The Holocaust: Arendt and Goldhagen

It has long seemed to me that looking back over this past century, the single most striking political event was Hitler's rise to power. Unlike others, I would emphasize the extent to which the Nazis succeeded by functioning within the context of the democratic rules of the game. Of course they took unfair advantage of political opportunities, and intimidation or violence played a part in their electoral campaigns. But according to the traditional standards of parliamentary democracy, Hitler's party received more popular support than many other democratically elected parliamentary governments. So the failure of the post-World War I Weimar regime to preclude Hitler's success remains an enduring mark against the vitality of democracy.

The German system can be seen as having self-destructed; proportional representation, which was viewed as democratically more fair than winner-take-all single-member districts, helped to promote the recognition of radical fringe parties like the Nazis. I wonder how many of us would continue to put such a premium on the ideals of free speech and minority rights in North America if we really thought there were a chance of neo-Nazism flourishing here; in France, today, Mein Kampf is still not able to be published. Toward the end of the Weimar republic it was, given the power of the Nazi right and the Communist left, impossible for a government to manage without invoking emergency power decrees which Hitler, once in office, was able to use with notorious advantage.

Hitler was proceeding to implement the objectives he had stated since the end of the First World War. Yet the enormity of the Holocaust that resulted still remains staggering, over half a century after the world learned the worst about what had happened. Recent comparative studies of genocide, which have, for instance, looked at the Armenians destroyed in the Ottoman Empire, or Stalin's assault on the kulaks, still do not match the horror of what the Nazis perpetrated (see Rosenbaum)