Working with the Führer: Reassessing Nazi Ideology and Anti-Jewish Policies

Ian Kershaw’s influential “working toward the Führer” thesis seemed to lay to rest a decade-long, acerbic debate among historians of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Kershaw had forged a middle ground between historians who argued that Adolf Hitler planned to murder European Jewry from the outset (“intentionalists”) and historians who claimed that genocide resulted fortuitously from the cumulative actions of a radicalizing bureaucracy (“functionalists”). According to Kershaw, Hitler set broad ideological objectives which subordinates in the state and party apparatuses raced to enact and thereby win the favor of the Führer. In the three decades following its publication in 1993, overwhelming consensus regarding this thesis has reigned in the historiography on Nazi Germany. This paper contends that Kershaw’s thesis is due for reexamination.

I argue that Judeo-Bolshevism constituted the core pillar of Nazi ideology and practice. From its inception, the Nazi movement endeavored to “cleanse” Germany of Jews and what it considered to be the political and cultural “outgrowths” of bolshevism. Confronted with this central aim, Kershaw’s thesis exhibits two main flaws. First, it ascribes Hitler too much authority over Nazi ideology. Second, it suggests that the coalescence of Nazi ideology and practice was a top-down affair and dilutes the ideological motivations of myriad actors. Drawing upon a wide variety of primary sources—municipal and state archive documents, newspaper articles, propaganda pamphlets, I show how fears of Judeo-Bolshevism permeated German society from 1918 onward. They undergirded the operational environment in which local, state, and federal authorities operated from 1933 onward. Municipal authorities, Nazis and non-Nazis alike, were deep believers in this ideology and instigated the first policies designed to “cleanse” German cities of Jews and Jewish influences. They had no need for prompting from above and thus worked with, rather than toward, Hitler to rid Germany of this supposed “contaminant.”