The many millions
Holocaust memorial day. The Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp was liberated 60 years ago today. In Finland, the day is held to remember not only the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but all victims of ethnic persecution, past and present.
The simple popular picture of the reasons for the Holocaust has two essential elements: an insane leadership that whipped up antisemitism to gain power, and fanatically loyal followers who were indoctrinated into totalitarian mentality, ready to obey any and all orders.
The idea that Nazis came into power by promoting hatred of Jews which then inexorably led to the Holocaust is somewhat mistaken. To the contrary, during the phase when the party expanded into the mainstream and took part in elections, Nazis played down rather than highlighted their antisemitism. Work, bread, peace and safety from communism were their selling points. After the Nazis consolidated their grip on Germany, the persecution of Jews was stepped up again. The Holocaust was not a necessary consequence of the Nazi strategy for obtaining power, but an expression of the personal aberrations of the Nazi leadership, to which they could give free rein in the extreme circumstances of war.
It should be immediately added that the personal ideas of the Nazi leaders reflected deep-seated tendencies in the population. The image of the Nazi leaders -Hitler in particular- as mad and totally off the scale in their ideology is quite mistaken. The Nazi leaders took a number of common prejudices to the extreme, but invented few of their own. The essential elements of their worldview were shared by a large part of the population, and are not difficult to locate today: monoethnic nationalism, anti-bolshevism and racism (in particular anti-Jewish and anti-Russian racism) were combined with an admiration of organised violence and belief in a cosmic struggle of good versus evil, where all means are not only legitimate but imperative to avoid utter annihilation.
The popular image of the genocide being committed by brainwashed Nazi fanatics is also somewhat misleading. A segment of the German population indeed embraced the most extreme elements of Nazi ideology and was ready to massacre Jews, gypsies, communists, liberals and other enemies. However, carrying out a wholesale extermination program would have been impossible without the involvement of a much larger number of people who just did their duty and accepted their defined responsibilities without dissent.
Still, it's not incorrect to say that they were brainwashed, if the practice is defined as "making people accept forms of behaviour that they would otherwise find morally or socially objectionable" (following Jeff Schmidt's definition in Disciplined Minds). The main point of the indoctrination involved is that it is a virtue to surrender personal moral judgement to totalitarian institutions, such as a military hierarchy. This was of course quite true for all civilised nations at the time, and again, this brand of thought is not difficult to locate today.
Of the other factors that made the Holocaust possible, among the most relevant today is extensive, passive racism. The majority of Germans would not have approved if they had been told that all Jews are to be massacred, as is clear from the secrecy surrounding the genocide. However, passive racism which allows ever more extreme sentiments to go unchallenged combined with indoctrination to act "honourably" and obey even when disagreeing leaves nothing to stop the descent into the abyss.
As one, by no means the most alarming, example I would like to mention anti-Arab racism and the British National Party. The BNP leader makes public statements such as Islam being spread by the rape of non-Muslim women, the party advocates bringing British troops back from Iraq to deal with the Muslim population in Britain, and so on. They also gathered 800 000 votes in the EU elections last June. Indeed, in Europe and the US, the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim variants are the last socially acceptable forms of racism, and it is not rare to come across things that would be right in place in 1930s Germany if one substituted "Jew" for "Arab" and/or "Muslim".
The simple popular picture of the reasons for the Holocaust has two essential elements: an insane leadership that whipped up antisemitism to gain power, and fanatically loyal followers who were indoctrinated into totalitarian mentality, ready to obey any and all orders.
The idea that Nazis came into power by promoting hatred of Jews which then inexorably led to the Holocaust is somewhat mistaken. To the contrary, during the phase when the party expanded into the mainstream and took part in elections, Nazis played down rather than highlighted their antisemitism. Work, bread, peace and safety from communism were their selling points. After the Nazis consolidated their grip on Germany, the persecution of Jews was stepped up again. The Holocaust was not a necessary consequence of the Nazi strategy for obtaining power, but an expression of the personal aberrations of the Nazi leadership, to which they could give free rein in the extreme circumstances of war.
It should be immediately added that the personal ideas of the Nazi leaders reflected deep-seated tendencies in the population. The image of the Nazi leaders -Hitler in particular- as mad and totally off the scale in their ideology is quite mistaken. The Nazi leaders took a number of common prejudices to the extreme, but invented few of their own. The essential elements of their worldview were shared by a large part of the population, and are not difficult to locate today: monoethnic nationalism, anti-bolshevism and racism (in particular anti-Jewish and anti-Russian racism) were combined with an admiration of organised violence and belief in a cosmic struggle of good versus evil, where all means are not only legitimate but imperative to avoid utter annihilation.
The popular image of the genocide being committed by brainwashed Nazi fanatics is also somewhat misleading. A segment of the German population indeed embraced the most extreme elements of Nazi ideology and was ready to massacre Jews, gypsies, communists, liberals and other enemies. However, carrying out a wholesale extermination program would have been impossible without the involvement of a much larger number of people who just did their duty and accepted their defined responsibilities without dissent.
Still, it's not incorrect to say that they were brainwashed, if the practice is defined as "making people accept forms of behaviour that they would otherwise find morally or socially objectionable" (following Jeff Schmidt's definition in Disciplined Minds). The main point of the indoctrination involved is that it is a virtue to surrender personal moral judgement to totalitarian institutions, such as a military hierarchy. This was of course quite true for all civilised nations at the time, and again, this brand of thought is not difficult to locate today.
Of the other factors that made the Holocaust possible, among the most relevant today is extensive, passive racism. The majority of Germans would not have approved if they had been told that all Jews are to be massacred, as is clear from the secrecy surrounding the genocide. However, passive racism which allows ever more extreme sentiments to go unchallenged combined with indoctrination to act "honourably" and obey even when disagreeing leaves nothing to stop the descent into the abyss.
As one, by no means the most alarming, example I would like to mention anti-Arab racism and the British National Party. The BNP leader makes public statements such as Islam being spread by the rape of non-Muslim women, the party advocates bringing British troops back from Iraq to deal with the Muslim population in Britain, and so on. They also gathered 800 000 votes in the EU elections last June. Indeed, in Europe and the US, the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim variants are the last socially acceptable forms of racism, and it is not rare to come across things that would be right in place in 1930s Germany if one substituted "Jew" for "Arab" and/or "Muslim".
posted by Syksy at 19:27
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