From: JEFFREY HERF: The Jewish Enemy.

“Despite the vast literature on Nazis Germany, World War II, and the Holocaust, the rationalist bias about human motivation has persisted. Resistance to grasping the power and impact of nonrational and irrational currents in Nazis Germany has been considerable.

“The Nazis leadership pushed to the extreme the human capacity for delusion and belief in illusions. The assumption that these men did not believe these fantasies relies on an optimistic view of the power of human rationality. 

“The weight of evidence leads to the conclusion that the Nazis leadership viewed the world in the way they said they did and supplied a narrative of events that offered an iron-clad explanation as well as justification for uniting ideology and practice in war and mass murder.

“If sheer repetition, in public and private contexts, can be taken as proof of belief, then it appears that Hitler, Goebbels, Dietrich, their staffs, and an undetermined percentage of German listeners and readers believed that an international Jewish conspiracy was the driving force behind the anti-Hitler coalition in World War II. 

"If they regarded this aspect of their own propaganda with cynicism, they did not leave much trace of that skepticism behind. Yet the sources point to the presence of true believers. They certainly acted as if the Final Solution was Nazi Germany’s punishment of the Jews, whom the Nazis found guilty of starting and prolonging World War II.”

Jeffrey Herf