Name: Parth Patel

Instructor: CGR

Date: 4/24/2013

Course: English 1103

Nazi Ideology: An Inner Look at the Holocaust

Burleigh, Michael, and Wolfgang Wippermann. The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945. Cambridge England: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print.

Cox, John. Personal Interview 2013.

John Cox is an associate professor of Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. His first book, Circles of Resistance: Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany, was published in 2009, and his To Kill a People: Genocide in the Twentieth Century will be published by Pearson Prentice Hall in 2013.

According to Cox, after experimenting with other methods to settle the so called Jewish Question, by the fall of 1941 the Nazis were dedicated to killing every Jew they could get their hands onand even those beyond their grasp. The genocides of Slavs, Roma and Sinti, and the mass murder of Africans and political and social enemies lacked the urgent priority and determination that, by late 1941, drove the Jewish Holocaust. But these crimes originated in closely related goals and congruent ideological roots in racism and imperialism. Slavs, Romani peoples, and Jews were murdered as part of a common process, one that is best understand within humanitys long history of genocide and the more immediate influences of European imperialism and racism.

Dr. Cox earned his Ph.D. in History at UNC Chapel Hill in 2005. Dr. Cox is a founding member of the editorial board of the Journal of Jewish Identities. John has written and lectured extensively on genocide, war crimes, and human rights. Among Dr. Cox's recent publications is a chapter on anti-Nazi resistance in an important volume published in January 2011 (The Routledge History of the Holocaust). Hence, the interview conducted by me can be considered reliable.

Germany Awake. Digital image. Deutschland Erwache. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Apr. 2013.
<http://avaxhome.ws/ebooks/history_military/0912138696.html>.

Koonz, Claudia. The Nazi Conscience. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 2003. Print.

Claudia Koonz's interests are in twentieth-century German history, women's history, and genocide. She has received research support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the German-Marshall Fund, Duke University, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the National Humanities Center.

According to Koonz, dismissing the Nazis as monsters without a conscience is too easy and simplistic. The Nazis were humans like everyone else and their acts, as immortal as they were, followed logically and easily from a set of assumptions and beliefs which constituted a conscience. The book analyses how the Nazis developed a philosophy and ethic of racial superiority. It also includes information on how academic leaders helped justify and legitimize Nazi beliefs. The book primarily focuses on public actions and discussions in the creation of a public moral philosophy. The book explores how the Nazis constructed a moral philosophy and worldview around the need of

coherence and order as an antidote to the liberalism and democracy of the Weimar Republic. It isn't hard to get people to accept the belief that they are special, that they are better than others, that they deserve special privileges, and that they belong to a group that spans space and time, creating a unique community that deserves aggressive protection. With that in place, the demonization of Jews and others could lead readily to mass murder; indeed, making the Jews social pariahs was inevitable by that point.

When many writers do not want to talk in depth about the Holocaust from a different point of view, Koonz takes a different approach and tries to prove her point philosophically. The book is printed so it is credible enough to be used as a good source of information

"The German Possessions; Imperialism and Expansion, Bismarck at His Best." Map. African Numismatics. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Apr. 2013.

<http://tielens.free.fr/Numis/AfriGerman.html>.

Totalitarianism. Digital image. Blow by Blow: Totalitarianism. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Apr. 2013.
<http://www.bilderberg.org/usglobal.htm>

Traverso, Enzo. The Origins of Nazi Violence. New York: New Press, 2003. Print.

Enzo Traverso held the position of a lecturer in the Department of Political science at the University of Paris VIII and at School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS). He worked for the International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE) based in Amsterdam, and after that in the Library of contemporary international documentation (BDIC) in Nanterre. The book is originally written in French but translated in English by Janet Lloyd.

Enzo Traverso's brilliant synthesis, The Origins of Nazi Violence, maps the troubling genealogy of the Nazi regime, situating the extermination camps at the terrible intersection of European modernity's industrialization of killing, dehumanization of death, and colonialist mindset. Challenging the conventional presentation of the Holocaust as an inexplicable anomaly, in which Nazi crimes have been excised from the trajectory of the Western world, Traverso navigates the intricate history of technical, cultural, and ideological antecedents to the horrors of the Holocaust. The uniqueness of Nazism, he argues, lay not in its opposition to the West, but in its terrifying blend of many forms of distinctively Western violence. Deftly tracing and elucidating this complex lineage, Traverso reveals that the ideas that coalesced at Auschwitz came from Europe's mainstream and not its margins. In his book, Traverso talks about, for most of the part,

the mechanism of death since the French guillotine and especially World War I. In the European colonies, it was understood that the conquered nations were a lower and less valuable culture that logically had to give way to the superior Western culture and race. The shock in Nazi Germany was not the principle, but the idea of applying the principle to the Jews, even though anti-Semitism had deep roots in European history as well.

The book was originally written by Traverso in French and it was translated in English by Janet Lloyd. Of course the book lost some of its originality while translation but the facts mentioned in the book doesnt change. Also, Traverso has also included a bibliography of sources he used while he was writing the book which makes the book equally credible as others.