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Alex Alvarez and Richard R. Fernandez, "Lethal Elites: The Institutions and Professionals That Made the Holocaust Possible" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
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A
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B
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hi, and welcome to New Books and Genocide Studies, part of the New Books Network of podcasts. My name is Keller McFall from Newman University and I'm a host on the channel. And today I'm thrilled to be talking with Alex Alvarez. Alex is one of the authors of a terrific new book titled Lethal the Institutions and Professions that Made the Holocaust Possible, published by Bloomsbury. His co author, Richard Fernandez, unfortunately is not able to join us today, but Alex is. And so, Alex, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us on new books and genocide studies.
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A
Hi Kelly. It was wonderful to be here. Thank you for this invitation on behalf of myself and my friend and colleague Rich. We're really pleased to have this opportunity to talk about this book.
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B
Yeah, I'm excited, too. I know you've been on the channel before, but it's been a while. So why don't we start just by giving you a chance to reintroduce yourself off to the audience and just to say something about Rich and how the two of you started working together.
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A
That sounds good. So I'm Alex Alvarez and I'm a professor of criminology and criminal justice here at Northern Arizona University. And for many years now, I've been doing a lot of research and writing and presenting about genocide and related forms of mass atrocity. And this book is the latest that I have worked on. And it actually started out with my friend Rich Fernandez a number of years ago. He's a sociologist and he was teaching these morning classes, statistics no less, at 8am and credit to him because his students were always active and engaged with statistics at 8 in the morning. But he would often stop by my office because I was on the way to his class and I was there early. I've always been an early morning person. And anyway, we would always have these conversations and chats and this area is not his area in terms of the Holocaust and genocide. But he was always very interested in it. And he has a lot of sociological understanding of structures and institutions and those kind of things. And those conversations led us to create a paper and a presentation on this theme and ultimately it turned into this book project. And he has since retired but it offered us also a great opportunity just to stay in good touch and to have morning coffees as we hammered out the details of this project. And so over the course of a few years, lots of coffee, lots of conversation, we. We managed to complete this project. And we're actually both very pleased with how it's come out.
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B
I've often thought that anybody who truly wants to destroy universities simply needs to get rid of coffee and the whole place will fall apart.
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A
But I tell you, it's. Does. I don't know. It is something I consume a lot of.
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B
Well, let's think about the book. And so maybe I'll just start with a simple thing. What. What is the central question or questions that you and Rich wanted to answer in the book?
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A
Well, you know, I. I think there are several. But what it really comes down to is what we both perceive is a widespread idea or misunderstanding might be a better way to put it, as to how these things are carried out. Genocide, more specifically, the Holocaust, which is the focus of this book, it feels in some ways hard to understand the heinousness, the horror of the kind of mass violence, the. The concentration camps, gas chambers, crematoria. These kind of things are so far outside of people's understanding that I think we often struggle to make sense of it. And one common answer that we hear a lot is that these people are monsters. They're all psychopaths. They're all somehow just evil. And that part and parcel of that that we really tried to disentangle is that these are thugs. These, you know, these are crimes carried out by the lowest of the low, hoodlums, thugs, the, you know, uneducated kind of people. And while there are those rank and file kinds of perpetrators, what we often miss is that the people who carry out these crimes are often actually pretty ordinary or normal, quote, unquote, in terms of their psychological processes. In other words, they're not all suffering from disorders. And second is that highly educated, influential, very learned people in different professions often play critical roles in. Invariably, I would say play critical roles in envisioning, planning, organizing, and then carrying out these horrific kinds of crimes. And I think that is kind of the central issue, if not quite questioned, but the central issue that we sought to address in this book.
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B
Well, as a historian, I've kind of got a glee in my eye as I'm about to ask a social scientist a definitional question, but I'll go ahead anyway.
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A
What? How?
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B
And you kind of gave a rough answer already, but could you say a little bit More about how you're defining elites in this book.
