Finally, my third class from last week. (I wish I had more time to blog.) My third class is History of the Holocaust and perhaps it's obvious that Nazi victims were dehumanized. Yet the particulars about how they were dehumanized came to be highlighted as we turned to a new part of the course about "culpability," in other words, we turned to examining perpetrators, bystanders, and rescuers (including resisters). An excerpt from Lifton's work on Nazi doctors highlighted how the use of language distanced the doctors from the prisoners of Auschwitz, making them into things other than human beings in their minds. An excerpt from Browning's famous Ordinary Men made plain that not all perpetrators were able to dehumanize the victims, but that most could become used to killing civilians.
None of the readings intended to excuse the "willing participants" (a phrase we came up with to describe and encompass all who exhibited behavior that did not help the victims), but it was clearly difficult for students not to keep very clear the distinction between understanding a person's behavior and exculpating a person.
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