James M. Glass provides a provocative new answer to the
questions about the Holocaust that bedevil us to this day: How and why did so
many ordinary Germans participate in the Final Solution? And how did they come
to regard Jews as less than human and "deserving" of extermination?
In this path-breaking work of intellectual and cultural history, Glass argues
that the answers lie in the rise of a particular ethos of public health and
sanitation that emerged from the German medical establishment and filtered down
to the common people. Building his argument on a trove of documentary evidence,
including the records of the German medical community and of other professional
groups, he traces the development in the years following WWI of theories of
racial hygiene that singled out the Jews as an infectious disease, and that
determined them as "life unworthy of life" in the works of Nazi propagandists
and German scientists.
Looked at from a broader perspective, Glass writes, the actions and beliefs
of the German people show that what today would be regarded as insane, became,
for WWII German society, normal politics. Murdering millions of innocent people
was not seen as a vicious criminal conspiracy but as a therapy essential to the
culture's well-being.
