Question: What group processes and structures enabled
people to participate in genocide?
Answer:
Culture of obedience to authority
Professional ethic w/o moral grounding (Prüfer)
Structure (organization) of Nazi state: chaotic;
competition between Party and state bureaucracy
Today's Question
What other factors played a role in causing the Holocaust?
In allowing it to happen?
EIEIO Theory
Interaction: E1 ® I1
One country limits the int'l oil supply, so others intervene
Vice-versa: an economic embargo
Interaction: E1 ® E2
Elites try to maximize their income and power
Textbook chap. 9: Economics
p. 224 "…determined almost wholly by material considerations and economic
self-interest"
p. 225 "…wary of international retaliation which might take the form of
anti-German boycotts…"
p. 229 "…self-interest came before allegiance to party dogma"
p. 240 "…many smacked of undisguised self-interest. This was often the case
with industrialists heading firms which (that) employed Jews."
Textbook chap. 9: Elites/Opposition
p. 228:
Pastors
Educated bourgeoisie
Liberal intelligentsia
Why?
Moral grounds (ideology)
Announcements
Videos in Kerr Hall tomorrow; web page
Topics for last week of class
People who deny that the Holocaust happened
Groups other than Jews; other generations
Art/films/representations
Spelling of Nazi+S:
plural: two Nazis were caught yesterday
possessive: that Nazi's gun was loaded
possessive plural: those Nazis' guns were loaded
Eugenics and Euthanasia
Eu [good] + gene [breed, kind]:
science of improving the human race
Eu + thanatos [death drive, opp. of eros]:
painless death; esp. of a person suffering from an incurable and painful disease
(Jack Kevorkian; physician-assisted suicide)
Nazi: killing the "racially unfit"
"Life unworthy of life"
(lebensunwertes Leben)
Film Clip
"Selling Murder" by Michael Burleigh
(essay in his Death and Deliverance, 1994)
Discovery channel, May 1993
Propaganda films:
1935: "What You Inherit,", "Hereditarily Ill"
for Party members and sympathsizers
1937 "Victims of the Past" shown in cinemas
1939 "Existence without Life," "Mentally Ill"
commissioned by T4 staff after gassings
