Frightened. The holocaust frightens people. Why is that . What is different . What is special, what is unique about the holocaust . Today i will offer you an answer to that question. I will talk for five minutes about my book, what is new about this book and why you may find it useful and i will take 15 minutes to summarize the central argument of my book which is my explanation, my answer to the question why did the holocaust happened in the last 12 minutes of my remarks i will return to the question in what sense may we consider the holocaust to be unique, to be in a category by itself not only among episodes of genocide but among all historical occurrences as in fact i think it is. As the title of my book implies, it is an attempt to explain why the holocaust happened. Up until now, we have gotten only partially insisted this question. The closest to books in print to an answer have been the histories of the holocaust, the narrative accounts and these suffer from the defect with regard to explanation of the event they focus almost entirely on the immediate shortterm causes of the genocide, that is to say what they believed about the jewish people and the situation of pressures or contexts that encourage hitler to radicalize his policy from discrimination in 1933 to forced immigration by 1938 to genocide by the end of 1941. These shortterm factors are essentials to understanding this event but by themselves they are completely inadequate in answer to the question why because they only beg so many larger questions for example where did hitler get his ideas in the first place . Even more interesting, how was it possible the educated elite of one of our most of fans societies would take these ideas seriously to the point of being willing to kill for them . What went wrong in the long term Political Development of germany that a man like adolf hitler could come to power in the first place . How do we understand the attitudes of tens of millions of germans who had substantial knowledge of the killings while they were having yet seem to have responded to the fate of the jewish neighbors with cold indifference . Eight ten other questions you need to answer if you want to put together a coherent and comprehensive and satisfactory answer to your question why. This is not to say historians over the last seven decades have been idle. Quite the contrary. Historians have and have adequately answered all of the many specific narrower stub questions that together make up the larger question of why. But they have done so by and large in specialized academic study, each examining this or that cause of the holocaust in isolation from the others. Unless we have books on hitler, books on world war i and antisemitism and psychological factors and Nineteenth Century german politics and failure of democracy in germany and so on and so on and so on but no book has put all these different pieces of the puzzle together in a coherent whole. To put it another way the historical profession long ago, 20 years ago adequately answered the question why did the holocaust happened . The answers they have given us has been useless to us because it has been available only in fragments, not in a coherent whole. Particularly if you are not and academically trained historian, that is to say if you are normal like everyone, where are you going to start . How will you know how to put these different pieces of the puzzle together in some kind of explanation . Even if you are a professional historian, it isnt intuitively obvious what the proper relationship is between the different causes of the holocaust. This is what my book does. It just unites the fragments. It is important i think because it is the first book to weave together the major strands of causation, the most important pieces of the puzzle in a coherent and reasonably comprehensive answer to the question that all of us have asked, why did this happen . So that being said, why did the holocaust happen . It happened in significant part because the pressure for democracy in germany from the 1880s on which was considerable coming from the german people, the pressure to transform the imperial political system which was authoritarian into a parliamentary democracy such as people live under in france and england at the same time, unfortunately this pressure came almost entirely from one Political Party and this Political Party was the socialist party of germany and this was very unfortunate because it meant from the outset that for many, for most germans the idea of democracy was tainted by association with socialism. This change was a very heavy taint indeed because the socialist party in germany at least in its rhetoric, its formally stated program, was quite radical. They call for revolution. They call to an end to the capitalist system, an end to private property, and for almost everyone in jerry outside the industrial working class which was the base, the constituency of the socialist party, the socialists were terrified. Compounding this problem in its impact was a second issue that democracy came to germany very late. The first german democracy was not founded until 1919 after revolutions that followed in the closing days of the First World War. These two factors in combination, the linkage between socialism and democracy and the late arrival of the democratic form of government to germans oil had the effect that in the very beginning of the republic a large fraction of the electorate was out and out hostile to democracy because they equated it with socialism. Making the problem even worse the republic being founded solely or to put it another way so close in time to the Great Depression had no time, had no breathing space, no period of stability or prosperity to win over these hostile voters and establish its legitimacy among the german people as any new form of government must among its citizens. The republic was barely founded in 1919 when after 1929 it was overwhelmed by the Great Depression which also struck germany with exceptional fury. In the end game you have an electorate that through large parts of which is hostile to democracy or another fraction is indifferent to democracy and people who are absolutely desperate amid economic chaos like nothing they have ever seen and in those circumstances on with