Initiation to mass Inurder

Pel/kert's essay expands the concept of the "Final Solution" to illcl'Uie ti,e perseCfltioll and exlermi11atiol1 of large 11umbers of non-Jews who were regarded by tile Nazis as racially or biologically "inferior," as "lives uHworthy of life." But the attempt to t1'llce racism back to science and rhe welfare state could perhaps risk leaving us with a story of Auschwitz without the Jews. We mllst 110t lose sight of tile unique position of IInti-Semitism within the Nazi ideology of mce or of the "special fate" of European Jewry in the years of tile Third Reich. Tile Nazis constructed lIlany racial "enemies," but they always attached nl! absoillte priority to the "soilltion" of the "Jewish Problem." Perflnps we too often viSllalize tile "Final Solutiml" nlld the "Holocaust" il1 terms of the relentless, methodical, relatively anonymous, "illdustrialized" mass /IIurder of milliolls of victims il1 the Nazi exterlIlination camps. But large numbers of Jews were also murdered in bloody shootings, at close range, by mell who had to look their victims, including women and cltilcirell, directly ill the face. How were the men who puI/ed the triggers nble, psychologically and physically, to contilllle tile killings after their lllliforms were splattered with the blood alld /Jone fragments of the people they had murdered? It is too easy to aSSHme that only the fanatical anti-Semitism of Tiimmler's "Ideological Shock I)'oops" the SS could have motivated this kind of brutality. BlIt as Cltristopher Browning shows in his chillingly concrete desaip-