(This is a sort of post that I haven\u2019t written in a while, in which I just summarize a book I\u2019ve read, as much for my own benefit in digesting, and later remembering the book, as anything else.)<\/p>\n
So I initially passed on this book because I thought it would be like the Goldhagen \u201cHitler\u2019s Willing Executioners,\u201d in which the Germans were, by their very Germanness, antisemetic murders, every last one.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s actually much different than that. \u00a0McMillan digs back into German history, to a far greater degree than the \u201charsh Treaty of Versailles caused WWII,\u201d and pulls out various elements which combined together to produce the Holocaust.<\/p>\n
National Disunity<\/b><\/p>\n
To begin with, Germany, unlike France or Britain, made it all the way to 1918 as an empire with a parliament with only an advisory capacity, rather than a parliamentary democracy. \u00a0While Germany had a parliament, it had very little power relative to a true parliamentary democracy. \u00a0Why didn\u2019t Germany transition to a democracy earlier? \u00a0Partly because it industrialized later than Britain or France, and, accordingly, developed a middle class, and upper middle class, later \u2014 historically the driver of democracy. \u00a0What\u2019s more, Germany only became a unified country until 1871, and the drive of the Liberals for reform was defused by Bismark\u2019s achievement of unification. <\/p>\n
In the years that followed, a political party system developed in Germany, but there was too much division among the parties for them to band together to press for greater democracy. \u00a0Due to the late and rapid industrialization, as well as the separate developments of the political entities prior to unification, the landed aristocracy was more reactionary than elsewhere, and the working class was more socialist, with further divisions between Protestants and Catholics. \u00a0What\u2019s more, the socialists were seen as such a threat that the elites feared democracy due to the risk of giving them political power. <\/p>\n
In order to avoid political change, elites instead attempted to unify the splintered Germans with nationalism. \u00a0(Well, on this point, McMillan says he can\u2019t prove this, exactly, but thinks it\u2019s a pretty good explanation for the developments he describes.) \u00a0There was a movement towards colonization, though Germany was kind of \u201cstuck,\u201d with potential colonies having already been gobbled up, but this manifested itself in persecution of the Polish minority in eastern Prussia (that is, the region that was formerly part of Poland until it was partitioned), as well as notions of racial superiority. \u00a0Even upon entry into World War I, the elites believed that the war would unite Germans and solve the problem of political divisions \u2014 and, to a degree, this worked.<\/p>\n
World War I<\/b><\/p>\n
McMillan\u2019s point about the impact of World War I is not the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, but the impact of the battles, and the repeated unrelenting bloodshed, upon the men who fought them. \u00a0Some men were broken by the war, others emerged with a hatred of war, but a significant minority \u201ccame to love the fighting and . . . gloried in the ways it had transformed them.\u201d \u00a0\u201cThe ghastly battlefields and massive slaughter of World War I produced a generation of violent and hardened men, men who could accept hte deaths of millions as a normal fact of political life.\u201d \u00a0This fact alone didn\u2019t cause the Holocaust, but combined with other factors.<\/p>\n
The Weimer Republic Period<\/b><\/p>\n
During the War, there was initially a tremendous national unity. \u00a0But as the war continued, Germans, espeically the working class, suffered greatly, leading to the revolution of 1918, which by unfortunate coincidence occurred at the same time as the German military recognized that the war was lost and sued for peace. \u00a0This in itself left the fledgling government vulnerable to accusations of betrayal. \u00a0What\u2019s more, several significant political parties didn\u2019t even support the new democracy, and, during the early 1920s, there were assassinations and riots, not to mention the hyperinflation of 1923. \u00a0Even though in the late 20s, the situation had stablized, the government never really had legitimacy, acceptance by the large majority of the people, with reactionaries on the right and a large number of communists on the left, feared by the middle class. \u00a0Hitler didn\u2019t take over a functioning stable democratic state that just happened to have fallen on economic hard times. \u00a0In 1932, Germany\u2019s president, Paul von Hindenburg, was already aiming to destroy parliamentary democracy, and his prime minister, Heinrich Bruning, was already governing by emergency decree; when Hitler was named Prime Minister, this was the end result of a series of machinations to avoid including the Socialists in a governing coalition. <\/p>\n
The idea of The Leader<\/b><\/p>\n
Why Hitler? \u00a0In part, because Germans were expecting a great leader to, well, lead them, as part of the ideals of German nationalism. \u00a0What\u2019s more, Hitler had a series of lucky breaks. \u00a0His plans to build up the German military had the fortuitious side effect of helping the German economy. \u00a0Each of the series of provocative actions in the period before all-out war \u2014 the reinstitution of the draft and increases in the military beyond Versailles-prescribed limits, the re-militarization of the Rhineland, the Anschluss of Austria, the annexation of the Sudetenland \u2014 was greeted with celebrations by the Germans when it didn\u2019t produce war, or any reaction at all, by France and Germany. \u00a0The victory over France in 1940 was just as \u201cmagical,\u201d though here Germany had a very lucky break: \u00a0the initial invasion plan was exactly what the French and British expected (no, not across the Maginot Line, but through Holland); it was only when the invasion was delayed from Fall 1939 to Spring 1940, that two generals proposed an alternative, through the Ardennes forest where the Allies wouldn\u2019t expect it. <\/p>\n
Over time, Hitler was worshipped in a quasi-religious fashion. \u00a0In addition, \u201cover time he became the sole source of legal authority in Germany,\u201d and unconditional loyalty to Hitler became the prime value. \u00a0This \u201cdemigod\u201d status meant that Hitler\u2019s orders, or the effort to please Hitler, overrode any normal moral values.
