HOW COULD THE HOLOCAUST OCCUR IN GERMANY?
"I was only following orders." "What was I to do? How could one person stand up to a powerful government?" "I wasn't aware of what was happening." "The real German people did not do these things." "The Holocaust was a myth." These statements and others have been repeated by thousands of people for 45 years as explanations for the atrocities committed by the Nazi government in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, apologies for the German nation, abdications of responsibility, and denials of reality. In truth, however, The Holocaust did occur; a nation was responsible; and individual Germans were knowledgeable of the atrocities, and made choices that, in turn, permitted the development of a societal system in which such atrocities could, and did, occur.
This research analyzes the development and manipulation of the social system in which nearly six million Jews, and hundreds of thousands of gypsies, Socialists, Communists, liberals, left-wing intellectuals, homosexuals, and the insane were systematically annihilated. That social system was Germany; not Nazi Germanyùjust Germany. This analysis is not an indictment of the German nation. It does recognize, however, that it was a German government which committed the atrocities, and that it was a German society which spawned that government.
Since the mid-1970s, it has become popular to subject, in absentia, the more prominent figures in the Nazi regime to psychoanalysis. The purported purpose of these analyses is to demonstrate that either (1) the Nazis were mad, in which case, a repeat of The Holocaust may be precluded by keeping the unbalanced out of power, or (2) the Nazi leaders were not insane, in which case, a society must be on guard against the development of conditions which would cause rational individuals to commit irrational and heinous acts.
In 1975, Florence Miale and Mich'l Selzer concluded (upon the reexaminatio...