The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi

by Johann Chapoutot

Winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research

The scale and the depth of Nazi brutality seem to defy understanding. What could drive people to fight, kill, and destroy with such ruthless ambition? Observers and historians have offered countless explanations since the 1930s. According to Johann Chapoutot, we need to understand better how the Nazis explained it themselves. We need a clearer view, in particular, of how they were steeped in and spread the idea that history gave them no it was either kill or die.

Chapoutot, one of France’s leading historians, spent years immersing himself in the texts and images that reflected and shaped the mental world of Nazi ideologues, and that the Nazis disseminated to the German public. The party had no official ur-text of ideology, values, and history. But a clear narrative emerges from the myriad works of intellectuals, apparatchiks, journalists, and movie-makers that Chapoutot explores.

The story went like In the ancient world, the Nordic-German race lived in harmony with the laws of nature. But since Late Antiquity, corrupt foreign norms and values―Jewish values in particular―had alienated Germany from itself and from all that was natural. The time had come, under the Nazis, to return to the fundamental law of blood. Germany must fight, conquer, and procreate, or perish. History did not concern itself with right and wrong, only brute necessity. A remarkable work of scholarship and insight, The Law of Blood recreates the chilling ideas and outlook that would cost millions their lives.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Germany, World War II, Nazi Party, Holocaust

512 pages, Hardcover

First published October 9, 2014

About the author

Johann Chapoutot est professeur d'histoire contemporaine à l'université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. Spécialiste de l'histoire de la culture nazie et d'histoire politique et culturelle contemporaine, il est notamment l'auteur de La Loi du sang. Penser et agir en nazi (Bibliothèque des Histoires, 2014) et de La révolution culturelle nazie (Bibliothèque des Histoires, 2017).

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are some books that are almost impossible to review because they are so crammed with large ideas on every other page, so many that by the end of the book you could only do it justice by writing a 30 page essay with footnotes; and this is not a Goodreads-friendly thing to do. The Law of Blood is one of these. (I’ve added a list of some other books in this category below.)
As a way round this, I thought, what you could do is review the said problem books bit by bit. I never really thought of that before. But why not ? So….

THE LAW OF BLOOD : PAGES 1-120

Everyone knows what the Nazis did. And we have had a number of books which try to explain how they got people to do all this horrendous stuff (Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning, the enormously controversial Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen, and so on). But I haven’t before come across a book that tries to explain the totality of Nazi thought, their worldview, their belief system. It’s a truly unpleasant subject, like trying to reconstruct Ted Bundy’s attitude to women in forensic detail. But it’s well worth doing. We need to be able to recognise this world view wherever it raises its head (and it’s never far away) so we need to look the beast right in the eyes without flinching.

Professor Johann Chapoutot does a fantastic job here, and he deserves whatever medals there are going for history books.

THE THEOLOGY OF THE NAZIS

This book opens with an investigation of what you have to call the Nazi religion. To call it a philosophy would be an insult to philosophy but yes, Nazis, bit by bit, did try to assemble a coherent theoretical framework, a setting out of their stall.

In so doing, they had a problem, because they were operating within a fundamentally Christian country, and they were radically anti-Christian. So they had to proceed with caution – I know, Nazis proceeding with caution sounds oxymoronic, but in this area that’s what they did. They explained the various anti-Christian concepts to the SS but they didn’t let on how much they hated Christianity to the rest of the German population. The people, alas, would not have understood. The Nazis knew it would take some time.

Their religion went like this : the monotheistic God conceptualised in Judaism and then Christianity was out there, above everything, creator and judge. But in the pre-Christian past, the German and Nordic races were pantheists, animists, revering Nature as the perfect expression of the divine. They were holistic, they lived with nature and didn’t exploit it. The Bible, in contradistinction, says that God condemned man and Nature as fallen, sinful. But this was a wicked lie. In truth there was a grand unity of all living things, man was an animal, part of and in no way superior to the natural world. It follows, therefore, that Nazis were strong on animal rights. Their Reich Animal Protection Act of 24.11.1933 was left on the statute books until 1972.

So the Christian religion had alienated the Nordic races from their original nature. Shame of the physical, of the body, was intrinsic to this distortion. The Nazis were not ashamed of the human body, and they had no problem with art depicting nudes, and it’s well-known that they promoted nudism.



Christianity’s essential idea is salvation – the rescue of the individual from a sinful condition, and the passage of the individual soul into the next, infinitely superior world. In the Nazi theology, the individual, firstly, is not essentially sinful, and secondly, is wholly unimportant. The individual is fused with the race in its place in Nature and there is no requirement for any kind of priesthood. Relations with the divine should be companionable and confident, as opposed to the terror-stricken grovellings of the Bible, that monstrous slave/master relationship. Prof Chapoutot summarises :
The youth of Germany had been subjected to the brainwashing of Judeo-Christian alienation, trussed and tied and handed over to priests who were nothing but rabbis in disguise.


A SLIGHT PROBLEM WITH JESUS

But it was always going to be difficult to throw Jesus out, alas, the people seemed to hold him very dear, so the Nazi thinkers tried the next best thing. They founded the Institute for the Exploration and Elimination of the Jewish Influence in German Religious Life and they proclaimed that Jesus wasn’t a Jew. One of these Nazi theologians wrote

We, the racists, are the only ones who revere Christ as he deserves

They said that Jesus’ original preaching was perfectly Aryan, but the rabbi Saul (St Paul) had rewritten it and Judaised the whole project, turning it from a socially revolutionary religion into a mystical-conservative one venerating death and rejecting nature.

All this in the first 120 pages.

I’m taking a break from this fascinating but wearing book, reading the whole thing through might give a person some psychological issues. But this is what great history looks like.

BOOKS TO MAKE YOUR BRAIN EXPLODE

In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm
Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X Kendi
Malcolm X by Manning Marable
Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary
The Good Soldiers by David Finkel
The Honor Code by Anthony Appiah
The Novel : a Biography by Michael Schmidt
Shrinks by Jeffrey Lieberman
A Terrible Beauty by Peter Watson
Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall
Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum
Black Earth by Timothy Snyder

[Paul Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

REVIEW OF PAGES 121-415

This study was based on the conviction that it is necessary to take seriously the texts, the images and the words of the Nazis. This is not easy to do. While reading them, it may be difficult to believe that these authors could seriously have believed or subscribed to the things that they wrote, that their texts could ever have been read without unease, mockery or indignation.

In Part One of this review we found out how profoundly anti-Christian the Nazis were (Jesus was an Aryan but Saul was a Jew and perverted the whole thing);



and we found that they sketched out a theology for themselves that – interestingly – was not a revival of some Wotan worship at all, but something quite different.

Before I sketch in the rest of this very dense book I might say that potential readers might think of first reading Black Earth by Timothy Snyder.



This is another very dense book (sorry!) but it brilliantly describes the world-view set forth in Mein Kampf and of course Nazi thinking sprang forth from that.

So, moving from the theological to more practical matters, we now deal with What Went Wrong and How to Fix It.

The blood of a people flows from the soil of its farms like a bubbling, lively stream, while it drains away and runs dry in the cities. (Darre)

The French Revolution threw out a set of pernicious ideas like democracy and civil liberty, and then the Industrial Revolution destroyed the purity of rural life by syphoning away all its workers. The Nazis were going to reverse all that. Their intention was to establish an agrarian utopia*, using all the rich land to the East which had been stolen away from them by a cabal of enemies who most cruelly crammed the great German people into the stifling cramped space in which they now eke out a living.

To fulfil this dream of millions of Germans farming peacefully their vast Eastern lands, the Nazis needed to fix the German people itself, and then enslave the millions who were currently squatting on German eastern territories.



The German people were the greatest in the world but they had weaknesses. There were too many useless mouths, meaning, disabled people. So a law was passed on 14 July 1933 which said that “anyone with a hereditary illness may be rendered sterile by means of surgical intervention”. Which would be “carried out against the patient’s will when required”. Well, “what good was a pity that produced more objects of pity”?

