The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust

by Jeffrey Herf

The sheer magnitude of the Holocaust has commanded our attention for the past sixty years. The extent of atrocities, however, has overshadowed the calculus Nazis used to justify their deeds.

According to German wartime media, it was German citizens who were targeted for extinction by a vast international conspiracy. Leading the assault was an insidious, belligerent Jewish clique, so crafty and powerful that it managed to manipulate the actions of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Hitler portrayed the Holocaust as a defensive act, a necessary move to destroy the Jews before they destroyed Germany.

Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, and Otto Dietrich’s Press Office translated this fanatical vision into a coherent cautionary narrative, which the Nazi propaganda machine disseminated into the recesses of everyday life. Calling on impressive archival research, Jeffrey Herf recreates the wall posters that Germans saw while waiting for the streetcar, the radio speeches they heard at home or on the street, the headlines that blared from newsstands. The Jewish Enemy is the first extensive study of how anti-Semitism pervaded and shaped Nazi propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, and how it pulled together the diverse elements of a delusionary Nazi worldview. Here we find an original and haunting exposition of the ways in which Hitler legitimized war and genocide to his own people, as necessary to destroy an allegedly omnipotent Jewish foe. In an era when both anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories continue to influence world politics, Herf offers a timely reminder of their dangers along with a fresh interpretation of the paranoia underlying the ideology of the Third Reich.

(20060817)

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

401 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Jeffrey Herf is a professor of history at the University of Maryland. His specialty is in 20th-century European intellectual history, especially in Germany. He won the American Historical Association's George Louis Beer Prize in 1998; in September 1996, he was awarded the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History by the Institute of Contemporary History and the Wiener Library in London. He has also published political essays in Partisan Review and reviews in the New Republic, as well as in Die Zeit, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Die Welt, and he has lectured widely in the United States, Europe and Israel. He was a contributing editor to Partisan Review and is a member of the editorial board of Central European History.

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oy, is all I can say. Simply by reading Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda before and during WWII, Herf shows just how consistently and dully nutty the whole enterprise was. Which we knew. But the sheer irrationality of the thing is just mind-boggling: year after year, week after week, day after day of "the Jews control everything," "the Jews have declared war on us and will stop laughing," "they started the war," even in the face of what the leadership knew was really going on, which was ordered kept out of the papers. The Jews, the Jews, the Jews: they controlled FDR and Churchill and Stalin, and even Stalin's having them shot and purged was actually evidence of their perfidious hold on the world. Plus, endless discussions of how to resolve the supposed paradox of Communists and capitalists working together to oppose the blameless Germans, each time announced with this thrill of discovery: guess who's behind it! It actually grows a little boring in the middle, which may be by design. After all, getting the world this backward requires a fairly endless system of reinforcement to prevent you from thinking, so we have six years of more or less the same three or four revelations. But only rarely does Herf let the mask slip, pointing out how odd it was to hear Goering explain that in some 1943 conversation Hitler had suddenly made something clear to him, when of course it was the same crap he'd heard for 20 years. Does this mean that everyday people read this and believed it, or that they numbly passed it by and had simply abandoned the habit?

Proof of what you can find on the web every day, I suppose: the inability of too many people to change or learn a thing.

[Phoenix · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Devil's Dictation

A fascinating look at the "other" war which presents the Nazi approach to winning "hearts and minds". Herf asserts that the key ideas of Germany's propaganda campaign was to instill the message that Germany was fighting a war of "defense" against Western imperialism, colonialism, Bolshevism and that the underlying threat and thread was that all of Otto Dietrich The Hitler I Knew: Memoirs of the Third Reich's Press Chieff these were orchestrated by cabals of Jews intent on destroying Germany and ruling the world. Asserting that the Jews intended to exterminate Germans was a complementary to employing racial and cultural stereotypes and acted as justification for genocide in turn. The message focused on the need remove Jews from the population, but the actual progress appears unspoken. (pp140)

Aside from and at least equally important as Goebbels' were the efforts of Otto Dietrich who acted as Hitler's Press Chief, controlling both the outgoing message to the German people and filtering incoming foreign press clippings for the Fuhrer's consumption. This was achieved mostly through the ubiquitous billboard publication Wandzeitungen (Word of the Week) and the co-option and corruption of the vast majority (over 2000) of German speaking press outlets. Also important were the various directives issued to media outlets, for example cautioning them about referring to "Jewish revenge" as that would imply a previous wrong. Another source Herf makes good use of is the government controlled paper Der Volkische Beobachter, in which Goebbels and other leading propagandists often published columns.

