Robert K makes these interesting remarks about Hitler
forcing people to take extreme positions on what up to
Nazism might have been just their run-of-the-mill,
"banal" antisemitism.  Either they regarded Hitler as
the evil guy, or the Jews as evil.
 
But, Robert, you leave out alternative reaction #3, the
most common: complete apathy.
 
==Dan P
 
>
>I have my own hypothesis here.  Before Hitler, anti-semitism was
>widely prevalent and was somewhat banal.  But the Nazis took
>anti-semitism to such an extreme that people were forced to see it for
>what it really was.  One could no longer be an anti-semite simply as a
>matter of unthinking conventional prejudice.  Consequently, most people
>were so repulsed by what was happening in Germany that they had to start
>feeling that, although they still might not like Jews in a lot of ways,
>still, one had to respect the fact that Jews were fellow human beings.
>
>If, on the other hand, one was not willing to back off from one's
>anti-semitism, then one needed to find stronger justifications for it,
>and and the result would be that one's anti-semitism would become even
>more extreme.  In other words, either one's stomach would be turned by
>what the Nazis were doing to Jews, even before the world learned about
>the death camps, or one would have to reconcile oneself to it by
>deciding that Jews were truly evil people who must be driven from
>society.  This is, in my opinion, what happened to Pound.  (One must
>also never forget that Pound was, during this period, not very sane.)
>
 
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