Introduction

How was the Holocaust possible? David Rousset, a survivor of the death camps, reflected that ‘normal men do not know that everything is possible’ (Arendt 1951: 436). And indeed Auschwitz has come to stand for unprecedented horror, unimaginable cruelty. This lack of comprehension, though readily recognized as intellectually disturbing, has a reassuring and, as such, comfortable effect on us: it helps side us, normal men as we take ourselves to be, against the doers, the Nazi perpetrators. The doers, we like to think, are not like us; indeed, their being unlike us is the very quality which explains that they could do what they did. Having committed atrocities so outrageous in nature and scope as to explode our faculties of comprehension, they, authors of the unthinkable, must surely be – or have been – abnormal men.

To think like this – and who tends not to? – is to close oneself off against the Holocaust. It is to prevent the challenge posed by that event from being fully acknowledged; it is to help perpetuate the very conditions which made its occurrence a historical fact in the first place.

Therefore, if there is a lesson to be learned from the Holocaust, the first condition that must be met is to bid farewell to the twofold premise that what happened then was fundamentally abnormal, and that it took abnormal men to make it happen.