Nazi conspiracy theories were often constructed through flimsy constructs of listing Jewish names, conjectured associations and exaggerated import. The Jewishness of the Bolsheviks in the context of the World War II period was vastly overrated and by 1939 the Jews had largely been purged from the responsible positions in the Party hierarchies (see pp 95-96). Yet there seemed to be almost nothing that Nazis could not try to explain in terms of the Jews, even arguing that Jewish capital in China was the basis for the Chinese/Japanese conflict! (pp134). In every theatre of war, physical, strategic, ideological and even historical, Germany's supposed enemy was joined by the invisible thread of international Jewry. Why else would establishment capitalists create the "WASP dominated National Council for American-Soviet Friendship? Simply put, WW II, as seen from the incessant barrage of Nazi propaganda, was nothing more nor less than war against the Jews,

Herf's scholarship and presentation are superb, and not only does he illustrate the Nazi's key rhetorical points, he ably shows their inconsistency and irrational folly. This is a quite a different approach to the war years than examining diplomacy or the military, but IMV it is just as important towards gaining an understanding of the progress of the war, and of the appeal and danger of conspiracy level belief systems. And unfortunately many of these beliefs can still be found lurking today.

Very readable and highly recommended!

[Douglas Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most books about the Holocaust is a rote recounting of the horrors of the Einzatsgruppen death squads or the concentration camps, but this particular book is important because it puts you in the minds of the Nazi propagandists, and the narratives they were trying to spin in service of their ultimate goal of global domination. In many ways, anti-semitism was a significant political tool rather than a real ideology, as many anti-semitic tenets of the Nazis already pre-existed in Germany and much of Europe well before the Holocaust.

Herf explains how the Nazis developed their message and their methods of propaganda throughout the regime, from when they take power in 1933, to when they started implementing several anti-semitic policies throughout the Reich until war in 1939, and how they then began spinning the ultimate narrative of kill or be killed, claiming that the international Jewish system was in control of both the Anglo-American plutocrats and Soviet Bolshevism and have attacked Nazi Germany to exterminate the German race, and that the Nazis were only fighting a defensive war against this threat. This is also seen as bogus, because if the Jews were that powerful to control America, Britain and the Soviet Union, how were they unable to prevent the genocide of a third of their people after the Nazis declared war on "international Jewry"? Why did the Allies try to minimize Jewish involvement during WW2 in response to Nazi propaganda?

Herf does a good job in analyzing Nazi propaganda dispassionately and more as an analytical exercise, in trying to understand the German public's culpability in the Nazi regime. He concludes that while most Germans knew that something was happening to the Jews, that most were unaware of the full extent of the "Final Solution" as this was something that Nazi propagandists were fully aware that wasn't supported by the overall German public, that while most were anti-semitic, there was a natural limit to their anti-semitism.

This book is a must read to understand how Goebbels, Dietrich and Hitler used the technology of mass media of radio and printed photos and colored posters to make their messages ubiquitous, in order to fully control the narrative and make most inundated with so much propaganda that many just simply believe in its truth out of exhaustion or fear of being turned into the Gestapo if they didn't say the "correct" things about the war or the Jews. As Malcolm X once said:

"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses."

[Bernard · Rating 4 out of 5]

One problem a historian has is when they are writing about a subject that they do not like, they need to somehow put themselves out of the discussion and focus on the subject. In this book, the writer clearly cannot do this and keeps on having to ague over the Nazi arguments. I would have preferred it had been put into a forward and conclusion rather than the main text.

The book is full of absorbing material and discussions. I particularly liked the stuff from the personal diaries of the top Nazis as I think it says much about the belief that a person in his private journal said something. Clearly, antisemitism was a significant component in the thinking of top Nazis.

I also found fascinating the structure of the Nazi propaganda departments.

I am no so sure if the writer is aware of the hunger plan, if so he may change a little of his thinking although I think his fundamental argument would be unchanged.

Still, I am not so sure that after reading the book in knowing, what did people living under Nazi control think of this, what the allies thought about it and did it affect the paths of the Axis leaders?