those attitudes a majority of german voters in the last election 1932 gave their balance to extremist Political Parties that were antidemocratic, communist on the left, nazis on the right. This is a very large takes a long way to understanding how a man like it there could come to power in their me whereas in our country he would have had no chance at all because in our country the idea of democracy was already respected and established for over a century before the Great Depression began and the democratic form of governments legitimacy was never in question. This is the short answer to the question why even those the American People and the german people experience comparable levels of economic suffering in the Great Depression we end up with fdr as our political leader and they got adolf hitler. The second cluster of issues is related to this rapidly rising socialist party and that is that the elite of German Society, this conservative ruling class, University Trained professionals titled aristocrats of large corporations, Higher Civil Service, this ruling class of half a million men on the eve of world war i in 1914 pursued a strategy of using nationalism and antisemitism as weapons against the rising socialist party and the wait is effectively worked, the logic of it was left as try to get germans to overlook their class differences, especially the crucial working class versus the rest of society by getting them to unite on the basis of something that supposedly is they had in common, there german blood which was now defined also by the exclusion of jews who were held to be a separate race. This is incidentally what ever became the fatal notion that the jewish people were a race that entered german political discourse. To put it another way this right wing strategy was one of saying to germans come on, let us not the upper class, let us not be middleclass and for heavens sake lets not be working class. These nasty socialists and their theory of class struggle, let us all the german together and one way to the german and emphasize our german this is united in star enemies, you may against foreign powers tainted to the german public is being resolutely hostile and a constant military threat and at home the jews who were blamed for fostering division in society. Crucial to this prongs of this strategy was the false claim that the jewish people were the originators of marxism, that they had created the socialist party, they controlled the socialist party and as this thinking was taken further after the Russian Revolution of 1917 that they controlled and had created the communist parties of the world. This is absolutely crucial because in germany and in europe during the first decades of the 20th century there are all kinds of different antisemitism. Many different strands of antisemitism, antisemitism as a religious prejudice and hostility to economic competitors, as a form of social snobbery. All these different forms of hostility to the jewish people were important and played a role in the holocaust one way or another but this particular strand, the equations of jews and marxism, blaming them for the communist threat which was something in the 30s and 40s was very deeply feared was a strand of antisemitism that let explicitly and directly to the holocaust. This is what adolf hitler and his accomplices were talking about, their justification for what they were doing. Altogether, this right wing political strategy to contain socialism by using National Unity and attacks on the jewish people was almost certainly where adolf hitler got his ideas about the jewish people and many other things. Not the is and one can interpret as essentially being radicalized version of this notion we can unite all germans together against our enemies. In propagating this antisemitism as part of this strategy germanys elite indoctrinated themselves, believed to their own rhetoric. This goes a long way to explaining why so much of the educated leaders of German Society participated in the holocaust, most of them quite willingly and arrest without complaint and without their participation particularly in the military and Higher Civil Service holocaust as we understand it would not have been possible. To take stock of the arguments of our the factors i have tried to analyze take as a long way toward explaining the holocaust in that they help us understand where hitler came from and where he got his ideas, why his ideas enjoyed substantial resonance among educated elites he needed to carry out his programs and altogether how man like hitler could have come to power and that is absolutely crucial to understanding the holocaust because of fears one point on which historians agree, an important point, without hitler the holocaust would not have happened. Not that he didnt do it all by himself and he is not an alibi for the rest of the german people but it is clear he was indispensable. The sequence of the events that got him into power is a crucial part of any explanation and yet that said, but i talked about so far doesnt that up to murder. I dont see how it does. It is enough to explain discrimination such as the jews of germany suffered in the 1930s 01 to sketch out three other factors that together performed a radicalizing function and helped make possible for us to understand the great leap from persecution to genocide. The first of these is the extraordinary popularity of adolf hitler. The popularity is too we could term. Is more accurate to speak of deification. Nonetheless, a belief in adolf s magical abilities or magical qualities could have gone a long way to neutralizing whatever misgivings they might have had about his more radical policies including his policies toward the jewish people. People could have, in effect, have said to themselves and theres a little bit of documentary evidence for this im not sure how i feel about this, but the furor sees things and understands things we mere mortals do not. In any case, perhaps the more interesting question is where did this popularity come from. Given all we know about adolf hitler, begin not only his moral depravity, but the fact that except for his gift for public speaking, he was a thoroughgoing mediocrity and someone whose personal qualities were repulsive. And yet this man is worshiped by an entire