Didn't this guy learn anything from the Goldhagen fiasco?There is nothing new here,the author just repeats all the mistakes that Goldhagen made.Germanophobia at its finest.

This is an interesting and quite diverting study of the Holocaust in terms of what the author describes as a pathological, irrational fear of and prejudice toward Jews which he argues quite convincingly characterized the German people in the decades leading up to the Second World War. Rather than refer to this syndrome as a virulent form of anti-Semitism, he calls it "Judeophobia", maintaining it constitutes a culturally unique psychodynamic form of such prejudice and fear found most profoundly affecting the worldview and general attitudes of the Germans of the early 20th century. Of course, no other phenomenon in this century had been so psychologized as the Holocaust, yet one finds much to learn from this latest effort to understand how an otherwise culturally advanced and civilized society such as Germany could have participated so willingly in the horrific torture and murder of the Jews.

He easily illustrates (long before Daniel Goldhagen, by the way) the logical fallacy involved in subscribing to the self-serving "I didn't know what was going on" excuses that attribute sole blame for the events in Germany to the National Socialists and the exclusive egregious excesses of the fabled Nazi organizations such as the SS or Gestapo. According to Fischer, there were far too many people involved in the activities collectively referred to as the Holocaust to take such protests of individual benign ignorance of the systematic collection, deportation, and murder of the Jews seriously. One would have had to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to recognize what was happening all around them. As others have argued since, the truth of the events seem to be a complex web of fear, cowardice and opportunism in a society in which all norms of civilized behavior had suddenly vanished in favor of terror, intimidation, and a feeling it was "every creep for himself". Under such circumstances, it is no surprise to see so many of these cretins then drift out of the woodwork and into public and political prominence. Fortunes were made and careers established at the expense of the Jews.

The author also covers a lot of historical ground in tracing the origins and promulgation of "Judeophobia", going back literally into antiquity to discover and analyze its roots in Christian doctrine as early as St. Paul, and ascribing early forms of virulent "Jew-hatred" in vestiges of the Crusades, and an element of such anti-Semitic attitudes in Torquemada and the first Grand Inquisition. Yet, while the fortunes of the European Jews rose and fell with some gravity over the centuries, nothing approaching the level of systematic persecution, displacement, and murder of the Third Reich can be found in history. He also argues quite eloquently that the ideological impetus for the Holocaust was located in the ordinary German's propensity for easy answers and convenient self-delusion. Associated with this, of course, are the wicked excesses resulting from such tendencies to project blame to innocent others who can subsequently be handily scapegoated. Also associated with such tendencies are a whole rafter of psychological constructs, such as fear, paranoia, and projection, which inevitably lead to aggression and violence.

Finally, in dealing with the issue of how wide the participation in the persecution, violence and murder of the Jews was in Nazi Germany, he believes that while this cannot be conclusively determined, it can be said with great certainty that in sowing the harvest of the crop of ritual Jew hatred and "Judeophobia" fomented so recklessly and fatefully by the Nazis in their rise to prominence and power, the final result was a quite calculated spilling of cauldrons of Jewish blood in which millions of willing hands were stained but for which no one was willing to take the blame. This is obviously a difficult book, but it is also a literate, well-written and painstakingly documented one, a book anyone seriously interested in trying to better understand what within the German culture made the Holocaust possible will be interested in reading. I strongly recommend it.

Klaus Fischer, the author of one of the most enlightening recent histories of Nazi Germany that I've encountered, tackles here the thorny question of the causes of the Holocaust from the perspective of German history and social psychology. He presents an intriguing multi-causal explanation, pointing (among other things) to the key role of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, and the ensuing instability of German society and politics; the separate, very visible identity of Jews in Germany despite widespread assimilation; a historic German inability to answer conclusively what it means to be a German; and a German unwillingness (that persists to the present) to foster a pluralistic, diverse society. Less satisfying are explanations that point to particular elements of the German character, such as blind obedience, orderliness, authoritarianism, militarism, etc.

This is a pithy book, not for those seeking snap answers to difficult historical questions, however. The author has mined the historiographic literature as well as contemporary sources to illustrate amply the points he makes.

One of the few criticisms I would register, however, is that Fischer seems excessively sanguine in his belief that the Holocaust could never happen again in the future in Germany. Certainly, people's unwillingness to believe that a progrom of this extent could happen in this enlightened "nation of Dichter und Denker" (poets and philosphers) in the first place was one of the reason that Hitler succeeded with relatively little interference from inside or outside Germany until it was too late. Even despite the fact of 50 years of strong democratic tradition in Germany since the war, continued incidents of xenophobic terrorism and the continued strength of racist right wing parties in the country indicate that continued vigilance is in order.

But the book offers a balanced, articulate analysis of German Judeophobia--the author rightly uses this term in place of anti-Semitism-- and the horrible results that it produced. It is a book well worth reading for anyone interested in this area.

