Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

THREE Climax and Retreat
latter went to prison in 1924. Italicized in Rosenberg’s writings
are adages like the following: “Soul means race viewed
from within: And vice versa, race is the externalization of Soul”
and “The life of a race does not represent a logically-developed
philosophy nor even the unfolding of a pattern according to law,
but rather the development of a mystical synthesis, an activity of
soul.” 38 Hitler and Rosenberg may not have literally believed
in the Devil, but their sense of the malignant spiritual
power that Jews could exert depended on a nonrational
belief in supernatural agency as much as, if not more than,
on the findings of racially biased biologists and eugenicists.
More amazing than the fact that a paranoid and delusional
heterophobe like Hitler could find others who were
prone to see the world in the same way was his success
in making himself the absolute dictator of a modern and
seemingly enlightened Western nation. I will not try to resolve
the vexed question of how much direct responsibility
the German people as a whole bear for the Nazi assault on
the Jews. Neither of the extreme views—that Hitler and a
few of his closest followers bear all of the guilt or that the
ordinary German was a potentially homicidal Jew-hater—
seems plausible to me. 39 Saul Friedlander, the foremost
American authority on Nazi Germany and the Jews, notes
that Hitler’s appeal was broad and varied, that he offered
solutions to problems afflicting various sectors of German
society. (Indeed one thing that gave his movement a
broader appeal than those drawing exclusively on the antisemitism
of the economically conservative members of the
middle class was that he professed sympathy for workers
being exploited by ruthless capitalists and promised to address
their grievances.) His international and domestic
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