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Ralf Georg Reuth's new book is a well-written and insightful study on an important subject--the origins of Hitler's anti-Semitism. Yet, while many of his claims are provocative and deserve serious consideration, his book on the whole promises somewhat more than it delivers.
In his introduction, Reuth explains that his main goal is to historicize Hitler's anti-Semitism in the sense called for by Martin Broszat in the 1980s. Significantly, he defends one of the more controversial figures who pursued this process of historicization at the time, Ernst Nolte, who famously linked the crimes of the Nazis to those of the Bolsheviks and, in the process, helped to spark the Historians' Debate of 1986-87. Reuth takes Nolte's claims about the Nazis' fears of Bolshevism seriously and makes it a major theme of his analysis. But he also links it to a second goal--that of challenging the contention that the Nazis' crimes against the Jews were part of a longstanding tradition of German anti-Semitism rooted in a "special path of development" (Sonderentwicklung) (p. 12). Reuth associates Daniel Goldhagen with this claim, but spends most of his book criticizing Ian Kershaw for adhering to it as well. Kershaw, as well as Allan Bullock and Joachim Fest, come under frequent attack by Reuth for having overemphasized the German roots of Nazism and overlooked the connection between its emergence after 1918 and fears of Bolshevism. While this is a serious claim, Reuth's defense of Nolte in his introduction--like his favorable citation of conservatives such as Rainer Zitelmann and Martin Walser--suggests that his overall project is about normalizing the German historical record. Reuth assures readers that his analysis "changes nothing about Hitler's monstrosity... . indeed, it makes it even greater" (p. 19). Yet, his rigid focus on Hitler's evil may be seen as serving the apologetic purpose of masking other factors from German history that explain the Holocaust.
The strongest sections of Reuth's book come at the beginning, which are devoted to challenging Hitler's representation of himself in Mein Kampf as a veteran anti-Semite. Claiming that most scholars have taken Hitler's claims at face value (he singles out Fest and Kershaw), Reuth draws on the work of Brigitte Hamann and Anton Joachimsthaler to...