Front cover image for The Nazi conscience

The Nazi conscience

Claudia Koonz (Author)
"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 antisemitism 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."--Jacket
eBook, English, 2003
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2003
1 online resource (362 pages : illustrations, map
9780674254978, 9780674011724, 067425497X, 0674011724
1036838002
An ethnic conscience
The politics of virtue
Allies in the academy
The conquest of political culture
Ethnic revival and racist anxiety
The swastika in the heart of the youth
Law and the racial order
The quest for a respectable racism
Racial warriors
Racial war at home