Wegner, Gregory Paul. (2002) Anti-Semitism and Schooling under the Third Reich. N.Y., N.Y.: RoutledgeFalmer Press.
Pp. xii + 262
$24.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-8153-3943-7
Reviewed by Katherine T. Carroll
Loyola University, Chicago
August 24, 2003
Scholarly assessment of academic curricula must place the perspectives and content contained in the components under consideration in the context in which the curricula were written and the group for whom the work was intended. Curriculum goals, foundational concepts, and organizing elements can only be properly evaluated when information providing this understanding is accessible. Anti-Semitism and Schooling under the Third Reich by Gregory Paul Wegner explores "how the Hitler regime articulated anti-semitism across the curriculum as a central element to the understanding of an educated person."(pp. 2-3) The book examines curriculum materials developed by pedagogues and theoreticians in Germany for elementary school students from the early period of gleichschaltung—the "meshing of gears" of all aspects of political and social organization toward Nazi ideological goals when the Nazis gained control of the German government in 1933-34—until late in World War II . Throughout the study, Wegner approaches these materials from a social constructionist perspective, and places his interpretation of these curricula and their historical context firmly within the "functionalist" school of thought. This perspective of scholarship views the mass murder of millions of Jews (as well as Sinti, Roma, Poles, and others) as having "remained in flux until the war with Russia in 1941." (p. 183) Assertions to support the position that the Nazis' original intent was to force migration of the Jews to Madagascar, Palestine, Guyana, or Dutch New Guinea appear regularly through out the study. (pp. 19, 153, 156, 174, 183) Anti-Semitism and Schooling under the Third Reich attempts to establish definitively that the anti-semitic ideas in these curriculum documents represent both change and contintuity, seen in "historical context," and that "Hitler represents a critical juncture in the history of European racism in that he was the first ruler of a modern state to legitimize anti-semitism through racial terms...(by) his clever propaganda strategy of integrating contemporary elements of race with older religious and economic forms of anti-semitic prejudice."(p. 7) One of the means to implement this policy was the "myth of Nordic pedagogy," a concept Wegner borrows from Hans-Christian Harten (1993), which refers to the foundational idea that a true, "Nordic" bloodline and genealogy existed that was to be protected and transmitted. (pp. 65, 88, 89, 126, and 251) Race science was to be the "conceptual glue" that held the curriculum together (p. 68), while "Volkish thinking provided part of the cultural glue for this chapter in the history of prejudice." (p. 5) Thus, the curriculum materials selected for presentation are of interest both as pedagogical materials and as documents reflecting the history of education in the Third Reich in Germany.
The study is organized into six chapters, with each of the first five based on a particular aspect of anti-semitism, depicting how each aspect was brought directly into specific subject areas in elementary level curricula. Wegner gained access to an extensive collection of teaching materials which had never previously been examined, included in the Henry Kroul Collection of Nazi Writings at Hofstra University, to which he added curricula and documents examined at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, the German Institute for Pedagogical Research in Berlin, the Bundesarchiv Berlin, the Weiner Library in Tel Aviv, and the Institute for the History of Education. Wegner had earlier accessed educational materials of Alfred Vogel from the collection at Hofstra for his article "Schooling for a New Mythos: Race, Anti-Semitism, and the Curriculum materials of a Nazi Educator," published in Paedagogica Historica in1991. Unlike earlier curriculum studies, like Gilmer Blackburn's (1985) study of Nazi textbooks, which Wegner asserts took a "macro perspective" of history and geography in the curriculum (p. 118), or the penetrating analysis of National Socialist educational philosophy and practice by renowned international education scholar I. L. Kandel (1935), this study focuses particularly on anti-semitism as it was used to further the Nazi ideology of the racial state. Wegner tells us that the "ambitious project to transform curriculum along racial anti-semitic lines through the union of myth with science remains unprecedented in history.... Nazis were the first political culture to legitimize racial anti-Semitism in school curriculum with the full legal support of the state." (pp. 3-5) Yet, this element of Nazi education accessed "older, more traditional forms of religious...(and) economic stereotypes going back to ...emergent market capitalism." (p. 5) The 262-page text provides lengthy samplings of both older, "traditional" antipathy toward the Jewish people, as well as the racialized anti-semitism included in elementary level textbooks, charts, and curriculum formats by the Nazi regime. Wegner presents extensive text quotations, color plates, illustrations, and tables to illustrate the approaches and conceptual tools by which Jews were defined to schoolchildren to appear as "race enemies" in race hygiene, biology, history, geography and literature as the National Socialists attempted to reconfigure German education to inculcate the racialist point of view.
To provide understanding of the earlier precedents in anti-semitic thought, the Introduction asserts that "hatred for Jews is an ancient phenomenon with roots ...even as old as the slavery suffered by the Hebrew under Ramses II in Egypt." The "Jew as cultural outsider (had) historical antecedents orginating in the Middle Ages."(pp. 1-2) Quotations from scholar Victor Klemperer (2000) are used to support one of the book's central positions. Klemperer, a German Jewish philologist, and French literature professor who lost his position due to the 1935 Race Laws, wrote that the Nazi use of language was key to the success of Nazi propaganda and that "the Jew ‘was the most important man in Hitler's state' through fulfilling the traditions of scapegoating and opponent." Wegner asks, "After all, as Klemperer's acid pen recorded, how could Hitler and the Nazi state have come to pass without the Jewish devil?" (p. 3) While Klemperer is also cited frequently regarding the Nazi manipulation of language, the inference that Wegner draws from Klemperer's position becomes the foundational construct that "German Nazism could not exist without the arch-enemy of the Jew." (p. 118), a construct supported by multiple methods through out the study. The author's own use of and theories on language will be examined later in this review.
