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The Text of The Holocaust:
A Study of the Nazis' Extermination Propaganda, 1919-1945

by C.C. Aronsfeld

pbk.    107 pgs
ISBN: 0-916288-15-3

$12.00

cloth    107 pgs
ISBN: 0-916288-17-X

$20.00

Description

Aronsfeld's book is a response to the historical revisionists who claim that Hitler never ordered the Holocaust. Aronsfeld shows that no immediate order from Hitler was necessary, for he had built a structure of implicit understanding through codewords, innuendoes and explicit statements regarding the extermination of Europe's Jews.

The Text of the Holocaust is important as a masterful study of propaganda, and is a warning about its lethal potential in any society. In this exacting documentation of the Nazi propaganda machinery, one follows the verbal and printed incitements to murder and genocide step by step. An appendix includes a description of the aftermath and careers of works like Mein Kampf and Protocols of the Elders of Zion, arguments for and against censorship and the hazards of intellectual license.

In an age when technology of the printed word has made propaganda a weapon of battle as effective as guns, tanks and bombs, we cannot know too much about how propaganda works, how it is manufactured, circulated, produced, bought, sold, traded, and financed. The book is a tool for the study of these processes.

The author, C.C. Aronsfeld, was editor of the quarterlies, Patterns of Prejudice and Christian-Jewish Relations. He is the author of numerous essays on contemporary and historical aspects of Jewish life, and The Ghosts of 1492: Jewish Aspects of the Struggle for Religious Freedom in Spain, 1848-1976.

Reviews

"The Text of the Holocaust"...catalogues exhaustively both the hundreds of figurative and literal references to the extermination of the Jews in Nazi pamphlets, speeches, and books and the topical responses to such murderous 'rhetoric'....Though Mr. Aronsfeld argues on the basis of these references that it is therefore clear that Hitler had 'planned' the Final Solution from the beginning, the ultimate value of his essay lies not in its argument so much as it does in the massive compilation of sources."

London Jewish Chronicle

"I have been reading a frightening, but moving and extremely important contribution to the accursed place of propaganda in recent history.

It is a learned work by Caesar Aronsfeld called the Text of the Holocaust...and easily the most eye-opening long essay I have ever read on the question of propaganda practised as a fiendish form of 'fine art.'

This study of the Nazis' extermination propaganda, which enables them to attempt genocide on an unprecedented scale, takes the story,though in brilliantly compressed form, from 1919-1945.

The author cannot be too highly congratulated on producing what has rightly been described as a 'tool for the study of all propaganda.' Never perhaps has such a study been more needed than in this brainwashing era."

Catholic Herald.

"This small volume...is the answer to those who maintain that the physical annihilation of the Jews was not the purpose of the Nazis, that no specific orders were ever given....What the world did not understand at the time--whether it could not or did not wish to understand is another matter---is that where hatred is preached day in and day out over a period of years,violence is sure to follow."

The Jewish Standard

"C.C. Aronsfeld displays in the sixty-odd pages of the main text of this book his considerable knowledge of the Nazis' attitude toward the Jews from the inception of Hitler's career....this is a valuable book....We are dealing here in the main with that period of the Holocaust--before the war--when something could have been done but wasn't."

University of Hartford Journal

"Aronsfeld's book is extremely informative, readable and thoroughly researched. It will provide students with vital information about the Nazis' aims and their ruthless use of power to further these aims."

Midstream