Bergen's War And Genocide

How was an atrocity like the Holocaust able to occur? This is a question many historians grapple with. In Doris Bergen’s book, “War and Genocide,” she explains how the Holocaust happened in terms of how a house burns down. “Three things are required,” she writes; kindling, a spark to start the fire, and complying weather. In terms of the Holocaust, these three factors are the deeply seeded antisemitism, Hitler and Nazism, and a public of compliant bystanders and collaborators. Most historians agree on these three implementing factors, however historians still tend to have differing opinions about the individuals who participated in the violence of the Holocaust. Christopher Browning and Daniel J. Goldhagen are an example of this: Two historians,
Goldhagen explains the German’s instinctive, demoralizing attitude towards the Jewish people that had been simmering and majorly progressed in the nineteenth century. The Germans endorsed this elimination themed antisemitism which easily turned into an extermination themed antisemitism once Hitler came to power. Goldhagen refers to this as “a demonological antisemitism [that] was the common structure of the perpetrators’ cognition and of German society in general.” The use of trivial excuses to justify the enormity of the abuse and murder further supports how little they valued a Jewish life and how easy it was for them to carry out these acts. The fact that this hatred toward a group of people was already their culture’s norm helped shape the extreme mentality where you can kill someone with the excuse of proving one’s masculinity or not wanting to be an
It is offensive to attempt to explain these acts of beatings, rape, and murder with such petty excuses. In many ways, it makes it more appalling that they could view a life as so worthless that they would kill a life just to fit in with the social mass. In order for such severe brutality and demonic behavior to occur, there must be a deeper, more entrenched drive and willingness to exterminate. The depths of these deplorable acts cannot be explained by such hollow excuses. In order for these horrific acts of inhumanity to be able to take place within the German population, Goldhagen’s belief that the people must have had a deep seeded elimination antisemitic nature which welcomed the shift to an extermination attitude is valid. Only an inner nature of hatred could enable a man to perform these egregious acts of