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A
Okay, so in this book, we use the term social elites a lot. And we use them in a kind of sociological way. And what we're trying to refer to are people who, because of their positions, training, background, have a lot of power and authority. And what we mean by that is that there are some people, because they have jobs, they have careers that are incredibly influential, right? Think about doctors. You know, medical doctors in most societies around the world, because of their expertise, because of their training, because of the work they do, right? Saving lives, healing and so forth, they have a lot of influence in a society. We know from surveys done, that medical doctors have high levels of trust among a lot of people, right? Think about lawyers and judges, especially judges, right? They, you know, they carry out the law, they interpret the law, judges sit in judgment. And the training, the expertise they have gives them a lot of legitimacy, influence, and that's a kind of power. And I think we often have this idea that people in these kinds of professions, because they're very learned, because they're very educated, oftentimes because they have these positions that require a lot of trust, that they use their skills and expertise for the. For the good, to help society to maintain law and order, if you're a judge or an attorney, to heal and save lives, if you're a medical professional, for example. And these were a couple of professions we actually look at in this book. But the reality is, if we look at the Holocaust as we do here, we find that medical professionals provided a lot of the legitimation and justification for the policies of persecution that had to do with things like social Darwinism, racial hygiene, these concepts that were in wide circulation at the time. And medical professionals actually pioneered many of the techniques of killing that were used in a precursor to the Holocaust, known as this euthanasia program, where they targeted people with mental and physical disabilities. And in order to better the race or protect the race, the government created a campaign to kill these people, lawyers and judges. A lot of the groundwork for the Holocaust was done through legal mechanisms, laws that. That marginalized, that excluded and made more vulnerable Germany's Jews. And because they were laws and because judges sat and made decisions and, you know, these laws were passed, these policies had the imprimatur right of the state. They. They were. That was what the law says. And we often use law as a shorthand for what is right and what is wrong. So social elites are those who, because of their training, because of their expertise, because they're very learned Individuals and have positions of authority. They are those within a society whose voice, whose judgments, they carry a lot of weight. And in that sense, these lethal elites are what we are writing about and exploring.
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B
Yeah, excuse me. And you also talk writing the subtitle about institutions. So I wonder how you see institutions and imagine their role. Do you see them as actors or contexts? Or how do you think about institutions as you think about these questions?
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A
That's a great question. You know, the thing we think about when we, when we learn about the Holocaust, for example, or other examples, genocide, we think of the perpetrators, right? And we, and we try to individualize this crime. We think about infamous people like Adolf Eichmann who was put on trial after the war, or we think about Heinrich Himmler or Adolf Hitler. But we, we tend to focus on them as individuals. But the thing we have to realize is the Holocaust was a massive continent wide project and that most of the actors who contributed in very direct ways, or sometimes in less direct ways. Think about someone working within the German railway system who is scheduling trains, who's not directly in the camps perhaps, but who is one little cog, one little piece of that machinery of destruction that they act within their roles, within different organizations, institutions, bureaucracies, and those actually have a powerful force in helping facilitate and shape their participation. And so we look at some of these institutions and the ways in which the structure of those institutions mediate, if you will, their participation. And we know a lot about the ways in which the organizations we're a part of shape our behavior. And so think about it this way, that think about a bureaucracy that people who work within bureaucracies, they're not often or always thinking about the outcome of their decisions. Because, hey, I just have to sign this form or I just have to see to this particular task and then I pass it along the chain, right? This kind of mediation in action, where you make decisions that are very limited, are one small piece. Maybe it's just paperwork, maybe it's gathering information or names or scheduling trains or things like this that allow a person to do their work without necessarily considering the ultimate consequences of that. And in fact, if we look at the literature of people who were put on trial after the war for their roles, that oftentimes many of them would argue that, hey, I was just a bureaucrat, I never went out to those places, I was just doing my job, you know, in a very limited bound kind of way.
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B
Yeah, yeah, doing my job. I wonder, and this is a little bit of an umbrella question, and we'll turn Specifically to some things. But just as a kind of first stab at this, how would you just. Is the mix of motivation that characterize elites significantly different than those motivations that inspire or characterize or drive people who don't belong to the elites?
