Why the Germans? Why the Jews?

April 14, 2014
Traditionally, scholars have divided anti-Semitism into religious and racial types, but German historian Aly (Hitler's Beneficiaries) posits a third type in modern Germany, one motivated by "envy, fear of failure, resentment, and greed." He notes that modern German Jews became increasingly urbanized and tended to be better educated and more professionally successful than their largely rural gentile counterparts. In 1913, the anti-Semitic ideologue Theodor Fritsch wrote, "In the big cities... Jews and Jewish sensibilities rule, and a person accustomed to nature feels like an alien, a clueless child." Even when the educational and status gap between German Jews and gentiles narrowed starting around 1910, the Depression crushed many Germans' hopes, leading some into the Nazi Party, which strove to "replace a class-based state with a mass-based one." Aly does not ignore unadulterated racial anti-Semitism, but his focus is on how status issues often fueled it. Though prone to sweeping generalizations, Aly has written a readable, nuanced, and important work on how German Christians' longstanding obsession with German Jews so prepared the ground for Nazism that its emergence seemed almost inevitable.

Starred review from February 15, 2014
In a fluid translation, a German historian soundly explores the numerous attractions of the Nazi agenda to a deeply insecure, unsettled people. Aly (Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, 2007, etc.) rehearses many of the standard understandings of why the Germans chose the Jews as the scapegoats for all their economic and political woes of the 1920s and '30s--the "question of questions"--adding some interesting new glimmers of Holocaust research. The author reaches back to the emancipation of the Jews after the Napoleonic Wars, which freed them to join guilds and even the armed forces, helping to unleash an entrepreneurial spirit and encourage competition. While the Jews greatly benefited from these modern currents of individualism and liberalism, German Christians, weighted under static "old certainties," looking toward the government for economic protection rather than liberation, "experienced legal and material progress as personal loss." While Germany was just coalescing into a united nation, the Jews were long committed to education, learning and bettering themselves. The German senses of inferiority, political immaturity and national anxiety, combined with the resentment over the Versailles Treaty, made them receptive to the siren song of Hitler's National Socialist Party, which emphasized entitlements for the "ethnic Germans" at the expense of the interlopers, the Jews. Aly asserts that even if most Germans did not initially agree with the Nazis' virulent anti-Semitic views, they were reassured by the Nazi visions of economic progress, self-sufficiency, and upward mobility and signed up for what increasingly became clear as a "criminal collaboration" between the people and their political leadership. Aly mostly wraps things up at 1933 yet hints chillingly at how the dawning sense of transgression played in the minds of average Germans. An elegant, erudite historical survey employing deep research and excellent examples, even from the author's own family.

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March 15, 2014
Aly is a historian specializing in the Third Reich and the Holocaust. In this provocative and disturbing book, he has set himself an impossible task: to explain why the effort to exterminate the Jews of Europe happened in Germany rather than other European nations with stronger histories of anti-Semitism. Other historians have tried, most notably and recently Daniel Goldhagen, who saw eliminationist strains embedded in German culture. But Aly posits a simpler explanation. Despite Nazi ideology and incessant campaigning about the Jewish race, it was simple jealousy and greed that led to the persecution of Jews. He convincingly illustrates how German Jews were especially proficient in coping with the challenges of rapid industrialization and other aspects of modernity that swept Germany in the late nineteenth century. Despite their relatively small numbers, Jews rose to astounding heights in business, academia, and eventually politics. Their prominence seemed to threaten the status and well-being of other groups, especially in the lower middle class. When world depression devastated the German economy, Jewish wealth was fair game for plunder. Aly has provided a useful emphasis on this aspect of German anti-Semitism, but it is ultimately no more satisfying than earlier efforts to explain the unexplainable.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)