“The nation that slays together, stays together.” This, in a nutshell, is the thesis of Thomas Kühne's provocative essay on German society under the Nazis. It takes its place alongside a number of recent works on Volksgemeinschaft—the racially defined, national community that was assiduously promoted by the Nazis. Following Michael Wildt and others, Kühne argues that the concept was not merely a theme of Nazi propaganda, used to paper over class tensions. Nor was it just a rhetorical device intended to mask the rapacity of the new Nazi elite and obscure the continuity of older structures of power and privilege. In his view it expressed a genuine aspiration for a “grand utopia of belonging.”

The notion of Volksgemeinschaft was the product of extreme nationalism and the embodiment of racial exclusivity. But Kühne makes more far-reaching claims. He maintains that violence, murder, and genocide were fundamental both to its construction and expression. “Perpetrators and bystanders,” he writes, “energized social life and built collective identity through committing genocide. The desire for community, the experience of belonging and the ethos of collectivity became the basis of mass murder. Perpetrating and supporting the Holocaust provided Germans with a particular sense of national belonging: the German nation found itself by committing the Holocaust.” These are sweeping assertions, but Kühne sees no other way to explain the resilience of German society in the last year of the war. He insists that the ceaseless pounding on land and from the air to which Germany was subjected only served to reinforce the sense of Volksgemeinschaft, though not by creating a common plight. Rather, he attributes the stubborn resistance on all fronts to a combination of guilt and fear, a direct result of the earlier complicity of ordinary Germans in genocide.

To have endured so well, the sinews of Volksgemeinschaft must have been well developed. Indeed, Kühne traces the origins of the idealized community to the trenches of the Great War. It was there that millions of German men experienced “comradeship.” Furthermore, the joy of male bonding and self-sacrifice for one's pals, one's unit, and one's nation spilled into civilian life. Returning veterans formed associations that applied the values of trench life to society as a whole. The humble Landser was depicted in popular culture as a caring soul whose wartime suffering had brought him closer to noncombatants. Even if they deduced diametrically opposed political programs from the premise of comradeship, both left- and right-wing veterans’ associations, notably the Reichsbanner and the Stahlhelm, preached its virtues for the nation at large.

The Nazis, of course, had their own radical version. In their creed, race replaced class as the basis for community. Access to the Nazi welfare state was racially exclusive. The word Volk became a prefix for a range of social benefits: loans, radios, cars. They were the projection of an all-embracing, all-caring community; yet they also defined its boundaries by denying any benefit to Jews. To participate in Winterhilfswerk was to express an idealistic belief in the Volksgemeinschaft, to help to give it concrete form, but also to become complicit in a system of race-based discrimination. The sense of belonging engendered a dissociation from racial “others.” Aryans had no cause to feel empathy with them; on the contrary, it was morally necessary to treat them with the greatest severity. Nazism attained the kudos of a revolutionary movement by challenging “bourgeois” notions of universalism.

As Kühne shows, this pseudo-revolutionary, ethnic morality was thoroughly inculcated into millions of young Germans through the Hitler Youth, the League of German Girls, Labor Service, the SA or SS, and, above all, military service. From its earliest days, drawing on the model of the Freikorps as much as trench life, the SA perfected the technique of building comradeship through violence. Street fighting and political murders forged togetherness. In the concentration camps, the SS elevated the rituals of initiation and bonding through violence to new heights of brutality. But, at the same time, this violence was carefully regulated and justified according to a specious “double morality.”

Some of Kühne's most compelling, though also most problematic evidence, comes from the letters and diaries of men serving in the Wehrmacht. He cites one missive after another in which young men expressed revulsion at the sight of Jews in Poland and poured scorn on the “Soviet paradise.” These messages home appear to prove the efficacy of Nazi propaganda. They show how it conditioned perceptions and, in turn, how what men witnessed validated Nazi ideology. Warfare also reinforced the bonds of comradeship, while the rhetoric of sacrifice for the Volk gave it justification. During the invasion of Russia, senior officers such as Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau encouraged their men to be merciless toward the “racial enemy.” The long-established doctrine of “military necessity” fused with Nazi ideals of “hardness” and the dehumanization of the enemy to trigger a spiral of violence. Having become complicit in the genocide, when the tide of war turned, soldiers and civilians alike were driven on by the fear of Jewish “revenge.” Hitler had created nothing less than a “brotherhood of crime.”

In his final chapter, Kühne explains how women were attracted by the ideal of Volksgemeinschaft. Once they accepted a racially inflected notion of gender, they could enjoy unprecedented autonomy. Building Volksgemeinschaft offered them careers assisting the settlement of Volksdeutsche in the conquered eastern lands, as nurses, welfare workers, and auxiliaries in the armed forces and the security apparatus. By denouncing Rassenschande or by assisting in the birth and rearing of Aryan children, millions of women did their bit for the Volk. Women in the Reich saw the deportations of Jews; many applied for vacated Jewish property. In so doing, they, too, were inducted into the “open secret” of genocide. They, too, were led to understand that their bridges had been burned; there was no way back.

Taken on its own terms, this analysis of Volksgemeinschaft is convincing. But on closer examination it begs many questions. Kühne acknowledges that German society was diverse and that not everyone who qualified as a member felt, or wanted to feel, a part of the Volksgemeinschaft. But instead of exploring that diversity, he asserts that the ideal was so ambiguous that it was capable of absorbing Christians, workers, and women whose sense of self and belonging to other types of collectivity might otherwise have proven resistant.

He repeatedly states that the Wehrmacht mobilized seventeen million Germans, eighty percent of whom served on the eastern front where “racial war” was at its sharpest. But that still leaves more than forty-five million other Germans, most of whom had been socialized and politicized in the Kaiserreich or Weimar Republic. As Thomas Weber shows in his recent book on Hitler and the 16 Reserve Infantry Regiment in which he served, region was a crucial factor in determining the enthusiasm with which Germans fought in the trenches and the extent to which they lamented the outcome of the war.

Kühne quotes extensively from published collections of soldiers’ letters along with individual memoirs of service on the Eastern Front. Yet although there were seventeen million servicemen, the same names crop up again and again in studies of this nature. Indeed, anyone familiar with Frontsoldaten by Stephen G. Fritz will recognize several of these letter writers. Even if it is beyond doubt that such examples are representative, the identification of Jews, Poles, and Russians as the “racial other” still leaves unexplained why they served so well to define the boundaries of the Volksgemeinschaft. And even if the choice of the Jews as the enemy can be accounted for, we are still challenged to understand why human and civil rights were so feebly rooted in German culture that they could be swept away so quickly in the stampede for an intangible, chimerical notion of community.