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A
Yes, I would say that human beings being human beings, that, yes, their mix of motivations may be the same. HUME we're not all that different from each other in many ways. The difference is the roles we inhabit and the impact of our individual decisions. And so, you know, the one thing I've studied a lot of different forms of violence for quite a few years now, and the one thing I've learned is that when you're trying to explain human behavior, especially around criminality, violence and these kind of things, there's never one answer, right? There's never one motive, there's even never one trigger. Not trying to be punny here at all, but that, you know, a lot of what dictates why you do things. We're not even always sure for ourselves all the reasons why we do something. And so I would suggest that when we look at the perpetrators of genocide and whether they're the rank and file, that ordinary guard in a camp or military soldier who's in some shooting action, or whether it's big policymakers at a higher level, many of them are acting for different kinds of reasons. And that can vary from person to person and it can vary with the person over time. So, you know, some of the people who participated were true believers. They were dyed in the wool Nazis. They believed in the cause. And while they might not like what they were doing, they felt that it was an important, I don't know, goal or National Socialism for the German race, for these kind of things tied in there too, especially within Nazi Germany, that if you're working within the government or you're in the military, those kinds of responsibilities that had to do with the so called Jewish question, right? Persecution of Germany's Jews and then occupied Europe's Jews that ultimately moved from persecution into outright extermination. That's where the money was, that's where the promotions were, that's where greater areas of responsibility were, right? And so sometimes some of the pieces of motivation had to do with careerism, right? Getting that promotion, getting that pay raise. One of the perpetrators we look at in terms of, in the business world, he was an engineer that worked for a company that made crematorium and he had almost lost his job. He had taken a big pay cut during the Weimar era, during the economic uncertainty, and he Found that in creating crematoria that the SS were using to dispose of bodies in their concentration camps in this growing system, that was his ticket. Right. It was an area that gave him more responsibility, bonuses, you know, these kind of things. And he became one of the experts in designing those crematoria. So, you know, for him there was very concrete kinds of motivations for that. And this is something we see in many examples of genocide, that the, the ways in which people come to participate are varied, as is their reasons for doing so.
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B
Yeah, we don't have time to talk about all the chapters, but I thought we'd just touch on a few of the professions you identity identify in the book to give listeners a flavor of the text. And as we start that, maybe we should start by just asking you what I say, listeners, what is your, who do you hope will read? That's not, that's not a fair question because we always hope everybody will read our books. But exactly how, how did you imagine the audience for this book? And how does that shape how you decided to write it?
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A
So, so I've been writing for many years as an academic and I started my career as most academics do, writing journal articles. And there's a very particular style when you write journals, journal articles that I think are pretty rigid. You know, you're reporting on data and you're trying to write about it in a way that other experts can read and understand and if they want, perhaps replicate it. Right. Or engage with it. But after a while I realized that I wanted to reach wider audiences yet I wanted my work to be accessible and understandable by non experts, yet informed by a lot of information and knowledge and so forth, to create a style that is scholarly but yet is very readable and understandable. And when Rich and I began talking about this particular project, we wanted a book that a Holocaust scholar or genocide scholar could pick up and read and maybe find some good pieces there that they could use, but that someone who is not an academic, someone who is just interested in these topics, even if they don't have that kind of formal training and so forth, they could pick it up and find it engaging and readable and learn some things about it that are not just of interest to scholars of this issue, but that have relevance beyond just this particular case. Right. That speak to deeper human drives, human processes and institutions and so forth. So we want as wide an audience as possible. Now, the topic is a pretty difficult topic. I mean, that's always, you know, the catch. I don't think people often look at these and go, oh, that sounds like a fun read. But that it addresses important ideas and themes that we're all struggling with. Right. Violence in societies, persecution, intolerance and prejudice. These are universal. And it is our hope that anyone interested in learning more about it through this one particular historic example, that they could read this, understand it, and come away with perhaps a better understanding of some of the ways in which these things are carried out and why people come to participate in different roles. Yeah.
