A VNN loyalist sent me a copy of this 2003 book by Claudia Koonz, the reading of which I am contemplating with tented-finger Burnsian glee...
And of course, the best bits will all be posted on VNN... Thanks!

From the preface...

Not every being with a human face is human.

This belief expressed the bedrock of Nazi morality. Although it might seem that a human catastrophe on the scale of the Holocaust was caused by an evil that defies our understanding, what is frightening about the racist public culture within which the Final Solution was conceived is not its extremism but its ordinariness -- not its savage hatreds but its lofty ideals. The men, and a few women, who popularized Nazi racism expounded at great length about what they called "the idea" (die Idee) of National Socialism. What outsiders saw as ideology, Nazis experienced as truth. Seen from a Judeo-Christian vantage point, the amalgam of biological theories and racist passions that characterized the Nazi belief system does not qualify as a moral, or even coherent, ideology. Compared with, for example, Adam Smith's liberalism or Karl Marx's communism die Idee of Nazism lacks formal elegance and a humane social vision. Nonetheless, Nazism fulfilled the functions we associate with ideology. It supplied answers to life's imponderables, provided meaning in the face of contingency, and explained the wqay the world works. It also defined good and evil, condemning self-interest as immoral and enshrining altruism as virtuous. Binding ethnic comrades (Volksgenossen) to their ancestors and descendents, Nazi ideals embedded the individual within the collective well-being of the nation.

I don't know whether this broad is a jew - not necessarily, I'd guess.

What a conceit, that Marxism is elegant and humane. Eternal class warfare? 'Elegant' - surely she's the first in history to apply that adjective to the jewiest of jewisms.

Anyway, who cares about style points? That's like a entomologist describing competing ant colonies in terms of how they OUGHT to relate. Nazism is sustained or rebutted based on its description of the men and men-appearing called man, and how it effects the protection and progress of the men who produced it. That seems a more reasonable standard for judging it.

the thing I found interesting about this book, was how after the seizure of power, so many specialists in so many different fields took the opportunity to mobilize against the Jewish rot that had set into so many sectors of society. In a way it's heartening to think that a national community can cleanse itself so quickly, and that so many people NOT nazis before 1933, when the "coast was clear" hopped on the bandwagon, not just cynically but in earnest, and did their part to help rejuvenate German folk community.

And of course the nazis deserve credit for leadership of this effort.

The book is filled with antinazi type comments, but to me it seems like Nicholas Goodrich Clarke's books-- kind of obligatory, superficial condemnations, to salt the hearty meat of of the abundant facts and details about Nazi cultural reformation efforts which in this book are served to the reader.