ABSTRACT
The vastness of some historical events and processes attracts scholars into postulates marked by singularity. In an early comparison, a historian of American slavery attempted to analogize the psychology of Nazi concentration camp inmates with the trauma of enslavement in order to explain what was considered to be the cultural annihilation and long-term infantilization of blacks in America. Historians of the Holocaust must analyze human behavior, thought, and institutional development within a time frame of years, not centuries. The Holocaust was envisioned as a "final solution" to a problem: Jews were beings whose very existence was a threat and whose physical disappearance was regarded as one of the highest priorities of the Nazi leadership. In the Nazi system, every Jew destroyed was a gain in "racial" security and a once-for-all economic gain in confiscated goods.
