Roland J Pean

Professor Robert Kunath

HI 254

10 April, 2024

The book by Hannah Arendt asks a crucial question about the Holocaust, why did it

happen? In the hypothesis listed on McKay 980 Goldhagen it states that it was simple hatred that

made the Germans assist in the mass murder of Jewish, Romani, and others deemed deviant or

undesirable by Hitler. In this excerpt from page 980 it states, “In a controversial work, the

American historian Daniel Goldhagen has reignited discussion of the Nazi crimes by arguing

that, above all, the extreme anti-Semitism of ‘Ordinary Germans’ led the to respond to Hitler

and to become his ‘willing executioners’ in World War II.”(Mckay 980). With Hannah Arendt it

is a more complex system of collaboration and coercion than simple hate, that there were many

ordinary men used to advance the designs of monsters. While There was indeed mass

collaboration, but it was not just out of hatred, it was also because the Nazi indoctrination

reversed moral responses and suborned traditional values and ideas such as honor, loyalty, trials

of sainthood, and desire for recognition to serve their genocidal goals.

In continuation of the above I am examining a record of Himmlers speech to the SS

regarding what they were going to be doing, as well as mentions of Nazi Propaganda in The

Portable Hannah Arendt. As it states in the text, “The member of the Nazi hierarchy most gifted

at solving problems of conscience was Himmler He coined slogans, like the famous watchword

of the S.S, taken from a Hitler speech before the S.S in 1931, ‘My Honour is my Loyalty’”.

(Arendt 338). The words used to inspire duty from the S.S were not ‘lets murder these
undesirable’ they were slogans regarding loyalty, honour, duty some of the highest values even

today and used them to subvert traditional thoughts against killing, by means as simple as filing

papers to send them to there deaths, by having refusal ‘dishonour them’ or that they are

‘betraying Germany. This is especially potent considering two things, the first is that Germany

was very much a society subscribing to the Abrahamic, specifically Catholic, and secondly that

the worst circle of the Abrahamic hell is reserved for traitors leaving a preexisting cultural taboo

against what could be viewed as treachery no matter how moral the ‘betrayal’ was, as such I

reject the overall premise of Goldhagen’s supposition of blind hatred being the cause of mass

collaboration

The other claims by the text while not laying the feet at the whole of the German people

is not acknowledging the collaborations that existed without the same blunt coercion and

extortion applied to the various Judenrat and sundry other communities victimized by the Nazi

regime and ideology. It states thusly, In this claim by McKay, “Who was to blame? An older

generation of historians laid the blame on Hitler and the Nazi leadership.”(McKay 980). This is a

presentation I disagree with, though I do not support the theory of rabid antisemitism as the sole

cause of the Holocaust. I do not agree that all blame should be solely on the upper echelons as

Eichmann who sent trains to Auschwitz while no foot soldier was also far from the inner circle

yet still responsible for his part in their deaths. This is supported by this quote by Arendt refuting

Eichmanns claims of innocence by virtue of being a small cog in the machine, “In Jerusalem this

matter was inadequately discussed because it was actually very difficult to discuss juridically. …

And one can debate and profitably on the rule of Nobody, which is the political form of what

bureaucracy truly is.”(Arendt 380-381 ). The Nazi leadership had socially engineered Germany

so that those who would not be psychologically able to directly exterminate those groups deemed
undesirable saw this remove as enough to say that they were not responsible despite the evil

being possible because of their part in the dark machinery of the The Final Solution.

To put it more simply, the point where the Banality of Evil came into effect is when the

first bureaucrat signed off on the shipment of materials to create deathcamps telling themselves

they had no business knowing what they were being used for because it was not their place to

know, that they were simply doing their job. Then I take in this context from the Himmler speech

to the S.S, “Eichmann remembered only one of them and kept repeating it … It is noteworthy,

however that Himmler hardly ever attempted to justify in ideological terms, and if he ever did it

was quickly forgotten.”(Arendt 339). This obfuscation is a subtle one but telling, the ideology is

unjustifiable so in addition to creating justifications for themselves, the Nazi leadership made it

easy to justify not looking closely at the ideology itself in addition to calling to mind and

drawing comparisons to many ancient heroes who found it in themselves to push beyond human

limitations to do great deeds. This both allows to create a willingness to look the other way by

‘just following orders’ as well as a belief that by moving past their own misgivings they were

becoming heroes to humanity.