400,000 people were sterilized over the 12 year Nazi period. They used the same argument over and over, when they talked about this issue or the Final Solution – yes, these look like harsh, brutal measures, but really, they are kindly – to the immediate families of the disabled people, to the Germans as a whole, and to humanity as a whole. Mistaken morality focuses on the individual. Superior Nazi morality focuses on the nation. Whatever is good for the German people is good.
Eugenics was the name of the game here, and although it was taken to its logical extreme by the Nazis, it wasn’t original to them. The USA, Switzerland and Scandinavian countries has passed laws for “racial improvement”. But they didn’t go as far as to physically liquidate disabled people, as the Nazis did, beginning in October 1939. (That operation was called T4.)

*

In the final chapter Johann Chapoutot reaches the subject of the Nazis’ apocalyptic antisemitism and finally I had a feeling that I had read all that stuff before. And there is an undeniable feeling that some of the (penetrating) points he is making and some of the (hair-raising) examples he uses are being repeated. Some pruning might have made this less exhausting. I say this in the spirit of a mouse looking at the King and thinking his crown looks slightly crooked during the last couple of chapters, maybe.

In conclusion:

For anyone seriously interested in the Nazi period this is a must read.

*We know another guy who wanted to do that : Pol Pot.

[Dagio_maya · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Non dimenticate:
se c’è qualcosa di pericoloso nella Storia,
su questo globo,
su questa Terra,
è il nostro stesso sangue.”


Dopo ben settantaquattro anni ci si chiede ancora come sia stato possibile che il nazismo prendesse piede in modo così ampio.
Il tempo non ha sedato l’incredulità di fronte ad una società così consenziente e in gran parte consapevole di ciò che stava succedendo.
Da qui l’accatastarsi di ricerche storiografiche di diverso spessore, ognuna delle quali ha cercato di fotografare da angoli diversi quella che è comunemente denominata come l’apoteosi di ogni espressione del male da parte del genere umano.
Così emblematica da accentrare su di sé ogni primato di malvagità.

Lo storico Johann Chapoutot, docente alla Sorbona, dimostra in questo libro come la nascita del pensiero nazista non abbia in sé molta originalità ma sia frutto di una somma di pensieri reazionari accumulati negli anni:
eugenetica, razzismo, nazionalismo, antisemitismo autarchia….tutte filosofie proprie del mondo occidentale che spesso affondano le loro radici tra il XXVIII° ed il XIX° secolo nelle politiche coloniali.

Il lavoro intrapreso da Chapoutot nasce da un turbamento che nel caso del semplice cittadino rimane una domanda sospesa mentre nel caso dello storico è una traccia che indica un sentiero di ricerca.
Quel qualcosa che sbalordisce è l’insieme dei nicht schuldig («non colpevole») che riecheggia nelle aule allestite a Norimberga nell’immediato dopoguerra.
Una negazione che è quasi sempre il riflesso di una reale sicurezza da parte dei nazisti di aver agito nel giusto.
L’etichetta di “follia” con cui si possono indicare gli anni nazisti non soddisfa, non è sufficiente per comprendere come si sia sedimentato il pensiero nazista irradiandosi in ogni piano piramidale e quindi facendo un percorso da discorso politico con la sua retorica a vero e propria filosofia che si traduce in comportamenti ed azioni quotidiane.

Una mole spaventosa di lavoro (anche la lettura, anche se assolutamente fattibile, non è scorrevolissima) che si basa sull’analisi di:
discorsi pubblici, lettere, diari ma anche film, libri, volantini (in particolar modo quelli distribuiti alle SS o all’esercito), vademecum, articoli di giornali, quadri, canzoni…

”Il corpus delle nostre fonti è dunque colossale: sostanzialmente, milleduecento titoli di opere e di articoli, una cinquantina di film.”

Una varietà di materiali che in realtà torna ad ogni paragrafo a ribadire pochi e ben precisi concetti.
Parole ed immagine che sostanzialmente affermano e confermano un indottrinamento continuo e martellante che inculca un unico obiettivo:
eliminare l’individualismo ed eleggere la razza e il sangue tedesco come unico valore da difendere. La salvaguardia del sangue è l’unica morale e l’unica legge a cui obbedire.

In base una visione olistica dai Trattati di Versailles il mondo dei valori crolla e comincia un fermento di attività intellettuali, politiche, sociali ed economiche volto a capire come il popolo tedesco possa cambiare rotta.
Non si tratta, tuttavia, del tentativo di trovare nuove strade ma scovare i vecchi sentieri e ristabilire l’antica etica della natura così che la Germania ritrovi la Weltanschauung (visione del mondo) originaria.

Seguendo le prescrizioni di tre azioni fondanti nell’ideologia nazista il testo è suddiviso in altrettante parti e quindi intitolate:
-Procreare
-Combattere
- Regnare

Lavorare per la fertilità considerata sana e dunque al contempo eliminare tutto ciò che è considerato patogeno (persone ritenute difettose nel corpo e nella mente, omosessuali e tutti gli ebrei indistintamente); partendo dal principio che è da sempre in atto una guerra razziale occorre battersi per ottenere la supremazia e dunque espandersi e governare secondo la legge del sangue.

Passaggi molto interessanti in cui si delinea la gerarchia del vivente (gli animali ad esempio sono tutelati con leggi speciali…) ribadita da più parti.

Nel complesso un po’ ripetitivo anche per mancanza di uno spirito narrativo dell’autore che rimane un po’ troppo didascalico.

Resta comunque uno studio interessante.

“Himmler domanda dunque ai giuristi, ai quali rivolge questo discorso, di fare in modo che il diritto tedesco, semplificato, sia reso congruente alle leggi della natura e della razza, come accadeva un tempo:
«I concetti fondamentali del diritto devono corrispondere al sangue e allo spirito generati dal corpo della nostra razza. Se riuscirete a formulare questo diritto e a riassumerlo in un corpo di massime – non in paragrafi ma in aforismi pieni di intelligenza e di saggezza, comprensibili per il piú semplice tra gli uomini, privo di cultura giuridica – avrete compiuto un’opera immensa. » “

[Vagabond of Letters, DLitt · Rating 2 out of 5]

This work is disjointed and never sets up a sustained argument for the NS view or lets old Reich authors do it, but puts up a block quote just long enough to deconstruct by way of snark and sarcasm (/everything/ is put in scare quotes, down to 'German Academy of Sciences'). For now, I mark this book (which, judged on the cover, had so much promise) as a 'pass' unless you want to learn an exaggeration of how much those damn Nazis hated Christianity! mainly by portraying Rosenberg as having influence and authority that the inner circle of the Party fought stridently and successfully to keep him from ever obtaining. In fact, most of the first 160 pages has been the same material covered in 'The Holy Reich', but covered here much more propagandistically and with a heavy hand.

The later pages never develop the promise of the cover or flap: we never get an exposition of Nazi ethics or philosophy that can't be summed up in 'they were tribalistic and particularistic, treating the ingroup well and being amoral towards outgroups, like Talmudic Judaism for gentiles [indeed, fighting back against what those Talmudic ethics had done to Germany by fighting fire with fire--Ed.] or every other collectivistic group ever.'

Recommend instead the 100-page preface to the paperback reprint of 'A People that Shall Dwell Alone' by MacDonald and 'Individualism and Collectivism' by Triandis. Remember that NS Germany was an extremely 'vertical collectivist' society and you'll learn more of their ethics and Weltanschauung from Triandis' universalistic overview than from Chapoutot's supposedly deep and particular dive.

The deep sarcasm and hostility that bends Chapoutot's work in to an unhistory seems to be the same that afflicts biographers of Hitler (but not Stalin or Mao) - an inability to look at his subject even half objectively or with a bit of detachment, instead of looking to write a demonology, promising to the reader (insight in to the Nazi ethical mind) that which he can not even get himself.

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Nazi is a rebel for the Id against the depredations of the ism; a vessel for the oceanic wholeness of nature, whose domain extends into the preconscious, libidinal hinterlands of the human soul. Abandoning reason as too formal and abstract, he plunges headlong into the shimmering currents of nature, in which all things struggle for the breath of life, but only the strong may breathe it. He rejects the isms imposed by the Enlightenment—liberalism, Marxism, humanism—as so many potentates of the noetic realm: the tyranny of the rational intellect, which alienates a man from his natural self. Life is to be lived and perpetuated, not hollowed out by theories and sliced apart by rabbinical squabbling.

