Guenter Lewy

If one is looking for a concise examination of the factors that generated the Holocaust, one could do quite a lot worse than this monograph, written by a man who witnessed "Crystal Night" as a child, and who has spent much of their career dealing with the analysis of organized violence against peoples. Concentrating on motivation amongst the field commanders and foot soldiers of the Nazi war on the Jews, Lewy is quite prepared to split hairs between genuine haters, careerists, and people just swept up in events. The one point Lewy comes back, and essentially ends on, is that while you can't expect suicide to be a general option by which to maintain personal integrity, even in Nazi Germany one did have options to avoid participating in industrialized murder, and the actual killers seldom availed themselves of it.

Apart from that, one thing that undercuts this monograph is that Lewy does invoke the work of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, whose experiments were being debunked basically as this book was coming out.… (más)

Nella storia della seconda guerra mondiale c'è un capitolo non ancora concluso: le responsabilità della Chiesa cattolica di fronte ai crimini commessi dal regime nazista, primo fra tutti il genocidio degli ebrei. Il ruolo di papa Pio XII e dei vescovi tedeschi è al centro, ancora oggi, di un dibattito molto acceso. Attingendo ai rapporti della Gestapo, ai documenti del partito nazionalsocialista e delle diocesi tedesche, Guenter Lewy ha compiuto un'indagine accurata, mettendo in evidenza, oltre ai cedimenti, i silenzi e le complicità delle gerarchie cattoliche, anche le episodiche opposizioni.… (más)