Any author who thinks that Hindenburg was loyal to the Weimar Republic is out of his mind. There wasn't a German alive who liked it and to say that somebody was loyal to it is ludecrous. He also implies that Hitler outwitted Hindenburg to gain the chancellorship. That's also crazy. Hitler just got lucky that Papen underestimated him when he used him in his plot to try to gain the chancellorship for himself (which failed obviously). In fact I don't believe that Hitler and Hindenburg had any interaction at all on the subject (except of course when he was sworn in). The matter was proposed to Hitler through Papen. If Fischer could be so off base on such a basic concept, I shudder to think about how acurate the rest of the information in this book is.

NOTE: This is not an uninformed opinion. I have compared this book with others by Burleigh, Kershaw, Machtan, and Turner on similar subjects.

My recomendation is to forget about this book and get Kershaw's book Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris. It's actually more of a biography of Hiter's power. I found it to be a much more logical, coherent, and enlightening book.

Klaus Fischer's account of Nazi Germany succeeds as a source of basic information, particularly regarding the early roots of the Nazi movement. Since this is its main purpose, it merits consultation by anyone seeking a solid basic grasp of those world-shattering events. However, the reader should be prepared to wade through some fairly archaic, and at times deeply disturbing, ideological baggage that pops up along the margins of the main historical narrative. First, Fischer's fleeting references to Marxism and Communism as historico-social phenomena are shallow, unsubtle and dismissive in a manner only possible for a scholar trained in America (as Fischer was), and thus saddled with that peculiar cultural blind spot of ours. However, this blind spot does not much compromise the narrative, beyond giving the misleading impression that the ideas of Marx are somehow "natural" (as opposed to historical and contingent) breeding grounds for totalitarianism. More disturbing by far is the extent to which Fischer's account of the psychological makeup and personal characters of Nazi party members echoes and reproduces some of the same archaic ideologies for which they themselves were so notorious. For example, Fischer makes frequent use of the term "deviance" to describe Nazi operatives, and explicitly includes under this rubric not only sadism but homosexuality! In his desire to paint the Nazis as twisted fiends, he ends up demonizing gays in much the same way that Jews were demonized by the Nazis. Equally archaic is his reference to facial physiognomy as evidence of criminal character among Nazis. Clearly, Fischer is unaware of the large body of literature (best represented by SJ Gould's The Mismeasure of Man) which documents the intellectual bankruptcy of such thinking. Both of these ideas played a role in the racist, homophobic thought complex which National Socialism inherited from the late nineteenth century and put to such deadly effect. That an historian writing in the 1990s could continue to use ideas that have been so thoroughly discredited by scientific research is unfortunate, and given Fischer's topic, gruesomely ironic. The problems noted here do not distort Fischer's account of matters of public record, but they do raise serious questions about his interpretive competence. In the end, some readers might not have the moral stomach to reap the factual rewards undeniably offered by Fischer's book.

For a comprehensive overview of the Third Reich, Fischer's book is one of the best single-volume works on the market. It's eminently readable on all aspects of Nazi society: the sham politics, the ruthless military ethos, the imposition of one man's psychosis on the policies of an entire nation. The opening chapter, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" is a cogent synthesis of the historical strains from which the darkest period of the 20th century emerged: Germany's anti-modernism, which stretched back to the Enlightenment; the economic breakdown, political instability, and unraveling of civil society which the Versailles Treaty wrought; and the scapegoating of two groups which Hitler believed were a mortal threat to the country--the Communists and the Jews.

Unfortunately, this beautifully written, morally reflective book was inadequately researched. Many of the author's anecdotes were simply culled from secondary sources (some of questionable reliability), and the book even contains lengthy sections of entirely unfootnoted assertions. Sax seems unaware of major recent work on Nazi Germany of direct relevance to the issues he addresses - Christopher Browning's "Ordinary Men," Ian Kershaw's "Hitler Myth", Paul Weindling's "Health, Race and German Politics" and Kurt Schleunes', "A Twisted Road to Auschwitz" are all missing from his bibliography. As a result, his book unfortunately adds little to contemporary scholarly understanding of the Nazi regime, despite the novelty and importance of his initial questions.

In this useful and interesting book, Sax discusses the treatment of animals in the Third Reich, but the focus is broader than that; he also explores the way that metaphors from the animal kingdom became an important way of expressing the Nazi world view. In the twisted ideology of the Third Reich, there was no important differentiation between "human" and "animal" life. Instead, the Nazis tended to look on the world as a continuum. The highest position on the continuum belonged to healthy humans the "Aryan race." Animals could be found lower down on that continuum, while lower still were the humans who were considered inferior because of their racial identity or mental handicaps. As Sax put it in the introductory material, "In their nihilistic perspective the important distinction was not between "humans" and "aniimals" .... It was between victor and vanquished, between master and slave. The underlying paradigm was ... that of predator and prey." This attitude reflected the viewpoint in National Socialism that depicted nature as "a harsh and implacable power," demanding obedience.