Research: a forum for historical writers

[CharleyH]

Don't get me wrong - I love you guys, or at least I'm often entertained on the AH forum. However, I am writing an historical piece (those who know me know that I often do) about WW2. I am desperately trying to find a forum where I can freely discuss and question ideologies and news facts about history, specifically about WW2. Does anyone have any idea if there is a forum for history writers?

Barring this, I bring my query to you ... I was reading a BBC article in the course of my research and the author stated, "They (Nazis) rejected morality as a Jewish idea, which had corrupted and weakened the German people." I understand that the Nazis believed that the Jewish people were immoral and had corrupted the Germans, but I do not understand why or how, or anything about how the Nazis rejected morality as a Jewish idea.

Any insight is welcome. Thank you.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

I'd like to see Dr. Paulsson cite his reference on that statement. I've never seen it before. The Nazis certainly had some deranged ideas of what morality consists of but I've never seen anything that ascribes a 'law of the jungle' to them. Not saying it's wrong, but the historian in me would like to see a primary source document.

Another root of the Nazi anti-Semitism was a paper written by Henry Ford about the Jewish conspiracy in the financial world. He later disavowed it and apologized for writing it but by then it was way too late. Hitler has seized upon it as confirmation of his own ideas.

 

[CharleyH]

I'd like to see Dr. Paulsson cite his reference on that statement. I've never seen it before. The Nazis certainly had some deranged ideas of what morality consists of but I've never seen anything that ascribes a 'law of the jungle' to them. Not saying it's wrong, but the historian in me would like to see a primary source document.

Another root of the Nazi anti-Semitism was a paper written by Henry Ford about the Jewish conspiracy in the financial world. He later disavowed it and apologized for writing it but by then it was way too late. Hitler has seized upon it as confirmation of his own ideas.

Thanks. That you posted means a lot. Do you have any ideas about other forums, by any chance?

 

[voluptuary_manque]

There are a lot of military history places embeded in other sites. I don't know of any specified 'history buff' sites but I admit I've never looked. Surely there must be some . . .

 

[BlackShanglan]

I agree with VM - I would love to see the sources for that statement on morality. On the other hoof, I can myself offer sources on a different (and, to one horse's blinkered sight, rather more convincing) source of Nazi distaste for Jews in the various turn-of-the-century and later writings on racial "science." The Nazis were far from the only people banging the "Jews are an inferior race" drum in the 1930's; in the US, they were still being banned from swimming pools after the war. The Nazis didn't invent anti-Semitism; they simply used the enormous quantities of it already extant. Open anti-Semitism was quite a normal part of society until the Nazis demonstrated precisely where that sort of thing led.

It is, of course, demonstrative of essential human nature that some people still don't seem to have gotten the message.

 

[3113]

"They (Nazis) rejected morality as a Jewish idea, which had corrupted and weakened the German people."

I"m with the Bear. This is bogus. First, everyone had to agree on what morality is (i.e. what is and is not moral or being moral)--and we haven't been able to do that yet! Next, having decided what morality is, the Nazis would have had to have decided it was a Jewish idea. How absurd is that? That'd be like us saying, prior to invading Iraq, "Saddam Hussain is moral so we won't do what he does and be moral. We'll reject morality and bomb Iraq...."

Wasn't was we did, was it? We said, "Saddam's immoral," and implied that we had a moral obligation to stop this great evil. Right? Now perhaps the Nazis rejected Jewish views of what morality was, but that doesn't mean they rejected the idea of morality--which is the idea that one is doing some great good and getting rid of some great evil. This sort of thinking rarely "weakens" or corrupts people--unless your definition of weakening and corrupting is that they try and commit genocide (which is defining yourself to victory).

As VM pointed out, there are too many premises in this statement that are unproven. Like the fact that Jews defined morality, or that the Nazis rejected morality because of that. Etc. I suspect the writer means something far more specific, but without a definition for his terms and examples for what he means, it reads as nonsense.

 

[ishtat]

This might be a starting point:-

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WW.htm

I think that trying to get inside the minds of the people of the time may help. It's important to remember that at that time everyone was a racist. It was the norm.

"Raum und Volk" by Ewald Banse is revealing in some ways.

 

[Weird Harold]

...the author stated, "They (Nazis) rejected morality as a Jewish idea, which had corrupted and weakened the German people." I understand that the Nazis believed that the Jewish people were immoral and had corrupted the Germans, but I do not understand why or how, or anything about how the Nazis rejected morality as a Jewish idea.

Like Old Bear, I'd like to see a more complete discussion of that assertion. I suspect it is either poorly worded or is an example, taken out of context, of the glaring inconsistencies in Nazi propaganda. The Nazis were quite capable of claiming that the Jews were immoral degenerates and that their idealist pacifist morality was undermining Aryan ideals -- and doing so in virtually the same breath.

Any insight is welcome. Thank you.

