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How Auschwitz Is Misunderstood

by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

The macabre gate of Auschwitz death camp

The macabre gate of Auschwitz death camp

The author of Hitler's Willing Executioners explained in an article published on 24 January in the New York Times how the common feeling that the Holocaust was an "assembly line killing" is wrong. Ideology is still the dominating feature of extreme evil in history.

Goldhagen wrote: 

"Historical and popular accounts of the Holocaust tend to emphasize its brutal, bureaucratic efficiency, with Auschwitz as its technological pinnacle, whose industrial scale was not only emblematic of, but also necessary for, its success. But as existentially troubling as Auschwitz was and is, and as lethally portentous as it would have been had Nazi Germany won World War II, it was technically unnecessary for the commission of the Holocaust.

And then he added: 

"The cliché “assembly line killing” belies the fact that rounding up Jews and shipping them, sometimes for many hundreds of miles, to a death factory was far less efficient than merely killing them where the Germans found them. The Nazi leadership created death factories not for expeditious reasons, but to distance the killers from their victims".

In Rwanda, said Goldhagen, 

"the Hutu perpetrators killed 800,000 Tutsi at a more intensive daily rate than the Germans did the Jews, using only the most primitive technological means, mainly machetes, knives and clubs".

To then state that the very nature of Auschwitz is that of a microcosm: 

"Auschwitz was thus much more than just the gas chambers and crematories — taken as a whole, it was a microcosm, not so much of the specific mechanisms of the Holocaust, but of the Nazis’ ideological vision of a world to be ruled by a master race, resting on the collective graves of the Jewish people and of tens of millions of additional victims the Germans deemed demographically expendable, and served by an enormous population of slaves. It reveals that during the Holocaust, mass annihilation, as genocide always is, was part of a larger eliminationist agenda and, at its core, a mechanism for social and political transformation".

Once again, the concept of mass atrocities, in which the Holocaust can be considered in link with the other cases of elimination of peoples and cultures, emerges forcefully from the most important works of a prominent scholar. 

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