>> man, i don't know. [laughter] but i think we'll find out, right? you know, what i wanted when i wrote this book was not that somebody would kind of take away one thing that i even knew. i was hoping people would engage with it and figure out stuff that i don't know. and there's other veterans who are writing books. there's more literature coming out about the wars. and i think that, you know, it all kind of adds to this conversation that we're having about iraq, about what it meant, about the new veterans. what i want people to do is engage with them as humans, right? you know, there's a way in which we kind of tend to conflate our feelings about the war and the veterans who served in it. and i think that, you know, thinking about what that feels like on a human level is extremely important for understanding the wars. and also for not kind of falling into false myths about war. >> great. thanks, phil. thanks, everyone. >> thank you. [applause] >> all right, thank you guys so much for coming out. if anyone wants to get a book signed, we have copies on the table just outside the door. feel free to get a copy, get it signed and personalized. you can pay for it afterwards, i still most of you even after those questions. thank you, guys. [inaudible conversations] >> we'd like to hear from you. tweet us your feedback, twitter.com/booktv. >> dan mcmill lain is next on -- mcmillan is next on booktv, he presents his causes on the holocaust from the prevalence of anti-semitism and political fissures created from world war i to germany's inability to become a democracy until 1918. this is a little under an hour. >> thank you very much for being here. the holocaust has been with me for a long time now, and in my experience it affects us in a way that is qualitatively different from how we respond to contemplating other historical events. when we look at all of the terrible suffering that human beings have inflicted on each other down through the centuries, we are often saddened by what we see, and sometimes it is good we're also angry. when we look at the holocaust, we're frightened. the holocaust frightens people. why is that? what is different? what is special? what is perhaps unique about the holocaust? today i'll offer you an answer to that question. i'll talk first for five minutes about my book, what is new about this book and why i think you may find it useful. then i'll take 15 minutes to summarize the central argument of my book which is hi explanation, my answer to the question why did the holocaust happen, and then for the last 12 minutes of my remarks i'll return to the question. in what sense may we consider the holocaust to be unique, to be in a category by itself not only among episodes of genocide, but among all historical occurrences as, in fact, i think it is. as the title of hi book implies, it's an attempt to explain why the holocaust happened. up til now we have gotten only rather partial answers to this question. the closest that we've come in books in print to an answer have been the histories of the holocaust, the narrative accounts. and these suffer from the defect that with regard to explanation of the event they focus almost entirely on the immediate sort of short-term causes of the genocide; that is to say what did adolf hitler believe about the jewish people, and what were the situational pressures or the context that encouraged hitler to radicalize his policy from discrimination in 1933 to forced immigration by 1938 to full blown genocide by the end of 941. and -- 1941. and these short-term factors are essential, of course, to understanding this event. but by themselves they're completely inadequate as an answer to the question why, because they only beg so many larger and important questions. for example, where did hitler get his ideas in the first place? and even more interesting, how is it possible that the educated elite of one of our most advanced societies would take these ideas seriously to the point of being willing to kill for them? and what went wrong in the long-term political development of germany that a man like adolf hitler could come to power in the first place? and how do we understand the attitude of tens of millions of germans who did have substantial knowledge of the killings while they were happening and yet who seemed to have responded to the fate of their jewish neighbors with cold indifference. and about eight or ten other questions that you need to answer if you wanted to put together a coherent and reasonably comprehensive and satisfactory answer to your question, why. now, this is not to say that historians over the last seven decades have been idle. quite the contrary. historians have, in fact, adequately answered all of the many specific, narrower subquestions that together make up the larger question why. but they have done so by and large in specialized academic studies, each examining this or that cause of the holocaust, by and large in isolation from the others. and thus, we have books on hitler, books on world war i, books on anti-semitism, books on psychological factors, books on 19th century german politics and the failure of democracy in germany and so on and so on and so on. but notebook has put all these different pieces together in a coherent whole. to put it another way, the historical profession already long ago, at least 20 years ago, adequately answered the question why did the holocaust happen, but the answer they have given us has been useless to us because it has been available to us only in fragments, not in a coherent whole. and particularly if you are not an academically-trained historian -- that is to say, if you're normal, like everyone -- [laughter] and how, where are you going to start? how are you going to know how to put the different'ses of the puzzle, all these different scholarly studies together in some kind of explanation? and even if you are a professional historian, it isn't immediately obvious what the proper relationship is between the different causes of the holocaust. so this is what my book does. it just unites the