Books
Author's Comments:
Translations: Spanish, Russian, Czech, Japanese
Abstract:
The Nazi Conscience is not an
oxymoron. The perpetrators of war and
genocide espoused a strong moral code that
was enshrined in the command to “Put
collective need ahead of individual
greed.” Against what they saw as state
immobilized by democracy and a culture
gutted by modernity, Nazis recruited
Germans across the divides of religion,
class, region, and generation behind a
crusade to restore endangered values. As
in wartime or after a natural disaster,
citizens were summoned to put aside their
petty concerns and sacrifice for the
collective good of the ethnic community, or
Volk. But after the Nazis seized power in
January 1933, Germans enjoyed economic
recovery and political unrest became a
thing of the past. Unlike colonial
regimes and slave holding societies, where
unwritten assumptions about white
superiority guided everyday practice, in
Nazi Germany persecution resulted from
formal laws, and the outcasts from the Volk
bore no physical traits of their difference
and had, until 1933, lived peacefully among
people with whom they shared a Heimat, or
Homeland.
The Nazi Conscience chronicles the spread
of a culture of self-love and other-hate
from 1933 through 1939 – years that many
Germans later remembered as a “normal” and
even “happy.” She describes Hitler’s
politics of virtue, racial experts’
conquest of mass media, and Nazi hard
liners’ solution to the “Jewish problem.”
Keywords:
Nazi, public culture, ethics, morality, ethnic fundamentalism, gender, race, antisemitism, third reich, hitler