larvatus prodeo

German Motivations for the Destruction of the Jews

By RAUL HILBERG

[See Part 1 here.]

        MALFUNCTION
    Broadly speaking, three kinds of breakdown have been proposed in malfunction theory: an intellectual failure, a cultural disruption, and a psychic disturbance. Propagandistic fabrications, upsetting a rational order of thought, may lead to indoctrination; the floundering of a culture may result in regression; personality disorders, produced by a series of frustrations, may yield abnormal behavior with compulsive, paranoid, masochistic, or anxietal manifestations. ( Read more... )

    The destruction of the Jews was a tour de force. An alignment of all the motivation theories against the available facts yields that conclusion as a residue. We are thus left with a crude contour of the hypothetical German mind. It is the image of a German who walked with fleeting fantasms. Frustrations nurtured and reinforced them. In a technological bureaucracy he found an impersonal medium for their realization. Obscure memories of a medieval heritage shrouded him with protective symbols. Propaganda supplied him with rationalizations. Ambitions spurred him on. And below, a helpless victim, twitching in pain, was ready for the fatal blow.

( Footnotes: )

Double standards don’t work anymore; Germany has become too sophisticated. One way to look at Hitler’s scurrilous anti-Jewish tirades is as a provocation to focus people on the Jewish boycott against Germany, ever-increasing Jewish domination of European finance and professions, unrequited Jewish responsibility for German defeat and humiliation, and virulent Jewish contamination of Nordic races.

Iranian Nazi language can be vile, but any Islamist European peace — and engagement with Iran Germany — will have to take account of these points.