fragments. it's important, i think, because it's the first book to weave together all of the major sort of strands of causation, all the most important pieces of the puzzle in a coherent and reasonably comprehensive answer to the question that all of us have asked; why did this happen? so that being said, why did in the holocaust happen -- why did the holocaust happen? it happened in significant part because the pressure for democracy in germany from the pressure to transform the imperial political system which was authoritarian into a parliamentary democracy such as in france and england at the same time, unfortunately, this pressure came almost entirely from one political party, and this political party was the socialist party in germany. and this was very, very unfortunate because it meant from the outset that for many, many, for most germans the idea of democracy was tainted by association with socialism. and this taint was a very heavy taint, indeed, because the socialist apparently in germany -- at least in its rhetoric and in its formally-stated program -- was quite radical. they called for revolution. they called for an end to the capitalist system. they called for an end to private property. and for almost everyone in germany outside of the industrial working class which was the base, the constituency of the socialist party, the socialists were terrifying. compounding this problem in its impact was a second issue, and that is that democracy simply came to germany very late. the first german republic was not founded until 1919 after a revolution that followed, that came in the closing days of the first world war. these two factors in combination, the linkage between socialism and democracy and the late arrival of the democratic form of government to german soil had the effect that from the very beginning of the republic a very large fraction of the electorate was out and out hostile to the democracy because they equated it naturally enough with socialism. and making the problem even worse, the republic being founded so late -- or to put it another way, so close in time to the great depression -- had no time, no breathing space, no period of stability and prosperity in which it could win over these hostile voters and establish its legitimacy among the german people as any new form of government must among its citizens. the republic had almost barely been founded in 1918 when it was overwhelmed by the great depression which also struck germany with exceptional fury. so in the end game, you have an electorate that, a very large part of which is hostile to democracy, a very large other fraction is indifferent, and people who are absolutely desperate amid economic chaos like nothing they have ever seen. and in those circumstances and armed with those attitudes, a majority of german voters in the last elections of 1932 gave their ballots to extremist political parties that were violently anti-democratic; the communists on the left, the nazis on the right. and this is a very large -- it takes us a long way to understanding how a man like hitler could come to power in germany whereas in our country he would have had no chance at all. because in our country the idea of democracy was already respected and established for over a century before the great depression began, and the democratic form of government, its legitimacy was never in question. this is, i guess, the short answer to the question why even though the american people and the german people experienced comparable levels of economic suffering in the great depression we ended up with fdr as our political leader and they got adolf hitler. a second sort of cluster of issues is also related to this rapidly-rising socialist party. and that is that the elite of german society, this very conservative ruling class -- that is to say, university-trained professionals, titled aristocrats, owners and managers of corporations, this ruling class of about a half a million men on the eve of world war i in 1914 pursued a strategy of using nationalism and anti-semitism as weapons against the rising socialist party. and the way that this effectively worked, the logic of it was let us try to get germans to overlook their different class differences, especially the crucial middle, you know, working class versus the rest of society divide by getting them to unite on the basis of something that supposedly they had in common, their german blood, which was now defined also by the exclusion of jews who were then held to be a separate race. and this is incidentally this what later became the fatal notion that the jewish people were a race. this is at one point in which it entered german political discourse. to put it another way, this right-wing strategy was one of saying to germans, come on, let us, let us not be upper class and let us not be be middle class, and for heaven sakes, let not be working class and vote for these nasty socialist ands their theory of class struggle. let us all just be german together, and one way for us all to be german and emphasize our germanness is to unite against our enemies, against foreign powers who are painted as a constant military threat and at home the jews who are blamed for fostering the divisions in german society. and the crucial to this prong of this strategy was the false claim that the jewish people were the originators of marxism, that they had created the socialist party, that they controlled the socialist party and as this thinking was taken further after the russian revolution of 1917, that they controlled and had created the communist parties of the world. you know, there were a lot -- and this is absolutely crucial because in germany and in europe during the first four decades of the 20th century, there are all kinds of different anti-semitisms. not just one anti-semitism, but many different strands of anti-semitism. anti-semitism as a religious prejudice, anti-semitism as a hostility to economic competitors, as a form of social snobbery, and all these different forms of hostility to the jewish people were important and played a