Rola przemocy wobec ludności żydowskiej w Europie środkowo-wschodniej w procesie decyzyjnym Zagłady
The Role of Violence Against Jewish Population of East-Central Europe in the Holocaust Decision-Making Process

Summary/Abstract: Individual and collective violence was an inseparable element of the exercise of power by the Third Reich in the occupied lands in East-Central Europe, both in relation to the Jewish population and other ethnic groups. Despite the that the Reich’s leadership took a lot of effort to create an illusion about the occupation order having the characteristics of the rule of law, the widespread violence applied to the subjugated populations and the Jews in particular meant that any civilizational and cultural norms were broken all the time and the brutalization of daily life proceeded unabated. Violence became an integral part of the system of exercising power, directing and driving the German occupier’s policy toward the Jewish population at all decision-making levels. With its help the German national socialists were building a new system of moral references, justifying the treatment of the hated minority in a manner far exceeding the rules of live in a society upheld so far. From the point of view of the perpetrators themselves this system made it possible to find ever further reaching rationale of their own active involvement in the implementation of that policy, and it convinced them about its indispensability for the success of the Nazi utopia. The use of massive violence ultimately became a sine qua non of the implementation of the utopian final solution of the “Jewish question” through genocide. This was a factor shaping a new system of moral values, cementing the sense of co-dependence of the perpetrators in a peculiarly defined “community of crime,” a vessel making it possible to transform utopian goals of the state into very tangible personal profits. Without the daily use of violence that overcame the still existing psychological barriers and suppressed any internal resistance the Holocaust just could not occur in the first place.

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