and foreign policy. He also provides reflections on the focus on the Holocaust in German historiography that erupted in the “Historians’ Dispute” (Historikerstreit) in 1986, in which many of Germany’s leading historians openly debated the singularity of the Holocaust in the press. The final two essays are reflective pieces that attempt to come to terms with the uniqueness of Nazism and what that period can teach us about the dangers we currently face with actual or potential genocides in the 21st century. He does not view the future with great optimism. The threats from rising fanaticism, particularly in the Middle East, are formidable. And humankind’s ability to combine new forms of ideological demonization with frightful technological killing power is far from eradicated.
This is a deeply insightful and well-written social history of the Nazi period, an excellent review of the scholarship of one of the greatest living historians of that era.
Michael N. Dobkowski is a professor of religious studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He is co-editor of Genocide and the Modern Age and On the Edge of Scarcity (Syracuse University Press); author of The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-Semitism; and co-author of The Nuclear Predicament.