role this the holocaust in one way or another. but this particular strand, the equation of jews and marxism, blaming them for the communist threat which was something that in the '30s and '40s was very deeply feared, this is the strain of anti'emtism that led explicitly to the holocaust. this is what hitler and his accomplices were talking about, this is part of their justification for what they were doing. altogether, so this right-wing political strategy to contain socialism by using national unity and attacks on the jewish people, this is almost certainly where adolf hitler got his ideas about the jewish people and his ideas about many other things. naziism, one can interpret, as being essentially a radicalized version of this notion we can unite all germans together against our enemies. and in pop gating this anti-semitism as part of this defensive strategy, germany's elite indoctrinated themselves. they believed their own rhetoric. and this goes a long way to explaining why so much of the educated elite of german society participated in the holocaust, most of them it seems quite willingly and the rest certainly without complaint. and without their participation, particularly i'm thinking of in the military and the higher social service, the holocaust as we understand it would simply not have been possible. so to take stock of the argument so far, the factors that i've tried to analyze for you here take us a long way to explaining the holocaust and that they help us understand where hitler came there and how he got his ideas, why his ideas enjoyed substantial resonance among the educated elites that he needed to carry out his programs and all together how a man like hitler could have come to power. and that's absolutely crucial to understanding the holocaust, because if there's one point on which historians agree -- or it is one of important point -- without hitler, the holocaust would not have happened. he didn't do it all by himself, and he's not an alibi for the rest of the german people, but it is also clear that he was indispensable. so anything that, the sequence of events that got him into power is a crucial part of any explanation. and yet, that said, what i've talked about so far doesn't add up to murder. i just don't see how it does. it's enough to explain discrimination such as the jews of germany suffered, and therefore, i want to briefly sketch out three other factors that together performed a radicalizing function and helped to make possible for us to understand the great leap from persecution to genocide. the first of these is the extraordinary popularity of adolf hitler and the deep popularity is too weak a term. it's probably more accurate to speak of deification. millions of germans worshiped adolf hitler. he believed he was a genius. and in many germans this inspired -- particularly in the nazi party -- a loyalty to hitler sofa gnat call that they would gladly do something that he -- anything that he asked of them. and in a much larger universe of germans, and here i'm on the realm of an educated guess, and yet it seems a reasonable kind of safe assumption, i think it's reasonable to assume that among very many other germans who may not have been committed nazis, nonetheless a belief in adolf hitler's magical abilities or magical qualities could have gone a long way to neutralizing whatever misgivings they might have had about his more radical policies including his policies toward the jewish seem. people could have, in effect, have said to themselves -- and there's a little bit of documentary evidence for this -- that i'm not sure how i feel about this, but the furor sees things and understands things that us mere mortals do the not and therefore, perhaps, if he wants it done, it should be done. perhaps the more interesting question is where did this popularity come from? given not only his moral depravity, but except for his gift of public speaking, he was a form of mediocrity, and yet this man is worshiped by an entire nation or seemingly so. on closer inspection, it's not difficult to understand. hitler was worshiped because he was fabulously successful. you have to remember the condition of germany when he took power in january of 1933. the german people were on the ropes. unemployment stood at 30 percent, the government was paralyzed. and over and above that, it was entirely unclear what form of government, if any, could function in germany and could allow germans to come together and govern themselves as a society. because the old imperial system had collapsed at the end of world war i. the democratic alternative that had been tried for 15 years up to that point also seemed to have completely failed. the way forward was entirely unclear, and the situation was dire. and yet within only a few short years, hitler seemed to have solved all their problems and appeared as the safe your of the country -- savior of the country. i'll give two examples. is first is he comes to power in '33, unemployment is 30%. only four years later, germany has returned to full employment. in our country unemployment remained in the double digits until war production in world war ii kicked us out of the great depression. germany was the only major industrial economy to climb out of the great depression in the 1930s. that alone won hitler a great deal of admiration. but a second example in the spring of 1940 german forces invade western europe, they conquer france, they drive the british armies off the continent of europe. in only six weeks of fighting and at the cost of only 30,000 german soldiers killed. compare this to their experience in the first world war where the germans fought for four years, they lost two million men, and they lost the war. you know, measured against that yardstick, i think that hitler would have appeared as a miracle worker not only to germans, but to the seem of any country. to people of any country who had experienced their experiences. so the worship of hitler, that's one radicalizing factor. the second is that the slaughter, the pointless slaughter of ten million young men