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B
And we'll finish with a little bit of discussion about how you might take these specific chapters and think about how they apply to different. Different parts of our own lives and of different parts of our histories. But maybe the place that I think most people who don't study this professionally would be most surprised at is the idea that people who are active in education played such an important role. We tend to think that teachers must. Wouldn't be. Wouldn't be likely to. I don't know, to use the slang, buy into these ideas. So can you. And here I guess I. Including in education, both teachers and people who do research, so scientists and so on. So do we have a. Let's start.
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A
What. What role?
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Recognizing this is a very general question. Can you say something about what role teachers and professors played in the Holocaust?
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A
Yeah, great question again. I mean, and I, as an educator, as a scholar, as a faculty member at a university, you know, this chapter hit close to home in many ways. And in that chapter, we look not only at higher education, but we also looked at what we, you know, tend to refer to as K through 12. Right. Grade school through high school, that kind of thing. And what we find there is sobering, honestly. And I think it is because especially those of us who work within education, we have this idea that education is inherently ennobling, that when we educate, when we become more learned, it in some ways is kind of like a vaccine, if you will, to some of the things like discrimination and prejudice and intolerance and hatred and violence. Right. That the more educated and learned you are, the more resistant you are to those forces. And unfortunately, what this book shows is that that's not necessarily the case. That people who go into higher education or people who become teachers, they live within societies and are as susceptible to the kinds of pressures, the prejudices, the struggles that open people up to supporting regimes that use hatred, whether it's anti Semitism or other forms of intolerance, that use that as a way to scapegoat population. Right. And so forth and so on. Teachers and professors during the Weimar era struggled like many other people during the hyperinflation era, during the social and political instability that wracked Germany during the 1920s, with revolutions in different cities and street violence and so forth. And so when the Nazis came to power, promising to restore Germany in terms of German pride, the economy, create stability, return to traditional German values and so forth, teachers and professors and others, many of them were not immune to those kind of blandishments. Right. These were appealing messages that anyone would want to hear. And so what we find in higher education, one of the first things that the Nazis began doing is they began this policy of coordinating, or it was called Gleichschaltung, but basically it was about getting rid of those who were not on the same program, Right. Whose ideas were antithetical to it. So if you were Jewish, first of all, you posed a threat, as, you know, the Nazis believed racially and intellectually. But if you were too left leaning or too progressive or liberal, those kind of things, that also could potentially mean that you were removed from your positions. Weimar was an era where the Constitution basically way ahead of its time, women had the same rights and protections as men. Well, the Nazis had a much more traditional view of that. And so women who were in academia, many of them lost their jobs. Right. That kind of thing. So the people who were left are those, some of whom were more in line with the Nazi way of thinking. And there were plenty of those. Those who stayed often had to choose, you know, to try to accommodate. And so there were some who, they stayed in their professorships and felt like, well, we've got to keep the light of education alive. And so we'll get through this tough period and we're just going to try to stay under the radar, so to speak. There were others who saw opportunity, right? You lose people in academia, lose their positions, and suddenly there are slots that are opening up for those who want to get in. Right. So it was also an opportunity for those who could accommodate themselves to this new era. Yeah. So there were a lot of things going on. Many professors left, right. Think about Albert Einstein, who was a real critic of the Nazi regime, and ultimately he was in the US Decides to head back and then, you know, it's just not going to happen. In fact, there was a. We quote this. I think he was a director of a fine arts in New York. And he says, you know, jokingly, right. Sarcastically, that he, he loves Hitler because Hitler shakes the tree and we gather all the apples. And it's because there were many, you know, in many fields, whether it was in the arts. Famous movie directors or movie stars or authors, you know, a number of famous authors, playwrights, and scientists and teachers who fled Nazi Germany. And many of these other countries reaped the benefits of that. You know, their intellects or their artistic achievements. And then at the K12 level, you know, many of these teachers had a lot less autonomy and ability to change the curriculum. So you either left education or you adapted yourself to the new textbooks that all of the lessons are ones which, you know, reinforce the Nazi agenda. And the Nazis did believe that the future of the Reich depended upon their children. And so in education, the whole process was geared towards indoctrinating young German kids into the National Socialist worldview. And if you were a teacher, you either went along with it or you lost your job. Simple as that.
