Germany and the Holocaust

Paper Summary:

The paper examines Lucy S. Dawidowicz's and Raul Hilberg's analyses of the history of European Jews. The paper discusses how both authors describe the nature of the process of the annihilation of the Jew and the way Germany was organized to carry it out, but Dawidowicz focuses more on the victims and how they reacted and what happened to them, while Hilberg focuses more on the machinery of death and on the lack of morality of so many functionaries and workers who assisted in the process.

From the Paper:

"Much of the Holocaust was indeed carried out by career civil servants, military personnel, and others in the private sector. The Holocaust itself thus became routinized so that it was carried on as if it were any other government activity. Two reasons given for the participation of ordinary men and women include obedience to authority, and the modern era's pursuit of specialization so that people could perform their part without knowing what the whole entailed, or without admitting what the whole entailed. It may be impossible to determine one reason why the many man involved committed the acts they did, for any general explanation is certain to be applicable only to a percentage of the whole. One force that we can see as operating in this case is the conditioning of society so that people respect and defer to authority. In this case, the society itself had a certain tradition of racism which affected these men and women and determined what they were being asked to do."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Davidowicz, Lucy S. The War Against the Jews 1933-1943. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975.
• Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1961.

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