Ideology of Death

by John Weiss

In his 1995 work, Ideology of Death, Weiss again breaks with tradition by suggesting that the Holocaust did not depend upon the unique character of Adolph Hitler for its inspiration. The culture of post-World War I Germany—which had its political roots in the anti-Semitic sentiment encouraged by several Lutheran and Catholic clergymen during the nineteenth century—contained numerous social groups "with hundreds of thousands of followers whose ideas were no different from those of the Nazis," according to the author. Anti-Semitism was only a part of the "kaleidoscope of hatreds" that characterized German society at the time, explained New York Times Book Review critic Michael S. Sherry, and it "overlapped, in bewildering and contradictory ways, other hatreds," including those against Czechs, Slavs, Catholics, and others. Such prejudices crystallized under Hitler, but were not inspired by him. While noting that by "ascrib[ing] consistency, power, even perverse sincerity, to ideas" such a