What\u2019s more, the chaos of German government meant that Hitler\u2019s subordinates not only faithfully implemented orders, but tripped over themselves implementing an order, or meeting a desire.<\/p>\n
Why the Jews?<\/b><\/p>\n
This is perhaps the least \u201cnew\u201d material. \u00a0Antisemitism had had a long and terrible history, though at the time that Hitler took power, German Jews were, economically, on average, quite successful, for example constituting 15% of Germany\u2019s lawyers and 11% of its doctors, even though they were less than 1% of the population. \u00a0This inspired envy and \u201cnourished theories of a Jewish conspiracy by creating the illusion of \u2018Jewish influence.'\u201d \u00a0At the same time, Jews were accused of instigating Marxism. \u00a0There was also a developing belief in Jewish conspiracy aimed at World Domination, firmly entrenched long before Hitler came to power, and these theories enjoyed a new respectability in Germany after World War I, when the Jews became a scapegoat for the loss of the war. <\/p>\n
Of course, Germany was not the only antisemitic country \u2014 a history of pogroms in Russia and the Ukraine, as well as growing discrimination in 1930s Poland meant that the Germans had no difficulty finding locals willing to collaborate. \u00a0And most Germans were not rabidly antisemitic, but had a certain unease which meant that, especially after the Jews were isolated in the 1930s, they simply didn\u2019t get all too upset at the deportations.<\/p>\n
On top of which, in the early part of the 20th century, and especially in the 1930s and 1940s, and not juts in Germany, \u201cracism\u201d was more than just discrimination, but was a \u201cscientific\u201d theory of racial superiority, coming out of Darwinian thought. \u00a0(It was the same impulse that led to Eugenics, and forced sterilization in the U.S.) <\/p>\n
The Absent Moral Compass<\/b><\/p>\n
But here\u2019s a key paragraph from this chapter: \u00a0\u201cTo explain why thousands of ordinary Germans \u2014 not to mention ordinary Turks, Cambodians, Rwandans, and a few Americans \u2014 have committed mass murder, psychologist and historians have studied a cluster of three closely related human behaviors: \u00a0automatic obedience to authority; conformity to the behavior of a group; and adaptation to a role and situatoin.\u201d <\/p>\n
In the case of the Germans, they knew, to greater or lesser degrees, that Jews were being murdered. \u00a0But they had their own concerns, such as bombed out cities and other hardships of war. \u00a0In addition, there was a \u201cdiffusion of the sense of responsibility that comes when a large number of people know about some kind of harm. \u00a0Each person can easily feel that if many people know, then one\u2019s own hsare of the collective responsibility is small. \u00a0If the entire nation has knowledge, each individual\u2019s responsibility is insignificant: \u00a0if all are responsible, no one is responsible.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m tired!<\/b><\/p>\n
So that took a long time to summarize (and, rereading, I see that I completely skipped the discussion of \u201cwas the Holocaust unique\u201d?). \u00a0But I think it\u2019s a very worthwhile book. \u00a0Do the specific circumstances of Nazi Germany mean this could never happen here? \u00a0If his ideas are correct, then it\u2019s actually a pretty comforting set of ideas. \u00a0And that\u2019s all for tonight!<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(This is a sort of post that I haven\u2019t written in a while, in which I just summarize a book I\u2019ve read, as much for my own benefit in digesting, and later remembering the book, as anything else.) So I initially passed on this book because I thought it would be like the Goldhagen \u201cHitler\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,285],"class_list":["post-434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-from-the-library","tag-holocaust"],"yoast_head":"\n