nation, or seemingly so. On closer inspection, its actually not so difficult to understand hitler was worshiped because he was fabulously successful. You have to remember the condition of germany when he took power in january of 1933. The german people were on the ropes. Unemployment stood at 30 , the government was paralyzed. And over and above that, it was entirely unclear what form of government, if any, could function in germany and could allow germans to come together and govern themselves as a society because the old imperial system had collapsed at the end of world war i. The Democratic Alternative that had been tried for 15 years up to that point also seemed to have completely failed. The way forward was entirely unclear, and the situation was dire. And yet within only a few short years, hitler seemed to have solved all their problems and appeared as the savior of the country. Ill give just two examples. The first is he comes to power in 33, unemployment is 30 be . Only four years later germany has returned to full climate. Employment. In our country unemployment remained in the double digit until war production kicked us out of the Great Depression. Germany was the only Major Industrial economy to climb out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. That alone won hitler a great deal of admiration. But a second example in the spring of 1940, German Forces invade western europe, they conquer france, they drive the british armies off the continent of europe. In only six weeks of fighting and at the cost of only 30,000 german soldiers killed. Compare this to their experience in the First World War where the germans fought for four years, they lost two million men, and they lost the war. You know, measured against that yardstick, i think that hitler would have appeared as a miracle worker not only to germans, but to the people of any country who had experienced their experiences. So the worship of hitler, thats one radicalizing factor. The second is that the slaughter, the pointless slaughter of ten million young men including two million german soldiers in the First World War can be said to have devalued human life, to have lowered the bar for violence in europe. All of the latest violence in europe in the 20th century, the crimes of hitler, the crimes of stalin, everyone elses crimes is just notten conceive not conceivable without the precedent that was set and the damage that was done to the value of human life by this slaughter. And for many men who lived through it, including combat veterans like adolf hitler who served for four years on the western front, with world world war i as their point of reference, murdering millions of civilians could seem like nothing more than, perhaps, those regrettable facts of political life. A third factor, finally, one that kind of reinforced in its effect the dehumanizing consequences of the First World War is that racism back then, unlike today, was not seen as the prejudice of the uneducated, of people we would call losers, but rather had complete respectability, was seen as science, and this made it possible to define the jewish people as almost a separate species and, thereby, to rob them of their humanity which made it a lot easier to murder them. And the holocaust happened, you know, for about a half a dozen other reasons as well. The ones ive summarized for you here, i think, are, however, the most important and could stand as the core of the argument of my book, although theres a lot more i have to say. One of the things thats so fascinating about the holocaust is the causation of it is so userly complex utterly complex. Now i want to return, finally, to the question i posed at the beginning of our conversation which is why does the holocaust frighten us, what is different about it, why is it so important to us . I want to tell you a story. Its an incident that took place in the try blink ca death camp in 1942 or 43. We learned about it from a journalist in a series of interviews conducted in 1971 with a man named franz stengel. He had been the commandant at two death examples in german camps in germanoccupied to beland. And in this capacity he had orchestrated, he had organized, presided over the murder by poison gas of hundreds of thousands of human beings, and these human beings were murdered for one reason and for one reason only, okay . They were murdered because they were jewish. And yet he insisted he was not and never had been an antisemite. Indeed, stengel claimed to have had, in his terms, quite friendly relations with the jewish prisoners in the camp. And when asked was there any aspect of his socalled work at try bleng ca that he had found pleasurable, he said with emphasis thats what i enjoyed, human relations. That is, with prisoners. And to appreciate how grotesque this notion is, you have to remember that every single one of these prisoners was living under a sentence of death. Stengel allowed them to live only so long as they could serve their german masters as slave labor to help keep the camps running. And as soon as they had outlived their usefulness, their lives were over. And these prisoners understood this terrible reality every bit as well as stengel did, and yet nonetheless, his contact with him is supposed to be friendly and, for him, enjoyable. His chief example of his enjoyable human relations with condemned men was with a man named blau from vienna. One day blau came to stengels office, he stood to attention. He formally requested permission to seek. He looked very worried. Blaus 80yearold father had just arrived in a cattle car from vienna, and he was going to perish in the gas chambers in a matter of hours. Stengel replied, really, blau, its quite impossible. You must understand, a man of 80. By which he meant that, stengel moment that since blaus father was too old to be used as slave labor, stengel could find no excuse to postpone his death. The younger blau indicated he understood this, but he did not want his father to meet his end in the gas chamber, so with stengels permission, he took him to the kitchen, served him a final meal, then escorted him to the infirmary. There at the door the two men would have said their goodbyes. A prisoner from the camp would have escorted the elder man down a long corridor to the edge of an open pit. There