Answer:
1. Never underestimate ‘fringe’ political voices. 2.Don’t assume that ‘extreme’ politicians do not mean every word they say. 3. Be aware that hatred of minorities can make very popular policy. 4. Remember that terrible crimes are often committed in small steps. 5. Don’t assume you can predict your own behavior in adversity.
Explanation:
The first insight can be deduced from two statistics. In 1928, after Adolf Hitler had been leader of the Nazis for seven years, the Nazis received just 2.6% of the vote in the German General Election. Many people dismissed the Nazis as a political force – they thought they were a collection of fanatics on the fringe of German politics, almost a joke. But just four years later, at the General Election of 1932, the Nazis were the biggest single political party in Germany with 37% of the vote, and in January 1933 Hitler became Chancellor. While Hitler did not possess a blueprint for the Holocaust at this time, his feelings about the Jews were obvious. It was clear that, were he ever to gain power, the Jews were going to suffer in one way or another. But there was a tendency in some quarters to play down the radical nature of Hitler’s views. Here, for instance, is what the German banker, Johannes Zahn, told us about his own attitude in the 1930s: "If you take Christianity, for example, the demands of the Bible, the demands of the catechisms, do you know anybody who fulfills the demands of Christianity 100 per cent, or even pretends to fulfill them 100 per cent? And one thought the same way about Mein Kampf - these are demands, these are ideas, but nobody thought that they were to be taken literally." Erna Krantz, another German who was a schoolgirl in Munich around the same time, remembered that "it was somewhat contagious. You used to say that if you tell a young person every day, ‘You are something special,’ then in the end they will believe you." Whatever the reason, there is a desire amongst many people, I believe, to think that there must have been a detailed blueprint for the Holocaust. The reality, however, was very different. While Hitler expressed hatred for the Jews and wanted to do something about what he saw as the ‘Jewish problem’ from the moment he became a politician, his ideas about just what form that ‘something’ would take changed over time. During the war, in 1940, there was even a plan to send the Jews to the island of Madagascar. While that plan would ultimately have been genocidal, it would not have led to the Holocaust as we know it. The fact is that the journey Hitler and the Nazis took to the death camps was a gradual one, full of twists and turns. Over the years many people have told me that they are certain that they know how they would have behaved had they been forced to endure Nazi persecution. They believe their characters are fixed, unlikely to change according to circumstances. When people say such things to me, I think of the interview I conducted with Toivi Blatt, a Polish Jew who, in 1943, was forced by the Nazis to work in the Sonderkommando at the death camp of Sobibor. Members of the Sonderkommando had to help the Nazis in the camp by performing tasks like cleaning out the gas chambers and sorting the belongings of the murdered Jews. Their work was the stuff of nightmares. And if the Sonderkommandos didn’t do their job to the satisfaction of the Nazis then they were immediately murdered.