For the Nazi, nature is an organic whole, and an individual is only one constituent part of that organism. By shedding the manacles of liberal law and Judeo-Christian morality, he reconnects with his vital instincts; he achieves symbiosis with his own biology, melding his will and consciousness into those of the Race. As the individual is to the liberal and the class is to the communist, so is the Race to the Nazi. In a strictly biologized world, the Race is the most fundamental biological unit. The purpose of an individual life is to sustain the life and purity of the Race. Miscegenation is blasphemy. It is the original sin of a pure and noble race, dividing a people against nature, and by consequence, against itself.

Only a mongrel needs commandments. In the eyes of the Nazi, the Jew is the original mongrel, the serpent of the Aryan Eden; a seething cauldron of inferior and agonistic bloods. As a non-race, the Jew is incapable of living with integrity, immune to conscience. He can hardly be called a human being: his body is a pitiless arena of competing wills. Deprived of a coherent morality by his tainted blood, incapable of finding God in nature—his very existence being unnatural—he was obliged to create a supernatural God; a God separate from life and hostile to it; a God who imposes commandments from on high like an oriental despot. From this alien God are derived the ideational strictures which have suppressed and splintered the Nordic-German genius from prehistory.

From the Hebrew scriptures, the Germans were taught that nature was evil, and that their life-giving instincts were vices. Christianity, invented by the Jew Saul-Paul and insinuated into the German consciousness by cloistered effeminates, taught them the ludicrous doctrine of universalism: that all of humanity was one, alike in sin and redemption, each man standing equal in the eyes of God. The Judeo-Christian legacy was carried on by Catholics, liberals, and communists, with Catholics oppressing the Race with their unnatural sexual scruples, liberals atomizing it with their life-denying dogmas of individualism and the rule of law, and communists “equalizing” mankind by levelling it down into ruin.

As the Jew was divided against himself by his degenerate blood, so Germany had been divided against itself by political partition and inhuman ideologies, both imposed from the outside. Cardinal Richelieu had kept the Race divided through his role in orchestrating the Peace of Westphalia, which had left the Germans a permanently divided people and quashed the religious revolution begun by Luther. Wilson and Clemenceau had ensured Germany’s further subjugation with the Carthaginian peace of Versailles and the artificial state system of Europe, which kept the German-speaking peoples separated by so many fabricated borders. The real frontier of the Reich lay beyond any national border. The Race could not be contained by political lines drawn on a map, but only by an expansive biotope. The true limits of the Reich were the limits of the German beech tree: any soil conducive to German flora was conducive to German people, because the two were part of a single biological continuum.

Such was the bohemian creed of a people in arms, as they prepared to make war against conscience, against humanity, and against God.

[Paul Ataua · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is so much in “The Law of Blood’ that really makes you think, and there are many details that are important for a clearer understanding of the age. It is, therefore, something worth reading. Please tread carefully, however, and please be critical of all that you meet. It is a strange mix of interesting fact and weird interpretation, and although it is presented as hundred present guaranteed high class historical scholarship, it sometimes elevates correlation to cause, and even effect to cause, or at least never really drives the argument home. It is , also, often laced with sentences that raise red flags. Chapter one begins with:

‘According to Nazi writers, even the most disinterested and unprejudiced of minds agreed that a German man was a brave man, and a good one.’ Go figure!

And further on we are subjected to the sentence :
‘The Nazis liked dogs’.. All of them?

Lots of good things, but please read carefully.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m behind on reviews. I finished this one at least a week ago. “‘It was a lot,’ the reviewer said with all the eloquence one has come to expect of millennials.” Johann Chapoutot brings the approach of the new cultural history (well, not that new anymore, but newer than the old cultural history ala Burckhardt) to Nazism. He combs over Nazi novels (acknowledging a major debt to Klaus Theweleit, who did something similar with a gendered reading of Freikorps literature), policy manuals, legal arguments, and so on to reconstruct “the mental universe in which Nazi crimes took place and held meaning.”

Chapoutot locates the source of meaning for Nazi ideology in a succession of bad biological metaphors popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The “struggle for existence” is a big one, as is stuff about nature’s balance, purity, the kind of stuff popular in contemporary pop evo-psych, etc. Unlike Enlightenment philosophers who used the concept of the “body politic” to argue for a rationally organized state, the Nazis understood the social body as answering to romantic imperatives of blood, with predictable results. Chapoutot isn’t an intellectual historian- he doesn’t trace these ideas back to a source (though others, like George Mosse, do). Instead he explores their development and application by people like Nazi lawyers, SS bureaucrats, SA memoirists, etc. They have the naivety one sees in the self-justification of doltish men with power. I think there’s a lot to this approach — call it the intellectual history of dullards — and would like to see it more broadly applied.

The worldview and the actions taken to sustain or instantiate it exist in a permanent feedback loop. Trying to suss out which came first is a chicken-egg question, the kind historians spend pointless decades on. Take Nazi legal theory. The Nazis believed in something like “natural law,” not in the sense Aquinas might have meant it but in an altogether dumber way. The law of nature is that which allows the best to thrive; Aryans are the best, the peak of creation; ergo, what is good for Aryans is the law. Thinking of law as an actual set of rules with meaning was just a Jewish mania for dead abstractions that the legal profession needed to guard against. This was both deeply felt and highly expedient for a dictatorship that didn’t want fetters on its behavior, both domestic and foreign. In the typical fashion of ambitious dolts making up rules as they go according to aesthetics, this tended to bite them in the ass. Their ideas about racial conflict dictated they had to be as cruel as possible to the Slavic inhabitants of the places they conquered in their war with the Soviets- by the time they realized they were only multiplying their problems with partisans, it was too late to do anything about it.

Over four hundred pages of this! There’s some interesting tid bits… arguing for the “ideology over function” side, did you know that the Nazis didn’t really pursue non-Germans for homosexuality? They considered it a problem for Germans because it took men away from their breeding responsibilities, but if French or Polish people or whoever did it, they didn’t care- let them weaken the rival races. Nazis also paid little attention to lesbianism, considering it a temporary expedient produced by the loss of men during the war(!) that they’d soon fix. Chapoutot enlivens the proceedings with a little sarcasm here and there, something of a relief- enough for at least one fashy goodreads reviewer I saw to get all huffy about it, worth a laugh on its own…

The picture that emerges here is not the sinister iron men of the Indiana Jones movies or whatever, or even the heel-clicking bureaucrats of popular comedic imagination. The picture of lockstep conformity and control that earlier depictions of Nazism stressed seems increasingly dated. Nazism according to Chapoutot and other recent historians isn’t any kind of fulfillment of western modernist bureaucratic rationality, but an attempt to re-enchant the world by marrying the means and methods of modernity with the (fraudulent, made-up) primeval values of blood and soil. That, in their view, implied giving ultimate power to the Fuhrer and through him his henchmen- that’s not the same thing as subjecting everything to rules, laws, procedures etc., which were specifically eschewed as unnatural and limiting. It was actually crazier than that: rule by vague concepts — blood, race, volk — that Chapoutot argues were meant less to guide and define than to act as incantations, mantras to guide one into a certain frame of mind that was the Nazi end goal. One gets the sneaking suspicion that many of the earlier drafts of interpretations of the Nazis had a lot more to do with what was expedient — for the Cold War, among other things — than what made sense.

Listen… I get that Nazi comparisons are lame and overdone. But I think that at least part of the problem with them is that we use them to distance unpleasant things from a supposedly good normative universe, because we’re using the Nazi as alien-monster-robot paradigm. Even arguments about the “banality of evil” and the “ordinary men” who committed the crimes can be used in this way- anyone can lose their humanity and become Nazis instead if they’re not careful.

But even if we and Chapoutot agree that Nazism was “inhuman” as in “extremely bad,” the picture that emerges from “The Law of Blood” is quite human, in the sense of being a muddle of contingency and misplaced sincerity, self-serving and fanatical by turns, the sort of thing we can easily imagine the sort of dopes who really go in for a certain kind of sentimental, chintzy conceptions of meaning buying into. We see similar arguments from nature all the time- think about the familiar cop spiels about them being “sheepdogs,” guarding us “sheep” from those evil “wolves.” Think about the sheer yearning, always there but which burbles to the surface at certain times, to violently dispense with everything — laws, norms, truth, science, history — that prevents a certain kind of people from living out some fatuous heroic narrative, articulated (if you want to call it that) in uncountable mutually-exclusive personal imaginings, but somehow all converging on the same sort of destruction… that’s where Nazism takes its place, in the long history of reactionary fantasy and efforts to make it reality. These fantasies share elements across modernity, and efforts to make them real share many elements too, regardless of how many people have abused comparison by doing it poorly. *****

https://toomuchberard.wordpress.com/2...