an ss guard, most likely a man who was notorious for his sadism, ordered the old man to take off his clothes, stand on a plank at the edge of the pit and then murdered him with a pistol shot to the back of the neck. Later that day blau returned, the younger blau returned to stengels office and thanked him. Well, blau, theres no need to thank me. But if you want to thank me, you may. In stengels eyes, he had done blau the favor of arranging to have blaus father murdered by gunshot instead of by poison gas, and this counted among the human relations he had enjoyed with prisoners during his time at the camps. And i very much wish that i could say to you that stengel was an aberration and that his attitude toward these prisoners was atypical, but i think instead one must have to see this as, as near as we can tell, an attitude that was emblematic of the way that many perpetrators of the holocaust thought about and felt about their victims. They subscribed to a racist belief system which held that j well, jews were not fully human and, thus, killing them was nothing to be upset about or anxious about or to feel any tension about. And they could and did live among these condemned victims in the camps. In the case of some prisoners, for a period of years. And moved among them every day and talked to them every day without any apart sign of discomfort apparent sign of discomfort. Their attitude toward their, toward the people they were murdering is reminiscent of nothing quite so much of that of a farmer living among livestock that he has destined for slaughter. And this attitude, this way of seeing and thinking about and feeling or rather not feeling about the victims, in my view, goes to the heart of what makes the holocaust so important. The holocaust so important, i contend, because it constitutes historys most uncompromising rejection of the idea that human life has any inherent value or meaning. And i think you can best appreciate the import of what has been a somewhat abstract statement that i just made by asking yourself, by asking yourself why not . Why not commit murder . How do you know and the emphasis is on certainty, how do you know that murder is wrong . And to this question, we all have the same answers. We believe that human life is precious. We believe that every individual has rights. We believe that our existence here on this planet has a meaning and a purpose. These are good beliefs. Theyre healthy beliefs. Theyre your beliefs and mine also. But theyre exactly that, theyre beliefs. Theyre not facts that you can prove. The proposition that human life has Intrinsic Value or significance is not a demonstrable fact. Its a postulate. Its an unsupported assertion. And you can choose to accept it, or you can choose to reject it. And this choice to accept or reject, to embrace or to deny the value of human life is the most important choice that any of us can make in our entire lives, and hardly any of us is ever aware of having made it. Were not aware of it because its been made for us by the people around us, by the families into which we are born, by the society in which we live. It is a choice that has been unstated, that has been assumed. It is a choice of which we have been happily innocent. And one way to characterize part of the horror of the holocaust is to say that the nazis made a theft of our moral innocence. They reveal to us the terrible truth that this is a choice and that it is eminently possible to choose very differently how we have chosen. They did this by themselves, choosing to affirm that human life is utterly without significance or meaning or inherent value, and they made this affirmation explicitly in the most uncompromising terms and on an absolutely massive scale. Ill make this concrete with a few examples. In the holocaust the killers expressed their moral nihilism, their rejection of the value of human life in words and in deeds that were unique or very close to unique to the holocaust that found only the most limited parallels in any episode of genocide or atrocity. First, what is very striking about the holocaust is the way that they denied their victims humanity in the language they used, calling them vermin and microbes and pests and subhumans and bacilli and bacteria and so on. And if youre, you know, if you are familiar with the rwandan or the armenian genocides, you will have encountered some of this language, language like this, that is to say. But it is used sparingly and metaphorically. In the holocaust this language is taken quite literally and used pervasively. Secondly, related to that first point is the way they denied their victims humanity by reducing them to the status of material objects that they processed for value using jewish prisoners as laboratory animals, harvesting the teeth to melt out the fillings, shearing off womens hair to make textiles. A second distinct feature is that in sharp contrast to the other cases, the victims of the holocaust were not murdered for any immediate practical purpose that one could remotely define as rational. It was rather that the very existence of the jewish people was unacceptable to their killers, and so for the first and only time in history, we have come to murder millions of our fellow human beings for the purpose of taking their lives. Their deaths were an end in itself which leads me to the third and last point i wanted to make in this connection which is that the jewish people are the only large ethnic minority to have ever been targeted for complete biological extinction. The nazis hoped to murder not only the 11 million jews who by their calculation lived on the european continent, but had they won the war in europe and with the resources of the european continent at their disposal, been militarily capable of overwhelming the united states. We cant prove this because it didnt happen, and yet its sort of in the logic of what they were doing in europe and in so much of what they said. We tend to agree that the next step would have been to strike at every single remaining Jewish Population around the globe no matter how small. The perpetrators of the holocaust saw the jewish people the Way Public Health officials used to see smallpox. As a virus that had to be eradicated completely so that it could never, ever, ever grow back anywhere