Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust

By Götz Aly

Discussion led by Mark Sendrow, M.A.

Thursday, February 13, 2025 at 2PM

Discussion via ZOOM

The two questions that make up the title of the German scholar Götz Aly’s book are the ones that many historians of the Holocaust have been attempting to answer for decades. And as the book’s subtitle suggests, the answer that Aly supplies is not radically new. The novel twist in his argument consists of the way he links envy and race hatred as causal factors: Aly argues that the German people’s “gnawing envy” of the Jews ended up combining “with a collectivist longing for a life among equals” and “paved the way for [the] racial theory” that the Nazis employed in their genocidal assault on the Jews in their own country and beyond.

What made the German Jews so enviable, Aly explains, was the way that they took advantage of the new economic opportunities that arose in the course of the 19th century, as the old feudal order gave way to the modern world. More literate and academically agile than their Christian peers, German Jews were “eight times more likely to earn a better class of secondary-school degree” and used their “educational head start” to pursue “well-paying forms of intellectual labor.” By 1914, Aly reports, they earned “five times the income of the average Christian.” As a consequence, “the Christian majority, only too conscious that they needed to move up the social ladder, became obsessed with how quickly Jews were bettering themselves.”

According to Aly, the German people’s envy toward Jews fed into an exaggerated sense of racial superiority, which many observers at the time regarded as a “compensatory mechanism” for deep-seated feelings of “social inferiority.” He further adduces the class backgrounds of both the Nazi leaders and followers as evidence that the goal of “social mobility” spurred the anti-Semitic effort to dispossess the Jews. The fact that countless Germans ended up profiting from the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies by taking the Jews’ jobs, businesses, and possessions explains why, in Aly’s estimation, “the overwhelming majority of Germans remained silent about the state’s persecution of Jews” and ultimately became active or passive participants in the Holocaust.

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