ABSTRACT
Historian Jeffrey Herf, author of The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, spoke to Fathom editor Alan Johnson about his book Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far-Left 1967–1981. In this extract, the two discuss the genesis of the book, the antisemitic purges in the Communist states in the 1940s and 1950s, and the motivations for, and the forms taken by East Germany’s undeclared war on Israel. They also cover the complicity of the United Nations, the emergence of a ‘Eurocentric definition of counter-terrorism’, and the reasons for the rise of left antisemitism on the West German far-left from the 1960s, which went on to take terrorist forms with the Baader–Meinhof Group and Revolutionary Cells. They end on the experiences of the Jewish people, routinely ignored, who were the targets of these undeclared wars.
