Victims and perpetrators in the Nazi genocide
In the 20th century genocide massively prevailed; thus many scholars refer to it as “the century of genocide” since the intentional eradication of the southwest Africa people of Herrero at the beginning of the 20th century to the ethical cleansing in Rwanda and Bosnia where more people were exterminated compared to other previous recorded incidences.According to Hilberg, more Jewish deaths occurred in 1942 more than any other year. All this ought to have been triggered by some perpetrators in the classic formulation of Nazi genocide.
The tension between resistance and awareness is defined as a “crisis of imagination” how these categories are mixed to provide an emotional and intellectual fingerprint that provides clues to how the victims of the genocide coped with the trauma. Hope was essential to the victims not so see themselves as perpetrators. According to the sources, there is an indication of annihilation possibilities, and negation of the part of the victim hindered resistance capacity, thus minimizing survival chances. The victims could only cope by putting the genocide reality at bay(Radonić). Historic traces are evident in many holocaust diaries with the likelihood to avoid the norm. The Nazi attempted to restore the final solution to the Jewish problem.
However, this doesn’t mean that the diarists had a systematic mechanism through which there was a final solution. For instance, between 1880-1942 the head of Warsaw Judenrat, Adam Czerniakow was informed of the genocidal sophistication of Nazi ideas and his lack of power to counter them thus his self-killing while other scholars like Anne frank were unable to figure it out. Nevertheless, there have been numerous violence projected to Jews of Europe in the second world war, and one may wonder why? Asking questions like “why are they doing this to us” or “which kind of person does this to another “lack of such issues showed avoidance and denial(Wilson, and Crowder-Taraborrelli). Mechanisms of evasion kept genocide intent imposing consciousness which is of particular interest.
Implicitly, in this perspective, the perpetrators encountered a dynamic tension comprised of denial and awareness.According to them, the genocide comprehension triggered mental opposition in the form of controversial psychological as described by Robert jay as “doubling” or in mental and drunkenness which was common among Einsatzgruppen troops in the eastern region. Additionally, denial of victim’s humanity and reality advantaged the perpetrators to give in to the Nazi imperative of genocide as state policy between the year 1939 and 1945 (policies of genocide).its evident that there existed a relationship between a victim and perpetrator. This is an example of how the perpetrators rationalized and enabled them to dehumanize the Jews and hindered their understanding of them as humans.
Referring to the holocaust diaries, the perpetrator’s victim interactions in which victims desire for survival met perpetrators wanted for negation. Negation means the scenario where idea and act of genocide where the victim was a Jew and the perpetrator a Nazi in a moment of annihilation(Feinstein). There exists deep conscious awareness of this negative perspective to the parties and close evaluation of the language used to explain other psychological defence mechanisms forcefully operating. It is primarily applicable to a broader point of view that there exists an inverse relationship between perpetrators and the victims.
In conclusion, the holocaust diaries are a representative of an untapped resource for a professional historian. The scholars analyzed genuinely there existed a tension between testifying and avoiding written confrontations by the perpetrators ensured they concealed genocide to impose consciousness for selfish gains. All through the decades of relentless killing, the majority remained to be Jews, and each time the numbers increased. The German government were perpetrators in all these genocides.
References
Feinstein, S. C. “America, Its Jews, And The Rise Of Nazism”. Holocaust And Genocide Studies, vol 17, no. 1, 2003, pp. 185-188. Oxford University Press (OUP), doi:10.1093/hgs/17.1.185.
POLICIES OF GENOCIDE. ROUTLEDGE, 2016.
Radonić, Ljiljana. “From “Double Genocide” To “The New Jews”: Holocaust, Genocide And Mass Violence In Post-Communist Memorial Museums”. Journal Of Genocide Research, vol 20, no. 4, 2018, pp. 510-529. Informa UK Limited, doi:10.1080/14623528.2018.1522831.
Wilson, Kristi M, and Tomás F Crowder-Taraborrelli. Film And Genocide. University Of Wisconsin Press, 2014.