including two million german soldiers in the first world war can be said to have devalued human life, to have lowered the bar for violence in europe. all of the later violence in europe in the 20th century, the crimes of hitler, the crimes of stalin, everyone else's crimes is just not conceivable without the precedent that was set and the damage that was done to the value of human life by this slaughter. and for many men who lived through it -- including combat veterans like adolf hitler who served for four years in the western front -- with world war i as their point of reference, murdering millions of civilians could seem like nothing more than one of those, perhaps, regrettable facts of political life. a third factor, finally, one that kind of reinforced in its effect the dehumanizing consequences of the first world war is that racism back then, unlike today to, was not seen as the prejudice of the uneducated, of people we would call losers, but rather had complete respectability, was seen as science, and this made it possible to define the jewish people as almost a separate species and thereby to rob them of their humanity which made it a lot easier to murder them. and the holocaust happened, you know, for about a half a dozen other reasons as well. the ones i've summarized for you here, i think are, however, the most important and could stand as the core of the argument of my book, although there's a lot more that i have to say. one of the things that's so fascinating about the holocaust is the causation of it so utterly complex. now i want to return, finally, to the question i posed to you at the beginning of our conversation which was why does the holocaust frighten us? what is different about it? why is it so important to us? i want to tell you a story. it's an incident that took place in the triblink ca death camp in 1942 or '43. we learned about it from a journalist in a series of interviews conducted in 1971 with a man named franz stengel. stengel had been the commandant at two death camps in german-occupied poland. and in this capacity he had orchestrated, he had organized, he had presided over the hurd by poison gas of hundreds of thousands of human beings, and these human beings were murdered for one reason can and for one reason only, okay? they were murdered because they were jewish. and yet he insisted he was not and never had been an anti-semite. indeed, stengel claimed to have had, in his terms, quite friendly relations with the jewish prisoners in the camp. and when asked was there any aspect of his so-called work at the camps that he had found pleasurable, he said with emphasis, that's what i enjoy, human relations. that is, with prisoners. and to appreciate how grotesque this notion is, you have to remember that every single one of these prisoners was living under a sentence of death. stengel allowed them to live only so long as they could serve their german haasers as slave labor to help keep the camps running, and as soon as they had outlived their usefulness, their lives were over. and these prisoners understood this terrible reality every bit as well as stengel did, and then theless, his contact with them is supposed to be friendly and, for him, enjoyable. his chief example of his relations with condemned men was with a man named blau from vienna. in stengel's telling, one day blau came to stengel's office. he stood to attention. he formally requested permission to speak. he looked very worried. blau's 80-year-old father had just arrived in a cattle car from vienna, and he was going to perish in the gas chambers in a matter of hours. stengel replied really, blau, it's quite impossible. you must understand a man of 08. by which -- 80. by which he meant that since blau's father was too old to be useful as slave labor be, stengel could find no excuse to postpone his death. the younger blau indicated he understood this, but he just did not want his father to meet his end in the gas chamber, so he took his father to the kitchen, served him a final meal, then escorted him to the so-called infirmary which was sort of a medical structure disguised by a red cross on the wall. there at the door the two men would have said their good-byes. a prisoner from the camp would have escorted the elder man down a long corridor to the edge of an open pit. there an ss guard, most likely a man who was notorious for his sadism, ordered the old man to take off his clothes, stand on a plank at the edge of the bit and then murdered him with a pistol shot to the back of the neck. later that day blau returned, the younger blau returned to stengel's office and thanked him. well, blau, there's no need to thank me, but if you want to thank me, you may. in single's eyes -- stengel's eyes, he had done blau a favor by arranging to have his father murdered by gunshot, and this favor counted for stengel among the human relations that he had enjoyed with prisoners during his time at treblinka and at the other camp. and i very much wish i could say to you that stepping l was an aberration and that his attitude toward these prisoners was atypical, but i think instead one must have to see this, as near as we can tell, an attitude that was emblematic of the way that many perpetrators of the holocaust thought about and pelt about their victims. they subscribed to a racist belief system which held that jews were not fully human and, thus, killing them was nothing to be upset about or anxious about or to feel any tension about. and they could and did live among these condemned victims in the camps. in case of some prisoners, for a period of years and move among them every day and talk to them every day without any apparent sign of discomfort. their attitude toward their, toward the people they were murdering is reminiscent of nothing quite so much as that of a farmer living among livestock that he has destined for slaughter. and this attitude, this way of seeing and thinking about and dealing or rather not feeling about the victims, in my view, goes to the heart of what makes the holocaust so important. the holocaust so important, i