The process by which "traditional" anti-semitic thinking and Volkish "idealism" became entwined with race science and spread through German culture prior to the National Socialist period is examined in ensuing chapters. Racial anti-semitism utilized "a long tradition of animosity toward Jews...keeping alive the ancient claim of Jewish conspiracy,"which Hitler exploited in the National Socialist advance to power. (p. 2) Nazi educators reconfigured old and new elements in "selective tradition...an intentionally selective shaping the past, and a pre-shaped present," as do "all cultures engaged with the socialization of the young." (p. 2) Through out the volume, the centrality of the Volkish, mystical base is emphasized, as is the position that the ideological framework for education was based on ideas found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, and reflected in a 1919 letter by Hitler asserting that a "rational anti-semitism" must be devised that would include "facts" establishing Jews as a "racial tuberculosis of the people," a race, rather than a religion, which must be removed. (p. 1.) As Albert Speer, whom Wegner interviewed in 1977 in conjunction with his Master's thesis, is quoted as observing: "Hatred of the Jews was the motor and central point for Hitler."(p. 17) Historian James Carroll (2001) is quoted in a later footnote, stating that "Hitler was less the beneficiary than the product of religious and racial assumptions that had their origins, perhaps, in the Jew-hating sermons of St. John Chrysostom or St. Ambrose, and certainly in the blood-purity of Torquemada." (p. 228, fn. 34)
In the chapters that follow, the study examines the implementation of the famous slogan of Hans Schemm, Bavarian Education Minister and leader of the National-Sozialistischer Lehrer-Bund (NSLB) until his death in 1937: "National Socialism is applied biology," in the restructuring of educational institutions and organizations throughout Germany. Through decrees in 1933 and 1934, all aspects of education were brought first under the administration of Hans Frick, Minister of the Interior, and later under Bernard Rust, appointed Minister for the Reichsministerium fuer Wissenschaft, Erziehung, und Volksbildung (RMWEVB). Frick disbanded all state teacher's councils, bringing prior organizations under the jurisdiction of the NSLB to ensure that pedagogy and approaches served National Socialist goals. Alfred Rosenburg, author of The Myth of the Twentieth Century, chief of the Foreign Office, and "Representative of the Fuhrer for the Supervision of the Entire Intellectual and Ideological Schooling of the NSDAP," and Phillipp Bouhler of Hitler's Chancellery Office selected curriculum materials deemed to be exhibit "ideological purity" for publication. Fierce professional competition particularly between Rust and Frick, and among other levels of bureaucrats and pedagogues affected both the decisions of what form of anti-semitic ideology to present at each grade level and in each subject area, and the participation of some scholars in this effort as each pursued career advancement which was, according to Wegner, "at least as important" as the furtherance of racialist Nazi ideology. (pp. 20-21, 44 179.)
Historian Georg Iggers (2000) has written that the term "misuse of history suggest[s] the past is instrumentalized; distorted for political and other purposes. It also means there is a real past which must not be distorted." When scholars perform academic evaluation of historical materials, the professional tradition—which originated in German scholarship in the 1800s—of the "research imperative" requires that the materials be presented in such a way that they present a neutral, disinterested, and reliable view of the individuals and groups that created the materials, and that these materials be placed in a contextual perspective that allows the reader to assess the documents within a genuine past. Though scholarly work has often contributed to national and ethnic myths over time, says Iggers, this "does not mean that there are no criteria of rational inquiry by which myths can be taken apart...interpretations are not arbitrary (and) research methods developed for professional inquiry must be used." (Note 1) It is in this critical aspect of analysis that this volume requires particularly cautious examination. Misrepresentations, inaccuracies, omissions of information and of conceptual components vital to understanding, inappropriate equalizations, pejorative terminology and re-organization of quotations, and the presentations of canards and textual references without any analytical background accompany this presentation of Nazi actions and ideology within a redefinition of the "historical context" of these curricula. Though Anti-Semitism and Schooling under the Third Reich fulfills its mission to represent the combination of older, culturally stereotyped perceptions of the Jewish people with then-current biological racialism in Nazi curricula, it is in terms of the "research imperative" Iggers refers to that is essential when dealing with historical materials that makes the exposition and approach in this volume highly problematic and questionable for use in academic and curriculum study settings.
In Chapter 1, the foundations of the Volk concept are explored and a cursory examination of primary theoreticians is provided. In this minimal discussion of the critical foundations of Volkish thought, inaccurate historical descriptions and misrepresentations appear, setting the precedent for what will become a pattern—nearly a style—of confusing and misleading ideas, which will be of central importance to the validity of this study. The concept of the Volk was originated by Johannes Herder to symbolize a unique, related grouping—a "family write large ," as Justus Moser put it—which defied comparison or a definition of "normative." Each Volk was self-defining; relationship between Volks could be diverse, but never equal. This idea found many adherents, reacting to both the Napoleonic conquest of Germany from 1806 to 1811 and the rationalism and scientific advances of the English and the French later in the century. (Note 2) Wegner, however, locates the roots of Volkish thought in the "Romanticism of the late eighteenth century [sic]...a reaction against modernity, and the rapid industrialization of Germany." (p. 7) Volkish pedagogues Julius Langbehn and Paul de Lagarde whose "anti-semitism was not racially based," presented a "strong strain of Romantic idealism in Volkish thinking." (p. 9) The Volkish "Aryan myth"—that Germans were the heirs to genuine Western culture and the "original" Aryan race—was brought forward in the late nineteenth century by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who "combined mysticism with a certain kind of realism" by linking science—such as phrenology—with "a certain mysticism of race" at a time when "social Darwinism enjoyed growing support among the newly emerging social sciences, especially anthropology." (p. 8) The determination of the Hebrew language as "semitic," not Indo-European, was developed by German philologists in the mid-1800s; the linguistic term was adopted by Wilhelm Marr as he founded his Anti-Semitic League in 1879. (p. 2) The mysticalized, Volkish linguistic foundation for the Aryan myth was a popular concept in the mid-1800s that both Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, among others, had argued vociferously for, to overflowing university classrooms and in their voluminous writings. (Note 3) Wegner cites famous composer Richard Wagner, Chamberlain's father-in-law, who was an adamant anti-semite, and Comte Arthur de Gobineau, whose ideas were "not anti-semitic in nature" as two other key popularizers of the racialization of the Aryan myth. (pp. 8-9) However, according to Richard Wagner's wife, Cosima Wagner, who led the Wagner Circle after Wagner‘s death—a group whose meetings were attended by Adolf Hitler—Gobineau and Wagner had become deeply fond of one another, and often engaged in extensive conversations on the need for "blood purity," and the "dangerous power of the Jews." (Note 4) Other than the inclusion of phrases indicating that "a certain mystical relationship" existed between the German race and aesthetics, nature, soil, and the fatherland in his brief description of the Volkish ideology and the thinking found in Chamberlain, Lagarde, Langbehn, and other Volkish authors, Wegner never describes the pagan mythological and theosophical foundations of the ideas of these men. These foundations were central to the work of Lagarde, a devout theosophist and Swedenborgian, and Julius Langbehn who "articulate(d) ideas about ‘racial soul' ...transmitted through bloodlines," an idea that was in fact similar to that put forward three centuries earlier, by vitalist Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim) and, a century later in the pre-Adamite theories of Isaac de La Peyrere. (p. 10) (Note 5) Similarly, theosophist Julius Langbehn espoused the idea that the Aryans possessed the "life-force" in a "'life-fluid' which flowed from the cosmos to the Volk." Jews did not possess this "life fluid" because they had "long ago forfeited their souls." (Note 6) Houston Stewart Chamberlain's (1900) two-volume work on the nineteenth century is likewise replete with allusions to the greatness of the Aryan nature, described in specifically theosophical terms. (Note 7) We are advised in the final pages of the text that "Nazi science ....could not be grasped without the power of mysticism, an element with deep roots in the Volkish thought of the nineteenth century." ( p. 184) While footnotes for this chapter direct the reader to many studies of merit, the text, in the end, does not include the tools to comprehend the Volkish phenomenon which is a centerpiece of this book. Importantly, the omission of analysis of the foundations of this area of thought will become a critical hindrance to understanding in many areas of this book, notably in its discussion of the Talmud and "Yahweh, the God of the Jews," later in the text.
