ABSTRACT
The Holocaust—the genocidal program of extermination that the Nazis called the Final Solution—took the lives of some six million Jews. This chapter provides some additional background to American sociology's historical neglect of the Holocaust. It considers the question of Germany's so-called special or separate path in history, and situates Nazism in the context of the broader phenomenon of totalitarianism and fascism. The chapter focuses on the tradition of classical social theory to raise several sociological themes that will provide an overview and illuminates some key issues in the study of Nazism and the Holocaust. It introduces the concept of collective memory in anticipation of postwar mnemonic disputes in four nations, namely: Germany, Poland, Israel, and the United States. The chapter shows how collective memories of the Holocaust have become globalized, as the memories of individual nations inter-penetrate with each other.
