Abstract
In 1988, Peter Haas published his important book Morality After Auschwitz.3 This is not a book analysing abstract philosophical theories but a detailed analysis of how a society adopts a new ethic — one capable of redefining the moral life so that what had been identified as evil becomes good and vice versa. Using a sociology of knowledge approach, the book provides a detailed historical analysis of how the Nazi ethic became embodied in the institutions and practices of German society. Haas traces the Nazi ethic from its sectarian base in a small political party (the National Socialist Worker’s Party) to its growth into a transcultural ethic covering most of Europe under Nazi rule. He follows the development of this new ethic in the transformation of political, legal and technical bureaucracies. As a consequence, everything that was done by the Nazis was, within this new frame of reference, both legal and ethical. In the end, Haas argues, we must conclude that the Holocaust was ‘not the result of absolute evil but of an ethic that conceives good and evil in different terms … That is why the horrors of Auschwitz could be carried on by otherwise good, solid, caring human beings.’4
A TESTIMONY:
‘I had no choice, I was in this web — this network of authority… They would say, “Don’t disturb the Organization” ‘ (from an interview by Robert Jay Lifton with a Nazi physician who selected Jews for death in the gas chambers).1
A SECOND TESTIMONY:
‘How can you call us “good”? We were doing what had to be done. Who else could help them?… Things had to be done, that’s all, and we happened to be there to do them’ (from an interview with Magda Trocme, wife of Pastor André Trocme. Together they led the citizens of Le Chambon sur Lignon in the rescue of over five thousand Jews during the Holocaust).2
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Notes
Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, (New York: Basic Books, 1986), p.106.
Philip P. Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (New York: HarperCollins, 1979), pp.20–21.
Peter Haas, Morality After Auschwitz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988).
Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue, 2nd edition (Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, 1984).
Sauvage, Pierre Weapons of the Spirit [Film]. (Los Angeles: Pierre Sauvage Production and Friends of le Chambon Inc., 1988).
My main focus is on Samuel P. and Pearl M. Oliners, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (New York: Macmillan, Free Press, 1988) [henceforth Oliners].
See also such studies as: Philip P. Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (New York: HarperCollins, 1979);
Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986);
Eva Fogelman, Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1994);
David P. Gushee, The Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust: A Christian Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994).
Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
Samuel P. and Pearl M. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (New York: Macmillan, Free Press, 1988) For a discussion of Gilligan’s dispute with Kohlberg see.
Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 164.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Geneology of Morals, tr. Francis Golffing, (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956).
Oliner and Oliner, p.155, quoting C. Glock and R. Stark, Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).
Jacques Ellul, The New Demons, (New York: Seabury Press, 1973 & 1975), p.48.
Greenberg, ‘Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity an Modernity after the Holocaust’, in Eva Fleischner (ed.), Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? (New York: KTAV, 1977), p.47.
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© 2001 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Fasching, D.J. (2001). Ethics without Choice. In: Roth, J.K., Maxwell, E., Levy, M., Whitworth, W. (eds) Remembering for the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-66019-3_67
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