I can tell you exactly why the holocaust happened. I can tell you the exact psychology of the German people.
They literally had to walk past the corpses of their towns people starving in the streets. They would have to disrobe them, take their coat, their boots, their money, their jewellery - people they recognized stripped bare. They'd have to do this to survive.
Then they'd all have to walk past that corpse, or those corpses, past another 5 homeless kids bones like sticks big eyed and begging for cash.
...and when you've got a loaf of bread to feed you, your mother, your sister, your brother and your auntie for a week. You're gonna be looking for answers too.
This wasn't just post-WW1 poverty. It was post-WW1 poverty PLUS the great depression. Every day you'd walk past dead naked corpses of your fellow Germans.
Then one guy tells you he has the answers. He knows how to fix it?
Of course you're going to listen... and they did fix it. They took that starvation, that death, that hunger - and they organized it.
It was no longer a chaotic entity you faced everyday on the streets. It was now in a box.... a box you could ignore. Because it's god damn better that it's happening to someone else. That someone stood up and took over that social function. Made it official. Forced it on just one group. That was the rationale... and it was one you could ignore. One that it you were able to ignore.
Shit just got better, because it was somewhere else. Someone else. In a box, a box called Auschwitz or Treblinka.
I write this not to excuse what happened. But to humanize it.
When you don't have to look away as you walk past skin and bones on the street that you recognized three weeks earlier... when someone can make order out of that level of poverty, starvation and death... then you have a genocide... and of course you're going to look the other way - because you know it was YOU there before. This is how YOU escaped it.
That's human. That's how a society eats its self.
