How Could This Happen

January 27, 2014
While many books have been written on the Holocaust, this volume claims to be the “first comprehensive analysis” of its causes. McMillan, a specialist in German history, addresses multiple factors, including an authoritarian tradition in German politics dating to the 1860s, a long history of German anti-Semitism, the demoralizing loss of WWI, the weakness and collapse of the Weimar Republic, the influence of Darwinian thought on notions of a German “racial struggle” against the Jews, and Hitler’s rise “from dictator to demigod.” McMillan’s best chapter, “The Absent Moral Compass,” surveys postwar psychological experiments to explain how even non-ideologues in the German bureaucracy and army could be led to murder, thanks to “automatic obedience to authority; conformity to the behavior of a group, and adaptation to a role and situation.” McMillan’s analysis is succinct, yet its relative brevity is occasionally a weakness, as when he claims, without sufficient evidence, that a “genocidal cohort” of men, hardened by their experience in WWI, were instrumental in implementing the “Final Solution.” Despite this flaw, and the idea that no truly comprehensive explanation for the Holocaust seems possible, this thoughtful work examines both why the Nazis came to power and how they could engage in murder on such an unprecedented scale.