Description

Chapter One Why should anyone bother to reflect once again on the extermination of Europe's Jews by the Germans thirty years ago? The event is over and done. The world has witnessed a plethora of new horrors since that time. And, given the global threat of overpopulation, it will probably witness the death of even greater numbers by famine in the near future. Why not consign the story to the dustbin of history and be done with it? Part of the answer lies in the fact that the popular imagination will not let the Nazi period die. People still continue to be fascinated by Hitler, Himmler, and the SS. Books about the Nazis continue to appear. They are bought in large numbers by a curious public. The Nazi period also continues to be a subject of great interest for the movies and television. Much of the popular interest is undoubtedly perverse. Some people use the Nazi story as a vehicle to express their own fantasies of sadistic domination of their peers, a domination they could never achieve in real life. Others may have an unsettling need for total submission that can more safely be expressed in fantasy than reality. Yet, in spite of the perverse fascination, there is a sound basis for the interest in the period. The passing of time has made it increasingly evident that a hitherto unbreachable moral and political barrier in the history of Western civilization was successfully overcome by the Nazis in World War Il and that henceforth the systematic, bureaucratically administered extermination of millions of citizens or subject peoples will forever be one of the capacities and temptations of government. Whether or not such a temptation is ever again exercised, the mere factthat every modern government possesses such power cannot but alter the relations between those who govern and those who are governed. This power must also alter the texture of foreign relations. According to Max Weber, "The state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory." I Auschwitz has enlarged our conception of the state's capacity to do violence. A barrier has been overcome in what for millennia had been regarded as the permissible limits of political action. The Nazi period serves as a warning of what we can all too easily become were we faced with a political or an economic crisis of overwhelming proportions. The public may he fascinated by the Nazis; hopefully, it is also warned by them.