contend, because it constitutes history's host uncompromising rejection of the idea that human life has any inherent value or meaning. and i think you can best appreciate the import of what has been a somewhat abstract statement that i just made by asking yourself, by asking yourself why not? why not commit murder? how do you know -- and the emphasis is on certainty, how do you know that murder is wrong? and to this question, we all have the same answers. we believe that human life is precious. we believe that every individual has rights. we believe that our existence here on this planet has a meaning and a purpose. these are good beliefs. they're healthy beliefs. they're your beliefs and mine also. but they're exactly that, they're beliefs. they're not facts that you can prove. the proposition that human life has intrinsic value or significance is not a demonstrable fact. it's a postulate. it's an unsupported assertion. and you can choose to accept it, or you can choose to reject it. and this choice to accept or reject, to embrace or to deny the value of human life is the most important choice that any of us can make in our entire lives, and hardly any of us is aware of having head it. we're not aware of it because it's been made for us by the people around us, by the families into which we are born, by the society in which we live. it is a choice that has been unstated, that has been assumed. it is a choice of which we have been happily innocent. and one way to characterize part of the horror of the hold is to say that the -- holocaust is to say that the nazis made a theft of our moral innocence. they revealed to us the terrible truth that this is a choice and that it is eminently possible to choose differently than how we have chosen. they did this by themselves, choosing to affirm that human life is utterly without significance or meaning or inherent value, and they made this affirmation explicitly in the most uncompromising terms and on an absolutely massive scale. i'll make this concrete with a few examples. in the holocaust the killers expressed their moral nihilism, their rejection of the value of human life this words and in deeds that were unique or very close to unique to the holocaust that found only the most limited parallels in any other episode of genocide or atrocity. first, what is very striking about the holocaust is the way that they deny their victims' humanity in the language they used, calling them vermin and microbes andests and subhumans -- and pests and subhumans and pack tier ya and so on -- bacteria and so on. and if you are not familiar with the armenian genocide, you will have encountered language like this. but it is used, in relative terms, sparingly and it is always used metaphorically. in this holocaust this language is used pervasively. secondly, related to the first point is the way they denied their victims humanity as they processed them almost like animal carcasses, using jewish prisoners as laboratory animals, harvesting the cost to gain the fillings. a second distinct feature is that in sharp contrast to, say, the armenian, rwandan or cambodian cases, the victims of the holocaust were not murdered for any immediate practical purpose that one could remotely define as rational. it was rather that the very existence of the jewish people was unacceptable to their killers. and so for the first and only time in history, we have come to hurd murder millions of our fellow human beings for the purpose of taking their lives. their deaths were an end in itself. which leads me to the third and last point i wanted to make this connection which is that the jewish people are the only large ethnic minority to have ever been targeted for complete biological extipg. the nazis hoped to murder not only the 11 million jews who, by their calculations, lived on the european continent, but had they won the war in europe and with the resources of the european continent at their disposal, been militarily capable of overwhelming the united states. we can't prove this because it didn't happen, and yet it's sort of in the logic of what they were doing in europe and in so much of what they said. we tend to agree that the next step would have been to strike at every single remaining jewish population around the globe no matter how small. the perpetrators of the holocaust saw the jewish people the way public health officials used to see smallpox. as a virus that had to be eradicated completely so that it could never, ever, ever grow back anywhere on earth. in sum, moving to conclusion, the nazis have compelled us to confront the horrible question of whether our life has meaning, worth, significance, purpose. because they affirmed so dramatically with such determine nation on such a close call scale that it does not. and this, i think, is -- i contend -- is what makes the holocaust unique and what makes it important and what makes it so frightening, is that the holocaust is the historical event that far more than any other confronts us with questions of existential significance. and as anyone who has pondered them can tell you, the existential questions are the scariest questions of all and also, perhaps, the most difficult to answer. i'm going to have at the end of our conversation two and a half minutes of concluding remarks. i now want to stop and take questions from you. if you have a question, please move to the microphone on the, on that side of the room. and we have about, we have about 15, 17 minutes for questions. so -- oh, there's a microphone there? i'm sorry, i said there's a microphone on that side, there's one on that side as well. i'm sorry about causing confusion. yes, ma'am. >> i have heard it said, in fact, read -- >> [inaudible] >> sorry. thank you. i've heard it said and, in fact, read somewhere that hitler's antipathy toward the jews was exacerbated by the fact that he was not allowed to enter an art academy when he sought it. and that as a result of that, he found that most of the judges who had turned him down were jews and that that exacerbated his antipathy toward them. is there