Does Studying the Holocaust Cause More Harm Than it Prevents?

It would be wrong to think that studying the Holocaust causes more harm than it prevents. A detailed study of the mass killing of Jews during WW II creates an awareness of the danger that the evil might be repeated and encourages steps to prevent that. A superficial study of Holocaust history (from textbooks only for instance) is unlikely to make anyone aware of how susceptible the human mind is to evil and how likely a repetition is, in some way, shape, or form. We need to "see" the perpetrators and the victims of this evil up close in order to feel the impact of what happened.

While writing his book, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing, and the Psychology of Genocide, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton interviewed many doctors who worked in the death/labour camps and who had "selected" prisoners (when they were unloaded from train freight and cattle cars) for either immediate death or for the slave labour force. Dr. Lifton found that these doctors were able to psychologically distance themselves from the mass killing because they actually didn't see the killings carried out. At Auschwitz, for instance, they were buffered from the actual killing because the gas chambers were separate installations. He found that many of these doctors had felt more oppressed by their memories of "brutal tasks" such as having to help torture confessions out of prisoners. Students today should not be allowed to distance themselves from the details of what happened, psychologically, or otherwise. They should see graphic documentary film footage and survivor interviews. This is the only way to understand that all humans are potentially capable of evil and to learn how to avoid crossing the line to actually commit evil.

In a Sunday New York Times Magazine interview with Dr. Lifton on July 21, 1985 (before his book came out), he comments on Hannah Arendt's "concept of the banality of evil in her portrayal of Adolf Eichmann as a rather unremarkable bureaucrat". In the same interview, Dr. Lifton passes on inmates' descriptions of the infamous Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele, as a "gentle and cultured man ". The evil committed by each of these two Nazis is not what one would expect of persons matching their descriptions and that is what we need to learn today: that you can't say "it would never happen here", or "my neighbour would never turn me in".

If students today are to make informed judgments about the past, history must present them with as full a picture as possible and not gloss over inconvenient or emotionally moving facts. This is the point that one of Canada's better-known historians, Margaret MacMillan, makes in her recent book, The Uses and Abuses of History. For example, in their book, Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong, Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow talk about how Charles de Gaulle "...carefully cultivated the myth that all of France had supported the Resistance - morally, if not in their actions", but that after his death French historians revealed that "...many of the evil acts attributed to the occupying Germans were actually the doing of the French administration" and that there was "...no doubt anymore that France persecuted Jews on its own". The authors praise the French for not refusing to face their past and they note that "most of France's modern structures were created to avoid a repetition of history".

It might be harmful for an individual to see graphic film footage of the liberation of the death camps after the end of WW II and of the remains of the dead victims; emotional upset or bad dreams might result. On the other hand, one has to learn how evil happened before one can successfully try not to let it happen again.

References

Nadeau, J. & Barrow, J. (2003).Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong, Naperville: Sourcebooks.

Lifton, Robert Jay. (1986) The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, New York: Basic Books

Lifton, R. (1985, July). Who Made This Man? Mengele. New York Times Magazine, 16-25.

MacMillan, M. (2008, April 12). An excerpt from: The Uses and Abuses of History. National Post, pp. A22.