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The Nazi conscience is not an oxymoron. In fact, the perpetrators of genocide had a robust sense of right and incorrect, predicated on civic principles that exalted the moral righteousness of the cultural community and denounced outsiders. Claudia Koonz's latest work discloses how racial popularizers developed the infrastructure and rationale for genocide during the so-called normal years before World Warfare II. Her careful reading of the voluminous Nazi writings on contest traces the change of longtime Nazis' vulgar anti-Semitism into a racial ideology that looked credible to almost all normal Germans who never signed up with the Nazi Party. Challenging normal 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 general public culture was saturated with a blend of racial fear and ethnic pleasure that Koonz message or calls ethnic fundamentalism. Normal Germans were prepared for wartime atrocities by racial concepts greatly disseminated in press not perceived as political: Academic research, documentary motion pictures, mass-market publications, racial health and art displays, slide lectures, textbooks, and laughter. By demonstrating how Germans learned to countenance the each day persecution of fellow people called alien, Koonz makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust. The Nazi Conscience chronicles the chilling saga of a modern condition so powerful which it extinguished neighborliness, respect, and, eventually, compassion for all those banished from the cultural majority.