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B
Did it matter? We sometimes think that some subjects are less likely to be corrupted than others. Did it matter if you were studying or teaching math or engineering or if you were teaching history or those kind of disciplinary things? Not really the most relevant.
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A
That's a great question. A tough one in some ways. I do know. So, for example, that there were movements in higher education to. So, for example, many physicists who were Jewish. Right. Very influential. Germany was the leading scientific nation in the world. And you lose all of these highly respected, very accomplished thinkers. And one way you address that is you basically start labeling physics in terms of how it was being done as being Jewish physics. So it's not legit. And you try to create a Nazi version of what is science. Right. It's not politics. It didn't work very well, but it didn't stop the regime and its supporters from trying to create things like this in mathematics lessons were created. You know, I think back when I was a kid in school, we always had word problems. Yeah, right. You know, that kind of thing. Well, the ways in which mathematics were taught, while the math itself might remain the same, the word problems or the ways in which it was being used oftentimes reflected Nazi thinking. So, for example, you would have word problems that might have to do with the number of calories consumed by people who had mental or physical disabilities and the cost of that to society. And it's a way of trying to then to create these. Thinking about these in terms of how the Nazi policies about protecting our racial fitness and about resources could then reinforce certain policies that the Nazis were trying to implement. I don't know if that makes any sense. Yeah, yeah. We see a lot of attempts to shape education in line with certain ideological beliefs that the Nazis had and would try to frame lessons around that.
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B
Similarly, I imagine the people who don't know much about this might be just as surprised about the willingness of clergy members in Germany to support or ignore the Holocaust or ignore the mass violence.
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A
Right.
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B
So to start with, can you say just a little bit, again, kind of globally, about is there a consensus among clergy about how to respond? Is there sharp division? How would you characterize this?
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A
This was, again, you know, I feel like I'm going to keep saying, oh, this was a troubling chapter to write. This one was. They all were in some ways. Because, you know, when you think about the role of religion in society, we often ascribe certain moral qualities to faith leaders. Right. That the work that they do, whether it's as a Protestant or as a Catholic thinking about Germany here. But we could extend this much broader that in some ways, the nature of that work gives them insight into deeper moral truths. And so if you think of any profession that would be resistant to the blandishments of genocidally inclined regimes, it would be clergy. And what we find in Nazi Germany is a much more ambivalent, contradictory, and mixed bag of responses. We do find that within both in Germany, largely Protestant, also Catholic, we find that within both of those religious traditions that you had some prominent leaders who really protested and worked against the Nazis. And there are some whose names are probably familiar. I think of Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I think of Bishop von Galen, right. This bury, he was the lion of Munster who was famous for giving these sermons, critiquing the regime around its euthanasia program. All right, That's a strong moral stance. And he put himself at risk because clergy were not immune necessarily from being arrested and sent to concentration camps, as did happen. Some lost their lives. Ironically, with von Galen, what's interesting is he was very strong in protesting the killing of German children and adults later with this euthanasia program. But he was not very outspoken when it came time to the Jews. There were those theologians who wrote and spoke out against the regime in addressing strong Christian principles. But there were just as many theologians who interpreted the National Socialist agenda and its policies as being fully in line with their religious beliefs and teachings. We see especially at the local level, at parishes, at, you know, the priests and the reverends who were, you know, in the. In the churches giving their Sunday sermons in towns and cities all across the country that at that level there was actually quite a bit of support for the Nazis. Those who ministered to their congregations on a day in Day out basis. There was a lot of support for the Nazi agenda, but it is very much a mixed bag, honestly.
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B
Yeah, so this is a place where the role of the church as an institution is important. And so I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the institutional realities of the church, whether that's the Catholic Church or the Lutheran Church, and how priests and pastors might have been constrained or not constrained by institutional policies. Carvana is so easy. Just a click and we've got ourselves a car.
