How the Nazis Made the Jews Everyone's Enemy — and Manipulated Public Opinion

In an era when antisemitism and conspiracy theories still shape world politics, Jeffrey Herf offers both a timely warning of their danger and a vivid account of the paranoid fanaticism that formed the ideological foundation of Nazi Germany. — Citation, National Jewish Book Award

About the author

Jeffrey Herf, born in 1947, is an American historian and professor of history at the University of Maryland. He studies modern Europe, and modern German history in particular, and has taught at Harvard University and Ohio State University. His books include Reactionary Modernism and Divided Memory. The Jewish Enemy (《德意志公敌》) was published in 2006 and won the National Jewish Book Award.

Book excerpt

Chapter One: Jews, War, and the Holocaust (excerpt)

There is no shortage of fine books on Nazi propaganda, but not one of them focuses on how radical antisemitism was turned into wartime words and images. The Jewish Enemy draws on a wide range of sources to trace that conversion: Adolf Hitler's speeches on the subject; the speeches, articles, and many volumes of diaries left by Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda; the thousand-odd daily and weekly press directives that Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich and his staff handed to newspaper and magazine editors at the Berlin press conferences; the front-page articles and news digests of the government-controlled press; and the black-and-white and color wall posters about the Jews that pushed their way into the daily field of vision of countless Germans throughout the Third Reich. Some of these texts and images are well known. Others, familiar enough at the time, have been ignored even by scholars of Nazi propaganda. The press directives known as the Daily Directives are of the first importance, and they came to light at Otto Dietrich's postwar Nuremberg trial, yet they have been strikingly little used since. The brightly colored antisemitic political posters have drawn almost no attention at all. Working from this rich material, I argue that Nazi Germany's radical antisemitic propaganda during the Second World War was fused with the Nazis' own motives for waging the war and carrying out the "Final Solution."

What does "the war against the Jews" mean? For Lucy Dawidowicz, the scholar whose pioneering work made the phrase familiar to a wide readership, it meant the Holocaust — the "Final Solution" to the Jewish question in Europe. As Holocaust scholarship then exploded, two camps formed. One, made up of military historians, went on telling the traditional story of the battlefields of the Second World War; the other examined the history of the Holocaust in far greater detail. While military historians recounted Stalingrad and the Normandy landings, others studied the Wannsee Conference, Auschwitz, and the other death camps. That split has since given way to attempts to join the Second World War and the Holocaust in time, space, and ideological inspiration, but Dawidowicz's phrase still calls up, sharply, the mass murder of Europe's Jews. The time has come to understand "the war against the Jews" more broadly, with the Second World War playing a vital part in it.

When Nazi leaders tied the Jews to the Second World War — in private talks, office memoranda, or public statements — they meant an apocalyptic war that merged the Second World War and the Holocaust into one. They did not limit the meaning of what they called their war against international Jewry to the "Final Solution." They held instead that the "Final Solution," whose particulars were never discussed in public, was a necessary counterblow within a wider defensive war, one Nazi Germany was waging against international Jewry, against world Jewry, and, less often, against "the Jews." In the minds and the public statements of Nazi leaders, all of these were fighting the same war: an enormous international conspiracy in which the Jews worked the strings behind forces of vast size arrayed against Germany and its allies, while their non-Jewish accomplices — chiefly the Allied powers — were merely the enemy's public face. The Nazi story granted the Jews great independence and power and denied both to the nominal leaders of the world's strongest countries. Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin were cast as the Jews' puppets, accomplices, marionettes, and servants.

Nazi Germany saw its enemy as a conspiracy without parallel. International Jewry stood at the center, pulling the strings that moved its puppets — the leaders of the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States. From the months before the war began in September 1939 to Hitler's last days in the Berlin bunker, the Nazi story held that the Second World War and the intent to wipe out Europe's Jews were both parts of a defensive war against an act of aggression, one launched by an all-powerful international Jewish conspiracy and pressed step by step toward victory. What made Nazi antisemitism radical and extreme was not merely the familiar, sickening racist caricatures of Jewish faces and bodies or of supposed Jewish sexuality. Such prejudices and fears had been commonplace in European antisemitism long before the Third Reich. Indeed, it was precisely because Nazi leaders worried so much about what they took to be the Jews' ability to pass as non-Jews that they revived a medieval practice and forced Jews to wear a yellow Star of David, so that they would have to declare who they were in public. The conspiratorial side of modern antisemitism was what nourished its radical, genocidal meaning. The wish for a "Final Solution" to the Jewish question cannot be separated from the Nazi conviction that the Jews were an internationally organized political force that decided the course of the Second World War.