In chapters 1 through 5, the process by which race hygiene became integrated with pre-existing economic and religious anti-semitism in curriculum materials developed by Ernst Dobers, Werner Dittrich, Fritz Fink, Paul Brohmer, Alfred Vogel, Ernst Kreick, Johann von Leers, Erwin Bauer, Deiter (Dietrich) Klagges, and Ernst Heimer, among others, is described. To understand this process, Wegner takes the position of Thomas Kuhn (1962), stating: "Scientific knowledge, like all forms of knowledge, was and is culturally bound...One may well ask whose science was practiced and for which political and social ends." (p. 12) Similar constructionist positions on science are taken through out this study, as when, for example, the reader is reminded that "other civilized nations" engaged in eugenics, and is informed that : "After all, race hygiene was steeped in the history of medicine as well as education." (pp. 94, 104) Wegner declares: "Passing off prejudice as scientific fact remains a significant part of the legacy left by Nazi education. Democracies as well as dictatorships engaged in this spurious activity, including the race eugenics movement in the United States which flowered from 1910-1940." (p. 185) To support this position, he asserts that "pre-Nazi developments in eugenics and race hygiene...demand a recognition." (p. 11) The development of the eugenics movement, initiated by British scientist, Francis Galton (1822-1911), and the social Darwinism promoted by Herbert Spencer, based on the ideas of Charles Darwin "from its inception...took on an international character," ( p. 11) (Note 8) Although German Rassenhygiene(race hygiene) and the international eugenics movement had different foundations and goals, Wegner tells us that "the Nazis certainly were not the first to introduce race hygiene as a matter of public policy," and that "race hygiene and eugenics [were] used interchangeably by the Nazis." (pp. 73, 85) These assertions would have infuriated Julian Huxley, famed British eugenicist, who, in his 1935 book, co-written with Cambridge anthropologist Alfred C. Haddon, We Europeans: A Survey of "Racial" Problems, attacked the ideas of "race science," ridiculed Nazi stereotypes, and vehemently opposed the misdirected and extreme measures in Germany in the 1930s. (Note 9)
As is found through out this study, inaccuracies and misstatements appear in the discussion of Nazi pedagogues. Frequent references and citations are made to the early and important work in curriculum formation and later in education administration of Ernst Krieck, described as "a faculty member with a strong international reputation from Frankfurt-am-Main and later the University of Heidelberg." whose curriculum philosophy was central under National Socialism. (p. 21) However, Isaac Kandel (1935) describes Krieck in 1935 in this way: "Ernst Krieck, a former elementary school teacher, who has written voluminously on education and who was given an honorary degree, made Rektor of the University of Frankfort-am-Main immediately following the (Nazi) Revolution, and then, as the highest expression of irony and cynicism, was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg." (Note 10) Similar discrepancies appear regarding Phillipp Bouhler, head of the commission at Hitler's Chancellery which, after 1939, had total control over all textbook publication, who is described by Wegner as a "young bureaucratic operative" seeking "career advancement ...(who) did not write with the same anti-Semitic virulence of others." (wegner p. 179) By contrast, Gilmer Blackburn (1985) describes Bouhler as an "ardent Nazi ideologue ...(who) bears major responsibility for the 'radicalization of the schoolbooks,'" citing German Nazi education expert Rolf Eilers. (Note 11) While these errors and omissions regarding these important figures in Nazi curriculum development may not be of primary significance, they represent just two of a large number of various types of errors and misrepresentations in this area and others which undermine the credibility of this study..
A central technique through out this study is the frequent citation of actions and positions of the earlier Weimar government and of other nations purported to be similar to those of the Nazis. The reader is repeatedly reminded that international scholars were engaged in eugenics work, and that Weimar textbooks contained militarism and nationalism that could be traced to the Wilhelmine period. ( pp. 28, 75, 126 ) However, Kandel (1935) states that: "After ...1918 history textbooks began to be rewritten from the republican point of view....'in the spirit of national character and of international reconciliation.'" This led Nazi educator H. J. von Schumann later to decry the "'emphasis on everything foreign and neglect of the national values, both marks of the liberal school' of the Marxist system, with the result that 'many pupils, especially in the secondary schools, were more familiar with foreign countries that with their own Fatherland.'" (Note 12) While the short-lived Weimar government was tragically unable to alter the direction of Volkish, racialist, and militaristic inclinations in Germany, education policies and materials were effective enough to concern at least some Nazi educators. Similarly, Wegner emphasizes that the immigrations policies of United States, France, and Australia were analogous to Germany in this period, that Austria provided the regime with Nazi death camp specialists Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Adolf Eichmann, and that the United States did not extend full civil rights and constitutional protections to African-Americans ( pp.119, 39, 106, 149, 185). Missing from this analysis is recognition that the critical distinction between unjust policies in a democracy and legislated exclusion of citizens and refugees in a dictatorship is that democracies may, and fortunately most often do, through legal recourse, destroy monolithic attempts to abrogate the rights of those living within their borders, where the reverse is the case in dictatorships. What is emphasized, however, is a broad-brush perspective to relativize the extremity of the actions of the Hitler regime, and a consistent attempt to find parallels in cultural settings with intensely different directions of standards and governance.
