Letter to NY Times 12.20.2023 re Holocaust in film Area of Interest

This is an unsettling, but necessary probe into the nature of genocide. It is too simplistic to dismiss the enormity of the Holocaust as the work of demented Nazis, who received their just punishment at Nuremberg.

I find the Holocaust frightening because it shows how easy it is to kill people who have become objects. Labeling is often the first step to violence toward people. The prologue to the Holocaust was centuries of persecution of Jews by Christians blaming Jews for the death of Christ. For example, St. John Chrysostom preached that "The synagogue is worse than a brothel... it is the den of scoundrels and the repair of wild beasts." (Europe and the Jews by Malcom Hay) As a result, people became accustomed to the labeling of Jews as subhuman. Once Jews became labeled as vermin, the plague of Europe, it was easy to exterminate them as one would kill rats-- an unpleasant but necessary task. Art Spiegelman depicts Jews as mice in his comic book Maus, to illustrate the dehumanizing process.

In the film Downfall by Oliver Hirschbiegel, Hitler is depicted, not as a monster, but as a human fanatic dedicated to the survival of the Reich. The Nazis were not monsters; they went home to wives and children. If the experience of the Holocaust only teaches us that Germans can be especially cruel, then the lesson that cost six million lives is wasted: that all of us have similar potential for inhuman action toward people whose humanity is hidden by labels.