any truth to this? have you come across that? >> it's a commonly broached theory. the problem is that for the first 30 years of adolf hitler's life, the documentary record is almost nonexistent, so there's no way of demonstrating this. we don't know if the judges were jewish, it's also unlikely he would have known whether or not they were jewish. on the other hand, hitler's well-justified feelings of inferiority are well known, his feelings of envy and of humiliation and of anger are enormously important and the success of so many, of so many jewish germans and austrians in the art world, it's quite plausible to think that that put an edge on his hatred. but i think the real, the best explanation for adolf hitler's hatred for the jewish people comes from the fact that he, he was personally so deeply invested in the german victory, in a german victory in the first world war because he'd been such a complete loser up til then in his life. and this was his first accomplishment, the first time he was respected by anyone. he had a purpose be, which was german victory. germany surrenders, a lot of people on the right wing of german politics blame the socialist party for the surrender, and since he and many other people believed the j well, well,ews were behind the socialists, they are the culprit for the defeat. that's our best educated guess as to the source of his hatred, which was ferocious. absolutely. yes, ma'am. >> i know that there's a lot, there are a lot of books on the holocaust and the murder of the jews. i often wondered, though, about what about the gypsies and all the gay people and all the medically, you know, stressed people? are there books about that? i mean, do they celebrate holocaust, you know, day also? >> yes. i mean, there's, there are separate scholarly treatments of all of these different classes of victims, that's quite right. in my book i really focus only on jewish victims because i have wanted to focus on what is really kind of unique to the holocaust which is this goal of complete extermination, this complete dehumanization of the victims and so on and so forth. even to the gypsies who suffered in very large numbers, the death toll was very high, and even though they were the targets of race is cyst thinking as -- racist thinking as were the jews, it wasn't theory as uncompromising. so i don't have much to say about that, but on the, just off the top of my head on the mental parables who were murder in the -- patients who were murdered in the so-called euthanasia program, the seminal work is by henry freelander, and it's from, oh, but i've forgotten. actually, i've forgotten the title, but it's henry freelander, and it's a very good book that explores that. there's also some good work by michael burleigh, british historian, who's written about that episode. yes, the me jan on the right. >> thank you for your presentation. i think it was very professionally thought out. thank you. >> thank you. >> someone said, you know, we don't study history, history, we will repeat it. so i want to put that out there. my question is, do you think that what happened to the jews by the nazis have affected the mentality of the jewish people in israel and around the world with the treatment of the palestinian people? >> the short answer is that i'm not qualified to answer that question because i really don't know a whole lot about israeli politics. off the top of my head, i guess my guess would be that given the intensity of that conflict, the palestinian conflict and how long that it's gone on, i'm always kind of surprised by the degree to which the israelis have been able to maintain the quality of their democracy and the degree to which although their security services up engage in quite a lot of violence against some of the palestinian community, it's impressive to me, frankly, how much -- how hard they work to keep that in balance and how much that troubles them. compared, for example, to the way our country reacted to 9/11. and so i wonder if that aspect of -- not that i'm praising israeli policy in the palestinian question. i take no position because i'm not qualified to judge it. but i'm just saying in the context of that conflict, the degree to which they've been able to preserve democratic values is impressive to me. it wouldn't surprise me if a desire not to emulate their persecutors might have played a role. but i'm purely speculating because i really just know very little about israel. it's a fascinating question, and one, unfortunately, i can't really give an intelligent answer to. sir? >> when i was around 25 years old, i realized for complex reasons that i could have easily gotten a district to damage caw or i could have made a good nazi, and i wonder if there's not an existential question in your book or argument that basically there's no biological difference between the germans of those days and the rest of us and, ultimately, how many of us in this room had we been in germany during those same cultural pressures, particularly if we'd been young in the '30s, would have done anything different? very few of us really could be heroes or martyrs, and if the germans are no different biologically, then we're just better to have live inside a different culture. >> you know, i could spend two hours unpacking your question because it's so good, and it's so on the money. and that's not a complaint. i'm trying to think about how i can answer briefly. the question is there something uniquely damaged about the germans is kind of the central question that has been studied by people who specialize in german history ever since the second world war. around the middle of the 1990s after trying this theory and that theory and the other theory, we kind of gave up, and we kind of had to admit sort of what common sense should have told us, that they're human like us. there's no such thing as a german brain, and they don't have a genetic predisposition to genocide s. there still remain all kinds of stereotypes about the germans like they're especially obedient to authority and so on which i think is utter