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent recount of the the Nazi obsession with persecuting the Jews, even at the expense of logical war aims. Herf lays out the statements of the top propagandists and the spread and exploitation of latent antisemitism, by the genocidal campaign of the Nazis, AKA the 'Final Solution'. The oral history of Goebbels, Hitler, Stricher, et al, is stunning in it's thinly veiled madness. The propaganda devices including strategic posters, flyers, education decrees, tight control of radio, so-called "journalism" (absent of independence or press freedoms, parroting the party line) and cinema - the totalitarian and criminal nature of the regime is laid bare. The book is almost anthropological in it's study of the paranoid climate which was ratcheted to a fever pitch by a poisonous ideology of hate in the face of a society sympathetic to appeals for xenophobia, discrimination, exclusion, military aggression and mass murder.

[Malcolm Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an extremely interesting but a hard book to read.Having to constantly read the vile hatred spewed out by God held and Dietrich is hard to take.As others have mentioned it is very repetitive. Some have pointed out the lack of reference to other groups.Hover the title of the book is the answer to the book.
The Foreign Office,being pro Arab,dismissed early reports of the holocaust. However standing for a minutes silence in the commons was of little use.The allies should have bombed the railway infrastructure to stop trains reaching Auschwitz even for a time.

[MaterialistAtheist · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book explains how prevalent Nazi antisemetic propaganda was in Nazi Germany and how the holocaust was motivated by the Nazi's irrational fear of an International Jewish Conspiracy that aimed to destroy Germany and their belief that the Jews were the source of all Germanys and the worlds problems. I believe this is important because this part of Nazi ideology is not talked about enough. The evidence shows it was the Nazis fear of a Jewish Conspiracy which was their motivation to perpetuate mass genocide, not just their belief that the Jews were racially inferior.

[Mandy Peterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A subject worth knowing about. Everyone should be educated on this subject. I studied the holocaust in University and this help to give me a refresher and provided additional insights. It is well written.

[Αγγελόπουλος · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5。極端民族主義就像一個漩渦，一旦不慎滑入，無論施加如何外力，都只會愈發快速得滑向深淵。

[Matthew Barlow · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm very much split on my opinions of this particular book. On the one hand it is clearly a very well researched narrative of the Nazi regime's hate for all things Jewish, its motivations, its propaganda, its skewed world view and its deliberate actions to pull the wool over the eyes of its own people. However, the book also strikes me as being incredibly one sided. Herf makes almost no acknowledgement of the other victims of the Holocaust, be they gypsies, POWs, political prisoners, or disabled Germans. His sole focus is on the anti-Semitic attacks of the Nazi controlled press. While this is clearly in line with his thesis, it strikes be as being imprudent to overlook the universal suffering that was taking place. Additionally he makes statements that he does not seem to be able to back up, or waits until much later in the book to provide tangible evidence for. Very early in the book he criticizes Soviet forces for not launching air raids on the death camps as soon as they came into range. He does not however immediately prove that the Soviets knew the location of these facilities, or what exactly was occurring at them. Nor does he take into account the larger scale military strategy consequences that attacking these facilities from the air would have had. True, air raids may have destroyed the facilities, but they certainly would not have prevented the Nazis from using other methods to commit mass murder, but instead would have likely provoked a violent reaction against the inhabitants of the facilities.

Herf is also unduly critical of the German people in their acceptance of the party line. He rails against the German people for not seeing through the Nazi lies about the Holocaust, arguing that they should have picked up on statements from men such as Hitler and Goebbels, saying that the Jewry needed to be liquidated or exterminated. Herf fails to make the case that the average German would have been able to grasp the horrors of these statements when they were constantly being fed the anti-Jewish propaganda that Herf himself is attempting to analyse. This, to me, shows a lack of understanding of the psychological effect that propaganda has on its recipient, especially when the state exerts such a masterful level of control over the media that the public is exposed to.

Finally, I found at times that Herf was extremely repetitive in his book, sometimes using the same quotation multiple times in the span of a few pages. This to me is the action of someone who is trying too hard to make a point. His repativity is also shown in his focus on the Jewish fixation of the book. There exists pages in this text in which the word Jew, or some derivative of the word are used in excess of a dozen times. If I had a dollar for every time he used the words Jew, Jewry, or Jewishness than I'd be a very wealthy person.

Despite the glaring issues that I have with this book, it is, in its core, a good source of understanding Nazi propaganda and analysis of the anti-Semitic views of Germany, and to an extent, the wider western world at the time.

