Belonging and Genocide: Hitler's Community, 1918-1945
No one has ever posed a satisfactory explanation for the extreme inhumanity of the Holocaust. What enabled millions of Germans to perpetrate or condone the murder of the Jews? In this illuminating book, Thomas Kühne offers a provocative answer. In addition to the hatred of Jews or coercion that created a genocidal society, he contends, the desire for a united "people's community" made Germans conform and join together in mass crime.
Exploring private letters, diaries, memoirs, secret reports, trial records, and other documents, the author shows how the Nazis used such common human needs as community, belonging, and solidarity to forge a nation conducting the worst crime in history.
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"Thomas Kühne's excellent book with its provocative thesis is essential reading for anyone interested in the problems of genocide and mass violence. Kühne shows that the Third Reich's promise of a unified national community proved powerfully seductive to Germans and underpinned the Holocaust."--Eric D. Weitz, University of Minnesota
"Belonging and Genocide is a fascinating example of imaginative insight into the past. It is highly significant for our understanding of the Nazi genocide and may serve as a model to explain other cases of mass murder as well."--Donald Bloxham, author of The Final Solution: A Genocide--Donald Bloxham
