Language:
English
Year of publication:
2008
Titel der Quelle:
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
22,2 (2008) 203-245
Keywords:
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
;
National socialism
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Historiography
Abstract:
Criticizes bureaucratical theories of Zygmunt Bauman, Hannah Arendt, Michael Thad Allen, and other social theorists, which depict genocide, and the Holocaust in particular, as a result of actions taken by modern state bureaucracies. Focusing on the Nazi Holocaust, argues that the real impetus for genocide came from the Nazi organizations created to parallel and subvert pre-existing state organs, like the SS-police complex or party leadership. The civil bureaucracy, army, etc. (which, like most of interwar German society, had shared racism) came, due to various factors, to carry out the mass murder devised by the Nazi ideological kernel. Compares the Holocaust to the Stalinist purges, the Rwandan genocide, and the Turkish genocide of Armenians. In the last case, the Ottoman ideological kernel, when confronted with the unwillingness of state bureaucracies to participate in the genocide, found other perpetrators, beyond state structures, to carry out the murders.
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