A relativizing position is also taken in this study with regard to pedagogy in history. We are told that "history as propaganda is a feature of education prevalent in both democracies and dictatorships," that "history as propaganda under Nazi Germany, not unlike other regimes, conceived of the historical process as a means of legitimizing the state," and "as with each generation, the Nazis invariably decided whose history would be legitimized as an ideologically acceptable framework for interpreting the past." ( pp.117, 141, 120) Wegner cites the work of historian Karl Hahn, who "followed the Nazi practice, not uncommon in other cultures, of exercising tight control over historical memory. Ideological control over historical interpretation also meant control over the historical identity of racial outcasts." (p. 127.) Similar to techniques which will be examined below in an exploration of Wegner's use of language, the terms "historical memory" and "historical developments" serve an additional purpose in this methodology. In an examination of Ernst Dober's curriculum materials, Wegner includes a tale from 1571, supposedly illustrating Jewish financial abuses. After elaborating this story in detail, Wegner writes: "Dobers made sure to place this historical memory immediately after a volatile quotation of Martin Luther from ‘On the Jews and Their Lies,‘ regarding the Jewish lust for money and power." One sentence later, the reader is told "Dobers kept pounding away at still other historical developments that explained the unfortunate expansion of the Jewish presence in German culture" (p. 37) Numerous other apparently explanatory configurations which blur the nature of the citation occur alongside frequent assertions that historical context must be included in understanding various attacks on the Jews by Germans over time. Another example of note is the admonishment that an understanding of historical context must be employed regarding the pogrom against Jews in Trier in 1349. Complaining that "Hahn ignored the historical context," Wegner states that "Trier was one of the most extreme examples of scapegoating against the Jews because of the Black Plague. Furthermore, the mass murder of Jews that year in Trier came largely at the hands of the Crusaders. Usury, while certainly part of the larger traditional Christian hatred of Jews, was a peripheral cause in this case." (pp. 131-132) Absent in nearly all Wegner's citations of historical events and accompanying commentary in this curriculum exposition is a genuinely larger historical context, which would challenge the assumptions on which the citations are based. This approach will be defining, however, through out the study.
To Wegner's credit, the reader is continuously reminded of the horrors of the mass murders of the Jews, Sinti and Roma, Poles, and the physically and mentally disabled which were perpetrated due to the Nazi race science perspective. At no time does the author side-step the enormity and the gravity of the murders of these human beings, targeted as "racial enemies." Yet, the language, omissions, errors, and arrangement of materials continually create questions regarding the conceptual repositioning which appears to be part of the central technique employed through out the study. Numerous examples will be cited below, which illustrate of these troubling areas of discrepancy. In addition, they will demonstrate a peculiarity of language construction that that both confuses the reader and raises further qualms over the author's intentions and scholarship.
Wegner points out that the Nazi curricula were constructed utilizing the "power of suggestion," that accusations and epithets were presented "with deadening repetition," that curricula demonstrated "repetitive reinforcement of more and more contemporary examples of alleged wrongdoing in the community," and notes the "linguistic subterfuge" and "the power of the word in reinforcing preconceptions of the negative other." (pp.15, 24, 95, 142, 143.) He asserts that the purpose for repeating "key anti-semitic phrases and relationships" throughout the works was to "heighten the racial consciousness" of youth. (p. 144) Wegner's analysis of language extends to the grammatical constructs used by these ideologues, as we are told: "Heimer used many of the same verb forms and nouns in telling the story of the mutt and in his exposition of the Jews. The power of repetition and association, qualities so important in the effective development of propaganda, marked the ebb and flow of the stories Heimer created for his young readers." (p. 167) Several areas of this study will illustrate the use of the same language techniques as those cited above.
To establish that the "rich Volkish tradition," "old myths" that were "durable," and "historical religious and economic anti-semitism that resonated throughout the Middle Ages," that was "associated (from) Egypt," resulting in "generations of Catholic and Protestant hatred" for Jews were not invented by the Nazis, Wegner conflates and extends the accepted meaning of"tradition" by applying the term to endless lists of charges, statistical tables, black and white graphics, and 8 pages of posters and drawings reproduced in color, indicting the Jews. (pp.15, 28, 181, 50, 187) Though consistently decrying the lethal results of this thinking and the "distortion," "exploitation," "bias," and occasionally, "falsification," of the statistical sources for the information, the tables and lists are invariably shown .
Extensive quotations of some of the most violent, salacious, and vicious accusations and descriptions of Jewish people from curriculum materials in science, history, and literature, are included in this text. On nearly half the pages of this book appear an extraordinary number of lists of charges, tables, statistics, "proverbs," quotations from the famous forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and historical "documentations" about the Jews. The lengthy quotations and citations from curriculum materials repeatedly delineate: Jewish physical features and personality traits, Jews instigating Communism, Bolshevism, liberalism, and revolution, the dangers presented by the Eastern European Jewish immigrants, the Ostjuden (who are mentioned over twenty times), Jews advancing the terms of the hated Versailles Treaty, Jews perpetrating sex crimes, perversions, pimping, drug-trafficking, dishonesty, laziness, treachery, cowardliness, dishonesty as cattle dealers, land fraud, and nomadism, Jews as vampires, parasites, vultures, Jews causing the fall of Rome, Jews as the Devil, Jews cross-breeding with Africans (having "Negroid blood" (sic)), the tricks of Jews, the likeliness of Jews to carry disease, commit ritual murder, "Jewish Secrets," the Talmud as a corrupt document and source of Jewish "crimes," and allegations of a Jewish desire to rule and/or devour other peoples. Additionally, curriculum materials are extensively quoted or reproduced which repeatedly enumerate: professions in which Jews were alleged to dominate, businesses owned by specified Jewish families in Germany and abroad, Jewish family names with their "economic" meaning, incessant references to the Rothschilds, the names of Jews on administrative boards of large businesses, alleged monopolies owned by particular Jews, banks controlled by specified and unspecified Jews, and so on.
The language used to present this material does, again to Wegner's credit, sometimes ameliorate the effect the often long and brutal passages will have on the reader. However, while the fact that sources for the statistical information are often not provided in the curricula is duly noted as symptomatic, in several instances Wegner identifies sources for statistics that had indeed been provided or points out that the statistics used were accurate. He then unfailingly chooses to feature both "distorted and unsubstantiated" and "accurate" groups of information in their essence, most often, in their entirety. Remarkably, all the qualifiers and disclaimers notwithstanding, these lists and tables frequently add accusations with each appearance of what are referred to as "familiar themes," "the traditional Christian rejection of Jewish culture and theology," "economic stereotype resonating back to the Middle ages," "the traditional, omnipresent stereotype of the Jewish male as sexual predator," "Jews eternally tied to the marketplace," and similar reconfigured descriptions that reinstate the nature of the charges themselves. Richard Evans (1989), in his landmark analysis of the revisionism of the "historikerstreit" historians in Germany in the mid-1980s wrote that "Nolte makes ritual obeisances to current moral orthodoxies, while devoting the larger part of his energies to developing, often by innuendo and suggestion, a series of arguments intended to subvert them and to put forward an alternative view." (Note 13) Astonishingly, by the exposition and organization of curriculum content, the use of language, repeated declarations of needed "contextualization," and especially by the relativization of the reliability of various forms of knowledge which form the structure of his analysis, Wegner appears to be attempting to produce a similar effect.