Without exception, even Hitler's fiercest opponents found it hard to believe that he meant, literally, what he said about annihilating and exterminating the Jews. I want to stress here how closely publicly declared intentions matched actual policy. We need to revise the conventional view of what euphemism and plain speech did in the public language of the Nazi regime. In fact, when its leaders said publicly, after 1938, what they meant to do to Europe's Jews — that they meant to annihilate and exterminate, to kill all the Jews of Europe — the statement was open and unambiguous. George Orwell wrote in a famous passage that the speech and propaganda of totalitarian regimes are "largely the defence of the indefensible" and consist "largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness." In his view, totalitarianism, in its effort to defend the indefensible, swapped crude abstractions for the plain nouns and heartfelt verbs that name acts of violence directly. Orwell's point fits the internal office memoranda of the Reich Security Main Office, the agency charged with carrying out the genocide of Europe's Jews; it fits the phrase "Final Solution," now a byword for the Holocaust itself; and it certainly fits the vicious lies with which camp staff hid from their victims the fate awaiting them. But Nazi Germany's public language did not stop at that notorious euphemism. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her classic The Origins of Totalitarianism: "We ought to remember that Hitler's frequently used phrases defining the actual aims of the movement were completely and even ostentatiously sincere, but the public was not prepared for such consistency and simply neglected to take him at his word." The regime's public language combined a total suppression of any fact about the "Final Solution" with a savage, at times coarse, announcement of murderous intent. Two German words, verb and noun, sat at the heart of this language of mass murder: vernichten and ausrotten. They can be translated as "to annihilate," "to exterminate," "to destroy utterly," and "to murder"; the nouns Vernichtung and Ausrottung as "annihilation," "extermination," "utter destruction," and "murder." Take their plain dictionary sense, or read them inside the speeches, paragraphs, and sentences where they appear: either way the meaning is clear enough. When Hitler and other Nazi leaders and propagandists used these words to describe what they meant to do to the Jews, they almost always did so straight after claiming that the Jews meant not only to destroy and root out the Nazi regime, the Nazi Party, and the German army, but to wipe out the entire German people. When the Nazis blamed international Jewry for a policy of annihilation and extermination, the plain meaning in the record was that the Jews were backing a genocidal policy aimed at Germany. By the summer and autumn of 1941, Hitler and Goebbels were publicly declaring that the threat to annihilate the Jews was part of official policy.

For German listeners and readers, the particular sense of these words was clear. To soldiers, "war of annihilation" (Vernichtungsschlacht) had a familiar Clausewitzian ring and meant the total rout of an enemy army. To paint all Jews as enemies of Nazi Germany, the Nazi story tried to lodge the threat of annihilation and extermination inside ordinary, or at least recognizable, military language. In doing so it went far past Clausewitzian orthodoxy. To anyone who remembered Germany's colonial episode in Africa, "annihilation" might have called up the war of extermination Germany waged in Namibia in the first decade of the twentieth century. In the opening months of the First World War, the blurring of the line between soldiers and civilians in Belgium and France may already have set a precedent for aiming a war at a people rather than an army. But as historians of the ideology of Hitler's eastern front have argued, German generals understood that what lay ahead was not a "war of annihilation" in the old Clausewitzian sense but "war as destruction" — a leap across a gulf with no European precedent. From 1941 to 1945, all Germans, in their ordinary daily lives, were exposed to radical antisemitic propaganda whose naked purpose was to justify the mass murder of the Jews. What "ordinary" men and women saw and heard was an antisemitism radical even against the background of centuries of hatred for Jews. The regime worked hard to fold this exceptional, genocidal language into a war story that looked, on its surface, ordinary or even conventional. In the texts and images the Nazis spread, the Jews of Europe were nobody's innocent victims but the party chiefly to blame for the Second World War. Annihilating them therefore did not erase the line between civilians and combatants: as the Nazi leadership saw it, every Jew was at war with Nazi Germany.