on earth. In sum, moving to conclusion, the nazis have compelled us to confront the horrible question of whether our life has meaning, worth, significance, purpose. Because they affirmed so dramatically with such determination on such a colossal scale that it does not. And this, i think, is, i contend, is what makes the holocaust unique and what makes it or not and what makes it so frightening, is that the holocaust is this historical event that, far more than any other, confronts us with excess of existential significance. And as anyone who has pondered them can tell you, the existential questions are the scariest questions of all and also perhaps the most difficult to answer. Im going to have at the end of our conversation two and a half minutes of concluding remarks. I now want to stop and take questions from are you. If you have a from you. If you have a question, please move to the microphone on that side of the room, and we have about, we have about 15, 17 minutes for questions. So oh, theres a microphone there. Im sorry, i said there was a microphone on that side. Theres one on that side as well. Im sorry about causing confusion. Yes, maam. I have heard it said, in fact, read [inaudible] sorry. Thank you. Ive heard it said and, in fact, read somewhere that hitlers antipathy towards the jews was exacerbated by the fact that he was not allowed into the art academy when he sought it, and that as a result of that he found that most of the judges who had turned him down were jews and that that exacerbated his antipathy toward them. Is there any truth to this . Have you come across that . Its a commonlybroached theory. The problem is that for the first 30 years of adolf hitlers life, the documentary record is almost nonexistent be, so theres no way of demonstrating this. We dont know if the judges who turned him down were jewish, its also unlikely he would have known whether or not they were jewish. On the other hand, hitlers well justified feels of inferiority are well known, his feelings of envy and of humiliation and of anger are enormously important and the success of so many, of so many jewish germans and austrians in the art world, its quite plausible to think that that put an edge on his hay hatred. But i think the best explanation comes from the fact that he was personally so deeply invested in the german victory, in a german victory in the First World War because hed been such a complete loser up til then in his life. This was the first accomplishment, the first time he was respected by anyone. He had a purpose, which was german victory. Germany surrenders, a lot of people on the right wing of german politics blame the socialist party for surrender. And since he and many other people believed the jews were behind the socialists, theyre the culprits for the defeat. That seems to be we cant be sure, but thats the best educated guess for the source of his hatred which was ferocious, absolutely. Yes, maam. I know that there are a lot of books on the holocaust and the murder of the jews. I often wonder, though, what about all the gypsies that they gathered and all the gay people and all the medically, you know, stressed people . Are there books about that . I mean, do they celebrate holocaust, you know, day also . Yes. I mean, theres, there are separate scholarly treatments of all of these different classes of victims, thats quite right. In my book i really focus only on jewish victims because i have wanted to focus on what is really kind of unique to the holocaust which is this goal of complete extermination, this complete dehumanization of the population. And even though they were the targets of racist thinking as were the jews, it wasnt nearly as uncompromising as it was with respect to the jewish people. So i dont have much to say about that, but on the just off the top of my head on the mental patients who were murdered in the socalled youth phase ya program, the seminal work is by a man named henry freedlander, and its from oh, but ive forgotten. Actually, ive forgot withen the title, but its freedlander, and its a very good book that explores that. Theres also some good work by michael burleigh, british historian, who has written about that episode. Yes, the gentleman on the right. Thank you for your presentation. I think it was very professionally thought out. Thank you. Thank you. Someone said, you know, we dont study history, we will repeat it, so i want to put that out there. My question is, do you think that what happened to the jews by the nazis have affected the mentality of the jewish people in israel and around the world with the treatment of the Palestinian People . The short answer is that im not qualified to answer that question because i really dont know a whole lot about israeli politics. Aft top of my off the top of my head, my guess would be that given the intensity of that conflict, the Palestinian Conflict and how long that its gone on, im always kind of surprised by the degree to which the israelis have been able to maintain the quality of their democracy and the degree to which although their Security Services often engage in quite a lot of violence against some of the palestinian community, its impressive to me, frankly, how much how hard they work to keep that in bounds and how much that troubles them. Compared, for example, to the way our country reacted to 9 11. And so i wonder if that aspect of not that im praising israeli policy in the palestinian question. I take no position because im not qualified to judge it. But im just saying in the context of that conflict, the degree to which theyve been able to preserve Democratic Values is impressive to me. It wouldnt surprise he if a desire not me if a desire not to emulate their persecutors might have played a role, but im purely speculating because i know little about israel. Its a fascinating question, but one, unfortunately, i cant give an intent answer intelligent answer to. When i was 125 years old 25 years old, i realized i could have been a candidate for a camp or a nazi. Theres no biological difference, and ultimately how many of us in this room had we been in germany during those same cultural pressures, particularly if wed been young in the 30s, would have done anything different . As very few of us really could be heroes or martyrs, and