How much do you see the element of antisemitism, be it traditional or racial antisemitism that the Nazis espoused during the Third Reich, as an explanation of the motivation for the killings?
I would see it in several instances; certainly for the regime in terms of setting policy, it was crucial. Hitler was an obsessed antisemite. He also worked within a German and European context of centuries of traditional antisemitism whereby, in an increasingly nationalistic Europe, the Jews — the most significant minority without a nation or country — were also the most vulnerable minority. Given various historical circumstances in the past, they were also identified — in terms of what we might call political buzzwords for political mobilization — with all sorts of movements in Europe, from left-wing politics to exploitive capitalism to internationalism. Antisemitism was thus made a very broad plank in right-wing politics in virtually every country in Europe. Over the background of Christian antisemitism and at least a hundred years of antisemitic right-wing politics in which the Jew was the symbol for everything the conservatives opposed was superimposed the antisemitism of the Nazi regime, which was an extremely obsessive and fanatical antisemitism. Regimes like that of the Nazis can then harness people from elsewhere who have been totally desensitized on this issue. Antisemitism may not be of the same priority to them as it is to the Nazis, but their sensitivities towards Jews as equal human beings has been dulled considerably. So the impact of both these antisemitisms — both the impetus behind the regime's making policy and the lowering of the threshold at which lots of ordinary people in Europe would find it easy not to see the Jews as part of the community of human obligation to whom they owe some sort of respect — dovetailed.
Your book begins with the story of Major Trapp bringing together the entire battalion and giving that talk, allowing those that do not want to shoot to step out of rank, and throughout the book, antisemitism as one of the motivating factors does not play a part. Why?
Oh, I disagree with that assertion. In the book I do talk about how there is a dovetailing of antisemitism with other factors; how the situation of the war and the polarization that it brings about in the creation of a racial empire in the East is in fact crucial. It made it easy for the Nazis to target Jews and to lower the thresholds by which other people could quite willingly shoot, or carry out the murder of Jews. Nothing, in a sense, helped the Nazis to kill Jews so much as the framework of a race war in which their own antisemitic priorities fit very easily. And it allowed them to harness others to their antisemitic priorities. As I've said, a broader kind of antisemitism of a much less obsessive kind was part of the equation as well.
Source: Taken From The Multimedia CD ‘Eclipse Of Humanity’, YadVashem, Jerusalem 2000.