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very useful book for understanding the Weltanschauung of National Socialism.

The book explains how National Socialism is based on ancient Aryan culture, which is itself based on the respect and worship of Nature. This leads to a completely different way of looking at the world, with a morality which is different from the current mainstream morality of the Western world, which is based on Christianity and the Enlightenment. This book is written from the perspective of the National Socialists, and it does a great job at making the reader understand their system of values.

The imperative to procreate, to fight, and to reign was none other than nature’s. If inherited norms ­were evil and harmful, if they ­were slowly killing off the race, it was ­because they ­violated the alleged laws of nature: every­thing that is diseased must die; all mixing is harmful; all wombs are made to produce the most ­children pos­si­ble.


The foundation of National Socialism is that nature is struggle, as Darwin explained us. But this struggle needs to be waged as a collective, and not as individuals; we must therefore promote what is best for the race, which does involve ruthlessness against the dangerous and negative elements, but also involves solidarity and empathy towards the people who need to be helped to become productive and happy members of the community.

I was really interested in this duality, where National Socialism represents a "middle ground" between the unconditional welfare system of today's Left, and the callous and ruthless ideology of today's Libertarianism. Everything needs to be put in its context: the NSDAP was able to help all the unemployed and the poor, creating a society where everyone who was willing to contribute (i.e. work) could do so and earn a living. But once this is achieved, there's no "excuse" for one to be unwilling to work or, worse, being a criminal - he is then not seen as a victim of circumstances, but as an inferior biological element which needs to be rooted out. It makes sense: if someone is starving and steals food from a supermarket out of desperation, this person cannot be seen as a "bad element". But if jobs are available, and one still decides to live off stealing, then he is a parasite and needs to be treated as such. I really appreciate this book for providing the context for certain measures that would, out of their context, be seen as exaggerated and unfair. The same considerations were also valid for homosexuality: the idea being that the vast majority of homosexuals are so out of necessity (i.e. lack of partners of the opposite sex), thus the NSDAP was punishing male homosexuality but not female homosexuality because there were many more women than men due to WWI; the idea being that women had to resort to lesbianism due to the lack of men, while men had a lot of women available so only pure genetic degeneracy would make a man homosexual in those conditions. If you find this strange, let me remind you that it is notorious that in environments that lack women, such as prisons or the navy, men resort to homosexuality.

Another important consequence of the idea that we need to wage a collective struggle is that the overall good of the race is put above the interests of the individuals. The liberal system (i.e. what we live under now) is described as:

“the law is a utilitarian rationalism intended to regulate relationships among individuals,” ­because individuals ­were the only acknowledged real­ity, and their egotistical and private interests the only ones to be defended—­both against t­hose of others and against the potentially tyrannical state

The National Socialist society on the other hand, considers more the relationship between the individual and the community.
For example, the private property of a farm is seen as the community entrusting the farmer with that land. A farmer who refuses or is incapable of putting the land to good use for the whole community can be deprived of it. Private property is therefore not absolute; which again, make sense if you think of a society that needs to prepare itself for war: we can't allow acts of sabotage.
Healthcare too, is seen as a communal: "To be and to remain in good health is not your private affair; being healthy is your duty”. People are seen not as individuals, but as part of something greater; a link in a generational chain.

Our liberal mentality may recoil at such notions. But think about it: do you think that a father should have the "freedom" of becoming an alcoholic instead of providing for his family and being a strong role model for his children?
It's easy to talk of freedom when you forget that all humans are born in a state of dependency towards their own family, and towards the community: none of us would survive if we were cast naked into the wilderness.

This book is very good at explaining the mindset of National Socialism. It doesn't, however, discuss how the law worked in practice. I couldn't understand from this book what kind of penalty one would receive for various offenses. It is not possible therefore to judge the harshness or kindness of the Third Reich. The situation is much complicated by the fact that the Third Reich was at peace for only 6 years. During wartime harsher solutions are required. The book misses the mark when it tries to make the reader feel sorry about Buchenwald, a concentration camp with a slogan like "to each his due", because we're not told who was killed there and why. Thousands of people were killed there during wartime, but they could have been child molesters for all we know. Probably most of them were enemy combatants, but then again the morality of killing enemy combatants in a certain situation is very difficult to judge.
The book does try to give some context to the Third Reich's atrocities, explaining how for them it was a war for survival. It is difficult to understand if the harshness against Slavs, for example, was due to the NSDAP racial ideology or if it was due merely to the fact that they were at war against them, a war that was basically provoked by Poland. We know for a fact that Polish people committed atrocities against German civilians and practiced guerrilla warfare, therefore how much of the ferocity of the Germans was motivated by desire for retaliation? Even the American war propaganda was depicting the Japanese people as subhumans, so using racism for warfare was certainly not unique to the Third Reich.

Overall, great book, well worth the read. It is fascinating to explore a completely different way of thinking. It is a tragedy for humanity that the war happened, due to the enormous cost of human lives. But I do not consider the war as the sole responsibility of the National Socialist ideology, as a basic understanding of the threat of Bolshevism would prove. It would have been very interesting to see how National Socialism would have continued to perform in peacetime. It may be that, if the war hadn't happen at all, National Socialism would have been considered so wholesome and compelling, and so widely accepted inside and outside Germany, that it would have been adopted by other countries and eventually the whole Enlightenment would have been reversed. More practically, perhaps Britain started the war to prevent the British workers to ask for the same good conditions of the German workers, as mentioned in the excellent Hitler's Revolution

[Matis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Une œuvre d'analyse historique magistrale. Les historiens n'aiment pas s'attaquer aux textes théoriques regrettait M. Gauchet. J. Chapoutot offre un démentir très précis dans cette analyse qui cherche à saisir « l'univers mental » dans lequel vivent les nazis. Projet aussi ambitieux que monstrueux. Monstrueux car il demande de prendre les nazis pour ce qu'ils sont: des hommes comme nous tous. Nullement des monstres, des « fous », mais des individus qui, face aux problèmes posé par leur monde ont cherché et élaboré des réponses. Comprendre n'est pas relativiser. Les nazis furent le comble de l'irrationalisme (avec leur réduction de tout au sang, à la race), irrationalisme que G. Lukacs à très bien saisi, malgré les critiques a faire, dans La Destruction de la Raison.
Étudier ce livre est d'autant plus intéressant que la conception du monde (Weltanschauung) nazie fut, selon les mots de Chapoutot, une condition de possibilités aux actes ignobles, à la barbarie. D'autant plus important que certains discours contemporain marchent dans les pas de ces discours nazis, de la critique du monde faussement subversive

[wakeupf*ck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kitap aslında nazi ideolojisini günlük hayata, yönetime, bürokrasiye nasıl entegre ettiklerini inceliyor. Kronolojik sayılabilecek biçimde ele alınmış, bir tık ağır bir kitap fakat ideolojiden ziyade gerçekten düşünce sistemlerini çok açık biçimde görebiliyorsunuz. Kitapta hukuksal açıdan incelemeleri ve çıkarmayı düşündükleri yasalara bile yer verilmiş ayrıntılı açıklamalar ile birlikte. Bilgi açısından acayip zengin bir kitaptı. Tek hoşlanmadığım kısım, bazı bölümlerde gereksiz ayrıntılara girilmesi oldu; bu da okurken akışı biraz bozup bunaltıcı bir etki yaratıyor.

[Paul Janiszewski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Johann Chapoutot - Law Of Blood (Thinking & Acting As A Nazi)
Review - Paul Janiszewski

Chapoutot has arranged his analysis into three logical sections. Procreation - the pseudo scientific racial theory of the time (prevalent in western culture) including eugenics and euthanasia, and relevance to a reconnection of the German peoples with their past. Fighting - the Darwinian theory of evolution and the notion of the survival of the fittest. Reigning - Germanys place in the international order, the legacy of the Treaty of Versailles and the expansion imperative. A wealth of primary sources including legal scholars, academics, historians, philosophers, films and culture are examined and brought together to surmise the Nazi world view, of how they came to view themselves, their fellow Germans, and the world at large.