[Camille · Rating 2 out of 5]

Un ouvrage qui part d'un postulat intentionaliste pour montrer l'importance de la propagande anti juive sous le Troisième Reich.
Intentionaliste, mais d'une façon très étrange : il n'est fait que peu référence, sauf à quelques reprises de Mein Kampf, qui pourtant est le livre par excellence du nazisme. Mais je suis quelque peu de mauvaise foi : l'auteur, je pense a choisit de se concentrer sur la propagande qui était la plus directement diffusé et accessible. Aussi le livre se présente selon un plan chronologique, détaillant les différentes unes et articles antisémites, depuis les origines du Troisième Reich (1933) jusqu'à la défaite totale.
Mais il n'y a que très peu d'arrière plan théorique : l'auteur présente des extraits d'articles de journaux, des journaux muraux, des extraits de discours, en se contentant de signaler qu'il s'agit de manipulation de la vérité (par exemple, "l'influence juive" sur Roosevelt est présenté par la propagande nazi comme démesuré alors que l'immense majorité des conseillers, membres du gouvernement sont des WASP).
Au final, j'ai eu le sentiment d'être confronté à une immense accumulation de documents, sans véritable fil conducteur.
J'ajouterais que le matraquage de la thèse de l'auteur, selon laquelle les nazis croyaient à leurs propagandes rend la lecture assez pénible et finit par obscurcir le sujet plutôt qu'à l'éclairer. Par exemple : en parlant de la propagande destiné au monde arabe l'auteur mentionne à plusieurs reprises le fait que les autorités déconseille l'usage du terme "sémite" et "antisémite" qui serait mal perçu. Et cela à des passages différents du livres.
Au final la thèse intentionaliste trouve une défense qui n'est que peu structuré, doté d'un plan chronologique selon moi inadapté.
Pour ceux qui s'intéressent à la propagande nazi je conseille l'ouvrage du même auteur qui, plus localisé ne tombe pas, du moins dans mes souvenirs dans les mêmes travers que celui ci.

[Damián Vives · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una verdad de Perogrullo, pero verdad al fin, es que la sobre-exposición anestesia. En este sentido y, mal que nos pese, la cantidad de libros, documentales, cómics, films y demás derivados de la producción cultural internacional dedicados al nazismo y la problemática judía hacen extremadamente difícil encontrar una propuesta lo suficientemente seductora y novedosa como para abordar el tema nuevamente; en este sentido, Herff logra el objetivo introduciendo un nuevo elemento a considerar para entender el espíritu de la época tanto en el aspecto cultural como en el aspecto político y socioeconómico.
Con argumentación convincente, Jeffrey Herf encara el análisis semiológico de la política propagandística por medio de la cual el nacionalsocialismo se hace firme en el poder y azuza la escalada exponencial del antisemitismo europeo durante la malograda década del 30. Escalada que hace eclosión en las purgas nazis y demás crímenes de lesa humanidad acaecidos durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial.
Considerando insuficientes, aunque execrables, los prejuicios raciales contra la población hebrea para desencadenar el Holocausto, el autor, profesor de historia en la Universidad de Maryland, se aboca a la reconstrucción y disección minuciosa de afiches, discursos, noticias y demás elementos de marketing soterrado utilizados por los medios de comunicación con el fin último de manipular a las masas, deformar la realidad y crear finalmente un nuevo escenario.
Herf deja a la vista la semántica perversa que facilita argumentalmente la construcción mítica de la figura del "Judío internacional", erguido en contra del pueblo alemán, y de las teorías conspirativas sobre el sionismo; que alimentaron la paranoia subyacente a la ideología del tercer Reich, favoreciendo las variables del horror.

[Enhoe · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's obvious it had been written by a Jewish, even thought it says: "The jewish enemy" I think it's a little bit too obsessed with demonstrating and arguing why every sentence Hitler or Goeebels or Ostrich, etc. said about jews can't be true. I mean, WWII is over and nobody believe a word Hitler said. Anyway it have interesting facts, tons of references, and it's worth it if you wanna know more of how Nazi propaganda worked. But you are warned: it goes around only of jewish propaganda (that's turns out to be the minority of Nazi propaganda)

[Angie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book changed the way I thought about World War II. It was especially interesting what he had to say about the power and danger of delusion.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

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[Andrés · Rating 1 out of 5]

Un libro muy interesante pero no supero mis expectativas.

[Kaspars · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nekā jauna! :) Amerikānisks skats uz Eiropā pašsaprotamām lietām!