Hitler's Apocalypse

Book excerpt: A study of Hitler's antisemitic, apocalyptic worldview, how it was translated into Nazi ideology and the implementation of the destruction of European Jewry, and how it has been adopted and adapted in the postwar period by the Soviet Union and Arab and Muslim countries. Chs. 1-8 (p. 12-173) deal with Hitler and Nazism. States that Hitler always spoke of the destruction of Jewry in tones of apocalyptic fervor. It was the fusion of a modern, totalitarian political praxis with a gnostic-racist Manichean ideology of war against the forces of Darkness that provided the radical novelty in Hitler's movement. He used the tsarist Russian idea of an international Jewish conspiracy as his inspiration for a radical restructuring of the modern political world. The Soviet, Arab and Islamic antisemitism described in chs. 9-12 (p. 174-255) are part of a multi-layered continuum of blood-curdling rhetoric which postulates the existence of an international, shadowy occult conspiracy with its Jewish political center in Israel. This crusade goes today under the name of "anti-Zionism."