Social Theory and the Holocaust: Causes and Explanations

The Challenge of Comprehending the Holocaust

The sheer scale of the Holocaust can make it difficult to understand. While human history is rife with examples of oppression and genocide, never before had mass murder been carried out in such an efficient, industrialized fashion. The methodical killing of some six million Jews, along with millions of other individuals who did not fit the parameters of the Nazis' racial utopia, left a scar on the global consciousness and forced a dramatic reconception of social theory, which now had to account for how the Holocaust could have come to happen. The old dualisms of social theory proved insufficient on their own, because the motivations, logistics, and execution of the Nazis' "Final Solution" defy easy categorization and explanation.

Instead, one must examine the explanations provided by each of these theoretical schemas and then attempt to formulate a broader, more eclectic explanation of the Holocaust than any individual theory provides. Doing so reveals that the Holocaust was "a socially constructed problem whose 'solution' involved the active participation and passive compliance of ordinary human beings, the thousands of Germans who, consciously as well as inadvertently, and for purposes that have historical antecedents as well as structural causes, contributed to the Jewish genocide" (Iverson 2003, p. 349). Ultimately, the Holocaust may be viewed as the almost inevitable result of centuries of ignorance and bigotry colliding with the grim realities of industrialization and modernization — a collision that reverberated through the German economy as well as the German consciousness.

The lasting impact of the Holocaust and its capacity to overwhelm is felt immediately upon beginning its examination, because one is forced to decide where to start and in doing so attempt to encapsulate the entirety of the event. Furthermore, one must be careful not to fall into the tempting trap of "turning to the Holocaust in search of universal moral lessons — 'lessons' that merely confirm what we already believe," because this "risks serious distortion of the past" and does not contribute to genuine understanding — understanding that might prove crucial in preventing future atrocities (Salmons 2010, p. 57).

This difficulty in determining an appropriate point of entry is part of why "Holocaust studies is difficult to define," and frequently "includes a variety of perspectives: philosophical, historical, sociological, literary critical, psychological" (Reitter 2000, p. 110). The rise of the Nazis and their subsequent actions included such a total dominance over every aspect of society, history, and identity that researchers attempting to understand this rise have been forced to develop eclectic approaches, but even then this runs the risk of explaining a variety of independent phenomena in German history and culture without ever being able to link them into the "burnt whole" of the Holocaust itself (Suedfeld 2000, p. 1). Thus, perhaps the easiest place to start is actually with the Holocaust's ability to overwhelm and defy examination, because this issue offers insight into why the explanations provided by traditional social-theoretical schemas are insufficient.

Cognitive Limits and the Imagination of Atrocity

The problem of effectively conceptualizing — and, in the words of one researcher, "fathoming the Holocaust" — rests in the fact that the cruelty and brutality of the Holocaust is so far beyond the scope of usual human imagination, even for those who lived through it (Berger 2002). This is evident in Elie Wiesel's account of his first night in the Auschwitz concentration camp:

I pinched my face. Was I still alive? Was I awake? I could not believe it. How could it be possible for them to burn people, children, and for the world to keep silent? No, none of this could be true. … Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night. … Never shall I forget the smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever … and turned my dreams to dust (qtd. in Berger 2002, p. 1).

More recently, this difficulty in comprehending the reality of the Holocaust has been explored in a scientific setting, in order to determine whether some of its seemingly impossible nature stems from actual cognitive biases and limitations regarding human beings' ability to imagine it. In a paper titled "Nazi cruelties: Are they literally hard to imagine?," Rassin et al. (2005) examined the connection between individuals' mental images of World War II and the degree to which they underestimated the extent of Nazi activities during the Holocaust (p. 321). The researchers found that individuals with less clear mental images of World War II — usually based on literally blurry photographs and film reels — were more likely to underestimate or even deny the extent of Nazi cruelty (pp. 328–329).

The results emerged from four different experiments and supported two distinct yet related phenomena. First, viewing blurry documentary evidence of World War II actually made individuals' mental images of that period less distinct. Second, less distinct mental images were "associated with the conviction that Nazi cruelties have been exaggerated in the media and history books" (p. 329). Thus, the evidence suggests that contrary to "our common-sense notion that we are able to imagine everything," imagining — and thus explaining — the realities of the Holocaust is in some ways beyond the cognitive abilities of human beings, especially those who did not experience it firsthand (p. 329).

This does not mean that the attempt is futile, but rather that one must recognize and account for the inherent imaginative limitations one faces when confronting the realities of the Holocaust. In particular, it will be useful to remember the concept of a whole too large to fully discuss when examining the explanations offered by traditional social-theoretical schemas, because all of these explanations ultimately suffer from a kind of limited perspective unable to account for the simultaneous influence of preexisting, predetermining structures and individual mutability.

