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I can tell you something that interests me: me being someone who was not born until long after the end of the Second World War, but whose heart goes out to everyone who suffered and/or died during that time.

Why did the Holocaust happen? There are many answers, none of them comprehensive. But after studying the history of the period for a very long time, one idea stays with me.

How could anyone do to anyone what the Germans did to the Jews of Europe? It seems to me that the Nazi ideology required adherents to murder large parts of their own psyches. Huge parts of the Nazi's inner birthright as a human being had to be suppressed, cut off, destroyed, suppressed. Compassion, for instance. And everything that seemed "feminine", such as emotions, especially love and empathy. (Nazis hated women. Even now, there is a word in German, 'weiblich', that sounds as if it should mean 'feminine', but really it means 'stupid'.) The German man who was trying to belong to the Nazi community was deeply ashamed of these parts of himself, and terrified of them. If they were seen by others, he would be rejected by the group he longed to merge with.

Carl Jung taught the world about the power of projection: how each of us can see in the outer world only what exists inside of us. Our image of another person is not truly them: it is our own projection, a manifestation before our eyes of what already exists within us. If the thing we see was not part of our own self, we would not recognize it in the outside world.

I believe that the Nazis projected their own Shadow onto the Jews of Europe. That is, the part of themselves that frightened them, that they rejected, that they would do anything rather than accept as a part of their own selves. Jews were Other; they were individualistic, not joiners, not belong-ers. They were helpless, many of them were poor. Many of them were intellectual or artistic. All of these were qualities that Naziism rejected, and that individual Nazis rejected inside themselves. Nazis were required to be masculine, powerful, anti-intellectual, without doubts or secret thoughts of any kind. They longed to be exactly the same as the man marching next to them: witness the uniforms, whose true purpose was (and is) to mask the individuality of the men wearing it.

What did the Germans gain by creating the Holocaust? That question has been bothering me for a long time. All that effort and money and time and labor, for what? What *good* did it do them, to do what they did?

I believe that what they were engaged in was the slaughter of their own intolerable inner selves.

I think of the symbolism of the concentration camp in relation to this. Why did the Nazis choose to do the particular things that they did? They tried to erase the individuality of their victims (shaving, removal of clothing, replacement of names with numbers.) They even gave their victims a uniform, of sorts--nothing from Hugo Boss, but garments of grey and blue stripes, signifying the new identity of the wearer as a prisoner and a slave. They seem to have cared about preserving the distinction between men and women: even in the freezing winters of eastern Poland, they gave women prisoners dresses instead of trousers. Almost as if they were protecting their male Jewish prisoners from identification with women.

It's as if the Nazis were saying, "You would not/could not join in. Now we are *forcing* you to join the group. We are taking away your existence as an individual. And when you have felt that fact, we will take away your life altogether."

So I began to see a sort of ghastly mirroring of the Nazis themselves in their victims in the camps. That whole world, after all, came out of the psyches of the Germans. The Jews did nothing to envision or to create it. Those emaciated human forms whom we see in films from the time of liberation--they are an image born out of the Nazi mind, not the Jewish one. The prisoners in the concentration camps were uniformed, as identical as possible, strictly segregated by sex. In Treblinka, at least, they were even forced to sing a militaristic marching song.

I believe that a Nazi, looking at a concentration camp prisoner as he suffered and died, was actually watching himself. That is what I find interesting about the Nazis. Because we *all* belong to the same species as those horrific men. What analogous trick of projection might we, ourselves, be playing?

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Q: What is interesting about the Nazis?
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