Extermination of Jews depended on wider German complicity than SS professionals alone

Evidence

Jews are in his view “people who …lived scattered across Europe from the English Channel to the Volga, with very little in common to them all save their descent from adherents of the Jewish religion” (p. 15). Antisemites, on the contrary, can claim direct and unbroken lineage through space and time from the Middle Ages when “Jews had been seen as agents of Satan, devil-worshippers, demons in human form” (p. 41), and the only qualification to such sweeping generalizations that the learned author of Pursuit of the Millennium sees fit to make is that he deals only with “the deadliest kind of antisemitism, the kind that results in massacre and attempted genocide” (p. 16). The book also tries rather strenuously to prove that “the mass of the German population was never truly fanaticized against the Jews” and that their extermination “was organized and in the main carried out by the professionals of the SD and the SS,” bodies that “did not by any means represent a typical cross-section of German society” (pp. 212 if.). How one wishes this statement could be squared with the facts! — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1935

Categorization

• SEED: Arendt’s rebuttal of Cohn’s ‘only SS professionals did it’ thesis is a usable lever for an essay on how claims of limited perpetrator pools reassign responsibility from societies to bureaucracies.