Valhalla, Calvary and Auschwitz

By: S. Giora Shoham

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Length: 18 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

In this tour-de-force S. Giora Shoham reveals the social, cultural and political mechanics of how anti-Semitism became the motivating ideology of the Third Reich and the Nazi movement. This ideology impelled an evil empire to murder some six million Jews and millions of other undesirables, viz., Slavs, Gypsies, Communist commissars, etc. The book provides the most detailed and cogent answer yet to the often asked question: how is it possible for the “most civilized nation” possessing the highest technological and scientific skills to embark on a campaign of murder, rape, and robbery on a scale unprecedented in world history? Even more pertinent for the Jews has been the question: why were the Jews singled out for immediate massacre and then systematic destruction? No single compelling answer has been proffered in the past fifty years. Shoham explains, why the German social character and the Jewish social character were dramatically opposed, why the clash between them was inevitable given the right circumstances, and why the Holocaust was inevitable in Germany due to an incestuous relationship between Germans and Jews. The multidisciplinary approach of the author raises interesting methodological questions which will no doubt stimulate debate among scholars. The power of his narrative analysis of the social characters of Germans and Jews is unsettling to the reader who is more used to a literary memoir, a social science treatise, or an historical survey, i.e., a study of the Holocaust captured in some conventional genre replete with its own specialized language. In his study, Professor Shoham ranges widely through various disciplines, arguing sub rosa for the efficacy of interdisciplinary studies in general. This book opens a new dimension in the study of the Holocaust. That it appeared fifty years after the end of World War II is fortuitous. We need new texts to help us understand a time and a place of which we no longer have a direct experience, yet whose memory is being invoked to support a host of ideas and ideologies that are inimical to our contemporary respect of society. – From the Preface by Steven Bowman.