The Law of Blood

Thinking and Acting as a Nazi

Bibliographic Data

ID23768660
AuthorsJohann Chapoutot
TranslatorsMiranda Richmond Mouillot
Year2018
Publication date2018-12-31
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueLaw of Blood (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherHarvard University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.4159/9780674985841
OpenAlexW2887380229
ISBN9780674985841
LanguageEN
Citations received7

The scale and the depth of Nazi brutality seem to defy understanding. What could drive people to fight, kill, and destroy with such ruthless ambition? Observers and historians have offered countless explanations since the 1930s. According to Johann Chapoutot, we need to understand better how the Nazis explained it themselves. We need a clearer view, in particular, of how they were steeped in and spread the idea that history gave them no choice: it was either kill or die. Chapoutot, one of France's leading historians, spent years immersing himself in the texts and images that reflected and shaped the mental world of Nazi ideologues, and that the Nazis disseminated to the German public. The party had no official ur-text of ideology, values, and history. But a clear narrative emerges from the myriad works of intellectuals, apparatchiks, journalists, and movie-makers that Chapoutot explores. The story went like this: In the ancient world, the Nordic-German race lived in harmony with the laws of nature. But since Late Antiquity, corrupt foreign norms and values-Jewish values in particular-had alienated Germany from itself and from all that was natural. The time had come, under the Nazis, to return to the fundamental law of blood. Germany must fight, conquer, and procreate, or perish. History did not concern itself with right and wrong, only brute necessity. A remarkable work of scholarship and insight, The Law of Blood recreates the chilling ideas and outlook that would cost millions their lives

Nazism · Political science · Blood donation and transfusion practices · European history and politics · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Medical History and Innovations · Trauma, Hemostasis, Coagulopathy, Resuscitation

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