if the germans were no different biologically, then were just lucky to have lived in a better culture. I could spend two hours unpacking your question because its so good, and its so on the money. And thats not a complaint, im just trying to think about how i can answer briefly. The question is there something uniquely damaged about the germans is kind of the central question that has been studied by people who specialize in german history ever since the second world war. Around the middle of the 1990s after trying this theory, that theory and the other theory, we kind of gave up and had to admit sort of what common sense should have told us, that theyre human like us. Theres no such thing as a german brain, and they dont have a genetic predisposition to genocide. There still remain all kinds of stereotypes about the germans like theyre especially obedient to authority and so on, which i think is Utter Nonsense based on my reading of their history. But, you know, you raise sort of this question of if we were put back in that time and place, we, of course, would not be ourselves. Wed be someone else. I guess the bedrock conclusion that i arrived at about human beings because, ultimately, the hardest thing about studying the holocaust, and i think the reason why it has taken so long for a book like mine to have been written even though the research was there to write a synthesis of this kind 20 years ago, we just dont want to pull everything together and look at it square on because were afraid of what were going to learn about ourselves. And maybe it was easier for me to study this because ive always been an optimist, and i just, i believe in people, so i was never so worried about that. But i guess my, the end of my rambling answer is i think the worst thing i learned about human beings is not that were evil in any essential sense, but that we are completely malleable by circumstances. And you take any human being, and regardless from who, you know, what genetic material, what family background that person has and you arm them with, you raise them with the wrong experiences, indoctrinate them with the wrong ideas, put them in the wrong circumstances, and they will do absolutely anything. And thats really quite terrible. But you can see this is, effectively, the shadow side and unfortunate side of something that otherwise has been very positive across the long history of humanity, namely that we are supremely adaptable. And not to want to sound pollyanna, but just as we are adaptable to complete moral depravity, were also adaptable to moral progress which i think weve demonstrated this a lot of ways. Thank you for your excellent question. Yes, the gentleman on the right, youve been waiting a long time. Sorry. Yeah. This question is a complex question good. And potentially a controversial question in these surroundings. Better. Im from the caribbean. I find what youre trying to do, i must say i think its quite important. I mean, this trying to bring about integrated social science, bringing different answers together to a very complex issue instead of trying to answer it in a very limited type of sense, although those have interest too. They have somebody like you to do what you did. But to call a holocaust unique against the history, for example, of black people coming to the west, being brought to the west as slaves, the slaughter, the hour to risk slaughter of native american indians. Where im from, the kind of wiping away of caribbean young people, simply wiping them away because they stood up to the white man. When the white man showed up, they said its either you or i. The white man had more weapons, so he won. Thats the first basis of the question, you know . Deciding whether its more unique than other slaughters, but the whole notion of it being unique, was if its unique you know, sir, the question youve raised so huge and so important be, id just like to try and answer that and let other people ask their questions. Its not that because i think, you know, what do i mean when im saying unique . This is very, this is hugely, hotly debated in all kinds of different contexts. And part of the problem is when you use the word unique, and especially, i guess, when you use it in the way that i have used it, people sort of feel that you are automatically saying worse, that the holocaust is worse, that the suffering of the jewish people was more terrible, that these victims were more important than those victims. Genocide conferences, this is one of the bad things about writing a book like this, you get to go to genocide conferences which is kind of an experience that i think most of you would be happy to avoid. [laughter] and, you know, and im not in any way saying worse, i am saying that the holocaust is different from every other episode in history in the specific dimension that is in the way that it con fronts confronts us with existential questions. And because of that i think that is why we give it a particular kind of importance and why it frightens us. But it is not in any way to suggest that the holocaust is inherently more terrible than the armenian genocide, the cambodian genocide or the atlantic slave trade and slavery. Thats a comparison, by the way, that has sort of simmered below the surface of american politics from time to time and has been the source of much contention. I mean, the short answer is you cant really compare them because these phenomena are so vastly different. But ultimately, when youre getting to a question of what is, what is worse or what is more terrible or what is more important, youre ultimately getting into a value judgment that is completely subjective. And you can make, for example, the case that, you know, that slavery because of the lasting damage that it has done in our society, the persistence of racism today, the suffering of so many people across three centuries you could argue that slavery hurt her or people more people more grievousously and in that sense is worse. Im simply illustrating this is a question of subjective value judgment. But i guess just to circle back to respond to the gentlemans question, im not really saying that the holocaust was worse. Unique is altogether an unfortunate term. Im just using it as a shorthand for the fact that i think we see it as being show in a category