The Holocaust required neutralizing popular attitudes, not mobilizing them

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

Categorization

• XREF: Bureaucratic autonomy from popular sentiment as genocide-enabler—carries forward to how modern institutions insulate harmful action from moral emotion. — connects to: Intense Nazi indoctrination failed to override conventional, nonracial loyalties; Holocaust perpetrators were ordinary citizens acting without personal anti-Jewish resentment. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 682; Organized killers, not popular resentment, are the operative cause of anti-Jewish violence. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 116 (+9 more)

Related

• Intense Nazi indoctrination failed to override conventional, nonracial loyalties (similarity 0.89)
• Holocaust perpetrators were ordinary citizens acting without personal anti-Jewish resentment. (similarity 0.87)
• Popular hatred was insufficient to drive the Holocaust (similarity 0.84)
• The Holocaust’s perpetrators were ordinary educated men of their era, not deviants. (similarity 0.84)
• Holocaust perpetrators were normal and their institutions socially non-pathological (similarity 0.83)
• German popular antisemitism was weaker than in several other European countries. (similarity 0.82)
• Traditional antisemitism negatively correlates with willingness to perpetrate genocide (similarity 0.82)
• Majority ambivalence toward Jews, not indifference, enabled genocide (similarity 0.82)
• The Holocaust’s moral categories grew more contested after consensus about the facts settled (similarity 0.81)
• The Nazi accomplishment was neutralizing universal moral inhibition against killing (similarity 0.81)
• Organized killers, not popular resentment, are the operative cause of anti-Jewish violence. (similarity 0.81)
• Nazi ideology encompassed antisemitic views that blamed Germans rather than Jews (similarity 0.81)
• The Holocaust resulted from distinctly modern social and political conditions (similarity 0.81)
• Popular antisemitism contributed to the Holocaust chiefly through induced apathy. (similarity 0.81)
• Public indifference, not hatred, greased the machinery of genocide (similarity 0.80)