Lucy Dawidowicz

The opening chapters of Mein Kampf present an invitation: come and join me, the author calls to his readers, in a journey of enlightenment that will reveal the clandestine evil destroying Germany: Jews. While Jews may be visible to the eye, the depth and extent of their wickedness require an awareness that comes with self-cultivation, Bildung. Rather than presenting itself in its opening pages as an ideological tract or political platform, Mein Kampf asks its readers to join its author in a journey of Bildung. Hitler's goal was creating a mass movement that would think of itself as a community, with each person identifying with him, since he viewed himself and his life as the political movement; Nazi politics was Hitler, not only in his own mind. He was the figure at the center, with whom each person should be tied in an emotional connection, as emotions, he recognized, are more powerful in uniting people than political platforms. Nowhere were emotions deployed more consistently in Mein Kampf than in its anti-Semitic passages about Jews. A massive body of anti-Semitic literature produced in Germany from the 1870s through 1945 informed readers of alleged Jewish wickedness in nearly every sphere of private and public life. The deleterious effects of Jews were enumerated: crashing the stock market, mocking Christianity, undermining German language and culture, threatening the cleanliness and health of Germans, perverting marriage and sexuality, robbing Germany of

Central European History, 2010

2003

The first complete and annotated edition of the book Hitler dictated just before his rise to power. Contains startling, revealing ideas that became his programme once in power but that he didn't want publicised. New here is the much broader, 'open' vision Hitler gave of his foreign policy views and the fact that all were oriented toward war and aggression. Perhaps the most unnerving vision is the terrifying future Hitler offered, one of continuous warfare, with new wars being carried out in a kind of chain-reaction until the final inevitable clash with the United States. These statements are wrapped in the trademark rhetoric and with many references to people and events, which are fully explained by Dr Weinberg's annotations. An essential document, unavailable until now, for a deeper understanding of the Nazi period and its dismal list of horrors.

American Jewish History, 2016

Central European History, 2021

Hitler's status as icon of evil is well earned although it can obscure the Hitler of history. First, Hitler is continuously portrayed as having come to power, and then maintaining power, through brute force at every turn. Here is a quote in support of that: “The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence.” (attached review, p. 520, first full paragraph). This is often cited without the sentence following it in which he writes that naked force can be counter-productive. Second, despite the increasing place of antisemitism and the Holocaust in Hitler biographies, none of the major ones include the history of German intermarriages (German Jews married to German non-Jews). To do this, they overlook or misrepresent a document that Hitler’s personal secretary Martin Bormann considered a fundamental decision regarding the Jewish question” (top, p. 525). This Hitler order of December 1938 divided intermarried Jews –and their non-Jewish partners—into two categories, “privileged” and “nonprivileged,” separating intermarried Jews who would be marked as criminals for death with the yellow star from “privileged” intermarried Jews who did not wear this. Contrary to plan, however, those wearing the badge also generally survived; in fact, intermarried Jews comprised virtually all of the German Jews who survived Hitler. “Strange as it may seem,” wrote Jewish statistician Bruno Blau in 1950, “the fact that a small number of German Jews were saved from liquidation is due almost entirely to mixed marriages.” Explaining why they survived is a key to understanding how Hitler’s dictatorship ruled his own people within the Reich. The story of intermarriage is intertwined with the sometimes overlooked history of women and gender. Goebbels was referring to non-Jewish German women when he wrote on November 2, 1943 that “The state may never, against its better insight, give in to the pressure of the street.” When he worried that “the people know just exactly where the soft spot of the leadership is, and will always exploit this,” he referred not only to a street protest by German wives for their Jewish husbands but also to a protest of 300 women in Witten in October 1943, also gaining them their goal (Nazi police report, November 18, 1943).

East Central Europe, 2003

This is a very good book. Good, because it hardly asserts anything; it incessantly asks questions and quite often narrates. Its author seems to have read all the relevant books of the last two decades written on his subject;' and made sure of the fact that there is hardly any essential question at least a faint majority of the authors would agree on. And the conclusion he drew from all this, to my greatest delight, is that the most important questions are not only unanswered, but unanswerable in principle because all affirmative answers become inadmissible generalizations. But the fact that these questions are unanswerable did not make him state that they are not worth asking. On the contrary! There is only one unique and necessary way of understanding, above all of understanding the ununderstandable: questioning incessantly and telling stories that light the facts from various angles-rather than finding the "true" statements interpreting the facts. Every story is unique of course, whether it is Father Daniel's folk-tale-like story of overcoming all obstacles, Stella's story of becoming evil, or Victor Klemperer's one demonstrating that the Germans quite often showed positive solidarity in Dresden.2 However "...in the course of time one grows weary of the perpetual patter about the universal, always the universal".3 The exception "explains the universal when it explains itself, and if one would study the uni-* English version by Istvin Lantos 1 Even if it is quite obvious for the reader, it is not easy to circumscribe what exactly `this field' maps. The history of Europe between 1933 and 1945, or 'only* the history of the 2nd World War as a whole? By no means! But the topic of the book cannot be narrowed down to the Holocaust only, although this latter is in the centre of interest in the books reviewed by Deak in the New York Review of Books and in the New Republic, as well as in his essays. I may be right to state that the book is inseparable from the history of World War II, but it deals with the genocides and cruelties independent from the combat actions, and also with their motivations, their perpetrators, their victims and their onlookers. The author articulated his essays in this respect. The chapters of the book are: Germaru; Jews among `Aryans ; Vtctfms; The Holocaust in other lands; and finally Onlookers. And if it is so; then the centre of the book must be the Hitlerian plan to exterminate the Jewish peopie or at least to deport them from the whole of Europe'