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Many
answers to this question have been offered theological,
historical, philosophical, psychological, and Marxist but none
alone will ever be satisfactory. The historical answer might read
something like this:
In the
1930s, large segments of the German populace consented to live in a
society based on the tenets of hatred, ethnic utopianism, and
violence. They went to war to redress every wrong and every
perceived wrong perpetrated against them over the previous 200
years, and to create their version of a better world. A central
belief in the system by which they lived was that the Jews (or
"The Jew") represented everything diametrically opposed to
them and, for this reason, had to be removed. This belief was
closely connected to a racial worldview, shared by many, which
defined the Germans as members of a master race the Nordic
Aryans and the Jews as an anti-race befouled by
destructive physical characteristics. The utopia toward which these
Germans strove would be unattainable if the Jews remained. When the
geographical removal of the Jews proved infeasible, they resorted to
the most radical of solutions: a Final Solution. |
