Re: Holocaust and Anti-Semitism (was Shaming Redux ) Abortion, Killing etc)]

[Katha Pollitt <kpollitt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Andy -- I don't think anyone would deny that anti-semitism played a role
in the Holocaust!  Obviously it did -- otherwise the Jews would not have
been a target.  The question was whether the Holocaust represented a
kind of inevitable or automatic flowering of a particular kind of
AntiSemitism ("exterminationist") that was endemic in the German people,
or whether  German anti-semitism was deliberately inflamed, and the
Holocaust  engineered, by the nazi regime, .
  Most Holocaust historians ( Saul Friedlander, for example) lean toward
the latter view. Germans were not more anti-semitic than, say the French
-- and probably a good deal less so than the Ukrainians and Poles. Most
Germans were not keenly interested in the Nazis anti-semitic program.
But of course the longer the Nazis were in power, the more normalized
that anti-semitism became, and don't forget, the nazis imprisoned,
murdered, assaulted and drove into exile enormous numbers of people who
opposed their policies. they were Germans too!
   My mother-in-law, a German Jew from Berlin, was born in l919 and was
a teenager under  Hitler.  she says ordinary Germans were not especially
anti-semitic. the only personal anti-semitism she experienced before
Hitler was when she was in the hospital as a child: a nurse gave oranges
to the other children, but didn't give Ilse one because she was Jewish.
  People always talk about the Holocaust as if it was so amazing that
ordinary citizens could be found to do such awful things. They're always
dragging out theories to 'explain" it by attributing special
characteristics to the perpetrators and their societies. I don't
understand this --  genocide and mass murder happen pretty frequently in
our century. The Armenian massacre, the Khmer Rouge.Ordinary Rwandans
killed 800,000 fellow citizens in three months, using mostly hand-held
weapons!  maybe it's not so hard to get a small but sufficient
percentage of the population to torture and kill. If you terrify the
rest of the people enough -- and the nazis certainly did that -- you can
have all the Holocausts you like.

Katha