ABSTRACT
The Holocaust, which has been referred to as a “gigantic, murderous operation” (Muller-Hill 1994, 68), involved the systematic annihilation of six million Jews (Eisner 1983, 155; Wellers 1978, 139– 43). It is recognized as one of the most momentous events in the twentieth century, if not in recorded history (Dawidowicz 1975, xi; Hilberg 1980; Katz 1989, 354). After the Holocaust there would never be the same level of innocence and faith in the inherent goodness of humankind or previous understandings of the way in which social institutions worked (Hilberg 1980, 102; Eisner 1983, 149; Rosenberg 1983, 8, 9, 14; Wiesel 1988, 11; Browning 1988, 173). Unlike other instances of genocide in history, the Holocaust was the first time when the power of the technology of the modern world had been turned on a group of people, connected only through a religious heritage, to attempt to murder them to the last person, more than ten million (Bauer 1989, 83–84; Talmon 1989, book 1, 185).