What I believe and is supported by both Arendt and McKay is best summarized in this

quote from McKay, “But in recent years, many studies have revealed a much broader

participation of German people in the Holocaust and popular indifference (or worse) to the fate

of the Jews.”(McKay 980). The responsibility for the Holocaust is not isolated solely to the Nazi

leadership as Adolph Eichmann was nowhere close to the top of the metaphorical food chain yet

played a significant role in sending people to the various camps. It was not solely due to rabid

antisemitism otherwise there would be no talk about having to make themselves inhuman to do a
‘necessary’ task rather than taking glee in what they were doing, not to mention there was indeed

cooperation from both Jewish and puppet governments in conquered territory.

Not to mention that the atrocity committed by Hitler and his Reich while an previously

unimagined scale were not without historical precedence as mentioned again by Hannah Arendt

in the Eichmann In Jerusalem which I myself read for the purposes of academia on page 380. To

Qoute, “For the concept of genocide, introduced explicitly to cover a crime unknown before,

although applicable up to a point is not fully adequate, for the simple reason that massacres of

whole people are not unprecedented.”(Arendt 380). Further Arendt points out that such purges,

though not on the same massive scale, were a matter of the day back to Antiquity and continued

well into the modern era by means of Imperialism and Colonialism. I could even cite the Trail of

Tears her in America which left hundreds of thousands of Native Americans marched across the

country and tens of thousands dead from the appalling conditions of the March. This, as well as

the various justifications used by the Imperial powers also created a cultural backdrop of sorts

which further enabled the cultural programming introduced by the Nazi Reich if by nothing else

then indifference.

There is both indifference and cooperation to be addressed in support of the above stance

from McKay with this section continuing to address the indifference that was created both to the

circumstances as well as to protesting by making an atmosphere of apathy to what was being

done. “The aim of the conference was to coordinate all efforts towards the implementation of the

final solution. … Well he was neither the first not the last to be ruined by modesty.” (Arendt

344-346). The lowest ranked person at the conference was Eichmann who was himself a not very

important person who buried their doubts under mob mentality, there was an apathy towards the

lives lost and objections were never said because ‘who were they’ to be the sole objectors when
seemingly no one cared giving further credence to the moderate position McKay has taken where

it was neither blind hate nor a few truly evil men alone that caused the Horrors of the Holocaust.

Further supporting the role of indifference is shown in this discussion of how Eichmann

defended his role in the Holocaust, he organized the trains an important role but not one of say

directing the extermination, commandant of the death camps, or any of other myriad evil roles

filled with monsters, but still vital. “He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what

he was doing. … The expression ‘Administrative massacres’ seems better to fill the bill.”(Arendt

379-380). Through his thoughtlessness millions died, and through the extreme bureaucracy of

extermination he never looked deep enough, and then that he could do nothing when he couldn’t

lie to himself about what went on under the surface level of his job of ‘making the trains run on

time’. This indifference and apathy were both as coded into Germany by the Nazi’s as the

notions of sub and super humans for the sake of the mass slaughter of innocent people with the

industrialized scale of an entire nation. Apathy letting them simply nod their head fill out their

forms and move to the next without truly considering what they were doing, and indifference to

those who did know under the thoughts, ‘What can I do I’m just one small cog’, ‘Im just

following orders’, and myriad more excuses. This in combination with collaboration, is just as

responsible as blind hate and xenophobia, for the Holocaust.

The role of collaborators itself is both key and very complex especially from those

victimized communities. This cooperation was often given at gunpoint, but it was still a key part

of the Holocaust, “To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people

is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story. … Dr. Kastner, in Hungary, saved

exactly 1,684 people with approximately 476,000 victims.” (Arendt 348-349). By Goldhagen’s

theorem that would include Jewish people as antisemites since the German Jews were still
Germans. By the same metric that those who participated in this were all rabid antisemites would

include the various Jewish elders who compiled and arranged the lists of people to be sent to

their grisly fates. However, while gained at gunpoint in the case of those like the Judenrat, there

were many outside of the Nazi leadership who cooperated either for fear of their lives or for the

benefits of profiting from the assets of those sent to the camps and Ghettos. Thus I also firmly

reject the laying of all fault soley upon the Nazi leadership and endorse the middle ground

previously mentioned of there being large scale collaboration, but with the motive of

antisemitism, rabid antisemitism at least, left to the upper leadership of the Reich.