"The Holocaust proceeded on a mortal accounting—a demographic balance sheet—of those lives worth living or sacrificing, and those unworthy of life and unable or unwilling to make the ultimate sacrifice. In Hitler’s Holocaust: The Logic of War and Genocide, Richard Koenigsberg argues that Nazi ideology revolved around the "glorification of sacrificial death.”

James Tyner, author of
 
Genocide and the Geographical Imagination
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Editorial Reviews

In Hitler's Holocaust: The Logic of War and Genocide, Koenigsberg identifies the link between what the German military did on the battlefield--and their genocidal program against the Jewish people. This linkage begins, Koenigsberg explains, with the sacrificial ideology of the Third Reich--"a giving of one's all." The ultimate "glory" was battlefield death. I recall the words of the American General, George Patton, who explained to his troops, "The object is not to die for your country. It is to get the other son of a bitch to die for his!"

For Hitler, this statement would have been anathema--because it contains the notion that service has a limit. In our view, one serves, then goes home and lives one's life--because the purpose of the Nation-State is the Good Life of individuals within society. Hitler reversed this idea. In Nazi ideology, the role of the individual was to serve the Nation-State--this was the end in itself! Only death released one from one's obligation. In death, one found life: salvation; sacrifice to the god of the Third Reich.

What is unique in Hitler's Holocaust is Dr. Koenigsberg's idea that Hitler connected the sacrifice of German soldiers on the battlefield with the genocide of the Jews. Mass murder was undertaken, in Hitler's words, to "balance the scales of death." On the Eastern Front, soldiers enacted their roles as sacrifices for the German State. Jews lost their lives as victims of the Holocaust. The death of both soldiers and Jews fulfilled a similar role: mythologizing sacrifices made in the name of the Germany.

Hitler saw the soldier's combat death as the ultimate display of patriotic virtue. The Jew, by contrast, was considered an unworthy parasitic human being, unable to contribute and viciously un-loyal to the Nation. Koenigsberg writes that in Nazi ideology the fundamental "sin" was "selfish individualism:" lack of devotion to the community. Since Jews were conceived as selfish individualists who lacked devotion, therefore, "a true understanding of Jews and Judaism insisted on their 'total annihilation'."

--Matthew Caverly, Middle Georgia State University, author of The Drama of the American Political System
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In Hitler's Holocaust, Koenigsberg accomplishes several unique objectives. He has written a book that satisfies the standards of scholarly rigor, while being eminently readable; he renders Hitler in human terms without humanizing him; and he focuses new light on a neglected dimension of the Holocaust: a mytho-historical interpretation of genocide as a mass-sacrifice.

Koenigsberg writes that Hitler undertook the extermination of the Jewish people to "balance the scales of death;" that he and Goebbels tried to "silence the 'Jewish voice' speaking asserting that death in battle is useless and futile." Hitler attempted to master the trauma of the first World War "by turning passivity into activity"--engaging in a program of wholesale extermination that would paradoxically glorify the fatherland by rendering "meaningful" the deaths of German young men in WWI. The implications of this hypothesis are far-reaching.

Hitler was traumatized by Germany's capitulation at the conclusion of the First World War--that seemed to render the death of his fellow soldiers meaningless. He sought to come to terms with this trauma by developing the bizarre idea that Germany's Jews had actively refused the obligation to die for their country--and moreover had spoiled the selfless nobility evinced by the flower of German youth. This quality, in Hitler's mind, resulted in an imbalance--a mythic imbalance--that could be righted only by a second world war and the grotesque butchery that would appease the godlike forces that delighted in blood-sacrifice.

What makes Koenigsberg's book striking is that it helps me to understand why Hitler acted in the way that he did yet explores his reasoning in such a way as to make palpable the monstrous extremes of his logic. I suggest that Richard Koenigsberg treat this book as a new beginning: the foundation for an expansion of his extraordinary analytical lens toward the events of our time. For we have not escaped the power--the logic--of sacrifice.

--Alexander Chirila, author of True Immortality