Explanations of The Holocaust

As both Browning and Goldhagen argue, and as the evidence of the Holocaust Museum in the U.S. makes clear, the primary target of the Nazi regime was European Jewry. Suppression of the Jews became a primary instrument of policy early in the regime, and their eradication a primary policy focus during the war. In retrospect, the mass murder of several million European Jews by the Nazis in World War II emerges as a fait accompli--something that was part and parcel of Hitler's plan from the moment he rose to power in Germany. While the intent of the Nazis can be seen as murderous from the beginning of the Nazi regime, a clear idea of the way the murder would be carried out was the result of a series of administrative decisions within the German ideological bureaucracy that were implemented with the collaboration of millions of Germans who had highly variable degrees of ideological commitment to Nazism. These were the "ordinary" citizens of Germany.

A complex issue that must be considered as informing the whole process of policy making and policy implementation is the history o

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f war and racism. Browning says that beginning with the first extermination by Battalion 101 at Jozefow, Poland, the men as a group fell in with an ethos of authority, however reluctantly the Battalion's officer might have conveyed the order, and even though the officer appears to have made a point of explaining the order as having come from "highest authority" (Browning 1-2; 174-5). This merges group/peer consciousness with a cultural tradition of authoritarianism that pervaded Germany and that Nazi propaganda and its war machine were able to exploit; Browning cites "the multifaceted nature of authority at Jozefow" (Browning 175). Further, Browning cites psychological experiments by Milgram, in which laboratory subjects were given (and exercised) the authority to punish persons who gave wrong answers and which led to the conclusion that most people will obey orders (Browning 174ff). Also in this regard, Browning (Browning 162) cites Hilberg's thesis of the impersonal bureaucracy of mass murder, which suggests an institutional character to orders proclaimed from on high. This makes antisemitism a factor but not the only factor of genocidal activities. Goldhagen's view of peer pressure is exemplified in the fact that "no one was ev
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Approximate Word count = 4409
Approximate Pages = 18 (250 words per page)

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