om any motive that could be called rational even in by most amoral and Machiavellian standards. In its earlier stages, it is true, Nazi Germany's war against the Jews might be interpreted as a characteristic instance of a regime consolidating its hold by turning popular frustrations against an unpopular minority group. The classic example of this form of terror, to an American, is the manner in which the post Reconstruction elite of the American South used the victimization of African Americans, and the fomenting of white racism among poor Southern whites, to forestall any possible development of an economic class based populism that might join poor whites and blacks in alliance against the dominant elite.
This was the way in which one master of power politics, Winston Churchill, appeared to misunderstand Nazi antisemitism. Churchill is reputed to have told a Nazi official that "antisemitism is a strong starter but a poor finisher." Implicit in this statement was the assumption that the Nazis were simply using anti semitism as a means to an end: that they were pandering to the worst impulses in the German people in order to strengthen their own political hold.
No doubt this was an factor in the use of antisemitism by the Nazis before they came to power, and in their earlier years of rule. But for practical purposes, the "populist" use of antisemitism in Nazi Germany reached its climax and end with Kristallnacht in 1938. Many Nazi functionaries were alarmed by the anarchic disorder implicit in Kristallnacht, and there were no repetitions. More notably, when the "Final Solution" was put in place after the Wannsee Conference of 1942, it was cloaked in secrecy.
No doubt there was much willful turning of blind eyes by ordinary Germans to the evidence of the Final Solution being carried out among them. But the crucial point is that the Final Solution was not used as an element of mass political mobilizati...