Word: nazi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...COMMON VIEW OF HITLER'S Germany that the mass murder of 6 million European Jews was primarily carried out by Nazi zealots. Ordinary Germans, we like to think, knew little or nothing about the Holocaust; if they participated in the killings, they did so under duress, subject to orders that could not be disobeyed. Utter nonsense, argues Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, an assistant professor of government and social studies at Harvard. In an explosive new book, Hitler's Willing Executioners (Knopf; 622 pages; $30), he contends that the perpetrators of the Final Solution were, by and large, ordinary men and women...
...Jews of Eastern Europe and shipping them to death factories like Auschwitz and Treblinka, were mostly composed of military reservists. Of the 500 or so officers and men who served in 1942 with one typical unit that Goldhagen details, Police Battalion 101, only 21 belonged to the Nazi elite force known as the SS. That year the battalion participated in a roundup of Jews from the Lublin region of Poland. Thousands were hunted down and slaughtered in execution orgies that left the police splattered with the blood and brains of their helpless victims...
...very inclusiveness of Carter's integrity makes it alarmingly content-free. Even a Nazi concentration-camp operative, to draw on one of Carter's illustrative cases, could, on the face of it, exhibit "integrity" by zipping through the three-step program before turning on the gas. In which case "integrity" wouldn't be much more than an accessory, like a walking stick or a pipe, designed to impart some of that ineffable quality we all seem to crave--gravitas...
Carter tries to extricate himself from the swamps of moral relativism by postulating that some ideas are, after all, just plain evil, and as examples of such genuine, integrity-destroying evil, he offers racism and genocide. Thus the Nazi operative couldn't be a man of integrity, no matter how much "discerning" he engages in, because genocide is just, well, over the top. But evil, in Integrity, seems a pretty makeshift deus ex machina. If, for example, racism is such a self-evident no-no, then why not sexism--including any attempt to restrict women's reproductive choices...
DIED. LUDWIG FREIHERR VON HAMMERSTEIN-EQUORD, 76, anti-Nazi conspirator; in Berlin. Part of the ill-fated July 1944 attempt by German officers to kill Hitler and end World War II, Hammerstein-Equord helped seize army headquarters. When it was retaken by SS troops, he escaped and hid until the defeat of the Third Reich...