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A
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A
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A
So, you know, thinking of. So a great example of this concerns the Catholic response to the, the Nazis and the Nazis coming to power. Because the Catholic Church is a very, was and is a very strong institution and it's a very hierarchical institution, right? The authority of the Pope that then descends all the way down to the ordinary priest and the laity and so forth. And the concerns of the Catholic Church were protecting the Catholic Church as an institution. And so there were, how to say this, there were a lot of accommodations made to the Nazis. And in fact the Catholic Church and the regime came to this agreement, the concordat, right? Where essentially it was this agreement that protected the Catholic Church in Germany as long as it stuck to its spiritual mission and left other areas to the regime without necessarily impinging upon it. I'm really kind of giving you a really rough overview of what was involved with that. But it was basically kind of this negotiation that was designed to protect the Catholic Church and was often violated. And in fact, the Pope, you know, had to come out and speak out against some of this in some of his writings and that kind of thing. But the official policy of the Catholic Church in regards to the regime was very much dictated from on high. And so that yes, many Catholic leaders in particular felt constrained in terms of what they could say, what they were willing to speak out against and so forth. And on the other side, the Nazi regime had a lot of, I don't want to say respect necessarily for the Catholic Church, but they recognized that the Catholic Church was a very powerful institution. And in fact, one of the things that the Nazis wanted was to have the same kind of obedience and discipline from the German people as a whole that the Catholic Church enjoyed from, you know, Catholics that kind of thing. And so they resented it. They wanted it. And they also wanted to co opt and weaken the Catholic Church in Germany so that they could take over that role for themselves and have that same kind of disciplined obedience to its teachings and so forth.
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B
I don't want to spend. We don't have a huge time to spend on this, so I'll just ask one question about one more chapter kind of again from the global.
- [38:38]
A
Look, one last thing about the religion. Please. Let me just highlight that this contradictory approach is not limited just to the Holocaust. Yeah. One of the. You know, Kelly, I know you're a scholar of Rwanda, and one of the things, if you look at the literature on the rwandan genocide of 1994, for example, you find that religious clergy played very powerful roles, not necessarily in preventing the genocide, but actually in facilitating and participating in it in some really horrific kinds of ways, where people came looking to their clergy in Rwanda for shelter and sanctuary and instead were subsequently victimized in ways that were often led and facilitated by their religious leaders.
- [39:35]
B
Yeah, well, we continue making this more and more depressing as a. As a discussion, so we'll continue this path. And just briefly, you also talk about the role of the elites in the army. And in some ways, traditionally in German society, the elites in the army were kind of traditionally conservative.
- [39:59]
A
Yeah.
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B
So that doesn't seem to be true in the discussions you have.
- [40:04]
A
So. Yeah, the military. So the military in German history had a really important role. The German state actually was created in the aftermath of a war that the military had won. Right. And so they were critical to the founding of the. The modern nation of Germany. They were seen as many militaries in many places around the world often are, as our troops who defend our country, our people, and so forth and so on. The German officer corps also had traditionally been drawn from Germany's aristocracy. So they had a lot of historic authority through their titles, their land, their positions, they, you know, dating back, you know, hundreds of years. And they were very conservative. And so, not surprisingly, the German military was not initially very supportive of this movement. During the 1920s, these Nazis who are subverting traditional values and their thugs and ruffians and the brown shirts of the sa, kind of the bullies of the Nazi movement, especially during the 1920s. The officer corps is above that. They're not into that. But even then in the 1920s, the German military had begun to change because the losses of the First World War meant that many of those traditional aristocratic officers had been killed. Yeah. And so many officers were Recruited from the working classes, the middle classes, from a much wider range of society. And many of them did not come from these aristocratic backgrounds and were therefore wanting to be able to move up in what was considered a real class based kind of system. And they were much more open to the ostensibly egalitarian practices of the regime. The Nazis also were very smart in terms of how they played the military. In other words, they tried to appeal to traditional values. They wanted the support, they needed the support of German officers. And especially after they. After the Nazis purged their more revolutionary members, especially those in the brown church and so forth, that went a long way in allaying some of the fears of the military. And we can't forget that one of the first changes that were made in terms of after the Nazis took power, that one of the things that happened is that the military, the officers, they would swear an oath of allegiance not to the state or to the people, but to the Fuhrer, to the leader. And in that way, they