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The psychiatrist James Gilligan argues that all violence results from the attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.
Hitler’s and Nazism’s insistence that antisemitism was a defensive, not an offensive, stance.
argument that persecution was an act of self-defense was so essential as a justification for what the Nazis wanted to do that it repeatedly appears in ever new forms: They threaten us, so we must strike to protect ourselves.
“Nothing is eaten as hot as it is cooked.”
Three-quarters of the nearly six million victims were killed within only twenty months, from June 1941 to February 1943, and half of the total victims died within only the last eleven months of that time frame. Moreover,
Altogether, at least three-quarters of the Jews who ever came within reach of Nazi Germany and its allies were killed, constituting in the end two-thirds of the Jews of Europe
For Jewish children sixteen or younger, the mortality rate was almost nine-tenths.
How could the Nazis come so close to killing all the European Jews—and do so at the average rate of 225,000 people per month, from mid-1941 to early 1943, and 325,000 per month (more than 10,000 per day), at the frenetic peak of the Holocaust in 1942–43?
The Nazi leaders knew that they could not employ the methods being used in the lands conquered from the USSR in Central or Western Europe. Simply shooting Jews and burying them in pits was likely to arouse revulsion and opposition there and thus to increase resistance to German rule, which would raise the military costs of maintaining it.
Besides, Himmler quickly came to fear the effect on his men of having to shoot women and children hour after hour, day after day.
What the Nazi regime needed was a way of killing people that
was more, again as they put it, “humane” . . . to the perpetrators.
The Nazi regime had prepared the German public for such an action by a propaganda campaign in the 1930s that stressed the drain that handicapped people, described as “useless eaters” and “life unworthy of life,” represented for the national economy and food supply.
Until early 1945, for example, the Dachau camp appears to have used its gas chamber primarily to fumigate clothing.
Most of the 20,000 camp inmates who perished in Action 14f13 were transported to die at Sonnenstein, Bernburg, and Hartheim, three of the sanatoria where T4 executions were carried out.
At 5 reichsmark per kilogram (that is, per 2.2 lbs.) and an overdosage of 5–7 kilograms for each group of 1,500 victims, the usual practice according to the postwar testimony of Commandant Höss, the average cost of murder per head ultimately came out to about two German pfennig (pennies) a person, which is to say less than one U.S. cent in 1942.
Accordingly, the six death camps set up in 1941–42 were all within prewar Poland,
and each initially concentrated on killing the Jews who lived in its vicinity.
Fewer than 400 Jews ever emerged alive from all four sites, and of these only somewhere between 90 and 150 outlived World War II.
freedom is indivisible; when taken away from someone, it can be taken away from anyone.
The temptation in times of persecution is for those not
immediately subject to it to try to ride it out until the horrors end, and in the meantime to look away or to take advantage.
After 1989 and the fall of communism in Poland, Lech Walesa, the hero of the Solidarity movement, showed how persistent antisemitism remained in parts of Polish society. He tried to discredit a competing candidate for the presidency of Poland by asserting that he was of Jewish descent and later dismissed Jan Gross’s findings about Jedwabne as the work of “a Jew who tries to make money.”
Hero of Polish democracy?
as William Faulkner famously observed, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The politics of division and emergency, of bullying and rage—the politics that says desperate times require the political equivalent of “stand-your-ground” laws—that sort of politics always deserves opposition and scorn because it is the politics that is just itching to get out of hand.
Wehret den Anfängen, “Beware the beginnings.” That proverb comes
