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Understanding the Holocaust: ‘Why the Germans? Why the Jews?’

The Jew-haters among us, as recent headlines out of France and Belgium have reminded us, reach without interruption all the way back to antiquity.
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August 6, 2014

The Jew-haters among us, as recent headlines out of France and Belgium have reminded us, reach without interruption all the way back to antiquity. Still, the worst-case scenario of genocide in general and the mass murder of Jews in particular is what happened during the Shoah. And still the reason Nazi Germany tried to exterminate the Jews of Europe (and nearly succeeded in doing so) remains one of the afflicting questions of Jewish history.

A whole literature has accumulated since the end of World War II in the effort to answer the question bluntly posed in the title “Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust,” a 2011 book by German journalist and historian Götz Aly (” target=”_blank”>Basic Books) and historian Alon Confino in “A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination From Persecution to Genocide” (

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