The job of turning ideology into a running journalistic account of events fell to the propaganda ministry, and above all to Dietrich's Reich Press Office. Day by day and week by week, that office issued directives to news organizations telling them how to narrate current events. The countless directives sent to the controlled press came out at Dietrich's postwar Nuremberg trial, yet they have played only a minor part in scholarship. They show how the propagandists used radical antisemitism to explain the course of events. Goebbels obviously stands at the center of the history of Nazi propaganda, but he did not play the decisive part in vetting and controlling what the daily and weekly papers printed. Rich and compelling evidence presented at Goebbels's Nuremberg trial in 1947 and 1948 showed that this work was done by Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich. Unlike Goebbels, Dietrich worked in Hitler's office every day and handed him an international press briefing each morning. He then passed Hitler's advice and wishes to his own staff in Berlin, who told German news organizations what to write and what not to write. Over the course of the war, tens of thousands of confidential press directives were issued, orally and in writing, at the daily Berlin press conferences. These were binding, and they went out to several thousand newspapers and periodicals. Through Dietrich and his staff, Hitler shaped how the German press recorded events more directly and more heavily than has been recognized. In propaganda and press control the regime showed coordination and efficiency, holding a united front on core policy aims even amid personal conflicts and turf disputes. In Ian Kershaw's phrase, both Goebbels and Dietrich "worked towards Hitler." But Dietrich saw Hitler daily rather than occasionally, and did not have to guess from experience what Hitler wanted. Hitler told him outright.

Another important side of Nazi propaganda was the Word of the Week wall poster, in which text, portraits, and pictures were visibly mixed together. Printed in the tens of thousands each week, sometimes in the hundreds of thousands, they were, in this new age of mechanized picture printing, the most widespread and most intrusive face of the Nazi visual offensive, in black and white and in color alike. The German wall poster was a peculiar hybrid of news editorial, political leaflet, political placard, and press digest, made with modern printing technology and aimed at a society whose daily rhythms of life and work ran on walking and public transit. Some of the visual marks of Nazism — the Nuremberg rallies, the torchlight parades, the gate into Auschwitz, Albert Speer's buildings, Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl's documentary of the Nuremberg rally), and the notorious antisemitic films The Eternal Jew and Jud Süß — have long been fixed icons of the modern mind and of the memory of the Nazi era. But apart from the weekly newsreel, no form of Nazi visual propaganda did as much as the Word of the Week to shape the regime's account of current events. A person could, after all, decide not to watch a film or a newsreel. Nobody could avoid the Word of the Week poster. Every week from 1937 through the spring of 1943, roughly 125,000 black-and-white or color wall posters were pasted into every corner and crevice of daily life. The Word of the Week went up in market squares, subway stations, bus stops, employment offices, hospital waiting rooms, factory canteens, hotels, restaurants, post offices, train stations, schools, and street-corner telephone booths across Germany and Austria. In a densely populated Germany where people got about mainly on foot or by public transit, political wall posters were placed at the points where crowds gathered and dispersed on any given day — the most effective way to force themselves into the sightlines of countless people. Drawing on modern advertising, on mechanized and pictorial printing, and on the organizational machinery of the Nazi Party and the regime, Nazi propagandists made the political wall poster an effective vehicle for mass propaganda. Every week, large numbers of party activists, members of the German Labor Front, and vanguard groups of hotel owners, gardeners, surgeons, war veterans, and landowners handed them out and pasted them up. Given the strong link between the leadership's ideas and aims and the daily experience of countless German pedestrians and commuters, these particular texts and images deserve to move from the margins of historical writing and thought to the center. They reinforced and elaborated on the message carried by government-controlled newspapers such as the Völkischer Beobachter.

The evidence and arguments that follow set out what the Nazi regime told Germans, not what "ordinary" or "most" Germans understood. The record of Nazi statements is broader and more concrete than the record of mass consciousness. The regime's efforts to gauge public opinion were tainted by the untypical, unscientific methods used to collect and report it. Postwar evidence, too, is often distorted by memory and by political interest. The evidence presented here cannot answer the question of what most Germans believed, but it does show, more fully than before, how far Hitler and his associates went, on many occasions, in telling the German public that his government was carrying out a policy of annihilating and exterminating Europe's Jews. Anyone who could read German, who read a major newspaper, who listened regularly to radio news, or who glanced at the ever-present Nazi political posters would have known this basic fact. That person would have known that the German government insisted current events could be understood only in connection with the power of international Jewry, with a Jewish plot to destroy the Nazi regime and murder the German people. The surviving evidence suggests that a fanatical minority — not a small one — lodged inside the Nazi Party and its vanguard organizations believed this to be true and spread it through a society where a milder antisemitism had long been commonplace. By shifting attention from what ordinary Germans thought to the texts and images of Nazi authoritarianism itself, I seek in this book to take up a question still unanswered: why, in 1941, in Europe's longest and darkest history of hatred, did antisemitism take on for the first time an unprecedented radicalism, one used to justify a policy of mass murder — the murder of the Jews — across the European continent.

Cover image: a still from the film Triumph of the Will. Source: Douban.