Chris Hedges recently interviewed philosopher Susan Neiman with the conversation centering on her latest book, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era. At one point the conversation moves to, essentially, how good people let bad things happen with Nazi Germany being the archetypal example.
Neiman says:
The Nazis did not confront people with Auschwitz in 1933 or 34 or 35, OK? People really did not know much about the mass murder going on at the Eastern Front until the '40s.
What?
First of all, Auschwitz was SS-free in 1933-35. It was in Poland and populated by Poles. (I think it was a military base.) It didn't become Germany territory until after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939.
This brings me to #2. There was no Eastern Front in 1933-35. There was no Eastern Front until September 1939 when Germany Blitzkrieged Poland.
Lastly, the mass murders on the Eastern Front - I presume we're talking Final Solution-Holocaust mass murders - didn't even begin until the '40s - 1941, to be exact. There was formulating and planning done in 1940 but it really began in '41. (As I learned a couple months ago, Zyklon B got its trial runs in'41 during Operation Barbarossa.)
I had to stop listening at this point. While this doesn't disprove anything she has to say about moral decay in our society today, I just had a hard time taking her seriously after hearing this blunder. It made any parallels she wanted to draw with Germany in the '30s or any use of that place and time as representative of human behavior more generally suspect to me.
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