Hist 33D, L 7: Origins III: Groups (sociology)

Prof. Marcuse, UCSB, Fall 2002
Hist 33D, L 7: Origins III: Groups (sociology)

Recap: Psychology and individual reasons

Sociology: group processes

Film clip: "Nazi Designers of Death"

Last Time: psychology

Force/compulsion: culture of obedience; fear of punishment
Enabling factors: dehumanization; ignorance; lack of empathy (cult of hardness); habituation; division of labor
Desire: ideology (antisemitism; racial superiority); own humiliation (psychological—pecking order)

Today's Question

What group processes and structures enabled people to participate in genocide?
Sociology: study of society, social relations, institutions

Important Concepts

"preemptive obedience": individuals internalize goals and work to realize them without specific direction
"cumulative radicalization": individuals (elites) in organizations use their authority to compete with other individuals/organizations to attain greater power
Anticipate the Führer's will and carry it out

Meditations, pp. 84-90

Intentionalism: prosecutors made this case at Nuremberg trials in 1945; Goldhagen
Functionalism: chaos, ad hoc solutions (Neumann, Mommsen)
"Twisted Road" to Auschwitz
Structuralism: like functionalism, but emphasizes competition within structure of Nazi state
(gov't vs. Nazi party bureaucracies)

Example: "race"

Cultural invention ("social construction"), not fixed biological category (Meditations, p. 96)
Bernhard Lösener (pp. 78-80)
- Number of grandparents
- Out-of-wedlock: 1918 rule
- "Liberation" and merit (scene in Wannsee film)

Announcements

Kurt Prüfer