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Antisemitism in germany essay
Anti-semitism & propaganda in nazi germany
Antisemitism in germany essay
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Arguments of Christopher Browning versus Daniel John Goldhagen Regarding The German View of the Holocaust The arguments of Christopher Browning and Daniel John Goldhagen contrast greatly based on the underlining meaning of the Holocaust to ordinary Germans. Why did ordinary citizens participate in the process of mass murder? Christopher Browning examines the history of a battalion of the Order Police who participated in mass shootings and deportations. He debunks the idea that these ordinary men were simply coerced to kill but stops short of Goldhagen's simplistic thesis. Browning uncovers the fact that Major Trapp offered at one time to excuse anyone from the task of killing who was "not up to it." Despite this offer, most of the men chose to kill anyway. Browning's traces how these murderers gradually became less "squeamish" about the killing process and delves into explanations of how and why people could behave in such a manner. Goldhagen's book however, has the merit of opening up a new perspective on ways of viewing the Holocaust, and it is the first to raise crucial questions about the extent to which eliminationist anti-Semitism was present among the German population as a whole. Using extensive testimonies from the perpetrators themselves, it offers a chilling insight into the mental and cognitive structures of hundreds of Germans directly involved in the killing operations. Anti-Semitism plays a primary factor in the argument from Goldhagen, as it is within his belief that anti-Semitism "more or less governed the ideational life of civil society" in pre-Nazi Germany . Goldhagen stated that a "Demonological anti-Semitism, of the virulent racial variety, was the common structure of the perpetrators' cognit... ... middle of paper ... ...d in is own home. He was found by Soviet men in his home and taken to Siberia, because he was too young, in their point of view, to not be a member of the Nazi party. This is a man that Goldhagen cannot say is a fanatic anti-Semite and because of his own story to me I cannot deem the entire German population to be Goldhagen's 'ordinary Germans'. It is not an easy debate and will probably never be one but I would hope that someone could see that we cannot say something about an entire population. We would have to look at each member individually and then I am sure that we would find that some were those 'ordinary men', that Browning believed and some were the 'ordinary Germans' that Goldhagen believed in. Bibliography: Browning, Christopher R., Ordinary Men. Harper Perennial,New York, 1993 Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Random House, Inc. New York, 1996
This essay will review Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial moral inquiry, ‘A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair’, published in 2002. Goldhagen attended Harvard University as a graduate, undergraduate and assistant professor until he was denied tenure in 2003; this possibly indicates his limited status as an academic. Goldhagen notes that he is ‘indebted’ to his father, a Holocaust survivor, for some of his findings on the Holocaust. This personal connection to the Holocaust on the one hand allows Goldhagen to write more passionately. On the other hand, it obscures his ability to view evidence objectively, evident in this book under review. Goldhagen status rose to notoriety due to the controversial nature of his first book, ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ published in 1996. This received much criticism and perhaps more importantly to Goldhagen, plenty of publicity. The contentious assertions of the book, whether academically valid or not, established the relative novice amongst historians. This is evident in the abundance of secondary literature that comments on Goldhagen’s work including that edited by F. Littell and F. Kautz. Goldhagen’s credentials as a controversial author explain the extremist content of his second book, ‘A Moral Reckoning’. Goldhagen’s academic background in political science is evident in the books emphasis on the church as a ‘political institution’ and the pope as a ‘political leader’ (p. 184). . This limits his work as a historian as he fails to fully examine the role of the individual.
Throughout the Holocaust, the Jews were continuously dehumanized by the Nazis. However, these actions may not have only impacted the Jews, but they may have had the unintended effect of dehumanizing the Nazis as well. What does this say about humanity? Elie Wiesel and Art Spiegelman both acknowledge this commentary in their books, Night and Maus. The authors demonstrate that true dehumanization reveals that the nature of humanity is not quite as structured as one might think.
The atrocities of war can take an “ordinary man” and turn him into a ruthless killer under the right circumstances. This is exactly what Browning argues happened to the “ordinary Germans” of Reserve Police Battalion 101 during the mass murders and deportations during the Final Solution in Poland. Browning argues that a superiority complex was instilled in the German soldiers because of the mass publications of Nazi propaganda and the ideological education provided to German soldiers, both of which were rooted in hatred, racism, and anti-Semitism. Browning provides proof of Nazi propaganda and first-hand witness accounts of commanders disobeying orders and excusing reservists from duties to convince the reader that many of the men contributing to the mass
In March 11, 1900 in a German town called Konitz the severed body parts of a human were discovered. Almost immediately, the blame fell on the Jewish. As Smith points out, anti-Semitism had been on a steady decline, and the anti-Semitics were looking for ways to revitalize the movement. The murder was an opportunity for anti-Semitics revive their movement. After the identity of the body was discovered to be Ernst Winter, the Staatsburgerzeitung, an anti-Semitic newspaper, printed several articles focusing on Konitz. Using unverified accounts from people in the town, it claimed that the murder was a ritual murder that had been carried out by the Jewish. The use of fear mongering was affective because the paper was a Berlin based paper so distribution was wide, and news of the murder traveled far. A crucial facet of the rise of anti-Semitism was due to anti-Semitic newspapers taking stories such as the Ernst Winter murder and using them to promote their cause. One of Smith’s sources, the Preuβische Jahrbṻcher, had a printed article written by Heinrich von Treitschke who was an historian; in which one of his quotes was “The Jews are our misfortune.” His article was what later spurred the German population’s turn from liberalism a...
