Belonging and Genocide

Hitler's Community, 1918-1945

Kuhne Thomas

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 Kuhne 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.

About the Author

Thomas Kuhne is Strassler Professor of Holocaust History at the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University.

Reviews

"Thomas Kuhne, one of the world's leading historians of German history, has written an explosive book that forever alters our understanding of the wellsprings of the Holocaust. In painful detail, he shows how the genocide of the Jews created a sense of belonging among the Germans. This is a disturbing, radical work, which no serious student of the immensely destructive twentieth century will be able to ignore" – Helmut Walser Smith, Vanderbilt University

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