nonsense based on my reading of their history. but, you know, you raise sort of this question of if we were put back in that time and place, we, of course, would not be ourselves. we'd be someone else. i guess the bedrock conclusion that i arrived at about human beings -- because, ultimately, the hardest thing about studying the holocaust and i think the reason why it has taken so long for a book like mine to have been written even though the research was there to write a synthesis of this kind 20 years ago -- we just don't want to pull everything together and look at a it square on because we're afraid of what we're going to learn about ourselves. and maybe it was easier for me to study this because i've always been an optimist, and i just, i believe in people, so i was never so worried about that. but i guess my, the end of my rambling answer is i think the worst thing that i learned about human beings is not that we're evil in the essential sense, but that we are completely malleable by circumstances. and you take any human being and regardless of from who, you know, what family background that person has and you arm them with, you raise them with the wrong experiences, indoctrinate them with the wrong ideas, put them in the wrong circumstances, and they will do absolutely anything. and that's really quite terrible. buck see this as effectively -- but you can see this as effectively the shadow side of something that otherwise has been very positive across humanity, namely that we are supremely adaptable. and not to sound pollyanna, but just as we're adaptable to moral depravity, we're also adaptable to moral progress which i think we've demonstrated in a lot of ways. thank you for your excellent question. yes, the gentleman on the right. you've been waiting a long time, sorry. >> this question is a complex question. >> good. >> and potentially a controversial question in these surroundings. i'm from the caribbean and, you know, i find what you're trying to do, i must say i think it's quite important. i mean, this kind of trying to bring about an integrated social science, bringing different answers together to a very complex issue instead of trying to answer it in a limited type of sense. although those have interest too. they have somebody like you to do what you did. but to call the holocaust unique against the history, for example, of black people coming to the west, being brought to the west as slaves, the slaughter, the horrific slaughter of native americans, of american indians. where i'm from they're kind of -- the kind of wiping away of caribbean young people, simply wiping them away because when the white man showed up, they said, all right, the white man have more weapons, so he won. so that's the first basis of the question, you know? the problem of deciding is it more unique than other slaughters and stuff like that. the whole notion of it being unique, because if it's unique -- >> i -- you know, sir, the question you've raised is so huge and so important, i'd just like to try to answer that and let other people ask their questions. it's not that -- was, you know, what do i mean when i'm saying unique? this is hotly debated in all kinds of different contexts. and part of the problem is when you use the word "unique," and especially, i guess, when you use it in the way that i have used it, people sort of feel that you are automatically saying worse, that the holocaust is worse, that is the suffering of the jewish people was more terrible, that these victims were more important than these victims. genocide conferences. this is one of the bad things about writing a book like this, you get to go to genocide conferences which is kind of an an experience -- [laughter] i think most of you would be happy to avoid. and, you know, and i'm not in any way saying worse, i am saying that the holocaust is different from every other episode in history in the specific dimension, that is in the way that it confronts us with existential questions. and because of that, i think that that is why we give it a particular kind of importance and why it frightens us. but it is not in any way to suggest that the holocaust is inherently more terrible than the armenian genocide, the cambodian genocide or the atlantic slave trade and slavery. that's a comparison, by the way, that has sort of simmered below the surface of american politics from time to time and has been the source of much contention. i mean, the short answer is you can't really compare them because these phenomena are so vastly different. but ultimately, when you're getting to a question of what is, what is worse or what is more terrible or what is more important, you're ultimately getting into a value judgment that is completely subjective. and you can make, for example, the case that, you know, that slavery -- because of the lasting damage that it has done in our society, the persistence of racism today, the suffering of so many people across three centuries, you could argue that slavery hurt more people more grievously and did more damage and, in that sense, is worse. i'm not taking that position, i'm just illustrating this is subjective value judgment. i'll just circle back to respond to the gentleman's question, i'm not really saying that the holocaust was worse. unique is altogether an unfortunate term. i'm just using it as a shorthand for the fact that i think we see it as being somehow in a category by itself, and i think i'm correct in making that assertion. yes, the gentleman on the right. >> yes. could you comment on the unique role of ideology, specifically daniel goldhagen's postulate and hitler's willing executioners that germans if not biologically in particular, did develop a unique strand of anti-semitism that was so virulent that it can be called anti, you know, external that story and wasn't shared by others. >> yeah. yeah, the gentleman refers to a very, a very controversial and also very popular commercially-successful book in 1996. hitler's willing executioners by daniel goldhagen, it was actually based on his ph.d. thesis in political