Countless people have grappled with these questions, but few have come up with answers as original and perceptive as those of German historian Gotz Aly. Tracing the prehistory of the Holocaust, from the 1800s to the Nazis' assumption of power in 1933, Aly shows that German anti-Semitism did not originate with racist ideology or religious animosity, as is often supposed. Instead, through striking statistics and economic analysis, he demonstrates that it was rooted in a more basic emotion: material envy. Resenting the success of the urban, well-educated Jewish minority in the rapidly modernizing world, Germans embraced compensatory theories of Jewish racial inferiority. And the growing resentment, pervading society, provided fertile ground for Hitler and his genocidal politics.
- ISBN10 1250062640
- ISBN13 9781250062642
- Publish Date 7 April 2015 (first published 15 April 2014)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 4 April 2022
- Publish Country US
- Imprint St Martin's Press
- Format Paperback
- Pages 304
- Language English