tied themselves in to the leader of the Nazi party, Adolf Hitler. Right, yeah. And the role they played, even though we don't recognize it very often, I mean, for many years after the end of the Second World War, the prominent idea has been that the German military was largely free of the crimes of the Nazis, that the Holocaust was carried out by the ss, you know, the black shirts, the death's head emblem, that kind of thing. But that the military had largely fought an honorable war in accordance with the traditions of war and so forth. And I think it was a convenient fiction. Right. You know, millions of ordinary Germans served in the military. But beginning in the 1990s, you know, people began reevaluating that position, especially as scholars have begun uncovering the fact that at many of the shooting actions that preceded the gas chambers, before the Germans instituted the death camps with the gas chambers in the crematoria, the ways in which a lot of the killing took place was what has in recent years been referred to as the Holocaust by bullets. Right. Mobile killing squads moving behind the lines, rounding up partisans, political officials from the Soviet Union, but also Jews, and then taking them to out of the way places, forested areas, ravines and so forth, and then killing them in these shooting actions. And what we found out is that not only was the German military very much involved with coordinating some of these actions. Ordinary German soldiers would go sightseeing and taking pictures at some of these things happening, but that German, ordinary German soldiers and units participated in some of these killing actions. They were, you know, hand in glove, oftentimes. Part of the processes of the murder of innocent civilians, especially Jews.
- [45:27]
B
There's a lot more we could talk about, but let's pull back and just ask a couple kind of broad questions. And when I was curious, Germans and German societies has a reputation, maybe deserved, maybe not, for privileging and honoring people who have achieved higher education or high status professions. How important is, is that important in thinking about your research? And to put that slightly differently, how important is the kind of cultural context as you evaluate the role of elites broadly?
- [45:59]
A
Well, so I think the lessons here are, extend beyond Nazi Germany. Social elites exist in every society. And people whose training and education, people whose jobs, people whose success think about business leaders, right? That carries a lot of weight among a lot of people in those societies. Nazi Germany or actually German society was no different than that German science. What was it? I think Germany had won. By the time the Nazis came to power, German scientists had had more, more Nobel Prizes for their accomplishments than I think, you know, most other nations combined, including the U.S. including Great Britain. Education in and science in Germany and medicine in Germany meant that Germany had this reputation of being a world leader in all of these fields. And there's a lot of influence and prestige that comes out of that. And so I think if you're looking at how this applies to people accommodating themselves or making sense of things that happening in their society that maybe they're uncomfortable with or scared of, it goes a long way in explaining how people come to adjust themselves to those realities or make peace with it, or at the very least tolerate it. And so think about it. You know, you're working in a job in, let's say, Weimar Germany, you're struggling to make a living, pay your bills, raise your kids and so forth. And you have some of the most influential. I mean, what's the term we use nowadays? Influencers. Right. You have people who have that level of status and who you see working or supporting or writing about or, or preaching from the pulpit or serving in your armed forces, who are doing work in their jobs that are furthering the genocidal aims of the regime. And that I think that kind of influence by legitimizing some of the behaviors that you might otherwise not be as comfortable with accepting. Right. Persecuting these people who've been in your community and so forth. I'm not saying everyone bought into it, everyone accepted it, but we have to understand how does a society come to support or at the very least tolerate policies that so obvious violate so many religious, legal or other kind of principles you might have been raised with. And again, no single answer. I mean, by making laws that, okay, that's helping. But I think a big part of it, and that's what we're looking at here of these scientific or medical or legal or business leaders who support and enable. And further. And the. The what the Nazis are doing, that goes a long way in terms of allaying for some, not all, but allaying some of the reservations or hesitations or outright resistance others may have. And human beings are nothing if they're not adaptable. And again, what's important for me to say here, I think, Geli, this isn't justifying or minimizing the horrific nature of these crimes at all. But if we ever are going to be effective at creating safer societies that are more resistant to these kinds of atrocities, we have to understand the very real dynamics here and how ordinary people, when faced with these kinds of policies and have to choose how to react and respond to it, that these. The role of social elites or other kinds of factors, these play a powerful role in helping shape their reactions and their own behavior. And when you have really powerful people who say something is okay, or that this is what we have to do or need to do, or if you do this, this is your patriotic duty and the people saying it have a lot of influence, it becomes a lot easier for some people to adjust their thinking and conform and rationalize that in ways that allow them to move forward in their lives. Does that make any kind of sense?