This unsettling organization of language and material is used in several particularly troubling instances. Early in the text, Wegner writes that Ernst Dobers, prolific curriculum writer and teacher's training college professor, in the second printing of his 1936 book, The Jewish Question: Subject Matter and Treatment in the School "added the words of Benjamin Franklin who allegedly stated that every country that had allowed Jews to increase their numbers usually experienced a decline in morals." (p. 34) Incredibly, 66 pages later, Wegner repositions writing by Ferdinand Rossner, Hanover Teacher‘s College professor, who coauthored The Care of Health and Race Hygiene with Heinrich Ihde and Alfred Stockfish (1939), so that Rossner's material on "the specter of the Jew as (a) sexual threat to German womanhood, an 'infection' of the people" is taken by Wegner from its original order, and placed immediately before an astounding, elaborated repetition of the Ben Franklin canard! Wegner now presents the canard this way:
[Rossner] more than many other writers, exploited a controversial speech by Ben Franklin of the United States as a source of anti-Semitic fear for the Jewish takeover of the young republic. Quoting from remarks Franklin delivered in 1789 during the opening of the First Congress, Rossner wanted readers to know that the Jew was a constitutional issue.... [The authors'] choice of sentences revealed an editing process designed for maximum anti-semitic effect.
These statements are followed by an eight line quote from the "controversial speech" by Franklin, which was "edited for maximum anti-semitic effect," after Wegner, in his introduction to the quotation, edits Rossner‘s own words! (pp. 100-101) One would think that the fact that this canard appeared originally in American Nazi William Dudley Pelley's magazine, Liberation, in 1934 and was utterly discredited by American historian Charles Beard and dismissed as fabrication by Henry Butler Allen, the director of the Franklin Institute and expert on the papers of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, from whose diary Pelley claimed to have derived Franklin's "prophecy," soon after its appearance would have been of historical interest for Wegner‘s study, since by 1939 Rossner, et al, no doubt knew the canard had been exposed when they printed it. (Note 14) For Wegner to present this canard in the language he has chosen, editing the text from which he is quoting (after commenting on the Nazi pedagogue‘s use of the same technique!), without any explanation of its source, its rapid exposure as utter hoax, or any aspect of its history is simply very faulty and, unfortunately, dubious scholarship. Wegner passes along two other canards in language only slightly less ambiguous and with even further omissions. He writes:
Drawing from Wilhelm Meister's Judas Schuldbuch (1919) ...(Ernst) Dobers quoted a pamphlet published by a circle of rabbis in Austria from 1901 that once again reflected the conspiritorial intentions of the Jews. "Every war, every revolution, every political and religious change," so it was written, "brings us every moment closer to reaching the highest goal toward which we strive." ( p. 39)
Though Dobers is identified as attempting to "paint the Jews themselves as aggressors bent on destroying the fatherland...during the First World War," we are not told that Wilhelm Meister was the pseudonym used by the intensely anti-semitic chief economic theorist of the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP), Dr. Paul Bang, whose Nordic spiritualist and corporativist ideas led him to work actively with the National Socialists in the 1920s. The Judas Schuldbuch (The Jewish Book of Crimes) reflected Bang's belief that the "Jews were responsible for all crimes, especially economic ones." (Note 15) Similarly, Wegner describes without comment Hans Warnecke's and Willi Matschke's 1942 History for the Elementary Schools rejection of the egalitarian ideas of the French revolution as a Jewish plot to enslave the world:
Equal rights...was the fateful step leading to an eventual Jewish takeover of governments. Even kings and queens failed to take this threat seriously. Queen Marie Antoinette warned her brother Joseph II on the throne of Austria about the unholy alliance of Jews and Free Masons (sic), but he ignored her pleadings. Louis XVI also remained blind to the danger and went to the scaffold with his queen wholly unaware of Jewish machinations in toppling the government. The overarching message was that Jews brought only disaster to the host cultures. ( p. 141)
The reader is never informed that the source of this group of ideas is derived from the pre-fascist writings of Lewis-Marie Prudhomme and Joseph de Maistre, brought forward in the unbalanced, pseudo-historical work of Nesta Webster. The inclusion of these hoaxes in misleading presentations with omitted factual backgrounds necessarily raises concern, given the nature of this study. Since the Ben Franklin "prophecy" canard and the conspiracy theories of Nesta Webster appear regularly as foundational constructs on extremist Islamic and neo-nazi websites today, and are put forward routinely by Matt Hale, founder of the World Church of the Creator, a white racist hate organization, these false and blurred representations become problems of even greater importance . (Note 16) The aspect of currency in any study of anti-semitism, as well as Wegner's structural and apparent compositional oddities bring forward serious questions both as to the reliability of this study and of the appropriateness of the constructionist approach when examining documents relating to events and ideas that, while historical, are, unfortunately also very immediate. As above, ideas that are repeated as fact, and as "historical memory" can and will be treated as such by practitioners of relativizing, constructionist frameworks, and, more alarmingly, by extremists who are only too happy to encounter such information in a scholarly format.
Another critically important example of omission is in Wegner's description of the German "Schwarze Schmach," or "Black shame," a term which referred to the German antipathy for "Blacks," renewed by the French occupation of the Rhineland after the First World War. Wegner discusses the "gross exaggeration " of the claims of "Black" soldiers raping German women, and suggests that this antipathy may have originated in " the German colonial experience." (pp. 89, 225, fn 131, 215 fn. 90) What is stunning in Wegner's omission regarding the background of the German relationship to "Blacks" is that the "German colonial experience," as he puts it, was typified by the German attempt to conquer the Herrero people of southwest Africa and the Maji-Maji in Tanganyika, which resulted in the murder of three-quarters of the indigenous population. This was military action "brutal even by imperialist standards." (Note 17)
The method of approach to this curriculum content raises concern in another area. As Wegner continually reinforces the idea of "tradition and stereotypes" in anti-semitic beliefs, he actively pursues an explanation of institutionalization for Catholic "anti-semitic policy." (p. 53) However, despite frequent criticism of Luther's drastic positioning in "On the Jews and Their Lies" (1543), in which Luther recommended burning the synagogues with the Jews in them, repeated attempts are made to place the "religious anti-semitism" of Martin Luther in an "historical context," asserting that "what remains crucial was Luther's orthodox intent to annihilate the Jewish religion, not murder the Jews." (pp. 32-33) In fact, in the same text Wegner cites, Table Talk by Martin Luther (1566), Luther states that if a Jew were to only appear to be converted "I would take him to a bridge, tie a stone round his neck, and hurl him into a river, for these wretches are wont to make a jest of our religion." (Note 18) The author's outrage that Werner Dittrich was "heedless of the historical context defining Luther's religious anti-semitism." and that "Warnecke and Matschke make no distinction between Luther's religious anti-semitism and the racial anti-semitism of the Third Reich. The theological context of Luther's reforms remain unaddressed," rings a bit hollow in view of Luther‘s positions cited above. (pp. 48, 140) Similarly misleading are attempts to diminish the intensity of Luther's and others' anti-semitism through statements which describe particular aspects of the anti-semitism found in curricula as the same as encountered "from Luther to Shakespeare to the 19th century." (pp. 160, 91, 127) Here the author is referring to the Shylock image in "The Merchant of Venice"—hardly a parallel to Luther's vitriol aimed at the Jews. Interestingly, Wegner chooses an excessively coarse quote of Luther's indicating his loathing for "the Messiah the Jews are waiting for." (p. 48) The alleged distinction between the Christian and Jewish "God" will be of key importance as we complete the review of this study.
