Traverso, Enzo - The Origins of Nazi Violence

[Hans Deventer]

Interesting book. Traverso, though not implicating that it could not have but happen as it did, does root the Nazi violence in an historic context. He argues that the mechanisation of death since the French guillotine and especially WW1 issued into the death plants of Auschwitz and the like, that in stead of regular products, produced corpses. Already in WW1, war had become nothing but sheer butchery by machines (canons, machineguns, tanks, poison gas). No more heroic charges of the light brigade.

He also notices how the idea of the "untermensch" wasn't foreign to European culture at all. In the European colonies (and likewise in the USA) 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 Europe wasn't this principle, but the idea of applying it to the Jews, even though anti-Semitism had deep roots in European history as well.

A book that gives food for thought.

[Jim Chabot]

Food for thought indeed. Everything that I have read roots the German conquest in the humiliation visited upon them at the close of WWI, resulting in a fierce nationalism.

I hadn't really thought of the violence visited upon the Jews and the rise of Arianism as taking a second track. My take was that these were Hitler's beliefs alone that were added in as he fanned the flames of nationalism in his rise to power. I suppose my thought process gave a measure of innocence to the German people, apart from Hitler and the military.

This is a different perspective.

[Ryan Scott]

The increased mechanization of war does separate people from death a bit more than in the past. I suppose it makes sense that, given the right conditions (retaliatory nationalism of Nazi Germany) it would be conceivable for something like this to happen.

[Ian Gentles]

Sounds a very interesting book, thanks for recomending it Hans.