Abstract
Philosopher and ethicist John K. Roth as well as Jonathan Glover reflected that thinkers in the early twentieth century like Martin Heidegger failed to condemn the Holocaust when they could have done so. This woeful silence prompts ethicists and historians to ask how the Holocaust could have happened. In this work genocide is identified as a process composed of several stages. Two phases of the process are discussed—the genocidal priming phase and the peak phase of genocide. Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 discuss genocidal priming in the Holocaust including stages such as identification, classification, and discrimination. Chapters 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 discuss how in the peak phase all the stages of genocide converge in mass murder in the Holocaust. In mass murder persons are denied their fundamental right to life. This study does not defend a Goldman-like thesis that an authoritarian society was the sufficient condition for the Holocaust, nor does it defend a Browning-like thesis that ordinary individuals responding to peer pressure and to superior orders caused mass murders in the Holocaust. This author asks a pragmatic question: how does genocide end? By comparing ethical decision making in the Holocaust and today one can recognize it has not ended.
I would like to thank the Faculty Resource Network (FRN) of New York University for granting me an FRN Remote Scholar Fellowship for Fall 2021, Spring 2022, and Fall 2022 to continue research on this manuscript. Resources in the Bobst Library enabled me to reply to comments and suggestions offered on the project. Administration at Shaw University have been supportive of my research by granting me time in my schedule for research while still teaching and acting as a school administrator. The Walter Clinton Jackson Library of Greensboro, North Carolina, has granted me an area teacher library card for research. I am grateful to reviewers and colleagues who have commented during the writing and revision of essays and chapters that now appear in this book. Thanks go to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for inviting me to attend Programs on Ethics, Religion and the Holocaust (PERH) Summer Seminars in 2016 and 2021. In addition, I would like to thank Editor Amy Invernizzi for choosing to review my work for publication with Palgrave Macmillan.
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Notes
- 1.
Peter G. Baines, “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow,” Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 20 (1963): 130–41.
- 2.
Norman Gladwell. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2002).
- 3.
Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2012).
- 4.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 228.
- 5.
Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 278.
- 6.
Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 225.
- 7.
John Roth, Ethics During and after the Holocaust: In the Shadow of Birkenau (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 161.
- 8.
Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, 370.
- 9.
Emmanuel Lévinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” Philosophy Today, 33 (Summer, 1989): 121–29.
- 10.
Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000).
- 11.
Neil Jeffrey Kressel, Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror (First Edition) (New York: Plenum, 2002), 277.
- 12.
For an extended discussion of the “ordinary men” explanation see: Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial 2017).
- 13.
I have assumed readers have some familiarity with the famous Milgram Experiment that aims to inform people of the ability of authority figures to compel persons to obey orders even if they are inclined to do otherwise. Readers unfamiliar with the Milgram Experiment may consult the resource: What was the Milgram Experiment? The experiment is cited as an explanation of why soldiers or police killed Jews in the Holocaust. The philosopher Claudia Card believed that there was a disanalogy between the subjects of the experiment and the perpetrators like Adolf Eichmann. I agree that there is a disanalogy at work, though I may not necessarily see the same disanalogy. See Card’s book, Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 11. I refrain from invoking the Milgram Experiment as the singularity that explains killing in the Holocaust. Why? My own short version of the experiment follows: Psychology professors on a college campus designed a controlled experiment to test the willingness of persons to obey orders to harm others. In the controlled experiment subjects are asked to force upon victims electric shocks that are mild, intense, and so severe they could produce a fatal reaction. In response to the command of authority subjects can or cannot not give victims shocks so severe that they could produce a fatal reaction. Subjects did give persons near fatal shocks. [Note: the delivery of real fatal shocks would not be allowed on any college campus by an IRB board.] Hence, subjects do demonstrate a willingness to follow superior orders to harm others. From this some would like to conclude: All persons under superior authority will harm victims if they are ordered to do so by their superior authority. I reject the Milgram Experiment as a singularity that explains the behavior of perpetrators in the Holocaust. First, I reject the experiment as a disanalogous example. I could be wrong, but I find the artificial environment of a college psychology lab with college co-eds as controlled subjects pressing buttons to be disanalogous to a field of battle where military police or soldiers under commanding officers are told to press triggers to kill Jews. The level of coercion is disanalogous. In the military dissenters may be shot on the spot. Since I could be wrong about the disanalogy, let me concede the point. Let us say that the Milgram Experiment does prove that persons succumb to the suggestions of superiors to inflict harm on others. The subject of persons who succumb is vague and lacks quantification. My second objection is that the claim is non-falsifiable. The experiment has the aura of falsifiability, but it leads to a non-falsifiable generalization about the power of authority to control subordinates. The hasty generalization I reject is: All subordinates are subject to the manipulation of their superiors. For the term “superiors” one could substitute any authority figure including metaphysical powers. If the Milgram Experiment is a falsifiable scientific experiment, the hasty generalization is unsound. Likewise, in the context of the Holocaust, if the generalization is fallacious, then some civilian and military subordinates would not succumb to the dictates of the Nazi inner circle whose aim it was to kill all Jews. In fact, some soldiers refused to serve in the killing squads, and some civilians refused to obey the Aryan laws and sheltered Jews at the risk of their own lives. The soldier who loads bullets into the magazine of his or her weapon knows what effect the ordinance will produce upon a human body when fired at the body at close range. They are not pressing buttons to await an uncertain outcome. See Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper Perennial, 2017).
- 14.
Rosalind Hursthouse and Glen Pettigrove, “Virtue Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition).
- 15.
When the right to life is seen as self-evident it is descriptive of a fundamental good. Declarations of this right are seen as descriptive. Thus, the right functions as a description rather than a stipulation within the “Declaration of Human Rights.”
- 16.
For the Declaration of Human Rights see Jack Donnelly, International Human Rights (Berkley, California: Westview Press, 1993).
- 17.
Card, Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide.
- 18.
Sheri P. Rosenberg, “Genocide Is a Process, Not an Event,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 7, 1 (April 2012): 16–23. Following Genocide Watch these stages are presented as ten stages. For an alternate view of the number of stages Mukimbiri, J 2005, “The Seven Stages of the Rwandan Genocide,” Journal of International Criminal Justice, 3, (4,2005): 823–836.
- 19.
Sheri P. Rosenburg, “Genocide is a process, Not an Event,” 19.
- 20.
- 21.
Alexander Hinton, Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004), 44.
- 22.
Regarding denial and the distinction between hard and soft denial see Deborah Lipstadt, Denial: Holocaust History on Trial (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2005). See also Berel Lang. “Six Questions on (Or About) Holocaust Denial.” History & Theory 49 (2, May 2010): 157–168.
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Wilson, P.E. (2023). Introduction. In: The Degradation of Ethics Through the Holocaust. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30919-9_1
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