science at harvard. and the book is exceptionally well written with a lot of passion. and it makes a very forceful argument. and i think this goes a long way to accounting for its extraordinary popularity. the problem, however, is that the arguments of the book really just do not fly, and let me -- the gentleman has alluded to them, and there really are sort of two central contentions that dr. goldhagen makes in his book. the first is that the holocaust happened and happened in germany as opposed to some other country because german anti-semitism was unique. and uniquely terrible and not like anti-semitism in any other country. problem is goldhagen really made almost no meaningful comparison to anti-semitism in any other country. and this is really a no-no. this is kind of social science 101. you don't make a claim that this country, germany, the united states, france, belgium, whatever is unique unlike every other country in some important way unless you compare that country to a lot of other countries. and even worse for his argument, had he done so, he quickly would have seen something that historians of anti-semitism can tell you right off the bat which is that pretty clearly in anti-semitism was far more widespread, intense, deeply rooted and violent in eastern europe and on the territory of the soviet union than it was in germany during the first, say, three decades of the 20th century. so the second sort of major contention of that book is that virtually the entire -- the overwhelming majority of german societies subscribed to this virulent, so-called eliminationist anti-semitism and actively approved of the holocaust. that they all basically agreed that the jews should be killed because the jews ought to die. and this argument flies in the -- aside from the fact that he doesn't martial very persuasive evidence in the face of it, it shows us that like every other society, in german society on an important question like this there was a huge variation in the character and the intensity of antisemitic sentiment that the really homicidal anti-semitism of the most committed nazis was something probably shared by only 100, 200,000 people at the most. and the best evidence we have is that the overwhelming majority of the german people were not actively approving of genocide or of persecution, but that they were just indifferent. which is also the conclusion of my chapter that addresses the german people's knowledge of the holocaust. and this indifference is, indeed, morally blameworthy. it's morally disgusting. but as a causal factor, you know, for causal analysis it's just fundamentally different from approval. and for this reason and for many others, the great majority of academic historians of had earn germany and the holocaust who have taken a public position on this book have con themed it or, at any rate, criticized it very, very harshly. summing up, i have to say i think it's a really bad book. [laughter] he's, you know, he's a very smart guy. i find a lot to admire in him. he took a lot, it took a lot of guts for him to take this on this early in his career, and he's published three books since then that i think have been better received. but this first book was not his finest hour, and it's very misleading. i think we have time for one more question. yes, ma'am. >> you just said, you did not approve of the book, hitler's willing executioners. however, the german people did go along. the masses of people you'd see in the movie of the heil hitler and the hysteria and everything. i want to ask you a weird question. >> good. >> now, germany was unified always. they didn't go out, and they didn't allow a lot of people in. is there a romanticism? is and by romanticism, i don't mean love and kindness and goodness, i mean irrationality to the german aspect that could possibly add into this? am i completely berserk in thinking this way? >> ma'am, you're clearly, from your posture and conduct and tone of voice, it's clear that you're not berserk, so i think we can discard that. [laughter] let's not worry about that. ma'am, you're in very good company many thinking this. look, the number of stereotypes about the german mentality, the germans think differently, the germans feel differently from us, their culture's different and so on and so forth, these stereotypes have just proliferated like weeds ever since the end of the second world war. and an awful lot of people subscribe to them, and the thing is one of -- there's two problems i find with them. one is -- or actually three. one is that even though people claim to be talking about culture, they're really talking about psychology. and all human beings have the same brain, and i don't believe that german psychology's different from american psychology. secondly, no empirical evidence for think of these theories. obedient germans, germans had particularly harsh toil let-tending practices and, therefore, were violent. [laughter] it's been argued, when the freudians get into the act, you've really got to watch out. [laughter] and so on. the biggest problem i have with these theories is they all were invented after the second world war, after we became aware of the holocaust, and i think they reflect not observable differences between the germans and their neighbors, they reflect the understandable desire to push the holocaust away from ourselves and to say this is not a human problem, it's a german problem. i could not do this because i'm not german. that's, i think, the agenda there. so thank you very much for the question, and i have just time for my concluding remarks. i want to, i want to conclude by posing the question that some of you have touched on a bit in your questions which is what does the holocaust say about us? .. it was not predictable and it was improbable in the extreme. the holocaust was about as unlikery a historical event can be and yet still happened. so draw from this exceptional event generalizations about who we are and what we can do is a grave error. i realize i presented you with a

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