Most narratives out of the Holocaust from the Nazis point of view are stories of soldiers or citizens who were forced to partake in the mass killings of the Jewish citizens. Theses people claim to have had no choice and potentially feared for their own lives if they did not follow orders. Neighbors, The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, by Jan T. Gross, shows a different account of people through their free will and motivations to kill their fellow Jewish Neighbors. Through Gross’s research, he discovers a complex account of a mass murder of roughly 1,600 Jews living in the town of Jedwabne Poland in 1941. What is captivating about this particular event was these Jews were murdered by friends, coworkers, and neighbors who lived in the same town of Jedwabne. Gross attempts to explain what motivated these neighbors to murder their fellow citizens of Jedwabne and how it was possible for them to move on with their lives like it had never happened.
During World War II, many German soldiers killed thousands of innocent lives, especially Jewish. However, not all lives lost during World War II, and the Holocaust be accounted for by German soldiers, and the mobile killing task force, Einsatzgruppen, but citizens themselves. In the book, Neighbors by Jan Gross, studies a Polish town called Jedwabne during World War II. The book provides evidence on a mass killing on July 10, 1941, by Polish citizens. The Polish citizens murdered roughly 350 victims, Jewish, in Jedwabne. This evidence brought to light by the author shows not all Germans were accountable for all the mass murders during the time period.
Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland was a book that took us back to the horrors of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a mass killing of Jews in Germany that was led by Adolf Hitler. Hitler wanted to get rid of all of the Jews in Europe because he thought they were an inferior race. So Hitler would gather the men who were going to have the job of killing the Jews, and they were called the “Ordinary Men”. In this book, Browning does a great job showing who the ordinary men were and how the ordinary men turned into killers.
Murders inflicted upon the Jewish population during the Holocaust are often considered the largest mass murders of innocent people, that some have yet to accept as true. The mentality of the Jewish prisoners as well as the officers during the early 1940’s transformed from an ordinary way of thinking to an abnormal twisted headache. In the books Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi and Ordinary men by Christopher R. Browning we will examine the alterations that the Jewish prisoners as well as the police officers behaviors and qualities changed.
Christopher Browning describes how the Reserve Police Battalion 101, like the rest of German society, was immersed in a flood of racist and anti-Semitic propaganda. Browning describes how the Order Police provided indoctrination both in basic training and as an ongoing practice within each unit. Many of the members were not prepared for the killing of Jews. The author examines the reasons some of the police members did not shoot. The physiological effect of isolation, rejection, and ostracism is examined in the context of being assigned to a foreign land with a hostile population. The contradictions imposed by the demands of conscience on the one hand and the norms of the battalion on the other are discussed. Ordinary Men provides a graphic portrayal of Police Battalion 101's involvement in the Holocaust.
Goldhagen, Daniel J. (1997) Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Abacus : London)
Rosenbaum, Alan S. Is The Holocaust Unique?. 3rd ed. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2008. 387. Print.
...test, it is hard not to draw some parallels. Milgram noticed that if people did not have direct contact with the people they were inflicting pain on, two-thirds of the subjects inflicted what was considered extreme pain. If they had visual and voice feedback, only forty percent obeyed orders. The number fell to thirty percent if they were in direct contact with the person they were shocking. Browning also points out that the social pressures of conformity were quite apparent. "Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets the moral norms. If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?" (Browning, 189) In closing, these men, who appeared to be quite ordinary, became extraordinary in their brutality and killing, no matter what the reason. Decidedly, their contribution to the genocide was quite significant. It is a shame that many received little, or no punishment for the slaughter they participated in.
...he So-Called Mischlinge.” The Holocaust and History. Ed. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. 155-133.
For thousands of years, the Jewish People have endured negative stereotypes such as the "insects of humanity." As Sander Gilman pointed out, the Nazi Party labeled Jews as "insects like lice and cockroaches, that generate general disgust among all humanity" (Gilman 80).1 These derogative stereotypes, although championed by the Nazis, have their origins many centuries earlier and have appeared throughout Western culture for thousands of years. This fierce anti-Semitism specifically surfaced in Europe’s large cities in the early twentieth century, partially in conjunction with the growing tide of nationalism, patriotism, and xenophobia that sparked the First World War in 1914. Today, one often learns the history of this critical, pre-WWI era from the perspective of Europe’s anti-Semitic population, while the opposite perspective—that of the Jews in early twentieth-century European society—is largely ignored. Questions like: "How did the Jews view and respond to their mistreatment?" and "How were the Jews affected mentally and psychologically by the prejudices against them?" remain largely unanswered. Insight into these perplexing social questions, while not found in most history books, may be discovered in a complex and highly symbolic story of this era: "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka. Through the use of an extended metaphor, "The Metamorphosis" provides both a basic summary of the common views held against Jews and offers an insight as to what may be the ultimate result of Europe’s anti-Semitism. This work serves as a social commentary and criticism of early twentieth-century Europe. It fulfills two main functions: first, it provides an outline of the s...
Who were the Nazis? Monsters? Psychopaths? Amoral? Or were they ordinary men that have rationalized their actions away? Gitta Sereny explores this perplexing image of Nazis and their consciences through her in person interviews of Franz Stangl, the Commandant of Treblinka, in her book Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience. Sereny ensures that she speaks not only to Stangl but also to his wife, his sister-in-law, men who worked with him, survivors of Sobibor and Treblinka, witnesses of events at Sobibor and Treblinka, those connected to the Euthanasia Programme in which he was involved, and those connected to his escape route after World War II (p. 16-18). Sereny works to humanize Stangl, and present him the opportunity to rationalize his role in killing hundreds of thousands of people. Though throughout the book she does not allow for Stangl’s rationalizations to