In The Cunning of History, author Richard Rubenstein discusses the elements within Germany and other countries of the world that contributed to the mass killings of the Jews in what we know as the Holocaust. Rubenstein further discusses the history of anti-Semitism that enabled the persecution of the Jews, and also compares the slave industry of the world wherein the importation and persecution of slaves in the United States and other parts of the world had existed pre-Holocaust. Rubenstein wants the reader to be able to peel back the emotional imagery and layers that encompass words like Auschwitz and Holocaust and look deeper at the true meaning of what really was going on and why it was able to happen the way in which it did. Analyzing
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“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, said Lord Acton, the 19th-century British historian. These words describe chapter two wherein Rubenstein details the rise to power of the Nazi party and the events that led up to the actual imprisonment of the Jews. Hitler’s decisive plan for total domination required three very specific conditions to occur:
Among the preconditions for such a society are: (a) a bureaucratic administration capable of governing with utter indifference to the human needs of the inmates; (b) a supply of inmates capable of continuous replenishment; (c) the imposition of the death sentence on every inmate as soon as he or she enters. Unless the supply is more or less inexhaustible, the masters will be tempted to moderate their treatment of the inmates because of their labor value. (Rubenstein 34)
Most of the camps that were constructed for the extermination of the Jews were solely utilized as extermination camps. There were exceptions in some cases such as with Auschwitz. There was a period of time during the war that there was a need for labor at the camps. This need was limited and only temporary. At Auschwitz, you were either selected for immediate execution or used for labor. Rubenstein does compare the import of African slaves to North America with that of the cattle car exportation of Jews to the concentration …show more content…
Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of Jews did not resist. They had been conditioned by their religious culture to submit and endure. There was no resort to even token violence when the Nazis forced Jews to dig mass graves, strip, climb into the graves, lie down over the layer of corpses already murdered and await the final coup de grâce. Such submission was the last chapter in the history of a cultural and psychological transformation begun by the rabbis and Pharisees almost two thousand years before. (Rubenstein
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, said Lord Acton, the 19th-century British historian. These words describe chapter two wherein Rubenstein details the rise to power of the Nazi party and the events that led up to the actual imprisonment of the Jews. Hitler’s decisive plan for total domination required three very specific conditions to occur:
Among the preconditions for such a society are: (a) a bureaucratic administration capable of governing with utter indifference to the human needs of the inmates; (b) a supply of inmates capable of continuous replenishment; (c) the imposition of the death sentence on every inmate as soon as he or she enters. Unless the supply is more or less inexhaustible, the masters will be tempted to moderate their treatment of the inmates because of their labor value. (Rubenstein 34)
Most of the camps that were constructed for the extermination of the Jews were solely utilized as extermination camps. There were exceptions in some cases such as with Auschwitz. There was a period of time during the war that there was a need for labor at the camps. This need was limited and only temporary. At Auschwitz, you were either selected for immediate execution or used for labor. Rubenstein does compare the import of African slaves to North America with that of the cattle car exportation of Jews to the concentration …show more content…
Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of Jews did not resist. They had been conditioned by their religious culture to submit and endure. There was no resort to even token violence when the Nazis forced Jews to dig mass graves, strip, climb into the graves, lie down over the layer of corpses already murdered and await the final coup de grâce. Such submission was the last chapter in the history of a cultural and psychological transformation begun by the rabbis and Pharisees almost two thousand years before. (Rubenstein