Chapter 7. Groups and Organizations
7.5 A Sociological Analysis of the Holocaust
This chapter concludes with a sociological analysis of the Holocaust to indicate the significance of some of the sociological dynamics of group behaviour. In sociology the group is always more than the sum of its parts. This chapter has examined this with regard to how individuals change their behaviour when they are around others in different types of group structure.
Chapter 1. An Introduction to Sociology noted how being in a crowd affected people very differently during the exuberance of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and the riots of the 2011 Stanley Cup final. Chapter 6. Social Interaction has shown how being a member of a social group influences people to conform, to engage in groupthink or to choose in-group and out-group attachments. Social networks are also deeply influential. Depending on where one is located in a social network, individuals are enabled or inhibited, to a lesser or greater degree, to share and receive resources of various sorts from friends, friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends, in ways which change peoples behaviours, attitudes and beliefs. Formal organizations structure the relationships between individuals in consistent and impersonal ways to be able to achieve organizational goals that individuals could not achieve on their own.
How does the insight that the group is more than the sum of the parts help to analyze how the Holocaust was possible? The Holocaust (literally “whole burnt”) refers to the systematic program of extermination of European Jews and Roma by Nazis between 1941 and 1945. How was it possible? It is difficult to imagine how the scale of this event could be the product of isolated individuals entering into interaction. It needs to be understood at the level of group behaviour.
Clearly, a significant minority of the population of Germany in the 1930s were anti-Semitic, but even among these individuals the concept of the Final Solution would have been unthinkable. Often, the explanation that has been put forward is that the Nazi era in 20th century Germany was a temporary aberration, a period of mass irrationality and social breakdown; an imposition of racism, hatred, and violence on the population by a megalomaniacal madman — Adolf Hitler — devoted to world domination. This explanation has an element of truth in that the combination of war reparations imposed on Germany after the First World War, the hyper-inflation of the 1920s, and the onset of a global capitalist crisis in the 1930s (the Great Depression) created conditions of instability and widespread desperation. Desperate people do not think clearly.
However, the sociological analysis of the rise of the Nazis and the implementation of the Holocaust is far more discomforting. Rather than an aberration or irrational outburst, the Holocaust unfolded within the purview of legal norms and on the basis of normal sociological phenomena. The Nazis were demo