Did the masses of “ordinary Germans” approve of the mass murder of Jews and act as willing participators in the Holocaust?
Participate: to be involved/take part
(if somebody doesn’t do anything to stop the action, he/she is still a participator)
Source/Author | Evidence & Interpretation | A- Daniel Goldhagen B- R. J. Evans C- Christopher Browning D- D. Bankier E- I. Kershaw F- M. Housdon G- Joshua D. Franklin H- William L. Shirer J- Ian KershawN- German policeman O- member of SSP- Nazi party memberR- David BuffumT- Italian writer | YES-many of the German perpetrators knew explicitly that they had a choice not to kill, and that no German perpetrator was ever killed, …show more content…
-It was possible for many perpetrators to avoid killing Jews-not a single German perpetrator was ever seriously punished for refusing to kill Jews (yet chose to destroy them anyway)-It has been the unspoken practice of so many scholars to all but ignore-Germans’ cruelty towards Jews was voluntary, widespread, sustained, incentive, and gleeful. Such gratuitous cruelty could have been produced only by people who approved of what they were doing-ordinary Germans degraded brutalized and killed Jews willingly because of their hatred of Jews-27% of those at the end of the war admit that they knew the extermination of Jews was taking place-Germans expressed different degrees of dissent to different policies yet virtually no dissent existed against the eliminationist persecution of the Jews-If Germans had been genuinely opposed, Hitler would have never been able to continue the murder mass-German perpetrators were like the perpetrators of other mass slaughters; the vast majority of them were willing executioners NO-old belief is made of abstract faceless structures and institutions greatly exaggerated -any people from any era with any set of beliefs about Jew (even non anti Semites) would have acted in exactly the same manner with the same brutality, zeal, and laughter-those who acquired Jewish property generally did so innocently -they disapproved of what they were doing but were forced-blindly obedient pressured to act as they did -did not know that their countrymen were killing