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Humanities Podcasts
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Beyond Belief: Understanding Hitlers Killers with Mark Roseman
05/09/07 | Talk by Mark Roseman
Pat M. Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History
Indiana University
It has not been easy for the world to make sense of the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Indeed, as academic and nonacademic observers sought in successive post-war decades to understand participation in the Nazi killing machine, the picture they drew of the agent of Nazi terror was strikingly unstable - cycling through the monster, the banal bureaucrat, the modern scientist, and the convinced ideologue. With each iteration, post-war analysts have captured but also missed key elements of the reality of participation in Nazi Germany. Roseman will argue that the Nazi perpetrators were neither banal executors of orders from above, nor independent agents with their own fount of evil or conviction. Rather, they have to be understood as participants in an evolving "conversation" of terror, in which even the most determined ideologues moved very far from their original convictions. In seeking to make sense of such genocidal careers, he will also explore the fact that the huge majority of the protagonists were able, after 1945, so easily to abandon their convictions and practices in the very different circumstances of the postwar world. |
Click on a file name to play:
- Beyond Belief: Understanding Hitler's Killers - Roseman.mp3
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