I don't know of any forums for writers interested in WWII or the Holocaust, but I do know of one that specializes in German/World History in a period where much of the roots of 20thcentury aantisemitism canbe found: Bean Books hosts a forum relating to Eric Flint's 1632/Ring of Fire Series. I'm not quite sure what the link is, but It shuld be accessible through Baen's Bar which is their general fan forum area.

If there is any place to find specialist historical forums for writers, it will be known to the denzen's of Baen's Bar and/or Baen's Twitter link. Other publishing marques might well also have similar sites for authors and fans to comingle that could lead to specialized historical discussions.

 

[Tarakin]

(...) I think that trying to get inside the minds of the people of the time may help. It's important to remember that at that time everyone was a racist. It was the norm.(...)

That's partly true, but only in regards of white and black/yellow/red. The Nazis took that to a different level when dividing the "Whites" alone in nine different subraces, the "Arier" being on top, the "Balten" (Baltics) in second place and so on. They even had sample measurements for nose length and other physical details. "Jews" were a race also, not a religion, so the people couldn't convert, and they were seen as parasitic, which was the "reason" for the later mistreatment. Btw the Nazis did find so much disgust with their methods from the German people that after the open "Reichskristallnacht" they went practically underground, all further measures to fight the jews were in secret. In the open they had programs like "The Führer is building a city for the jews", which refered to Theresienstadt, the KZ shown to the Red Cross for instance, and of course the most harmless of them all, at least on the surface. The secret was far from perfect, but it allowed the populace to look the other way.

Charley, I think you'll find many infos on the WW2 and Nazi topics right here in the AH if you ask

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Somewhere in the couple of thousand volumes that insulate the walls of the den is a small book entitled Occidentalism, by Ian Buruma & Avishai Margalit. It is subtitled "The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies" and discusses the Western roots of the jihadi delusional madness directed against Western Civilization. The conflict the Islamists see between "the timid, soft bourgeois versus the heroic Revolutionary, the machine society versus the organically knit one of 'blood and soil', the sterile Western mind--all reason and no soul versus the 'inner life' of the spirit" is traced to the German reaction against the Enlightenment that resulted first in Romanticism and finally in National Socialism. Another one in the same vein is George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe.

 

[Verdad]

I can't make sense of that statement about morality either, but I'm willing to make a cautious guess.

The statement might be referring to Nazi's perversion of Nietzsche. The morality Nietzsche criticized was Christian morality, but the things he despised about it, the Nazis habitually attributed to Jews.

Nietzsche was particularly hard on the whole "the meek shall inherit the Earth" idea, because he saw it as a mere cover up for hypocrisy. He held that the 'meek' in truth harbor resentment and envy and small-mindedness, all the while dreaming of the revenge they would have in the afterlife. The similarity with Nazi portrayal of Jews as sycophantic backstabbers is rather striking.

By contrast, the virtues Nietzsche praised were baldness, assertiveness, magnanimity, self-affirmation, which are pretty much the opposites of the Christian ethos' emphasis on humility and self-sacrifice. Not only were Germans supposed to be endowed with these virtues (and Jews not), but in the twisted and simplified form in which the Nazis exploited the ideas, they pretty much came down to "might makes right".

Perhaps another way of portraying this contrast is in terms of 'masculine' and 'feminine'. The work of one Otto Weininger, a XIX century anti-Semitic ideologue from Vienna, used precisely those terms.

Weininger's ideas were about as misogynist as they come, so he killed two flies at once: First he expounded on the virtues of masculine (hard, bright, penetrating, spiritual, etc) as contrasted to feminine (soft, dim, animalistic, etc), then he asserted some people were heavy on the feminine regardless of their sex, and of course that Jews were these loathsome people. Being Jewish himself, as well as gay, he decided he could only kill himself, and did.

Although he's not that much of a major figure, I think you'd get a good idea of this dichotomy if you google up a few excerpts, plus his being Jewish speaks of the phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred of the time. The picture I'm trying to paint, at any rate, is of contrast between Nazi ideology's, let's say, military virtues, 'manly' to boot (honor, bravery, love of the fatherland) and the Judeo-Christian 'softness'.

To get back to Nietzsche, there's another idea that plays here. He was fond of Aristotel's Nicomachean ethics, with its classes of people. The perversion of this idea is evident in Nazi notions of master and slave races, as well as in Nazi authoritarianism. The idea, which is hierarchical, once again contrasts the basically egalitarian model of Judeo-Christianity.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Verdad, that certainly would be a logical starting place for Paulsson's arguments. When teaching elementary Ancient World history, I always put Western Civ on a pair of legs. Our moral roots go back to the Old Testament and our intellectual roots to Greece. They come together in Rome where Christianity gets heavily inoculated with Greek thought. Throw in a bit of Northern Barbarian legal principles and there we are. So your derivation isn't far from the way I see things. Did Hitler? Anyone's guess.