My summary of the Holocaust lecture notes.

 

Racism and Anti-Semitism:

 

 

Short chronology:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Historical Debate:

 

The debate on why this horrible part of history took place when it took place and how it could be carried out is still ongoing.

 

The hottest debate has been between:

  1. Intentionalists.
    1. Hitler and the Nazis had the intention all the way to exterminate the Jews.
    2. “The Holocaust was the outcome of long-term, deliberate planning; in some versions the plan is traced back as early as 1919. The importance of ideology rather than structure is stressed, and the Holocaust is located primarily within the contexts of German and Jewish history and within the larger history of antisemitism (rather than in the context of modernity, or along a continuum of genocidal events in human history). Intentionalists also tend to argue for the uniqueness of the Holocaust, insisting that it was such an extreme form of genocide that it must be separated from other examples. The term Holocaust is thus to be reserved specifically for the murder of European Jewry. Lucy Dawidowicz, Gerald Fleming, Yehuda Bauer, and Eberhard Jäckel stand as the chief representatives of the intentionalist position.” [1]
    3. The war gave them the possibility to carry out the mass murder.
  2. Funcionalists or Structuralists.
    1. “The functionalist or structuralist paradigm focuses on the structure and institutions of the Third Reich and explains the Holocaust as the outcome of an unplanned process of ‘cumulative radicalisation’ … There was no straight path from Hitler’s anti-Semitic intentions to Auschwitz but rather a ‘twisted road’ characterised by haphazard development, improvisation and ad hoc decisions by various groups within a chaotic polycratic system of rule. The Final Solution arose in a piecemeal fashion, emerging through responses by local Nazi officials to the immediate context created by the war. The importance of ideology and antisemitism is strongly downplayed in functionalist explanations. Martin Broszat, Hans Mommsen and Uwe Adam are the most prominent advocates of a functionalist interpretation of the Holocaust.”[2]
    2. When faced by the horrors of having to shoot people taken from their every day life the Nazis adopted the Gas and the dehumanization policies.
  3. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has become one of the most famous historians in dealing with these questions in his book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust”.
    1. He tries to explain the Holocaust from the perspective of the perpetrators, in understanding why and how seemingly ordinary people carried out these orders he sees the explanation of why the Holocaust took place.
    2. He means that studies of the Holocaust have been colored by a few false truths:

                                                               i.      All perpetrators were SS Nazis. Convinced hardcore nazis.

                                                             ii.      Anyone who disobeyed an order to murder Jews would be murdered.

                                                            iii.      The use of Gas and industrial methods of killing were necessary for the holocaust to take place. Modernity explains why it happened now.

    1. He asks the question “Why, once the killing begun did those receiving the orders to kill do so?”. [3]
    2. He comes up with five explanations to why the orders were carried out, all of them ending up in the simple truth that orders were followed and not questioned. These explanations are:

                                                               i.      Shoot or be shot. Disobeying an order means death.

                                                             ii.      Perpetrators were blind believers in Hitler and Nazism.

                                                            iii.      Perpetrators were subjects to tremendous social and psychological pressure. In extraordinary times extraordinary measures are taken.

                                                           iv.      Perpetrators were petty bureaucrats or soulless technocrats. A step in the career.

                                                             v.      Tasks were fragmented, the perpetrators didn’t have the full picture.

    1. These are the conventional explanations but the don’t answer the question according to Goldhagen. He says:

 

“The conventional explanations assume a neutral or condemnatory attitude on the part of the perpetrators towards their actions. They therefore premise their interpretations on the assumption that it must be shown how people can be brought to commit acts to which they would not inwardly assent, acts which they would not agree are necessary or just. They either ignore, deny, or radically minimize the importance of Nazi and perhaps the perpetrators' ideology, moral values, and conception of the victims, for engendering the perpetrators' willingness to kill. Some of these conventional explanations also caricature the perpetrators, and Germans in general. The explanations treat them as if they had been people lacking a moral sense, lacking the ability to make decisions and take stances. They do not conceive of the actors as human agents, as people with wills, but as beings moved solely by external forces or by transhistorical and invariant psychological propensities, such as the slavish following of narrow "self-interest." The conventional explanations suffer from two other major conceptual failings. They do not sufficiently recognize the extraordinary nature of the deed: the mass killing of people. They assume and imply that inducing people to kill human beings is fundamentally no different from getting them to do any other unwanted or distasteful task. Also, none of the conventional explanations deems the identity of the victims to have mattered. The conventional explanations imply that the perpetrators would have treated any other group of intended victims in exactly the same way. That the victims were Jews - according to the logic of these explanations - is irrelevant.

I maintain that any explanation that fails to acknowledge the actors' capacity to know and to judge, namely to understand and to have views about the significance and the morality of their actions, that fails to hold the actors' beliefs and values as central, that fails to emphasize the autonomous motivating force of Nazi ideology, particularly its central component of antisemitism, cannot possibly succeed in telling us much about why the perpetrators acted as they did. Any explanation that ignores either the particular nature of the perpetrators' actions - the systematic, large-scale killing and brutalizing of people - or the identity of the victims is inadequate for a host of reasons. All explanations that adopt these positions, as do the conventional explanations, suffer a mirrored, double failure of recognition of the human aspect of the Holocaust: the humanity of the perpetrators, namely their capacity to judge and to choose to act inhumanely, and the humanity of the victims, that what the perpetrators did, they did to these people with their specific identities, and not to animals or things. “ [4]

 

    1. His point is that “Simply put, the perpetrators, having consulted their own convictions and morality and having judged the mass annihilation of Jews to be right, did not want to say ‘no.’” [5]

 

 

 

 


[1] http://www.yale.edu/gsp/publications/Holocaust.doc

[2] ibid

[3] http://www.historyplace.com/pointsofview/goldhagen.htm

[4] ibid

[5] ibid