7 - Aryan Responsibility During the Holocaust, I

Summary

During the trials of the perpetrators of the Holocaust, the existential notion of individual responsibility for one's actions was superseded by various excuses. The first defense for the Shoah was that rank-and-file Nazis were inculcated with absolute obedience to the principles of National Socialism. Indoctrinated with Nazi propaganda, inundated with the notion that Jews were primarily communists and thus were enemies of the Volk, intoxicated by anti-Jewish rhetoric of mass demonstrations, and threatened by the terroristic tactics of the Gestapo, perpetrators argued that individual responsibility was decided upon for them by the state. This philosophy also stems from the viewpoint that destructive acts are justified in terms of a higher good, much in the fashion that Christianity led to the Inquisition and the conquest of America led to the extermination of Indians. However, as Primo Levi realizes, the twelve years of the Third Reich did not form the sole educational experience of the perpetrators: “They were born and educated long before the Reich was openly ‘totalitarian,’ and their adherence to the regime was a matter of their free choice.” The overbearing nature of the Nazi propaganda machine, combined with a power hierarchy that molded bureaucrats into automatons and otherwise terrorized a civilian or military population refusing to conform, seemed to have made individual choices negligible. However, closer scrutiny of this argument finds that it is ungrounded. Even in the ranks of the disciplined SS Einsatzgruppen, defections were not uncommon.