To my estimation, what Chapoutot really attempts to illuminate in his book (originally published in 2014) about the Nazis and the broad German consciousness of the early 20th century is really just a snapshot of the workings of phenomenon inherent to the human condition. Certainly the Germans of that time were no different to any of the other advanced, cultured, moralistic western societies of the day, yet it had come to focus on certain issues relevant to its particular social, economic, and political exigencies which forged a path of perception borne and underwritten of the then current political rivalry between nations and the accepted scientific thinking of the day (eugenics). The element of threat throughout history, had always served to consolidate and motivate nations. Accordingly governments sought to foster, educate and propagate awareness of those threats in order to build a coordinated arsenal of defense consolidating the realms of action, perception, attitudes and in particular a moral justification or "normalization" (Chapoutot's terminology) for notions that might challenge ingrained ethical norms.

Chapoutot refers to the awareness of the German historical context as "the mental universe in which the Nazi crimes took shape" and points to a connection of ethical relevance: "Nazism was not just an aesthetic, it was also an ethic". Commonly held indisputable moral values were modified to accommodate a grand plan of action that they believed would rescue a faltering Germany (of superior human stock) from eventual demise. It is this understanding that is difficult to comprehend for anyone not having lived that period. Chapoutot explains it as so: "In addition to confronting the fact that they were twentieth century Europeans, we must come to terms with the fact that the Nazis were, quite simply, people. They were people who came of age and lived in a specific set of circumstances... the Nazis have in common with all other humans, including ourselves, the fact that their lives took place within a universe of meaning and values. Put another way, it is unlikely... [the Nazis]... woke up delighted each morning at the thought of the abominations they were about to commit. These men were not madmen. They did not see their actions as criminal. Rather they were accomplishing a task, an Aufgabe - perhaps unpleasant, but necessary nonetheless.... Here, the sources all concur: private correspondence, personal diaries, and memoirs, public speeches such as the one Heinrich Himmler delivered to his superior officers and fellow generals in Posen (Poznan) in October 1943 - they all bear witness to this point... Himmler himself conceded it - [would] weigh on a man's conscience; although it could be grueling; it was carried out and held meaning in the context of a grander plan, one that was "historic" and "glorious"".

The Nazi zealots were the convinced overlords, but the broader German public required a re-education that would strike at the very heart of their belonging. This, in order to achieve an acceptance of the perversion of indisputable moral values. Professor Jay W. Baird in his book "To Die For Germany (Heroes In The Nazi Pantheon), had made reference to the many years of the German cultural psyche up to 1945 including the Weimar Republic. In it he brings to light the process of transformation of traditional German culture to the Nazi aesthetic which, as a result became (for the required purpose) almost indistinguishable from the original, yet imbued with the new values of National Socialism. Folk songs were repossessed as marching tunes, poets, writers, playwrights, scriptwriters and all forms of art were conscripted in this concerted effort to reinforce and inculcate a modified German identity of belonging, and thereby sowing the seeds for an acceptance of a degree of tolerance (a "blindness") to ethical and moral norms. In this light Professor Ian Kershaw's cauterization "the road to Auschwitz was paved with indifference" takes on a new reinterpreted meaning. Chapoutot ascribes this normalization as providing "a crucial role in mobilizing people to act in situations that pushed at the limits of what was morally acceptable - that is, to commit these crimes... - all of the sources attest to this. Formulating a discourse that conveys meaning, and even transmits imperatives, maxims, or duties, facilitates the act of killing by establishing, at the very least, the condition in which it becomes possible."

For today’s reader such a stretch of postulation regarding sacrosanct morality seems impossible. In his Introduction Chapoutot affronts the present day reader with a reference to a 1949 controversial ruling of the regional court (Landgericht) of Hamburg that dismissed murder charges brought against eighteen physicians of the Rothenburgsort Pediatric Hospital, who between 1939 and 1945, had participated in the euthanasia of fifty six children diagnosed as permanently unfit under the auspices of the Nazi world view of the time. Our present day reader no doubt is dumbfounded and outraged at such a ruling, since "the crime against humanity" leveled against the defendants is today, in our collective minds, unequivocal and irreproachably true. Chapoutot explains that the hospital’s director Dr Wilhelm Bayers argued that such a crime "can only be committed against people, whereas the living creatures that we were required to treat could not be qualified as 'human beings.'" Under such terms the defendants believed their actions to be permitted under the law of their governing body, since the law deemed them to be corrupt biological specimens. The "law for the prevention of hereditary disease" required sterilization and was enacted by the Nazi government in July 1933 but was amended through executive order by Hitler in 1939 to be remedied with lethal injection. Chapoutot points out that the "not guilty" result of the trial, four years after the war had ended, illuminated a heritage of intellectual and social values of a world view still stubbornly current in the minds and being of the judges.

In this way Chapoutot introduces his work and attempts to explore what he calls "Nazi normativity", "the study of the norms, imperatives and duties that underlie Nazi discourse", "the mental universe in which Nazi crimes took place and held meaning". The title of the book itself refers to the human attributes of 'thinking" and "acting" but I would also add the missing link of "feeling". Humans don't necessarily act on thinking alone, and in the realm of the complexities of human behavior it is more likely that thinking and feeling work together to bring action. It is indeed the feeling of outrage that affronts today’s reader as a result of Chapoutots Introduction. The court’s ruling is a perceived injustice and an assault on what it means to be human, that is, from the perspective of today’s world view. Clearly the presiding judges were not moved by such emotion, nor did they adhere to the superseding laws of the day as they admitted the acts were "against the law" but instead offered the justification that the defendants "believed their actions to be permitted under law". Herein lies the enigma of temporal consciousness. Of humanity, of law and morality, and the development of a modern collective consciousness of "crimes against humanity" conceived and enumerated through debate at the Nuremberg Trials. Not withstanding this, the values previously inculcated in the being of the presiding judges remained as a legacy of their lived experience. We today cannot easily begin to "understand" the truth of their era. They still ostensibly "felt" like the Germans of their day, just as we too "feel" like the citizens of our era, with all the emotions, that that may encompass. The Nuremberg code and the United Nations Charter of Human Rights have come to prescribe a modern world view of principles, molded into our very being. We purport to hold these values in highest regard, and in doing so, entertain as a presumption, an arrival at a world view of the tenants that equate to the highest moral conscience. Neither I, nor anyone might contest, these shared values as central to our identity and therefore a cornerstone for our belonging within that society. Those presiding judges still "wore" in feeling, and identity, a belonging that pervaded their particular era, their particular place, their particular existence. The social, moral and ethical norms of their Nazi generation. This I believe, is the essence of understanding that Chapoutot is attempting to communicate. He attempts to identify the barrier to the awareness of understanding of the temporal nature of peoples and societies. It is the stumbling block of unequivocal "timeless truths" that are assumed by each generation, for each society, for each culture. This phenomenon blinds one to a misunderstanding of those who had lived before; instead they may see an alternate reality, disparate and horrific to where they find themselves today.

As such the relevance of Chapoutot's work is not well understood by most as the world is still no less baffled, distanced and uncognizant of the depths of depravity of mind that the quest for the "common good" made possible. (the "common good" in Nazi ideology would have referred to those not simply exclusive to a born German but rather those thought of as being of superior ancestry, the putative "Aryan race" and having to do with the "Nordic race" descendant from Proto-Indo-Europeans). Acting as a neutralizing agent or anesthetic, to the unwary ordinary majority of person, this lack of insight, overarching trust in authority, and sense of belonging to a society of irreproachable morality, had an effect that would ultimately lead to the untimely horrors of last century. This "phenomenon of trust" as I had coined previously, (enumerated in a previous review) is ascertained from the writings of the diary of the German Wehrmacht judge Werner Otto Muller-Hill who had recorded the actions, thoughts and motivations of his peers. The degree of "capture" for which varied from person to person I likened to the current of a tidal wave drawing all into its sphere of influence and thereby blanketing the whole society with varying degrees of compliant force. This phenomenon of naivety wrapped in trust, encapsulating the unwary ordinary population, and actioned by seemingly "benevolent" ideologue decision makers, formulated, articulated, educated and propagated a world view designed to remedy looming existential threat. A solution to collective survival (at least) might be achieved, however only those in trust, and of superior understanding, might truly appreciate and understand the cost. An unpalatable horrific cost that ultimately involved the sacrifice of citizens deemed of lesser value, and a present threat to the well being of the whole.

