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,