More on the Holocaust

I read or I should say skimmed a huge book called "Hitler's Willing Executioners".

It was too much of an academic book to read every word...the book was the result of a Doctorate by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen of Harvard.  But it really cleared up the answer as to how Hitler was able to carry out the "Final Solution" for at least six million anyway.

Mr. Goldhagen "shows that antisemitism was already deep-rooted and pervasive in German society before Hitler came to power, and there was a widely shared view that the Jews ought to be eliminated in some way from German Society."  

Most of the executioners were not just the Nazis and SS but just ordinary Germans.  And contrary to belief, they were not forced to kill, they could have been assigned somewhere else.  They were also much more cruel to the Jews than to  other prisoners.  "They individually made those choices as contented members of an assenting genocidal community, in which the killing of Jews was normative and often celebrated."

Church leaders proclaimed "the Jews to be incapable of being saved  by baptism, owing to their racial constitution, to be responsible for the war, and to be "born enemies of the world and Germany".  They did not believe they could get to the millennium without the expulsion of the Jews.

It was a very interesting book (though too much for my eyes to read) and certainly clarified a lot of questions.  It was published in 1996.