- [50:58]
B
Yeah, there's lots more to say about this. We don't have time to do it. So here, I'll just say that Alex is right, that this is a great book for a popular audience, or maybe I should say an audience that's not scholarly. And so I encourage you, if that's you, to go out and get the book. There's more in the book than we've had a chance to cover. And Alex and Rich write really well. I would end with the same question, and that is, I don't know about you. My semester's three weeks. I can see the tidal wave of grading coming to me, but it is not here yet. In this brief moment where I have a life, what should I read or what should I watch that was meaningful to you? What would you suggest to the audience? Well, you, as you were thinking about this book.
- [51:45]
A
Okay. You know, there are so many books out there from so many great scholars and others, and I'm not. Honestly, I'm not even going to give you a suggestion because they're just everywhere. But there are a couple of movies I've watched fairly recently that actually made a powerful impact on me that I would like to share, and I think they have something important to say. The first one is a film that came out, must be about a year ago now, called the Zone of Interest, and I think it's from a book by Martin Amis, but it's all about Auschwitz, but not about the camp, Auschwitz, but about the family of the commandant, Rudolf Hess, that lived right next to the camp. And in many ways, it showed how this family can engage in its ordinary life in earshot of the violence, the killing, the torture, the brutality of the concentration camp that was Auschwitz. And honestly, it feels to me like there's a powerful metaphor about the ways in which all of us live in a world in which we are adjacent to injustice or intolerance or things like this. And I was in Auschwitz with this program a while ago and had a chance to meet the historian who consulted with the film. And this historian said, this film is actually. I forget the percentage, but it was like 98% accurate or something like that. As a historian, you know, there are a couple of little things that this person saw that were not quite 100% accurate, but that overwhelmingly it did give you a real understanding of how the family of the commandant, his wife, his kids, his relatives, could live kind of an ordinary life in many ways, right in the shadow of mass killing. The other film I saw is just a little bit older. It's based on a very real story. And you can actually see clips of this on YouTube, but it's called One Life, and it's about this British man, Nicholas Win, who, before the Nazis invaded other countries, basically worked very hard to try to rescue. I get choked up when I think about this. Children. And basically was able to get the British government to issue passports, passes, whatever it was, and had these trains that were able to try to get them to safety in England. And it did happen, but the Nazis invaded. I think this was Czechoslovakia. Don't hold me to it. It's been a while. But anyway. And the last trains were not able to get out. And in many ways, it's a story of a man who often felt that he failed to do anything. And then late in his life, he actually. The record he had kept of what he had done came to be known. And he was then brought to this TV show in England where he was surrounded by all the people he had saved. And I think for me, that's a really powerful message that you don't think you can do a lot. You think you haven't accomplished much, but that actually what we do matters. And even in little ways, whether it's teaching or scholarship or making a difference in your community can have an impact that echoes over time and means a lot to those people. And that movie, I tell you, even just thinking about it, I think it's just so powerful. But it shows you what good people can do and make a difference and save lives. And I like that a lot.
- [55:39]
B
We've been talking with Alex Alvarez, co author, along with Richard Fernandez, of the book Lethal the Institutions and Professionals that Made the Holocaust Possible. Possible. Alex, thanks so much. This was great. I really appreciate the book. I recommend it. And I hope that whatever your next project is, you'll come back on the podcast and talk about it with us then.
- [56:01]
A
Kelly, this has been a pleasure, despite the nature of the topic. Thank you. And absolutely, I think the work you do on this podcast is important. And, you know, bringing books to the world is, I think, something that is worth protecting. So thank you for all your hard work on this podcast.