Name: The Nazi Conscience
ISBN: 9780674011724

The Nazi Conscience

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 flap.

What Hacker News says

jacquesmJan 2023

Absolutely, 'it can't happen here' is a complete delusion, it can happen here and in fact to a certain degree it is already happening here.

But from my reading without that massive propaganda engine, especially Hitlers radio broadcasts of Goebbels poison there would have been more Germans still thinking clearly.

I can't recommend this book enough for a - chilling - insight into the runup to World War II and how the propaganda engine set the stage for what followed:

https://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Conscience-Claudia-Koonz/dp/0674...

It is especially sobering when you realize how much of that parallels developments today.

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anigbrowlSep 2017

But this isn't a new problem, is it? We have a plethora of books, essays, documentaries, and museums examining that very subject. For that matter, many modern nazis are not shy about articulating their reasons - desire for collective identity, desire for power, difficulty with women.

If you'd like some reading material:

The Rise and Faull of the Third Reich by William L Shirer - the single best historical overview

Anti-Semite and Jew - by Jean-Paul Sartre - an examination of the fundamental dynamic of nazi ideology

The Nazi Conscience by Claudia Koonz - examines the nazi worldview in detail

Kill All Normies by Angela Nagel - examining the intersection of chan culture and far-right ideology

* What we have with Daily Stormer is a quite literal database of interactions of people who self identify as Nazis... I'd say deleting it is not the most productive thing we could do with such information.*

True, but it's not some petri dish that you can keep isolated in a lab, is it? You have to balance the benefit of what you might learn against the costs that their organizing activity imposes on other people.

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