"The very idea that the horrors written down, proclaimed or committed by the Nazis were the work of human beings is difficult to comprehend - and that is a good thing. As madmen, as barbarians, or, for followers of certain strains of theology and the occult, as incarnations of some kind of radical "evil", the authors of these crimes are inevitably placed outside the bounds of our shared humanity". This statement of Chapoutot further explains the distancing of our present day difficulty of understanding. In today’s world the mere utterance of the word "Nazi" is universally understood to be imbued with hate and disgust representative of evil, typically wielded as a weapon of insult in order to subdue and incriminate directly, those among us who might not measure up to the purportedly righteous beliefs of a world view construct that seemingly holds the principles of freedom, democracy, justice, tolerance and equality as the cornerstones of our "well to do" modern shared reality. The word and its unequivocally associated notions are so entrenched that no reprieve might be tolerated for its intended accused. It has become a terminology, a meaning and a characterization of a permanently fixed non negotiable understanding. The definition of "Nazism" provided by Wikipedia reflects today’s popular understanding of what it means to be a Nazi: "... it is the far right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany." As a simplistic overarching view, the equation here is unmistakable and profound: Far right ideology is "evil". As a consequence, the implication of its converse is also clearly intimated: Far left ideology is "good" (or at the very least, the left leaning view represents the high moral ground). The problem here is that these notions of "right and "left" (right and wrong) are indicative of a linear way of thinking. Two opposing ideas linked by a straight line continuum of gradations that connect the two extremes, and therefore traits of one may not be perceived as representative of the traits of the other. Such a simplistic model certainly cannot leave room for the complexities of the lived world. Herein lies another compounding problem of perception pervading today’s western masses. We look to the left for righteous benevolent leadership and despise the right as somehow adherent to the principles that made possible the catastrophe of last century. This plague of misunderstanding has taken many years to manifest, and today the world suffers the consequences.

Today’s trusting masses are no different to the ordinary Germans of last century, especially when it comes to any doubts one may have of those charged with ones well being. Historically we recognize the evils of last century and attribute them to the "right". Today modern western governments are predominantly "left" leaning, and in governance are obsessed with a preponderance of seeking to "parade" a vision of righteousness. Overarching bodies such as the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and the World Health Organization all propagate the same vision, such that the western world has put its unquestioning trust in their benevolent leadership. The Nuremberg code and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights were a direct result of the catastrophe of the last century, and put in motion a world view that pervades our emotions, our thinking, our being, our belonging, and yet it seems some of the very principles defined therein, have been mischaracterized and set aside in order to pursue actions and ideas of a more elevated justifiable moral value, in response to perceived existential threats. Is the German experience of last century not ominously similar when put in the context of the last few years? Indeed all the elements of the early twentieth century in Germany are again in motion. Governments actively are conditioning masses to conform to an accepted norm of societal inclusion impacting ones notion of self and belonging. The element of existential threat looms; that of global warming and global pandemic is forever on the horizon. The accompanying disregard of human rights in the wake of such exigencies has been transformed into an everyday acceptance. Government propaganda using psychological campaigns of fear, manipulation and coercion disguised as benevolent messages of righteous moral principle pervade the media. Justification and non cognizance of the wrongs implemented as necessary measures in aid of the "better good" invade the individual’s headspace. The silencing of scholars, knowledge and science using catch cries of "misinformation", "disinformation" and "conspiracy theorist" put to rest those of non compliance. Censorship and the impending implementation of legislation limiting free speech are actively championed as a necessary protection for the civilian population. And most damning of all, the obfuscation of the continuing wave of excess deaths in heavily vaccinated populations that parallel the rollout of the covid vaccines. Is the perfect holocaust now upon us? Are we this time an unequivocally moral collective world, rather than the "evil" German nation, in the grip of a phenomenon of tidal proportion, being driven obediently and unknowingly toward a "final solution" by a power that has as its precept a mission to save humanity. Is it that we have looked at the past so simple mindedly that all we "see" is a story of evil which we as participants in today’s "parade" of self righteousness, cannot stop to comprehend, that it was in fact ourselves who brought us to the abyss, our own human condition, and not the archetype of an unthinkable narrative.

[Jackson Cho · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are historians and then are capital h Historians. The former is content to read and know events. The latter is obsessed. He needs to know why things turned out the way it did. Why did people fall down the path of madness. The latter must look to immerse themselves in the subject’s world, what were they reading, seeing, hearing. The cultural historian is the greatest historian for that reason in my opinion.

The Nazis are the symbol of evil in the west the way Satan once was. But what did they actually believe? The book does it’s best to wade through its disgust and give us an answer. The result is something like gazing into an abyss, feeling the madness that swept over not only brutish thugs but academics and scholars. This is a story about the power of narratives.

Nazism wasn’t just racism. It was something like an advanced racism, a PhD in racism at the University of Racism. People weren’t just inferior in intelligence according to the Nazis. Jews were literally believed to be non human, to have been infecting the world’s naturalistic innate beliefs that come with being Germanic with positivistic law. Christianity was a Jewish creation and took over all. Jews were quite literally considered not human, that people had to fight any sympathy they had to end Jewry.

And you see how this came about. A “scientific” evolution, backed by papers and studies, feeding off of the already existing more animalistic antisemitism arising from just the general suspicion of those who are different, of the Other. What is new just built off the old suspicions, the old views, the old stories. It was a nation covered in tinder soaked in gasoline. All it took was someone coming in with a match. It supercharged it by taking it to its natural conclusion, one that led to the Holocaust. It was an insane ideology that took over a country and exacted its views to its full extent.

I think the closest comparison is if something like Qanon, an insane set of views with its own perverse logical sense, took over a nation. It isolated the person engulfed in these views. Loved ones protesting it became only proof that it was true.

The book goes also into the plans for the eastern colonization, the hatred of Christianity, the almost religiously pseudo-Mendelian view that everything is race and even things like bravery and goodness is also transferred through blood. It’s all madness and this book manages to convey just how insane, how otherworldly, how completely alien all this was, while yet having its own internal logic that once you accept one premise, that race is the most important thing, the rest becomes only obvious.

It’s a book that made me further thankful that America has embraced a civic religion, one not based on race but on a creed. And the farther we get from that and the more one gets engulfed in even general views of “what race is better”, something like Nazism is not only conceivable but maybe in a way inevitable, awaiting only for someone to take the existing clay and mold it into something horrible.

[Fernando Pestana da Costa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the English translation of the French original La Loi du Sang: Penser et Agir en Nazi. It is an extraordinarily illuminating book about the way Nazis thought about their place in History and in the contemporary world they lived in. It is divided into three parts ("Procreating", "Fighting", and "Reigning") and through countless quotations from speeches, books (both academic and to the general public), and other written sources by Nazi thinkers, the author presents us, in an organized way, a comprehensive landscape of the Nazi worldview. In spite of its interest and of the huge importance of understanding Nazi ideology in their own terms the book is not a light reading: I had to make occasional breaks during the reading to recover from an intense feeling of utter disgust and physical revultion induced by the extensive presentation of racial arguments on the supposedly superiority of the "Nordic-Germanic race", the sheer absurdness of most of its constructions (in History, Theology, Biology, Law, etc.), and, of course, the terrifying consequences such a racial and violent worldview had in the treatment of opponents inside Germany, the Slavic peoples in the East, and the Jews everywhere. An outstanding scholarly work that deserves a readership much larger than only the academics interested in the study of Nazi history.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating look into the fascistic superstructure, focusing upon philosophy, legal thought, theory surrounding the state, religion, etc. of the ideology of National "Socialism," which seems to me to be a non-Marxist culmination of everything that Losurdo had worked for in his philosophical analysis of fascism and German history. A must read for anyone who is interested in that side of his works, or the structured irrationalism of the Nazi worldview in general.

[Daniel Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I’ve mentioned in a few other reviews, I undertook a self-styled research project on the rise of the Third Reich in January and February 2024. Despite the voluminous coverage of that era in fiction, drama, historical writing, and the like, it continues to mystify me how a civilized nation could fall for such a destructive ideology. I searched for a long time to find the best possible books to understand Germany from the inside. Let’s just say I was more selective than Harvard.

