Fresh Eyes on Jewish History: A Deep Dive Into Evil and the Kingdom of Hell

Even with stories about which we feel we know a great deal, we find, upon further examination, we know very little.  Further, that our continued examination, informed by master historians, will invariably deepen our understanding of who we and others were, and what perils we faced.

According to four outstanding historians, for both American labor and Nazi Germany, it was neither callous sociopaths nor snarling psychopaths who led to multiple tragedies. Instead, it was society’s top echelons – and their willing followers.

Four criteria.

To appear on this list, each book must have bona fide solid prose. Neither overwritten nor pretentious, non-clichéd, no flights of poetic fancy.

Each tells the story cleanly, clearly, straightforwardly.

Each has indefatigable, in-depth research, presenting things previously overlooked.

Each puts these new facts together with theses that haven’t been considered.

Here are four five-star reads:

1) Triangle: The Fire That Changed America

David Von Drehle

Quite simply, Von Drehle makes everything – every person, every place, every political act – walk off the page. In the single best description of Lower East Side tenement life and labor I’ve ever read, he transforms every privation – every horrors — come to life. Written fast and tight, Triangle is as brilliantly evocative as it is marvelously specific.

Integral to the story is a cast richly drawn, seamstresses to socialites, bosses to Brahmins, the Belmonts and the Vanderbilts and all the way up to Frances Perkins, reformer par excellence, tireless in her work for working people, a proverbial force of nature who rose to become America’s first Cabinet secretary. Following her lead, Robert Wagner, Al Smith, and FDR changed America.

Along the way to a better end for labor, Von Drehle studs his story with countless indelible images. Burned corpses with their life savings sewn into their clothes – because they had no idea of what banks were. Teenagers suddenly responsible for a household of younger siblings. Bodies so fire-consumed they were identified only by their belongings – rings, earrings, combs; even a daughter’s cork shoe inserts.

The Triangle fire took 146 lives, 123 of them women. Every block on Lower East Side lost someone.

Von Drehle makes us feel that loss.

2) Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich

Richard J. Evans

Perhaps to rehabilitate – exonerate – a country America wanted as an ally, for nearly a century Hitler’s people, his inner circle of supporters and advisors, were invariably portrayed as an anomalous group of rabid ideologues, loners, losers, degenerates, even outright psychopaths over whom Hitler ruled by some sort of hypnosis. What’s more, Der Fuhrer himself was invariably drawn as a cypher, an asexual, empty shell devoid of all normal friendships and feelings.

Those aberrations, that psychosis — it was so much easier to say the Germans and Germany were more or less blameless for the most hellacious crimes in history.

Yet as Evans proves, nothing could have been further from the truth. Employing newly discovered personal data on Hitler and two dozen top Nazis, he builds the case that Hitler had many friends, social contacts, even lovers. Manipulating extreme racial and political nationalism, the crudest sort of political violence and virulent antisemitism, Hitler was ruthless “beyond anything imagined by the world of conventional politics in Germany.”

Through cunning, power, and charm, he drew around him a band of highly educated and efficient lieutenants. Herman Goring, for example, was not only a skilled pilot but also a highly cosmopolitan patron of the arts.

Josef Goebbels, the brilliant creator of sensationalist advertising campaigns, held a Ph.D. in literature. (The architect of Kristallnacht believed so fervently in Hitler that rather than live without him Goebbels and his wife murdered their six children before committing suicide.)

Ernst Rohm, creator of the Brownshirts, read classics, collected art, played piano, and particularly loved Wagner’s music.

Hardly the mindless order-following bureaucrat, as he portrayed himself at his trial, Adolf Eichmann was instead highly ambitious, preternaturally efficient, and hungry for both power and fame. How to reach the pinnacle in the Third Reich? Simply murder more Jews than anyone else.

Even Leni Riefenstahl, the lone woman in the group, creator of the landmark films Triumph of the Will and Olympia, far from being an apolitical artist, as she claimed, was an extremely nationalistic, antisemitic opportunist who willingly, gladly, made propaganda films. While she steadfastly maintained until her death at age 101 in 2003 that she didn’t know about Hitler’s true treachery and tactics, the reverse was clearly the case. The beatings, murders, camps – all of it began very early.

She knew. They all did.

3) Mengele: Unmaking the “Angel of Death”

David Marwell

Hannah Arendt, writing Eichman in Jerusalem, got it wrong. Evil is not banal, as she claimed. It is sheer malevolence, made all the more frightening by its knowing descent.

Or so convincingly argues David Marwell, whose scrupulously researched account presents an academically inclined German physician who became a veritable monster who ceases to see human beings as such, but instead as humanoid lab rats, to be experimented upon (i.e., tortured), discarded, destroyed.