Nature, Nurture, and the Origins of Racism

This inability is all the more evident when one recognizes that for the most part, the common dualisms of social theory are themselves examples of these simultaneous factors, with the only problem being that they are presented as oppositional binaries rather than coordinated, contemporaneous phenomena. Perhaps the most widely known dualism of social theory is the supposed binary between nature and nurture — that is, the degree to which inherited traits or learned behaviors and attitudes affect an individual's, and ultimately society's, actions. The so-called "nature vs. nurture" debate is particularly relevant to a study of the Holocaust, because racism — one of the more obvious motivating factors — is itself the product of both.

On the one hand, one can find evolutionary-biological underpinnings to racism, because it is easy to imagine how an inborn aversion to individuals not of one's own phenotype might prove evolutionarily beneficial. A tendency to discriminate based on race offers individuals a quick means of determining whether another person represents a threat; but like so many evolutionary traits, this tendency is only useful up to a certain limit and actually becomes actively detrimental in a society composed of organizations larger than a single village or extended family unit. Thus, one can identify "nature" as a component in racism, because from one perspective racism is little more than an overreliance on an evolutionary tendency with limited applicability.

However, while this helps to explain some of the basic cognitive and behavioral sources of racism, the nature explanation cannot account for the complex system of ideology and policy that springs up to support and perpetuate racist beliefs. When racism is discussed in an academic context, the individual act of discrimination is often the least important part; instead, researchers examine racism "as a set of institutional conditions of group inequality and an ideology of racial domination, in which the latter is characterized by a set of beliefs holding that the subordinate racial group is biologically or culturally inferior to the dominant racial group" (Bobo & Fox 2003, p. 319). In this context, the important element of racism is not its evolutionary origin but rather the social dimension that has arisen as a result of conditioning and ideological development, because it is this element that results in a notable power differential and the institutionalization of racist policies (Sullivan 2005, p. 140). Furthermore, the fact that not all individuals give in to their evolutionary predisposition to judge based on racial or ethnic divisions suggests that certain non-intrinsic, social factors contribute to the emergence of racism as both an institution and an individual belief system.

Conclusion: An Eclectic Account of the Holocaust

As should now be clear, no single schema of social theory can effectively explain how the Holocaust could occur, because no single schema can sufficiently account for the complex combination of social, economic, and even biological factors that allowed the Nazi Party's rapid rise and eventual genocide. However, examining the variety of explanations offered by key schemas and theoretical dualisms nevertheless allows one to begin to come to terms with the sheer scale of the Holocaust. As their similarities and differences become evident, one is able to paint a clearer picture of the contemporaneous forces at work.

The Nazis' rise was the result of an attractive economic platform melded with a racial and nationalist ideology "that was deliberately designed to highlight every manipulative device — symbols, language, ritual, hierarchy, parades, rallies culminating in the Führer myth" — in order to forcibly create a social structure wherein the continued existence of Jews and undesirables would become a functional impossibility (Brustein 1996, p. 4). This melding of economics and racist ideology transcends the ostensible divide suggested by any particular dualism, because it depended on nature and nurture, emotion and rationalism, and preexisting social structures as well as the concerted direction of human agency.

Racism itself is the product of biological evolution, but the particular racist ideology espoused by the Nazis was born out of the combination of Europe's historical treatment of Jews and the newly emergent theories of eugenics that served to retroactively justify that historical treatment in the eyes of their adherents. The Nazis' appeal to the German populace was likewise more complex than any single schema could account for, because it was simultaneously rooted in highly emotional appeals to national pride and racial solidarity as well as in coldly rational estimations of economic self-interest. Furthermore, while Hitler's personal agency constituted the driving force behind the Nazi Party's ideology and ultimately its entire strategy, the Holocaust would not have been possible without the social and logistical structures already in place, because otherwise Hitler simply would not have been able to mobilize the resources and personnel necessary to carry out genocide on such an efficient, industrialized scale.

Confronting the reality of the Holocaust remains difficult not only because it resulted from a complex interaction of individuals, social structures, ideas, and actions, but because the entirety of its horrors is almost literally beyond human beings' ability to imagine. One might even go so far as to say that imagining the true extent of the Holocaust is impossible, because even Hitler was likely incapable of admitting or acknowledging the full extent of the brutality and cruelty that occurred throughout Nazi-controlled Europe. However, the Holocaust's tendency to overwhelm and escape examination is actually instructive, so long as the researcher is willing to acknowledge his or her own cognitive and theoretical limitations.

Recognizing that the Holocaust's importance is precisely due to the fact that it represents a phenomenon well beyond the scale of anything human beings deal with on a regular basis allows one to begin developing explanations that do not fall into the trap of reductionism or unnecessary dualism. The effects of World War I and the Great Depression, coupled with Europe's history of discriminating against and subjugating Jews, made 1920s Germany the ideal environment for a biologically inspired but socially conditioned racist ideology to gain traction and ultimately complete power. In this sense, the Holocaust can almost be viewed as the inevitable result of human society in the early and middle twentieth century, because the conditions were simply too conducive to an ascendant racism. One is thereby able to examine the Holocaust from a variety of perspectives, revealing that it was the result of Germany's modernization and industrialization coupled with economic conditions and a social history positively ripe for exploitation and radicalization.