ABSTRACT
The Holocaust becomes a natural out-growth of our type of society, not an exception to it. Extermination becomes a child of modernity, not a return to an earlier stage of barbarism. The conditions for the Holocaust are precisely those that have helped to create the industrial society: the division of labour, the modern bureaucracy, the rational spirit, the efficiency, the scientific mentality, and particularly the relegation of values from important sectors of society. Zygmunt Bauman warns against the Jewish tendency to monopolize Holocaust, to make it into a phenomenon peculiar to the Jews. The central part of Bauman’s explanation of Holocaust is the social production of moral indifference in modern societies. German industry was most helpful in realizing the “final solution”. According to Raul Hilberg, the enterprises that furnished it were part of the chemical industry, specializing in disinfecting buildings, barracks and clothes in specially constructed gas chambers.
