Clayton was applying a test of common sense plausibility to various statements put to him. This is an incomplete procedure, but in a subject like history that depends on testimony it is appropriate as a starting point of inquiry.
Clayton Moore has repeatedly offered bare-assertions based on utter ignorance, and refuses to examine any of the evidence.
Other deniers have in the past offered similar arguments to incredulity about how was it possible, but none have ever bothered to explore the circumstances in which genocide unfolded, and none whatsoever have ever compared with other situations of mass violence, which is a sine qua non in social science.
I agree with this thus far. You might add the bombing campaigns against civilians by the UK and USA in WW2 which we all know were widely approved of. However, there are still unique features of the holocaust as a whole as currently described, which is part of the background to the widespread interest in it in popular culture.
Every outbreak of mass violence has its unique features. The issue is whether one can generalise and compare. Resorting to a universal argument to incredulity steps into social science territory, and demands comparison.
Allied bombing certainly was not seen as especially cruel, not least because the Nazis had themselves routinely bombed civilians.
A better comparison would be German reactions to the euthanasia program. These
varied. There were numerous protests from churchmen, from lawyers and from the educated middle class, who possessed the skills necessary to leave traces in the historical record and the confidence to make their views known. But far from all Germans outside or inside the Nazi Party were bothered. Religious motivations unsurprisingly underlay a significant part of
These are certainly relevant. There are both domain specific (animal) and domain general (rational) mental mechanisms that might be at play. For the former, there are general facts about territorial mammal behaviour and pack animal behaviour that result in mauling and less often killing. This is also found in humans. Here though, you have to include the fact that submissive behaviour by one animal will inhibit aggression by another (think of dogs). Holocaust narratives often show this inhibition being overridden, though it is a human behaviour pattern too.
Where reason/ideology is at work, it can override other behaviour patterns. This is alleged in the case of the holocaust (e.g. the supposed influence of Christian anti-Semitism or Social Darwinism). However, Christianity has been around for 1000s of years and the influence of people like Dawkins is probably as great as that of Haeckel in the 1930s.
I note in general that you don't introduce any specific text that compares the behaviour alleged in the holocaust with the known facts of human nature. I suspect that there is none, for the reason that the allegations are out of line with knowledge drawn from other historical facts. This is not so for the revisionist interpretation that propaganda has seeped into the historical narrative. I refer you to Jean Norton Cru on Testimonies and Witnesses in WW1 for example.
There is a largescale comparative literature in sociology, anthropology and psychology on violence including reactions to violence and massacre. One might add that all these disciplines have covered prison like situations which are also highly relevant.
The Milgram experiment and the Stanford Prison experiment are two standout examples, the latter also covering victim behaviour. In sociology, Randall Collins' book
Violence noted widespread passivity in the face of violence and massacre drawing on the empirical literature describing such incidents.
Psychologists such as Harald Welzer have examined perpetrator psychology and the social psychology of Nazi Germany vis-a-vis the Holocaust, there are explicitly comparative studies as well eg Steven Baum, The Psychology of Genocide.
It would be worth reminding you that we're nearly 50 years into a wave of research triggered by the repetition of 'like sheep to the slaughter' accusations by Hannah Arendt, echoing Raul Hilberg. This research documented the
varied reactions of Jewish communities and Jewish leaders to deportation and extermination; to name the classic example, Isaiah Trunk's Judenrat offers a mass of empirical detail on the differing patterns of resistance, resignation, suicide, flight and compliance.
We are now 71 years on from the first details emerging about how the victims reacted to slaughter in the death camps, with plenty of data available on the differing reactions as well as a considerable amount of data regarding regional, social, age, religious and gender profiling as well as prior cultural experiences (like military training, familiarity with/access to weapons).
I don't accept all of supposed facts 2) or 3).
Whether or not you accept something is irrelevant unless you can refute the point, which would be difficult since the points summarised a mass of research you almost certainly don't know.
