Mobilising Hate: The Story of Hitler's Final Solution

Summary

Praise for The Perfect Nazi:

'Absorbing, highly readable and painstakingly researched' NIALL FERGUSON

'Unforgettable, haunting reading' SIMON SCHAMA

'A fascinating and extraordinary journey into the banality of evil at the heart of Nazism' BEN MACINTYRE

'Riveting' THE TIMES

'Fascinating, scrupulously researched, compelling' SUNDAY TIMES

---------------------------------------------------

By 1942, it was a Nazi article of faith that what they called 'The Jewish Question' had only one answer: the mass extermination of an entire people. Six million European Jews were savagely murdered as a result of this perverted but profoundly held conviction.

In this radical new perspective on Hitler's so-called 'Final Solution', Martin Davidson shows that the terrible fate of Europe's Jews was not one Nazi policy amongst many, but the central preoccupation of the regime, the purpose towards which so many of its resources and energies were directed - the one which they were most determined to achieve and of which they were most chillingly proud.

It is the exploration of the mindset from which it sprang that is the central concern of Mobilising Hate. How were so many people convinced that the Jews deserved such treatment - or were at least persuaded to shrug their shoulders and turn a blind eye? How could they have been led to think that Germany could not be reborn without their eradication? That their suffering as a people was not only necessary, but was deserved? How, in short, were the moral standards of an entire nation so warped and perverted, that the Final Solution could come to be regarded as a rational, irresistible, even sacred, element of state policy?

Mobilising Hate seeks to answer these questions by examining in detail the ways in which Nazi ideologues worked to create and amplify anti-Jewish feeling in Germany, arguing for its core importance. Davidson explores the origins of radical anti-Jewish polemic in the volcanic upheavals that swept over Germany in the months after the First World War. How it seeded a theory that claimed to explain the truth of the entirety of human history. How that theory would go on to pervert science; corrupt the law; rewrite history; taint art, music and literature; and turn the media into the servant of a brutal and pitiless regime with a single message to communicate: making the Jews suffer was the necessary first step to making Germany - and indeed, Europe - great again.

Davidson goes on to track the way in which Nazi leaders moved from theory to practice, skilfully dramatising the many twists and turns that would lead to Auschwitz and beyond, many of which are not generally included in conventional accounts.

Mobilising Hate is driven by the first-hand accounts of many of those defined by the Nazi genocide; both its architects and perpetrators, as well as its targeted victims. Poignantly too, the book turns the spotlight on the many contemporary whistle-blowers who saw, recorded and shared accounts of the horrors unfolding across the continent - only to be greeted time and time again, with guarded and non-committal hedging from Allied governments - and a sceptical wider public. Many people inside Germany and across the world knew, but, it seemed, so few felt they needed to care.

As our world once again finds itself grappling with the challenges of mass resentment, economic insecurity and a growing desire to find people - indeed, populations - to point the finger of blame does the issue of Hitler's Final Solution and the thinking that gave birth to it have worrying new resonance. Never has the 'warning from history' been so acute, nor the refrain 'never again', been so urgent.

Above all, Mobilising Hate is the story of how the Nazis spawned a vision of 'us' and 'them', that taken to its logical conclusion, spelled a death sentence for millions. They may have lacked an early masterplan for the mass extermination of Europe's Jews, but it would be their zealously constructed policies and unflinching determination to see them through to the bitter end - that would make it impossible for their Nazi Holocaust not to happen. That the Jews would face extermination was Hitler's biggest prophecy, and the one he would do all he could to ensure it came true, whatever the cost.