by itself, and i think im correct in making that assertion. Yes, the gentleman on the right. Yes. Could you comment on the unique role of ideology, specifically daniel gold haggens postatlanta in hitlers willing executioners that germany did develop a unique strand of antisemitism that was so virulent that it can be called external that story and yeah. And budget shared by others. Yeah. The gentleman refers to a very controversial and also very popular, commercially successful book in 1996, hitlers willing executioners, actually based on his ph. D. Thesis in Political Science at harvard. And the book is exceptionally well written with a lot of passion, and it makes a very forceful argument. And i think this goes a long way to accounting for its extraordinary popularity. The problem, however, is that the arguments of the book really just do not fly. And let me, the gentleman has alluded to them, and there really are sort of two central contentions that dr. Goldhagen makes in his book. The first is that the holocaust happened and happened in germany as opposed to some other country because german antisemitism was unique and uniquely terrible and not like the antisemitism in any other country. The problem is goldhagen really made almost no meaningful comparison to antisemitism in any other country, and this is really a nono. This is social science 101. You dont make a claim that this country, germany, the united states, france, belgium, whatever is unique unlike every other country in some important way unless you compare that country to a lot of other countries. And even worse for his argument, had he done so, he quickly would have seen something that historians of antisemitism can tell you right off the bat which is that pretty clearly in antisemitism was far more widespread, intense, deeplyrooted and violent in Eastern Europe and on the territory of the soviet union than it was in germany during the first, say, three decades of the 20th century. So the second sort of major contention of that book is that virtually the entire, the overwhelming majority of german societies subscribe to this virulent socalled eliminationist antisemitism and actively approved of the holocaust, that they all basically agreed that the jews should be killed because the jews ought to die. And this argument flies, aside from the fact that he doesnt martial very Persuasive Evidence in favor of it, it flies in the face of a huge amount of evidence that shows us that, like every other society, the German Society on an important question like this there was a huge variation in the character and the intensity of antisemitucker sentiment antisemitic sentiment that the Homicidal Intent of the most committed nazis was probably shared by 100, 200,000 people at most. And the best evidence we have is the overwhelming majority of the german people were not actively approving of genocide or persecution in the 30s, but that they were just indifferent which is also the conclusions of my chapter that addresses the german peoples knowledge of the holocaust. And this indifference is, indeed, morally blameworthy, its morally disgusting. But for causal analysis, its just fundamentally different from approval. And for this reason and for many others, the great majority of academic historians of modern germany or the holocaust who have taken a public position on this book have condemned it or, at any rate, criticized it very, very harshly. Summing up, i have to say i think its a really bad book. [laughter] you know, hes a very smart guy. I find a lot to admire in him. He took a lot, it took a lot of guts for him to take this on this early in his career, and hes published three books since then that i think have been better received, but this first book was not his finest hour, and its very misleading. I think we have time for one more question. Yes, maam. You just said that you just did not approve of the book, hitlers willing executioners. However, the german people did go along. The masses of people youd see in the movie of the heil hitler and the hysteria and everything. I want to ask you a weird question. Do you think now, germany was unified always. They didnt go out, they didnt allow a lot of people in. Is there a romanticism . And by romanticism, i dont mean love and kindness and goodness, i mean irrationality to the german aspect that could possibly add into this . Am i completely berserk in thinking this way . Maam, youre clearly from your posture and conduct and tone of voice, its clear that youre not berserk, so i think we can discard that, and lets not worry about that. [laughter] maam, youre in very good company in thinking this. Look, the number of stereotypes about the german mentality, the germans think differently, the germans feel differently from us, their cultures different and so on and so forth, these stereotypes have just proliferated like weeds ever since the end of the second secd world war. And an awful lot of people subscribe to them, and the thing is one of theres two problems i find with them. One is or, actually, three. Even though people claim to be talking about culture, theyre really talking about psychology, and all human beings have the same brain, and i dont believe that german psychologys different from american psychology. Secondly, theres no empirical evidence for any of these theories. Obedient germans, germans had particularly harsh toilettending practices and, therefore, were violent. [laughter] its been argued when the freudians get into the act, youve really got to watch out. [laughter] but the biggest problem i have with these theories is they all were invented after the second world war, after we became aware of the holocaust, and i think they reflect the understandable desire to push the holocaust away from ourselves and to say this is not a human problem, its a german problem. I could not do this because im not german. Thats, i think, the agenda there. So thank you very much for the question, and i have just time for my concluding remarks. I want to, i want to conclude by posing the question that some of you have touched on a bit in your questions which is what does the holocaust say about us . Because, after all, the perpetrators as best we can tell and theyre a very great majority were completely normal psychologically. Most of