Volk and disease. The cancer infecting the volk? Der Juden.

The cure? Death.

Not a Nazi Party member until he was compelled to join, Josef Mengele was a medical researcher who wound up with the world’s largest laboratory of live, unanesthetized patients. As Marwell reports, following Robert Jay Lifton’s landmark study, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killings and the Psychology of Genocide, after the German eugenics campaign of the 1920s forced sterilization of the “unfit,” it was a short step to “euthanasia,”’ which translated into the systematic murder of Jews and other undesirables. Arguably the most notorious war criminal of all time, Mengele became the embodiment of bloodless efficiency and passionate devotion to a grotesque worldview.

Holding two Ph.D.s, Mengele’s promising career as a scientist became his grotesque researches into twins and eye color. Escaping after the war, he ignited a worldwide search, ending in a São Paulo cemetery – a fascinating story in itself.

4) Three by Gotz Aly

Although they were published as three separate volumes, I present them here them as a trilogy. As the titles indicate they plow different fields; taken in toto they provide an extraordinary picture of the swirling cultural, economic, and political forces that produced the demonic Third Reich.

Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State

Simply stated, if average Germans were neither ultra-nationalistic nor rabidly antisemitic, how could they embrace – approvingly if not enthusiastically – the Nazi regime? Aly’s answer is quite simple: they were bought by plundered wealth. Need a new couch? Go to the equivalent of local ward chairman. Ach du Lieber! – the couch magically appeared, in all likelihood a piece of furniture stolen from dead Jews.

As the Depression raged, war loomed and arrived, and the rest of Europe suffered, slaved, and starved, most Germans ate and lived relatively well – benefitted by an ocean of premier consumer goods and delicacy food items looted from every occupied people and country.

So as other countries’ currencies crashed, and millions of Jews lost everything, the German citizenry experienced unprecedented upward mobility. As Aly points out, “economic logic was a motor that drove the Holocaust.” How? “The Nazi leadership made automobiles affordable to everyday Germans. It introduced the almost previously unknown idea of vacations.” And so on.

So by sharing in the war’s spoils, people who were not necessarily Nazi sympathizers were able to better themselves and their children – just as long as they didn’t ask too many questions.

Why the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust

That’s always the question, isn’t it? How did a nation known for music, literature, science, civil rights, even liberal democracy turn genocidal (a term coined to define the Teutonic new wrinkle in good old-fashioned Jew-hating)? Of course, there was racist ideology and religious animosity. But also something more mundane – material envy. With their tight networks, group loyalty, and hard work, Jews worked smarter, got richer. As the largely agrarian, illiterate German majority floundered during the rising Industrial Revolution, Jews – urban, well educated, recently freed from ghettoes – simply soared.

Equal and opposite reaction, the better the Jews did, the more the Germans embraced the pseudo-science of racial inferiority. What was more, following the zero-sum lunacy so favored today, if Jews are doing well, it must be at someone else’s expense, in this case the German peasant-worker. Such resentment, and real economic hardship, proved highly fertile ground for nascent Nazi ideology.

From haven to Holocaust. Emancipation to Wagner’s screeds about the so-called Jewification of music. Then Judenfrage, the Jewish question, all the rage in the newspapers and parliament. By 1880, when the word antisemitism first appeared, fears were articulated about losing Germany to a supposed Jewish nation, one not comprised of honest labor but instead of usury and deceit.

Discussions increase about deporting Jews. And so on.

As Aly’s last line, written in 2011, reminds us, [people] “should not kid themselves into thinking that the antisemites of the past were completely different from who we are today.”

Europe Against the Jews 1880-1945

Expands the focus into what he calls “European hostility,” Aly’s case studies are than chilling. His paradigmatic, anecdotal case – a German violinist who was persecuted, stripped of his livelihood, forced to the border, where the Poles revoked his citizenship and sent him back. Not long after, he died in a labor camp.

Other countries followed suit. Romania, for example, gleefully vowed to rid itself of the “bloodsuckers,” adding “we can’t afford to miss the moment…[to] exploit the exceptional historical situation.”

The culmination? “Not a single social group in Europe showed solidarity with the Jews persecuted between 1939 and 1945.”

As always, the level of complicity is simply staggering. With the wheels of nationalism turning, when encouraged Jewish emigration didn’t work in numbers desired, more often than not nations decided to join their righteous cause with the Nazi onslaught. After all, they’re Germans. They really know how to get the job done!

The result: ethnic and religious cleansing became a standard, even mundane political technique for achieving the ends of racial and national purity.

Overall, as Aly documents, the death camps and Einsatzgruppen aside, the sheer number of pogroms and other actions designed to make Europe Judenrein – long before Nazis made that word regular and normalized – is simply breathtaking.