While scurrilous and sinister accusations purportedly derived from the Talmud are mentioned incessantly through out the curriculum materials included in this study, the choice of citations from curricula dealing extensively with the Talmud and the language used to describe them, once again, raises concern. Earlier in the study, the curricula of Werner Dittrich and Fritz Fink had included as informing concept the idea that the Jews hated non-Jews, wished vengeance on non-Jews, sought to devour them, and had become racially suited to vindictiveness.(pp. 44, 45, 51, 62) According to this form of anti-semitic rationalizing, the Jews deeply hated the German culture, following the commands of the Talmud to consider Germans and all non-Jews as animals. (p. 62) Jews, in fact, had caused the hatred the non-Jews felt for them, since they were the "great hater(s)," and throughout history had set an emotional cycle in motion which ultimately resulted in their expulsion by the surrounding peoples. (pp.115, 133) One pedagogue‘s approach held that "the causes of anti-semitism were tied exclusively to Jewish culture and history." (p. 150) Wegner's interpretation of this perspective is yet another example of the problematic organization of thought consistently found in this study. He writes: "Stripped out was any recognition that European non-Jews might hold some responsibility for hateful actions taken against Jews across time." (p. 150) High among the reasons for German hatred and fear of Jews, however, was the constructed "misinterpretation of the Old Testament." School inspector Franz Fink contributed an important "misinterpretation of the Talmud" in his The Jewish Question in Instruction (1937). To further his "goal of deepening anti-Semitic attitudes and values among school children," Fink wrote particularly assaultive segments, condemning the Jews as "Old Testament people whose God, Yahweh, was not the God of the Germans."(p. 60) Fink believed that the idea of being the chosen people had been invented by the Jews, and further that Yahweh had commanded that all uncircumcised were to be "exterminated." Like many other anti-semitic writers, "Fink exploited the use of both undocumented quoted language along with selected and documented expressions from the Old Testament." (p. 60) Though the unknown source of the undocumented quotations was "not of any importance to the writer," Fink's "own biblical references are restricted to the Book of Psalms and the Book of Deuteronomy" to illustrate his position that Yahweh "was unjust and cruel ...(and) demanded the destruction of all non-Jewish people." (pp. 60-61). Wegner paraphrases Fink's "undocumented quotation" regarding circumcision, and quotes his "documented biblical references" in toto—Deuteronomy 7:16 and 15:6 and Psalms 2:8-9 (which isn't, strictly speaking, considered part of the Talmud)—without a word of explanation of the intentions of the author of the Hebrew scripture.( pp. 60-61) Particularly in the case of the quoted verse from Deuteronomy 7:16, the intention of the Hebrew author is obvious. The verse states: "You shall consume all the nations which the Lord, Your God, will deliver up to you. You are not to look upon them with pity, lest you be ensnared into serving their gods." In his groundbreaking examination of Nazi textbooks, curriculum expert and historian Gilmer Blackburn (1985), addresses two similar passages from Hebrew scripture in this way: "The reasons for this drastic policy were clearly explained in the Scriptures: the presence of alien groups with idolatrous religious practices would threaten the purity of the Hebrew worship." After quoting several more verses, including Deuteronomy 7:16, Blackburn concludes: "So absolute was Jehovah's covenant with his people that violators of the most minute provisions were dealt with as contaminated persons....(one of whom) was ordered destroyed so that Israel could stand victorious." (Note 19) Instead of providing some balance against the Nazi interpretation, as Blackburn does in his examination of the usage of the identical Hebrew scripture in Nazi curricula, Wegner relates that Fink used the Talmud to inform students that Jewish criminality originated in the Talmud, "exploiting the historically estranged relationship between Christians and Jews." (p. 61) Similarly, at no point in either the exposition of Volkish ideas, or in the multiple inclusions of curricula describing Yahweh, the "Jewish God," does Wegner provide any explication of the apocryphal theological sources for the idea of the "other God" of the Jews. Originally formulated by such second century Christian Gnostics as Marcion, and reflecting the duality central to Zoroastrianism brought forward by Mani, the idea that the Jews worshipped the "demi-urge"—Ialdaboth, a creature spawned in despair by Sophia during her alienation from the Pleroma—was maintained and reconfigured by the Albigensians and the Cathars, the German Meistersingers and Minnesingers, and in the theosophical constructs of Jacob Boehme, Emmanuel Swedenborg, Helena Blavatsky, and Rudolf Steiner. In the 1920s, German theologian Adolf von Harnack wrote extensively on Marcion's ideas, thus supporting this subterranean belief construct, and making it current and useful to 20th century anti-Semites. (Note 20) Anomolies continue as Wegner refers to "Christ's" words used in Fink's curriculum material regarding the Jews as "born of the devil," and "a child of hell." (p. 63). Once again, the content of some of the most unsound and hateful materials ever inserted into school curricula is presented without analytical challenge. At several more points in the book, Wegner quotes from various writers without providing necessary historical backgrounds, such as Johann von Leers, Paul Broemer, and Elvira Bauer whose work continues this exposure of Nazi ideology regarding Jewish scripture. "Secret laws," passages from the Protocols, repetitions of "Christ's" and others' references to Jews as associated with the devil, repetition of accusations of Jews as "killers of Christ," of "Jewish immorality" and "thieving" as sourced in the Talmud, and repetition of the charge of ritual murder appear through out the text. (pp.83, 84, 160, 162, 171, 62, 82, 163, 171,163) In the conclusion of Anti-Semitism and Schooling under the Third Reich, Wegner informs us that the charge of "deicide survives to this day in anti-Semitic circles." (p. 181)
Conclusion
When I. L. Kandel examined the curriculum and theories which were emerging from the new National Socialist regime in 1935, he included in his study the words of Johannes Gottlieb Fichte, one of the foundational theorists to Volkish and later Nazi ideologies. Fichte wrote: "Truth in reality, is what you wish to be true; false is what you wish to be false." (Note 21) Kandel quotes a Nazi pedagogue writing on history: "Objectivity in the teaching of history is only one of the numerous fallacies of liberalism." British Professor Ernest Barker wrote in 1934, "It is sad ...that in a great country which has done so much for the scientific study of history, the writing of history should fall the to the level of legend...a legend of hate." (Note 22) As historian George Iggers wrote, the "research imperative" in historical examination, which originated in German scholarship, demands "commitment to the idea and the ideal of objectivity and disinterested, neutral inquiry." Though the concept has been misused not only by "authoritarian regimes...(nevertheless) interpretations are not arbitrary ...there are standards of humanity and logical thinking which can guide the rational discourse among historians." (Note 23)
