Includes bibliographical references (pages 277-342) and index.

An ethnic conscience -- The politics of virtue -- Allies in the academy -- The conquest of political culture -- Ethnic revival and racist anxiety -- The swastika in the heart of the youth -- Law and the racial order -- The quest for a respectable racism -- Racial warriors -- Racial war at home.

"The Nazi conscience is not an oxymoron. In fact, the perpetrators of genocide had a powerful sense of right and wrong, based on civic values that exalted the moral righteousness of the ethnic community and denounced outsiders." "Claudia Koonz's latest work reveals how racial popularizers developed the infrastructure and rationale for genocide during the so-called normal years before World War II. Her careful reading of the voluminous Nazi writings on race traces the transformation of longtime Nazis' vulgar antisemitism into a racial ideology that seemed credible to the vast majority of ordinary Germans who never joined the Nazi Party. Challenging conventional assumptions about Hitler, Koonz locates the source of his charisma not in his summons to hate but in his appeal to the collective virtue of his people, the Volk."--Jacket.