Antisemitism certainly was a major force in Germany, but it was a major force across Europe. Look at
what Orwell wrote about it in 1945:
More importantly, there's a
huge leap between disliking the abstract idea of Jews, blaming the abstract idea of Jews for your problems, and firing upon physical, unarmed, begging human beings. At Auschwitz, there was a peep-hole into the gas chambers, and army regulations required somebody to watch to supervise every time they were used. You can't explain a willingness to do that through any volume of speeches, articles and racist cartoons.
As I said, the historians are divided on exactly how it all worked, but most of them don't see the majority of Nazis as particularly politically committed - they just didn't have strong opinions, one way or the other, and were content to see evil as just part of the job, to set it within an entirely normal frame of work, with recognition and promotion for doing well and meeting their targets, and to turn a blind eye to exactly what they were helping to do. If this looks unbelievable, look at what we find when modern companies are uncovered doing terrible things.
Monsanto sold Agent Orange (a defoliant, supposed to clear jungle) to the military despite knowing that it was deadly to human beings - and half a million Vietnamese civilians died from it, along with hundreds of thousands born with birth defects and thousands of American servicemen given cancer. Those numbers would make Agent Orange the fourth most deadly Nazi concentration camp. People sold thalidomide in the United States despite knowing that it had been taken off the German market for causing birth defects - and 17 Americans were born disabled because of it. Bayer sold a drug that was supposed to treat haemophilia, but was found to be giving its patients AIDS - so they
stopped selling it in Europe and the United States, but sent that stock to be sold in Asia and Latin America at an even lower prices. 20,000 people there died. Perhaps most damningly, IBM Germany, with the approval of HQ in New York,
custom-designed a machine for the Nazis to keep the records of the death count of the Holocaust. You simply cannot say that the leaders of IBM in America did nothing because they were indoctrinated by the Nazis, or were the passive recipients of German anti-Semitism.
It's not just companies. There are plenty of stories of 'enhanced interrogation' from Iraq, Afghanistan and military prisons around the world that we can quite clearly see, from our detached position, clearly amount to torture. Until 1973, the CIA were
experimenting with mind-controlling drugs on unwilling participants - something explicitly ruled illegal at, of all places, Nuremberg. Until 2006, British and American soldiers were running 'corrections' in
an Iraqi prison which included torture, rape and sodomy of prisoners. Some of these, illegal under the Geneva Conventions, were authorised by the senior US officer in Iraq, and by the Pentagon.
These things don't happen because irredeemably evil people just happen to end up at all levels of a corporate or governmental hierarchy. They happen because people turn off their moral awareness and choose not to see, because they are in a system which rewards them for a sort of 'success' which is totally morally blind. On cold reflection, they know what they did, but they do not coldly reflect because they have people all around them, people they know and admire, congratulating them for exceeding their monthly targets, or for finding a way to make the train run more efficiently, or for securing that big contract with the German government. This sort of thing is happening right now, and we are fools to delude ourselves that only other people can do it.
EDIT: That was a bit heavier than I intended. I'm happy to split this off into its own thread if people would rather keep this one for the much lighter discussion of cinema!
