Organisational reasons for the Holocaust

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Abstract

Written in the shadows of Christopher Browning’s seminal Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992) and not quite furnished with the intellectual brilliance of Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), German sociologist Stefan Kühl retells the story of the Reserve Police Battalion 101. He places what is largely known into his sociological-organisational framework of “goal-identification,” with chapters devoted to “coercion,” “comradeship,” “money,” and “the attractiveness of the job,” to analyse the “general motives” of “killers and perpetrators” in order to assess the “normality and abnormality of organisations” (chaps. 2 to 9, respectively). It may certainly be true that “personalisation assigns responsibility to just a few, while absolving the rest” (1). The large volume of literature on the personality of Hitler, for example, seems to indicate as much. On the downside of the sociological structureversus- agency theorem, focusing on a few individual personalities may even have assisted the seamless integration of what Gavriel Rosenfeld called “ex-Nazis. . . in Bonn” into Post-WW II Germany, few were prosecuted while the many transitioned seamlessly into Post-Nazi Germany. Set against the personalisation of the Holocaust, for example, is Max Horkheimer’s still useful and correct statement, “whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism.”
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)209-216
Number of pages8
JournalEuropean Legacy
Volume25
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020

Keywords

  • Holocaust
  • Holocaust_Jewish (1939, 1945)
  • antisemitism

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