Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany

Paper Summary:

This paper examines Raul Hilberg and Christopher Browning's understanding of how the Holocaust happened. The paper discusses their claim that the Holocaust was not an exclusive event chosen by the German people due to their hatred for Jews, but was due to a combination of factors including the administrative smoothness of the operation, the impersonal quality of the killing and the belief that it had to do with the frailty of human beings in general. The paper concludes by refuting the argument presented by Daniel Goldhagen that the Holocaust was an exclusively German event. The paper uses MLA style footnotes but does not append a bibliography.

From the Paper:

"The pivotal question to the debate on the Holocaust is whether it could have happened only in Germany by ethnically German people, or whether it was a set of various factors that would produce the same results regardless of the ethnicity of the people. Hilberg argues that being German was irrelevant, and that such a thing could happen in any society even today. The Holocaust was not executed by the German people because of some deep-seeded German hatred for Jews, but instead was able to occur due to the vast German bureaucratic system. The "final solution" did not consist of a single department staffed with specialists in destruction, but instead it was a multi-pronged operation of a highly decentralized apparatus, which included all parts of German society, its ministries, armed forces, party formations, and industry."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Browning, Christopher "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion and the Final Solution in Poland," In Raul Hilberg, "The Bureaucracy of Annihilation," in Interpretations of the Western World. ed. Mark Kishlansky (Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2004), 81.
• Goldhagen, Daniel "Hitler's Willing Executioners," in Interpretations of the Western World. ed. Mark Kishlansky (Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2004), 104.
• Hilberg, Raul "The Bureaucracy of Annihilation," in Interpretations of the Western World. ed. Mark Kishlansky (Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2004), 63.
• Hughes, H. Stuart and Wilkinson, James Contemporary Europe: A History 10th ed. (New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc, 2004), 320.

More papers on Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany:

• Analytical Essay # 4237 : "Robert Abzug's "America Views the Holocaust, 1933-1945"
• Book Review # 101108 : "The Holocaust Experience"
• Book Review # 142212 : "From Darwin to Hitler"

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