these men, in fact, most of them were men, but not all, were highly functioning individuals, well educated, successful in their careers, loving husbands and fathers. In their psychological, their emotional, their cognitive equipment, they did not differ by one iota from the people in this room, and yet they did this. What does that say about us . This fact has inspired over the years an enormous amount of pessimism about humanity, about human nature, about our capacity for progress. And the main thought i want to leave you with is that i just want to say that i think that to embrace this kind of possessism is a terrible pessimism is a terrible, terrible mistake. We need to remember that it was not enough for one thing to go wrong to cause the holocaust or two or three or a half dozen. The holocaust had, by my count give or take, about a dozen causes, and they came together in a way that, obviously, was possible. I mean, it was possible because it happened. But it was not predictable, and it was improbable in the extreme. The holocaust was about as unlikely a historical event can be and yet still happen. And consequently, i think that to draw from this exceptional event some generalizations about who we are and what we can do is a grave error. Now, i realize i have presented you with a very sweeping claim, and my presentation today has certainly not provided you with adequate evidence to to support this claim. The evidence is the book. Thats an added reason for you to go out and buy it. [laughter] so in conclusion, there are two things i want for you, two things that i hope you will get from reading my book. One, i hope and i rather expect that after you have read my book, you will feel with some confidence that you understand why this happened and that this is not a mystery to you anymore the way it has been for all of us for so long. And secondly, i hope that you will come to see the holocaust in what i believe is the proper historical perspective. Yes, its quite possibly the most terrifying thing weve ever done in at least some interpretation, the moral that dir of our history and, thus, is something we must always keep vivid in our memory. But not as our destiny and not, never as an excuse, much less as a valid r. N. Reason for pessimism about the value of humanity. I thank you very much for listening. [applause] [inaudible conversations] for more information visit the authors web site, doctordanmcmillan. Com. Youre watching booktv on cspan2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. Booktv, television for serious readers. This weekend on booktv we bring you the 2014 eagle Forum Leadership summit. For a complete sedge, visit booktv. Org. Also this weekend on after words, Chris Tomlinson follows his familys name by tracing two families, one white and one black. Chris is the descendant of the former slave owners from tomlinson hill, texas, and he sits down with a descendant of former slaves. Then booktv talks with authors from Pepperdine University to discuss Marijuana Legalization and exploration of the south pole. Youll see books about the u. S. Border patrol, israel, fracking, the taliban in afghanistan and the American West in 1776. All this and much more. 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors on cspan2. Booktv, television for serious readers. Host joining us now on booktv to preview some of the books coming up from Yale University press, mr. Donatich, lets talk about your new book coming out, stronghold. Guest yeah. By thomas shaller, a professor at the university of maryland in baltimore, close to the scene of the action in d. C. , and this is about whats been happening with the Republican Party sort of majority in the house of respectives in congress. And representatives in congress. And its a really interesting thing theyve gotten themselves into, the gop, in the sense of different constituencies sort of tearing at the boundaries of their ideology. And it used to be, i always used to think to myself individually that the right was much better at asserting a kind of uniform opinion, as a sort of unanimity. I think thats falling apart now, and the pressure of that will actually have, will actually come to bear on the ideology of the gop and the way it runs its politics and the campaigns for the coming years. I think its going to be an interesting book and very timely. Thats kind of what the democrats tasted 20, 30 years ago. Guest exactly right. The virus is contagious, and its spread across the aisle. Host youve got another book coming out by lori glover, founders as fathers. Guest again, in d. C. When you think about the men who founded the country, adams, jefferson, washington, you think of them as such strong individualists, and you think of their, of the lack of their own personal lives coming to fruition in the way they thought about the new nation. Lorri glover, a wonderful historian, is actually trying to change that opinion. Shes trying to take a look at how important family was to them and how it actually informed the structure of their cosmic intelligence and actually came to family values, actually came to bear on the writing of the constitution and the forging of the new nation. Its a brand new look at how family values were at the very core of our foundation in ways that are very different than the way we talk about them now in contemporary politics. Host and who is lorri glover . Guest shes an academic at nyu, a wonderful professor. We think were going to do really well for this. Host what kind of books does yale look for . Guest we actually try to i think we do best when we look at scholars who bring all the chops of their, of their magnificent scholarship to kind of a narrative story thats actually going to cross over. Were known as a trade academic house. We love to speak with authors who want to broaden their sphere of influence and speak to a wider group of intelligence peers intelligent peers and lay people who arent in the academy but still want to learn and continue this life project of learning. Host and a very quick look at some of the books coming out from Yale University press in the fall of 2014. Next month on booktvs in depth, former republican congressman from texas and president ial candidate ron paul. Hes written more than a dozen books on politics and history with his