Book received from NetGalley

This book goes into what happens when the law doesn't punish those who many feel should be punished. The people who committed genocide starting just after World War I and the consequences of the lack of action and how it pertained to the aftermath of The Second World War. It was a rough read and many times I felt myself getting mad at the lawyers who represented the individuals who participated in the various atrocities mentioned in this book. I believe that I learned quite a bit about a part of history that seems to be glossed over.

A well written book. I learned a lot from this book. The Splendid Blond beast is a ☆☆☆☆☆ rating.

Chilling but could have been much better. Not my interest area, it did highlight things I had previously not known. Won't be read again though!

The Splendid Blond Beast of Christopher Simpson’s title refers to Nietzsche’s image of a predatory elite operating outside the law and above conventional morality. Whilst it is often claimed that Nietzsche’s philosophy was misappropriated by the Nazis, the choice of this particular phrase by Simpson seems apt given that his book is subtitled ‘Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century’ and his thesis is that financial interests collaborated with certain politicians, unconstrained by domestic or international law, in committing genocide.

The book focuses on two genocides in particular: the Armenian Genocide of 1915-18 and what Simpson calls “Hitler’s Holocaust of the Jews”, although this shorthand phrase is something of a misnomer in terms of Simpson’s argument as he alleges (in words echoing Daniel Goldhagen) that “the Nazi party, SS, and similar groups — by themselves lacked the resources to disenfranchise and eventually murder millions of Jews” so that they only “succeeded in unleashing the Holocaust … by harnessing … commerce, the courts, university scholarship, religious observance, routine government administration, and so on — to the specialized tasks necessary for mass murder.”

Simpson addresses and cogently dismisses the thesis that the Holocaust is unique and his pairing of the Armenian with the Nazi genocide is well chosen, given that “Hitler repeatedly pointed to the Turkish race-murder of Armenians as an example for his own thinking”, although obviously the Armenian genocide lacks big business involvement analogous to the role of, say, I. G. Farben in Auschwitz.

‘The Splendid Blond Beast’ is often illuminating but it is not without shortcomings arising from the very boldness of Simpson’s claims and the vigour with which he advances them. For example, Simpson writes that, “Jewish wealth, and later Jewish blood, provided an essential lubricant that kept Germany's ruling coalition intact throughout its first decade in power.” Yet to speak of a “ruling coalition” of Big Business and the Nazis overstates the case.

Gleichschaltung was the process of co-ordination or Nazification whereby Hitler sought to eliminate independent institutions and agencies so as to bring all the levers of power within the control of the Nazi state. It is a word that does not appear once in the almost 400 pages of Simpson’s book but whilst Big Business, like the German military, was not subject to the full force of Gleichschaltung it is misleading to treat Germany’s business elite as if it constituted an independent partner of the NSDAP in the Third Reich. Nazi ideology did not always sit comfortably with business interests as shown by the way in which Kristallnacht initially threatened to undermine the fragile recovery of the economy, until the Nazis hit upon the idea of fining the Jews themselves for the damage caused during the pogrom.

Simpson’s tendency to make sweeping statements is also illustrated by his claim that “crimes against humanity are usually something a government does to its own people, such as genocide” when a moment’s thought reveals that the German and Austrian Jews – Hitler’s “own people” (not of course that he would have accepted that characterization) comprised only a small percentage of the Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Simpson may well be right to castigate the United States for blocking the creation of an international criminal court but it is difficult for the reader not to feel that at times his frustration with perceived U.S. failings today results in unjustified harshness in his assessment of the record of previous administrations, so that he claims, for example, that “by the 1940s the Allied refusal to rescue Jews … seemed to key U.S. officials of the day to be reasonable and ‘appropriate’, even in situations where rescue would have been relatively simple and inexpensive.” Would it really have been “simple” to extract Jews from a continent locked in total war? Would genocidal Nazis (or rather genocidal Germans if one follows Simpson’s argument) have been willing to let them be rescued?

In short, this is an ambitious and thought-provoking book, which does particularly well in reminding us of the Armenian Genocide when the Turkish government persists in denying it, but it is flawed in making assumptions and claims which often reach beyond what the evidence can comfortably support.