I recently read Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt. I learned a bunch I didn't know. For one thing, I had no idea how much the Nazis and their counterparts in other countries relied on Jewish leaders to organize, administrate, and carry out the complex task of rounding up every Jew and sending them off to their doom. Of course, the Jewish leaders were not responsible for the genocide. They had attempted to apply order and reason onto unimaginable events.
Arendt also made the point several times throughout her book that whenever a country chose to protect their Jewish population, either through evasiveness and sabotage or through out and out defiance, they were quite successful - like Denmark, Sweden, Italy and Bulgaria. Letting Evil happen was a choice.
She made stabs at why a few countries protected their Jews, and others couldn't shove them into the cattle cars quick enough -- something to do with Jewish assimilation at higher levels of society. But she admitted that the efforts of Bulgaria to protect their Jews defied easy explanation. Why wouldn't the people there condone the murder of their neighbors, despite their anti-semitism?
Arendt attempted to understand and explain how a mediocre man like Eichmann, who professed to have no prejudices against the Jews, who worked hard to find a non-lethal way out for them, could nevertheless end up sending millions of them to their deaths. She writes about Germans developing a rationale centered on doing their duty, of having the strength to develop a "ruthless toughness" to do what was necessary for the security of the State. The ends justify the means kind of rationale.
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