Nazi Anti-Semitism: From Prejudice to the Holocaust

by Philippe Burrin, Janet Lloyd

Overview

From a leading historian of Nazi Germany, a new exploration of the evolution of policies that led to the horror of the Holocaust.

One of the continuing puzzles of twentieth-century history is how Germany moved from a kind of anti-Semitism that was despicable, but did not seem exceedingly dangerous, to the Final Solution. This question has been much debated in recent years, and historians have arrived at very different answers.

In Nazi Anti-Semitism, Philippe Burrin, one of the leading historians of Nazi Germany, offers a new understanding of the evolution of Nazi thought and policy. Disagreeing with those such as Daniel Goldhagen (author of Hitler's Willing Executioners) who would condemn the German population as a whole for being inherently anti-Jewish, Burrin presents a more nuanced picture and shows how Nazi policy evolved gradually. How the Germans proceeded from seemingly unthinkable premises to the actual horror of the Holocaust is the story that he tells in this essential book.

Burrin's France Under the Germans, published by The New Press in 1997, received widespread praise and has become a seminal work. Already published to great acclaim in France, Nazi Anti-Semitism opens new perspectives in a vital historical debate with continuing relevance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781565849693
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	10/01/2005
Pages:	154
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Philippe Burrin is a professor of international history in the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. His previous books include France Under the Germans and Hitler and the Jews. He lives in Geneva, Switzerland.

Editorial Reviews

Given its brevity, this study, which originated as a series of lectures given at Paris's College de France, is better at asking probing questions about the Nazi period than at answering them. Still, the author's answers are provocative. Burrin (Hitler and the Jews), a Swiss professor of history, goes back to the basics as he uses the latest scholarship to explore the core of Nazi ideology and why the German people accepted it. He's persuasive in tracing the multiple origins of Nazi anti-Semitism, noting that it combined traditional beliefs, Christian anti-Semitism and modern theories of race. Burrin locates anti-Semitism at the heart of Nazi ideology, rather than as an aspect of it. As to why Germans followed Hitler, Burrin effectively debunks Daniel Goldhagen's argument for longstanding German eliminationist anti-Semitism. Burrin's own hypothesis is that Judeophobia, as he calls it, became more than a prejudice; it was "an interpretive grid by which to make sense of what was happening " and thus became part of the national identity. Burrin's generally straightforward approach to these difficult questions will attract those who want a brief account of the latest scholarship on the origins of the Nazi policies toward the Jews. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly