Customer Reviews

Survivors, Victims, And Perpetrators: Essays On The Nazi Holocaust

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Although this book is primarily about the Nazi extermination of Jews, it does touch on other genocides.

Based on German documents (p. 49), Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg writes; "The Poles in the territories incorporated by the Reich were in a rather precarious position. It had been planned to shove them into the Generalgouvernement, while the incorporated provinces in the west were to have become purely German. But that program, like the forced emigration of the Jews from Europe, collapsed. In the back of some people's minds a `territorial solution' now loomed for these Poles. On May 27, 1941 an interministerial conference took place under the chairmanship of Staatsekretar Conti of the Interior Ministry. The subject of discussion was the reduction of the Polish population in the incorporated territories. The following proposals were entertained: (1) no Pole be allowed to marry before the age of twenty-five; (2) no permission to be granted unless the marriage was economically sound; (3) a tax on illegitimate births; (4) sterilization following illegitimate birth; (5) no tax exemptions for dependents; and (6) permission to abortion to be granted upon application of the expectant mother." (p.11). (The foregoing proposals were only partly carried out owing to the steadily deteriorating German military situation).

It is not difficult to visualize the extension of the foregoing-discussed plans to all Poles had Germany won the war. The Polish intelligentsia had already been partly destroyed by the Germans through mass shootings and slow deaths in concentration camps, and the remainder would follow suit. The Polish people themselves would be exterminated, over the long term, primarily through passive genocidal methods (artificially-reduced birth rates (including possible mass sterilizations) coupled with artificially-increased "natural" death rates).

Most of the chapters in this book deal with the psychological aspects of being the perpetrators (Nazis) or being the victims, as in the concentration camps. There is also a study of the psychological dynamics of children of Holocaust survivors and children of concentration-camp survivors. Being a child of concentration camp survivors myself, I found this interesting.