The Nazi conscience is not an oxymoron. In fact, the perpetrators of genocide had a powerful sense of right and wrong, based on civic values that exalted the moral righteousness of the ethnic community and denounced outsiders.

Claudia Koonz's latest work reveals how racial popularizers developed the infrastructure and rationale for genocide during the so-called normal years before World War II. Her careful reading of the voluminous Nazi writings on race traces the transformation of longtime Nazis' vulgar anti-Semitism into a racial ideology that seemed credible to the vast majority of ordinary Germans who never joined the Nazi Party. Challenging conventional assumptions about Hitler, Koonz locates the source of his charisma not in his summons to hate, but in his appeal to the collective virtue of his people, the Volk.

From 1933 to 1939, Nazi public culture was saturated with a blend of racial fear and ethnic pride that Koonz calls ethnic fundamentalism. Ordinary Germans were prepared for wartime atrocities by racial concepts widely disseminated in media not perceived as political: academic research, documentary films, mass-market magazines, racial hygiene and art exhibits, slide lectures, textbooks, and humor. By showing how Germans learned to countenance the everyday persecution of fellow citizens labeled as alien, Koonz makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust.

The Nazi Consciencechronicles the chilling saga of a modern state so powerful that it extinguished neighborliness, respect, and, ultimately, compassion for all those banished from the ethnic majority.

Trudl Junge, former personal secretary to Adolf Hitler, once noted that the Führer's success came with his ability to manipulate other people's conscience. On a vast scale, the German people no longer knew right from wrong. Koonz presents a compelling argument to suggest that Junge was in some degree right. The Germans did not surrender their conscience but submitted to its transformation away from conventional Western notions of right and wrong to a radical, racial nationalism that established criteria for assessing moral actions and outcomes.

Koonz displays the gradual transformation of the traditional idea of conscience into something that was utterly shaped by the subordination of one's own self to that of the Volk.

In this valuable and original book, Claudia Koonz analyzes how the Nazis legitimized the Third Reich and facilitated Hitler's consensual dictatorship and genocidal policies. This daring reinterpretation of the relationship between the Nazi leadership, its middle- and low-ranking cadres, and other sectors of the German population shows the gradual shift in public opinion toward the regime's worldview. Ultimately, Nazism created a positive, moral image of itself just as it sanctioned the annihilation of enemies perceived as unethical and immoral.

Faced with the German degradation and murder of the Jews from 1933 to 1945, historians and, indeed, so many thoughtful men and women have posed no question more insistently than, 'How could it happen?' Claudia Koonz's powerfully written study of the inculcation of a Nazi racialist ethos in the years before extermination answers this question as persuasively as any other to date.

Claudia Koonz's arresting new book makes the case that between 1933 and 1939, before the Second World War and the Holocaust, the Nazis built a perverse ethical consensus in Germany. Preaching fears of racial weakness along with pride and commitment to a new moral order, self-righteous opinion leaders created an ethnic fundamentalism--of which we have not, she suggests in a closing reflection, seen the last.

[Koonz] documents in exemplary fashion what the historical actors actually thought, felt, advocated, planned, and organized before they acted...impressively researched, lucidly organized, disturbing, yet eminently readable.

Claudia Koonz's latest work reveals how racial popularizers developed the infrastructure and rationale for genocide during the so-called normal years before World War II. Challenging conventional assumptions about Hitler, Koonz locates the source of his charisma not in his summons to hate, but in his appeal to the collective virtue of his people, the Volk. By showing how Germans learned to countenance the everyday persecution of fellow citizens labeled as alien, Koonz makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust.

The Nazi conscience is not an oxymoron. In fact, theperpetrators of genocide had a powerful sense of right and wrong, based on civic values thatexalted the moral righteousness of the ethnic community and denounced outsiders.

Claudia Koonz's latest work reveals how racial popularizersdeveloped the infrastructure and rationale for genocide during the so-called normal years beforeWorld War II. Her careful reading of the voluminous Nazi writings on race traces thetransformation of longtime Nazis' vulgar anti-Semitism into a racial ideology that seemedcredible to the vast majority of ordinary Germans who never joined the Nazi Party. Challengingconventional assumptions about Hitler, Koonz locates the source of his charisma not in hissummons to hate, but in his appeal to the collective virtue of his people, the Volk.

From 1933 to 1939, Nazi public culture was saturated with ablend of racial fear and ethnic pride that Koonz calls ethnic fundamentalism. Ordinary Germanswere prepared for wartime atrocities by racial concepts widely disseminated in media notperceived as political: academic research, documentary films, mass-market magazines, racialhygiene and art exhibits, slide lectures, textbooks, and humor. By showing how Germans learnedto countenance the everyday persecution of fellow citizens labeled as alien, Koonz makes a majorcontribution to our understanding of the Holocaust.

The Nazi Consciencechronicles the chilling saga of a modernstate so powerful that it extinguished neighborliness, respect, and, ultimately, compassion forall those banished from the ethnic majority.

Claudia Koonzis Professor of History at<>DukeUniversity

Prologue

1. An Ethnic Conscience

2. The Politics of Virtue

3. Allies in the Academy

4. The Conquest of Political Culture

5. Ethnic Revival and Racist Anxiety

6. The Swastika in the Heart of the Youth

7. Law and the Racial Order

8. The Quest for a Respectable Racism

9. Racial Warriors

10. Racial War at Home

Abbreviations

Notes

Acknowledgments

Illustration Credits

Index