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🪵 The Threshold

Intense Nazi indoctrination failed to override conventional, nonracial loyalties

Properties2
tagsja-picks, causal_relationships, singleton, xref, category/factual-claims
aliases@arendt_origins_1951, loc. 522

4 min read

Intense Nazi indoctrination failed to override conventional, nonracial loyalties

Evidence

There is a growing consensus among historians of the Nazi era that the perpetration of the Holocaust required the neutralization of ordinary Germany attitudes toward the Jews, not their mobilization;, that the ‘natural’ continuation of the traditional resentment towards the Jews was much more a feeling of revulsion for the ‘radical actions’ of the Nazi’s thugs than a willingness to co-operate in mass murder; and that the SS planners of the genocide had to steer their way toward the Endlösung by guarding the job’s independence from the sentiments of the population at large, and thus its immunity to the influence of traditional, spontaneously-formed and communally-sustained attitudes towards their victims. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 522 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Whatever else the Nazi state has achieved, it certainly succeeded in overcoming the most formidable of obstacles to systematic, purposeful, non-emotional, cold-blooded murder of people – old and young, men and women: that ‘animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering’. We do not know much about the animal pity, but we do know that there is a way of viewing the elementary human condition which makes explicit the universality of human revulsion to murder, inhibition against inflicting suffering on another human being, and the urge to help those who suffer; indeed, of the very personal responsibility for the welfare of the other. If this view is correct, or at least plausible, then the accomplishment of the Nazi regime consisted first and foremost in neutralizing the moral impact of the specifically human existential mode. It is important to know whether this success was related to the unique features of the Nazi movement and rule, or whether it can be accounted for by reference to more common attributes of our society, which the Nazis merely skilfully deployed in the service of Hitler’s purpose. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 520 (#expands, via linked claim)

According to the widely shared opinion of the historians, this did not happen. In spite of the enormous resources devoted by the Nazi regime to racist propaganda, the concentrated effort of Nazi education, and the real threat of terror against resistance to racist practices, the popular acceptance of the racist programme (and particularly of its ultimate logical consequences) stopped well short of the level an emotion-led extermination would require. As if a further proof was needed, this fact demonstrates once again the absence of continuity or natural progression between heterophobia or contestant enmity and racism. Those Nazi leaders who hoped to capitalize on the diffuse resentment of the Jews to obtain popular support for the racist policy of extermination were soon forced to realize their mistake. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 212 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Popular hatred was insufficient to drive the Holocaust — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 212; The Holocaust required neutralizing popular attitudes, not mobilizing them — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 522; Prejudice is neither necessary nor sufficient for genocide — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 702 (+2 more)

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