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Unit 2—Handout 3
THE HOLOCAUST―SUMMING UP
What “Caused” the Holocaust? Yehuda Bauer
Historians agree that the Holocaust resulted from a confl uence of various factors in a complex historical
situation. That antisemitism festered throughout the centuries in European culture is centrally important; the
Jews were (and are) a minority civilization in a majority environment. In periods of crisis, instead of searching
for the solution of such crises within the majority culture, the majority will tend to project blame for the crisis on
a minority which is both familiar and weak. As the originators and bearers of an important part of civilization,
the Jews are a “father civilization” against which pent-up aggressions are easily unleashed. Christianity’s long
quarrel with a religion that, according to the church fathers, should not really exist exacerbates the dangers.
The view of the Jews as a satanic force out to control the world, developed in the Middle Ages, was reinforced
in the crises accompanying the emergence of liberalism, democracy, and the industrial world by the modern
secularist biological theories of blood and race.
Violence against Jews was perpetrated not only in Germany. Antisemitism is a Euro-American phenomenon,
the oldest prejudice of humanity. Without denying the universality of antisemitism, the conception of the
Holocaust by German Nazism can be explained by specifi c factors operating in Germany:
1. The rigidity of German family structure as a precondition for acceptance
of an authoritarian dictatorship
2. The destruction of a German national identity and the retardation of the
development of a national unity resulting from the Thirty Years’ War and
the consequent division of Germany into a large number of separate
political entities
3. The identifi cation of popular German (volkisch) nationalism with both
Germanic Christianity and German pagan anti-Christian traditions, which
excluded Jews.
4. German romanticism, which rejected liberal and democratic traditions
5. The weak liberalism of the German middle class
6. The German defeat in World War I and the resulting desire to reassert German
collective strength
7. The economic crises and the resulting destruction of objective and
subjective security for the group, the social class, and the individual
8. The long-standing tradition of antisemitism in “explaining” [or blaming] crises
and social problems on Jews and other groups such as the handicapped that the Nazis deemed inferior.
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