It is equally so however, that there were ideological factors that would counter these influences. The influence of Christianity for example ("Thou shalt not kill") which the Nazis claimed to support in a depoliticised form (see Steigman-Gall's work on this), military discipline in both the Wehrmacht and the SS - e.g. the death penalty imposed on SS men who killed Jews. The traditions of the German army ("Gott mit uns") permitted criticism of superiors within limits and Catholic civilians spoke out about euthanasia (hence the supposed failure to speak out about the Jews has to be explained by anti-Semitism).
As mentioned, there was no failure on the part of Germans to speak out about antisemitism. Individuals who had protested against euthanasia may have been more silent on the Final Solution, but this remark certainly doesn't apply to the German Catholic Church as a whole, or indeed the Protestant confessions. Nor does it apply to churches across Europe or outside Europe, who were usually at the forefront of making noises, including in your own country, France.
I cannot comment on this case.
It is widely discussed in the literature, eg in Browning, Origins of the Final Solution, and many other works.
However, I did take the trouble to look at one of your East European sources (Symbiosis and Ambivalence by Rosa Lehmann. NY: Berghahn, 2001) and I find the usual feet of clay in the text and footnotes.
In the relevant chapter (7. The Destruction of the Communities), Lehmann begins by citing a story about a horse which ploughs a Jewish cemetery dying, the obvious meaning of which is that Jews were esteemed by the Poles, but which being set in a cemetery has a sinister tone.
She describes her Polish sources as "selected" [on what principle she does not say] from "often anecdotal (that is, incomplete) and divergent (in contents [i.e. contradictory] and emphasis) stories told by the informants." (page 146)
The contemporary written record of a school headmaster refers not to killing but to Jews being "carried to the ghetto in Dukla" after men, women and children were separated and property confiscated. (page 146)
Despite the supposition that everyone knew the Jews were going to be killed, they are said to have spent 4-8 weeks in Dukla. But as usual, eye-witness testimony trumps documentation. There is a story (page 150) about Jews being "selected" by being asked to jump over a hole filled with petrol without getting petrol on their feet. As this is an absurd procedure (given the shortage of petrol and why not just ask them to long jump) it surely counts against the plausibility of the witness.
The evidence for one shooting is that "Dates and numbers are inscribed on the memorial plaque located at the place of the massacre." (page 151) - i.e. the same quality of Soviet era evidence as would lead us to say 4 million were killed at Auschwitz prior to 1990. Of the other shooting, an eye-witness reports "that the earth moved for three weeks after the shooting." (page 151). This too casts doubt on the credibility of the witness.
There is only one footnote to this, which reads: "According to Israel B. (in Litwak, 1969, 4) on 14 August 1942 the young people [the ones who could jump over the petrol] (men, women and children) were made to walk on foot to the railway station in Iwonicz (28 km from Jaliska), where they were put on transport to the extermination camp Belzec. Israel B. knows of five or six survivors from all the Jews who had been sent to the camp Belzec." So one person knows of five survivors from an "extermination camp"?
LOL. Rosa Lehmann is an anthropologist not a historian. Her work sought to reconstruct Polish-Jewish relations in an extremely small town which naturally meant that doing ethnography among Poles in the region was the best method. Alina Cala did a similar more wide-ranging ethnographic study entitled The Image of the Jew in Polish Folk Culture not that long before.
You're misreading the final remark - 'knows of five or six survivors from all the Jews who had been sent to the camp Belzec' does not mean they escaped
from Belzec; it is overwhelmingly the case that a survivor
of deportation jumped from the trains.
Ethnographic methods i.e. interviewing bystanders are about the only way that
some events in the past will ever be reconstructed, because contrary to an apparently widespread delusion among deniers, most written records do not survive.
Where there are no written records from the era itself (of whatever provenance), one turns to later efforts to document events through eyewitness testimonies and where relevant, physical investigation.
That is the historical method. It's not the anthropological method.
As Lehmann was not a historian she did not think to look up the Main Commission records or 1940s investigations in the Institute of National Memory; her method was ethnography, her discipline is anthropology. It's almost as stupid to expect her to do archival research as it is to expect that historians will automatically conduct fieldwork.
The methods are different.
