Escalating Violence
From Facing History and Ourselves:
Holocaust and Human Behavior, Chapter 6
In Chapter 2, we saw that every individual and every nation has a “universe of obligation” – a circle of persons “toward whom obligations are owed, to whom rules apply and whose injuries call for [amends] by the community.” Each, however, defines that universe just a little differently. Chapter 6 focuses on the way individuals and nations defined their “universes of obligation” in the late 1930s and the consequences of those definitions.
Hitler made no secret of his racist views or his plans to build a “Greater Germany.” As early as 1928, he spelled them out in Mein Kampf. It was all there – the antisemitism, the militarism, and the demands for Lebensraum, or living space in the East. Throughout the 1930s, he advanced those plans step by step. When one action against an individual or a nation encountered little or no opposition, he carried the next step a little further. This chapter highlights the steps he took between 1936 and 1940 and explores the following questions: Why didn’t the German people stop Hitler when he threatened minorities at
home? When he turned on neighboring countries? Why didn’t world leaders take a stand?
The chapter also considers what it meant to be outside a “universe of obligation.” To be, in Richard Rubenstein’s words, “superfluous.” As he puts it, “Men without political rights are superfluous men. They have lost all right to life and human dignity. Political rights are neither God-given, autonomous nor self-validating. The Germans understood that no person has any rights unless they are guaranteed by an organized community with the power to defend such rights.”1 His words were as true of nations as they were of individuals.
Download Chapter 6 from Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior
Selected Readings from the Chapter
Notes
1 Richard Rubenstein, The Cunning of History (Harper & Row, 1975), 33.