This is Professor Wegner's first book, though he has published several journal studies and is the Director of the Center for Shoah and Genocide Studies at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse. He has been quoted as saying that the term "Holocaust" for the death of the Jews at the hands of the Nazi regime is inappropriate and that the Hebrew term, Shoah, should be used, a position taken by other scholars. Wegner states in the Introduction to this study, "in the Nazi ...experiment" various factors contributed to producing "this chapter in the history of prejudice," thus placing these events among the larger group of tragic mass murders due to prejudice throughout human history. However, whether the mass murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children, along with millions of others, is termed the Holocaust or the Shoah, this event is unique for two reasons. First, the Nazi effort was unprecedented in its aim of the absolute elimination of an entire group of people the Nazis had determined were a "race." Secondly, after their murder, these people's remains were converted into agricultural and household products, and plundered for gold. These elements disqualify the Holocaust as accurately placed as another "chapter in the history of prejudice." In addition, implying that this group of events is endemically "inexplicable," as Wegner does in the final pages of this study, citing Raul Hilberg's statement that "he still could not answer the question of why in relation to one of the greatest tragedies of modern history," simply serves to further "mystify the Holocaust," which, according to Yehuda Bauer, head of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University, "can actually rob it of significance." (p. 189) (Note 24)
Wegner uses Victor Klemperer's statements to try make the case that without the Jews there would have been no Nazis. A deeper and more accurate examination and analysis of the development of anti-semitism in German thought and its lethal results through National Socialism is available in some of the books Wegner himself cites—for example, in the works of George L. Mosse, Fritz Stern, and Leon Poliakov—as well as in the Nazi pedagogical study by Gilmer Blackburn, and the studies of German university education before and during the National Socialist period by Max Weinrich and Fritz Ringer. (Note 25 ) The delusional grandiosity of Volkish ideology did not exclude only Jewish people from the mysticalized racial state. Other non-Aryans were also perceived as threatening and were to be ostracized. Eugenics, tinged with racism, was, as Wegner correctly asserts, gaining currency internationally among "progressive" thinkers of this era. But no other nation, including the United States, despite its shameful civil rights, sterilization, and immigration policies at this time, was contemplating doing away with the "unfit" as an essential policy to achieve a hallucinatory idea of "race" purity. The phantasmagorical character of the Nazi ideology of mysticalized racial superiority was what ultimately sounded the death knell for the "unfit" first, and then the Jewish people and other "race enemies." A conceptual, historical understanding of the Volkish mysticism which was at the root of the National Socialist race hygiene program, to which Wegner alludes to but never provides a serious examination, is essential to comprehending subsequent Nazi ideology and practice. It was the crucial ingredient of difference between the loathsome sterilization practices of American eugenicists and the Nazis' transformation of human beings into usable product. Educational curricula intended to bring pupils into service to a master race state must, as must all curricula, be examined for components which produced unbalanced and distorted thinking. And, as Wegner correctly admonishes, scientists, citizens, and educators in the United States and all the nations now involved in biotechnology must think deeply and responsibly about the horrifying legacy of the Nazi racial state as they determine how to proceed in the attempt to "improve life" through the use of biogenetics and nanotechnology. But to advance necessary deliberation on these crucial issues, trustworthy information critical to gaining understanding must be made available in a format that can reliably guide inquiry into the thought and activities of this group who so appallingly erred in the past. That effort is not served by attempting this examination in a framework of social constructionism. The position cited earlier of the seminal Volkish ideologue Johannes Gottlieb Fichte, that "that truth is what you wish," is foundational to relativizing approaches in historical scholarship that have appeared in the past twenty years. Discovering, (or inventing) "a law, a causal nexus," for events, as Fichte believed he had done in 1805, which would provide "the answer" to a reasonable life became the foundation for leading Nazi theorist Ernst Krieck: "the law of the whole (is) above the law of the part...(of) the individual." Fichte called it Gattung—the individual "forgets himself in the group." (Note 26) By abdicating the critical responsibility of rational assessment of the past as accountable individuals, those of us who are alive at this moment will create a future in which the human "race" has no future, in which the past is, truly, prologue.
As George Iggers was quoted earlier in this review: "...there is a real past which must not be distorted." Though national and ethnic myths insinuate themselves in purportedly "objective" documents, "that does not mean that there are no criteria of rational inquiry by which myths can be taken apart." Our assessment of past events and attempts to decide on the future direction of humanity cannot be based on constructs which put forward the position that "scientific knowledge, like all forms of knowledge" is socially constructed and that history is propaganda. Examining anti-semitism in Nazi Germany from a perspective which brings forward racial myths and canards within a framework that is grounded in the belief that all information is culturally contingent is not an approach appropriate to serious analysis of this issue. Unfortunately, rather than a rigorously researched and well-documented analysis of National Socialist curricula, Anti-Semitisim and Schooling under the Third Reich is, instead, a detailed sourcebook of the delusional racist "traditions" and legends held by Germans in the early and mid-twentieth century.
Notes
1. George G. Iggers. (2000). The uses and misuses of history." Apollon. Available online: http://www.apollon.uio.no/2000_english/focus/misuses.shtml, pp. 1-3.
2. See George G. Iggers. (1988) . The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present. Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University/University Press of New England; George L. Mosse. (1981) TheCrisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich. New York: Schocken Books; Fritz Stern . (1974) . The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study of the Rise of Germanic Ideology. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
3. George L. Mosse. (1985) Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.,p. 41. It is worthy of note that Sir William Jones, the Oriental expert, refused to support the idea that languages in India and Europe had common origins. Friedrich Schlegel traced Aryan linguistic origins for Germany "using the very word comparisons...Sir William had deplored." Mosse. (1985) . pp. 39-40. See also Leon Poliakov. (1996) . The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe. tr. Edmund Howard. New York: Barnes and Noble, pp. 191-93
4. Cosima Wagner. (1980) . Diaries. Vol. II. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, p. 864. In addition, Wagner's son, Gottfried, states: "Influenced by the fascist philosopher Arthur Gobineau, Wagner's anti-semitism increased." Gottfried Wagner. (1999) . Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family's Legacy, tr. Della Couling. New York: Picador , p. 64.