Of all the books that passed my screen, this was the one I had the highest hopes for. It had glowing recommendations from multiple key sources.

Chapoutot certainly avoids the common dismissal of the Nazis as brutes unworthy of examination.

One of the more interesting aspects he pursues is the medicalization of life during the early 20th century. Top doctors and scientists enjoyed a status somewhat similar to tech entrepreneurs today. People thought that eventually everything could be explained by medical science, the way many today think that tech will solve all our problems in the long run. The medical field began to expand well beyond its established boundaries into trying to explain whole nations in medical terms. This helped me understand the susceptibility of the mass of people to the Nazis’ adoption of this language in their phony racial doctrines and antisemitism.

The Nazis were simultaneously the party of the future and the youth, while harkening back to an ancient “Germanic tradition” that they believed started with the ancient Greeks and Romans. Much of this was pure delusion, while some may have been cynical attempts to add historic legitimacy to their cause which was essentially rootless. As an aside, I might add that it is interesting that we see authors today rewriting classical texts to fit their progressive world views in much the same way the Nazis co-opted the ancients to suit their cause.

Finally, probably the most disturbing aspect of the story was how openly hostile the Nazis were to Christianity and just how important that was to their hatred of the Jews. They saw the Christians ideals as weakness, an opium used by the Jews to subdue the masses and tarnish the “true German spirit.” They believed they needed to return to the “law of blood,” which they saw as the primordial law of nature which was supported by their understanding of Darwinism, among other things. This open hostility was only made possible by the general religious exodus of the late 1800s, which Chapoutot traces back to the philosophical revolution put in motion by Kant, although I’m sure it has many roots.

This book is highly scholarly in its approach. I would not recommend it to anyone who isn’t ready for a deep dive. I also made a mistake in reading this as an eBook on my phone, it was really too long for that.

It was a helpful puzzle piece in my quest to better understand the Nazi worldview and its antecedents, but by no means the one-stop shop I hoped for. Perhaps the best explanation is the simplest one: there were just a lot of really bad people making really bad choices.

The one other book that made it through screening that I have yet to sample is “The Nazi Consciousness.” Hopefully I will make a pass at it sometime soon.

[Antoine Couture · Rating 4 out of 5]

*mise en garde : même si mon propos fait un parallèle avec les pays alliés, ce dernier ne traite que d’idéologie raciale et n’est pas une large critique de la philosophie (universalisme, individualisme, lumières, etc.) ou de la politique (démocratie, état de droit, charte, etc.) qui sont les fondements de nos sociétés libres actuelles. De toute façon ce n’est pas le propos du livre.*

Tout ça pour dire que, au final, les paramètres idéologiques (concernant la race) et qui ont motivé l’Allemagne nazie ne sont pas bien différents de ceux des nations qui l’ont combattue. Il me semble qu’avant ce livre, jamais nous n’avons établi un dialogue ferme et sincère avec ce qu’est vraiment le nazisme dans sa conception. Cette chose supposément sans précédent, inimaginable et que l’on cherche à nous faire passer comme extraterrestre dans le vaste évantail des possibilités historiques n’est en fait qu’un produit de l’Europe telle qu’elle a toujours été c’est à dire profondément raciste, colonisatrice, esclavagiste, impérialiste, violente, nommez-les tous. Vous connaissez les exemples. À la seule différence près que, en actes, le nazisme s’est effectué avec une violence, une efficacité et une fougue colossale, dont l’apogée est la mise en marche de camps d’extermination, véritables usines de la mort, opérées à partir de 1942. Mis à part cela, il faut admettre qu’étudier véritablement l’histoire de l’idéologie raciale nazie est inconfortable de notre point de vue vainqueur, puisque dès qu’on s’y approche, en pensant y découvrir quelque chose de nouveau, on fait plutôt face à un miroir dans lequel, sous plusieurs angles, on croise notre propre regard.

« Oui mais nous n’avons jamais exterminé 6 millions de personnes » direz-vous. Premièrement, oui, seulement pas en 3 ans et pas au même endroit. Mais sinon, voyez le de cette façon: il ne suffit pas d’être un nazi de 1942 pour que le chapeau nous fasse. Tout cela est indépendant du nombre de personnes que vous avez tuées. On peut très bien être un nazi de 1933 ou 1923 même. Réunis dans une brasserie avec un verre sous le nez, sans élus au parlement encore, discuter un peu, joyeux et enthousiastes d’élaborer un nouveau projet de société pour le peuple germanique…être nazi, c’est d’abord une construction de pensées suffisamment convaincantes pour exécuter ce qui sera imposé par la suite. C’est gens là n’étaient pas fous, ils étaient convaincus. Et en un sens c’est bien pire.

[Gustaf Runius · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Law of Blood is a rigorously structured and deeply unsettling exploration of Nazi ideology, presenting a comprehensive analysis of the norms, principles, and mentality that underpinned the Third Reich. At its core, the book examines how the Nazi worldview positioned the survival and supremacy of the Germanic-Nordic race as its founding principle and ultimate goal. This chilling ethos is encapsulated in the statement:

“Keeping the race alive was the founding principle and the end goal of this openly particularistic and holistic set of norms: we must act for the Germanic-Nordic race alone (or for the German people)—not for humanity, which is a dangerous and dissolving chimera—and we must act for the community, not for our own personal interest.”

One of the most fascinating, yet disturbing, aspects of the book is how it explores the Nazi effort to rewrite legal principles to align with their racial ideology. They did not merely aim to define how laws should operate but also what laws fundamentally are. Rooted in the belief that positive and negative traits were inherited, the Nazis saw law as an extension of the racial essence. It was not a tool for intellectual deliberation but an immediate, intuitive expression of what was “already captured in the blood.” Under this framework, a crime was not just an unlawful act but a sign of an inherent defect that needed to be eradicated. Legislation, in this context, became a means to enforce racial purity as a natural, almost instinctual order.

This perspective provided a chillingly clear rationale for their actions, offering an entirely new understanding of how they could justify the horrors they perpetrated. The immediacy and intuition they associated with law reveal the profound and dangerous ways ideology can distort foundational concepts of justice.

While the book’s analysis is compelling and its conclusions thought-provoking, the repetitive nature of its arguments detracts somewhat from the reading experience. The subject matter itself is, of course, harrowing, which makes it a challenging but rewarding read.

Rating: 3/5
The Law of Blood is a disturbing but essential read for those seeking to understand the ideological and psychological underpinnings of the Nazi regime. Its clarity of purpose and depth of analysis—particularly its exploration of Nazi legal philosophy—make it a valuable, albeit unsettling, addition to the scholarship on Nazi ideology and the broader questions of morality and self-perception.

[Danilo Lipisk · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of those books that renews everything you know about a subject, in this case the complex question of why "normal", educated, obedient and idealistic people have become efficient gear in a genocidal regime?

The answers to this question, asked so many times, are given by the author - Nazism is the accumulation of ideas that emerged in the 19th century, social Darwinism, eugenics, as well as the denial of other ideas, many from the Enlightenment era, religions and mainly Marxism. He shows that Nazism was not only a terror machine, but also a "system of coherent" thought within its own perverse logic - with its laws, its morals, its notion of "nature", "duty" and "freedom (sic)".

It was great to learn many new things. The idea of ​​the State for the Nazis, seen as something "unnatural" (the "natural" valued by the Nazis, the Germanic tribes "united by biology" not by the State - with their codes, rules, norms and "ethics").

The idea of ​​the Reich was completely different from the idea of ​​the State in the Nazi conception, which reverts it to its medieval meaning - regnum - and what would govern this Nazi "non-State State" would be only the "Volksgenossen", the fellow race members, who would lead Germany "towards the liberation" of the ideas of the State (again, a State that with ethical values ​​would prevent genocide, slavery, expulsions, euthanasia and everything the Nazis would need to open up their living space - their Lebensraum).

This project was not only a project of ignorant bullies brutes - philosophers, jurists, historians and linguists actively contributed to building an ideology that justified extermination as part of a natural and historical order.

This book brutally reminds us that horror can be done calmly, with justification and with rhetoric.
And this resonates a lot with contemporary dilemmas and conflicts, where ideologies of supremacy, and "natural law" also reappear in new guises.

