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Explanations of The Holocaust

The plan of the research will be to set forth the explanations offered by Christopher R. Browning in Ordinary Men and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in Ordinary Men and Hitler's Willing Executioners, respectively, and then to discuss which of the arguments make the most compelling case and whether and to what extent each argument suggests ways of interpreting the human condition and the prospect of future genocides.

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 of antisemitism in Europe, before, during, and after World War II. For Browning, antisemitism is undoubtedly a factor of the processes that led to the murderous behavior of Battalion 101, the focus of his book, but it is subsidiary to his argument that the shape and priorities of German culture more generally, complicated by the fortunes of war, including the energetic anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda apparatus, and the vicissitudes of battalion life and culture in...

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Explanations of The Holocaust. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 15:23, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1711948.html