5. Mosse. (1981) . pp. 41-44; Don Cameron. The Legend of Noah. (1963) . Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp. 86, 133-35; Hiram Haydn .(1950). The Counter Renaissance, New York: Grove Press, pp. 517-18.
6. Mosse. (1985) . pp. 97-9
7. Houston Stewart Chamberlain. (1968). The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Vol. II, New York, Howard Fertig, , pp. 19-20, 37, 489-90 and passim.
8. Among other works cited as reference in this presentation is Stephan Kuhl's (1994), The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism, a book which avers that specifically American eugenics theory and practice was directly and critically influential on (and, inferentially, possibly responsible for) Germany's later race policies.
9. Pat Shipman. (1994) . The Evolution of Racism: Human Abuses and the Use and Abuse of Science. New York: Simon and Schuster, pp. 146-149. In their book, Huxley and Haddon originated the famous "Aryan" prototype: "as blond as Hitler, as dolichocephalic (long-headed) as Rosenberg, as tall as Goebbels, as slender as Goering, and as manly as Streicher." See also Julian Huxley. (1953) Man in the Modern World. New York: New American Library, pp. 38-41.
10. I. L. Kandel. (1935; reprint 1970) The Making of Nazis. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. p. 46 Strangely, Wegner also attributes the editorship of the journal Volk und Werden to Alfred Baumler ( p. 22 ), when, in fact, this journal was edited by Krieck. See Kandel, p. 50; and Gilmer W. Blackburn. (1985) . Education in the Third Reich: A Study of Race and History in Nazi Textbooks. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press , p. 208.
11. Blackburn. (1985) . p. 37, 189, fn. 10
12. Kandel. (1935) . p. 65
13. Richard Evans. (1989) . In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past. New York: Pantheon, p. 34
14. Paul F. Boller, John George. (1989) They Never Said It: Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 27
15. Mosse. (1981) . pp. 247-50; 290-91.
16. Extremist Islamic websites are readily available through Google; for Hale see the HBO production "Hate.com" in which Hale presents this identical "prophecy" story, and World Church of the Creator websites for the Franklin and Webster quotes.
17. John Weiss. (1996) . The Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany, Chicago, Ivan R. Dee, pp. 150-2; see also Ann Topham. (1992) A Distant Thunder: Intimate Recollections of the Kaiser‘s Court. New York: New Chapter Press.
18. Martin Luther. (1952, orig. 1566) . The Table Talk of Martin Luther, ed. Thomas S. Kepler, New York: The World Publishing Company, pp. 218-19. Also see pp. 169-170: Luther also expounded that Moses and his Law were of this world and "of the devil," an issue of "tradition" regarding the gnosticism inherent to Volkish ideology that will be discussed later in this review.
19. Blackburn. (1985) . p. 91. Blackburn's study includes many of the same sources as Wegner and presents thoughtful and wide-ranging analysis that is missing from the study under review.
20. For gnosticism see Giovanni Filoramo. (1992) . A History of Gnosticism, tr. Anthony Alcock. Cambridge: Blackwell; regarding theologians who brought these ideas forward see Koppel Pinson. (1968) . Pietism, As a Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism. New York: Octagon Books, Inc.. and Klaus Koch. (1970) . The Rediscovery of the Apocalypse: A Polemical Work on a Neglected Area of Biblical Studies and Its Damaging Effects on Theology and Philosophy, tr. Margaret Kohl, Naperville, IL: Alec R. Allenson, Inc. It is also worth noting that Helena Blavatsky may have been responsible for the composition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, see Norman Cohn. (1996/1967) . Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." London: Serif, p. 110.
21. quoted in Kandel. (1935) . p. 25.
22. ibid, p. 73, and p. 73,fn. 7
23. Iggers. (2000) . Objective Standards heading, para. 4.
24. Bauer quoted in Christopher Simpson. (1993) . The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Laws, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century. New York: Grove Press, p. 9.
25. See Blackburn (1985); also Fritz K. Ringer. (1983) . The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933. London: University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press; Max Weinrich. (1999/1946) . Hitler's Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany's Crimes Against the Jewish People. London: Yale University Press.
26. Kandel . (1935) . p. 27
References
Blackburn, Gilmer W. (1985). Education in the Third Reich: A Study of Race and History in Nazi Textbooks. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press.
Boller, Paul F., John George. (1989) . They Never Said It: Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cameron, Don. The Legend of Noah. (1963) . Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart (1968). The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Vol. II, New York: Howard Fertig.
Cohn, Norman . (1996, orig. 1967) .Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the"Protocols of the Elders of Zion." London: Serif.
Filoramo, Giovanni . (1992) .A History of Gnosticism, tr. Anthony Alcock. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Haydn, Hiram .(1950). The Counter Renaissance, New York: Grove Press.
Huxley, Julian. (1953) Man in the Modern World. New York: New American Library.
Iggers, George G. . (2000). The uses and misuses of history. Apollon. Available online: http://www.apollon.uio.no/2000_english/focus/misuses.shtml.
Iggers, George G. (1988) . The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present. Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University/University Press of New England.
Kandel, I. L. (1935; reprint 1970) The Making of Nazis. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Koch, Klaus. (1970) . The Rediscovery of the Apocalypse: A Polemical Work on a Neglected Area of Biblical Studies and Its Damaging Effects on Theology and Philosophy, tr. Margaret Kohl, Naperville, IL: Alec R. Allenson, Inc
Luther, Martin . (1952, orig. 1566) . The Table Talk of Martin Luther, ed. Thomas S. Kepler, New York: The World Publishing Company.
Mosse, George L. . (1981) The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich. New York: Schocken Books.
Mosse, George L. (1985) Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Pinson, Koppel. (1968) . Pietism, As a Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism. New York: OctagonBooks, Inc.
Shipman, Pat . (1994) . The Evolution of Racism: Human Abuses and the Use and Abuse of Science. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Ringer, Fritz K. (1983) . The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933. London: University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press
Simpson, Christopher. (1993) . The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Laws, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century. New York: Grove Press.
Stern, Fritz . (1974) .The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study of the Rise of Germanic Ideology. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Wagner, Cosima . (1980) . Diaries. Vol. II. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
Wagner, Gottfried . (1999) . Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family's Legacy, tr. Della Couling. New York: Picador.
Weiss, John. (1996) . The Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany, Chicago, Ivan R. Dee.
Weinrich, Max . (1999/1946) . Hitler's Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany's Crimes Against the Jewish People. London: Yale University Press.
About the Reviewer
Katherine T. Carroll is completing a Ph.D. in Comparative Education at Loyola University Chicago. Her academic interests include comparative studies of the major ideologies of the twentieth century, and the history of ideas.
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