[Bryant Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably the darkest non-fiction I've ever read. Chapoutot takes the reader on a mission to understand the thinking of many German elites before Hitler came to power. Many already believed in the superiority of the Nordic (German) race over the Slavic peoples of the East. There was great national angst over the Treaty of Versailles and the belief that Germany had been betrayed by her leaders. These were two of many reasons the elite followed Hitler and his National Socialist Party. Chapoutot declares that Germany was not taken hostage by Hitler and his fellow monsters but that the nation was already prepared for such a direction. To be sure, many Germans would also suffer under the oppressive regime.
The Jews were targets of destruction because Hitler held them responsible for so many of the ills of the day. Jews were behind every possible conspiracy and had to be eliminated. In the Nazi world, failing to destroy even the Jewish children would allow a revival of the Jews who would, in their thinking, bring merciless retribution against future Germans.
The book reveals many lesser-known direct quotes from Nazi leaders appealing to the racist thinking of the elites. I found it interesting that in the later years, many soldiers recoiled from murdering helpless women and children, and these required greater "persuasion" from the powers of the party.
At times, Chapoutot is so enmeshed in his study that you wonder if he's a supporter of the Nazis. He is not but works to reveal their thinking and strategies without inserting his own views. That's good work for any serious historian.
I commend the book as an important adjunct to understanding how and entire nation could go so wrong in just over a decade.

[Ajk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this on the recommendation of a friend, and was pretty blown away. It's a weird book, especially for an academic tome. It's 400 pages of taking the Nazi worldview at its word, and just going on about "this is how they saw the world, this is the intent, and this is where they expected to go from there."
So, it's brutal work. Just page after page of seeing Poles as subhuman and Jews and not even that. Lots of crystallization of how the work of an Aryan man was war and procreation. It's just dark and awful and no place to be.
So the book itself serves as a bit of illumination here - and kind of really gets at the whole "there's no use in arguing with a Nazi." The premises of Nazi thought are just so...you know, insane, that the whole concept has to be rooted out. There's no middle ground here, it's just cruelty to everyone involved.
The author does a great job both documenting this and not getting lost in the lurid details. Here is how it is. Don't wince, don't glorify. So it's really interesting to read in this ugly day and age, so we can say, yes, we know how this goes. And it's not worth treating with even-handedness.

[Davide Di Legge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Il primo centinaio di pagine non mi aveva convinto: dalle citazioni delle opere di alcuni intellettuali e/o alti dirigenti del partito mi sembrava che Chapoutot cercasse di trarre generalizzazioni per spiegare tutto il nazismo. Ma è solo andando avanti nella lettura che emerge quale fu il modo di pensare degli uomini che poi effettivamente prendevano le decisioni: emerge con chiarezza la "mitologia" della visione del mondo nazista e anche se il saggio non si occupa di indagare quanto quelle idee fossero veramente diffuse e accettate dai cittadini, è comunque un lavoro molto importante per comprendere cosa c'era nelle teste di quelli che governavano quegli stessi cittadini. Se "Le origini culturali del Terzo Reich" di George Mosse è un testo fondamentale per capire le radici del nazionalsocialismo, questo lo è per capire come quelle radici si erano ben radicate nel terreno e perché fu possibile quella deriva che portò alle politiche di sterminio nell'Est Europa.

[Daniel Schotman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolultely harring book, but gives a clear idea of what drove the Nazi's to commit the crimes that were comitted. I was particulatly surprised to read that their realy grievances dated back as far as 1648.

Ideological there is not much to say here. The intellectual influences of the Nazi ideology was always a bit on the thin side and this book confirms one more that there wasn't much more to it than 'racial purity' and that factually everything they set out to came foreward out of this idea. Athough I was pretty sick of the word 'race' after 416 pages.

For the ones that want to get in the mind of the Nazi, this is highy recomanded and a very welcome autition to the ever growing WO2 list of books.

[Ben Vos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dispassionate, thoroughly based on the sources, clear and truly enlightening. A totally different, utterly new way of looking at the world and it's people was revealed to me. My misunderstandings of Nazi racism have been dispelled. That I never want to read more about Nazi ideas will be made easier by a confidence that I know all I need to know. Very good, and shocking even to someone fairly well acquainted with reading about the 1930s, the Second World War and the Shoah.

[Bryan Fichter · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is definitely a worthwhile project; it's important to understand how the Nazis thought about the world around them and get beyond the cliches that they were all "crazy". Unfortunately this book is written in almost impenetrable academic jargon that obscures the points the author is trying to make. A wasted opportunity.

[Maurizio Manco · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Lo studio delle idee naziste e dell'universo mentale degli attori è particolarmente fecondo per comprendere quello che l'uomo può fare all'uomo." (p. 378)

[Nikki Gipson Čadeni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Za mě velice zajímavá kniha (v češtině však s dosti zavádějícím titulkem). Jako správný nadšenec pro historii a WWII jsem si tuto knihu musela pořídit z čisté zvědavosti a dozvědět se o tom, proč si vlastně nacisté neuvědomovali špatnost své ideologie a jak vlastně smýšleli. Knihu sepsal francouzský historik, který dlouho studoval aspekty přemýšlení nacistických ideologů a severské mytologie, odkud přejímali svoje hodnoty a nápady (které pramenily z Edd a byly více než rozumné), avšak nacisté, zaslepeni svým národem a myšlenkou expanze pro germánský národ, dali těmto původním hodnotám strašlivé rozměry a úplně pozměnili původní záměr do nám již známých zvěrstev.
Z knihy mě opravdu mrazilo, bylo to děsivé čtení s ukázkou, jak je schopná pracovat lidská mysl a jak lehce lze z dobré věci udělat špatnou.

[Dario Varese · Rating 5 out of 5]

“La Legge del Sangue – pensare e agire da nazisti”, titolo originale: “la loi du sang. Penser et agir en nazi”, Johann Chapoutot, traduzione di Valeris Zini, edizioni Einaudi, ISBN 978-88-06-22712-8.

Un saggio bellissimo che ci guida alle radici della cultura nazista spiegandone i dogmi, le origini fattuali, i riferimenti culturali e perfino (il che mi è apparso stranamente curioso!), la sua insospettabile coerenza interna.

Si perché, una volta accettati i dogmi fondanti (per me molto fantasiosi) della preminenza di una razza nordica originaria e naturalmente “superiore” sul piano genetico e etico, della purezza del sangue e di una forma radicale di darwinismo naturale e sociale, si finisce per considerare come coerente un mondo all’incontrario che riscrive la storia attraverso una chiave di lettura che racconta di una guerra totale apocalittica e plurimillenaria fra culture e razze diverse, finalizzata al dominio del proprio spazio vitale e alla conservazione della purezza dei caratteri raziali originali. In questo contesto, tutto è ricompreso nei concetti di popolo, razza, sangue e suolo; l’individualismo come l’universalismo sono illusioni, errori o vizi del pensiero, mentre è importante solo ciò che preserva e rafforza la comunità raziale del “Popolo” (Volk). Da qui consegue l’odio per gli allogeni, la condanna dell’aborto, il ricorso all’eugenetica, la pianificazione dell’aggressione territoriale e la pratica del genocidio. Per la morale nazista tutto ciò è frutto di “Scelte”, ma soprattutto trattasi di azioni necessarie, coerenti e virtuose finalizzate alla prevalenza in una lotta per la sopravvivenza disperata e totale che non ammette né cedimenti né dilemmi etici e morali.

Un vero tour nelle catacombe dell’animo umano.

[Sergio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lecture très derangeante mais necessaire pour comprendre comment le genocide nazi a pu avoir lieu.

[Nicolas Masselot · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ce qui choque c’est d’abord le travail absolument titanesque de l’auteur. La quantité de sources et de citations permet un propos précis et détaillé.
Cette précision conduit parfois à répéter une même idée beaucoup (trop?) de fois parce qu’appuyée par un auteur nazi différent à chaque fois.
Au global, c’est un ouvrage de très haute volée qui permet un éclairage sur la conception du monde et la philosophie nazi, et donc sur la « praxis »qui en a découlé.
Les actes perpétrés par le Troisième Reich sont glaçants, mais cohérents avec leur manière d’appréhender le monde.