Definition

I Dismissals of employees and expropriation of business firms

I Concentration

1 Exploitation of labour and starvation measures

I Annihilation

1 Confiscation of personal effects

The sequence of steps in a destruction process is thus determined. If there is an attempt to inflict maximum injury upon a group of people, it is therefore inevitable that a bureaucracy - no matter

towards a Sociological Theory of Morality 191

how decentralized its apparatus or how unplanned its activities should push its victims through these stages.¹⁸

The stages, Hilberg suggests, are logically determined; they form a rational sequence, a sequence conforming to the modern standards which prompt us to seek the shortest ways and the most efficient means to the end. If we now try to discover the guiding principle in this rational solution to the problem of mass destruction, we find out that the successive stages are arranged according to the logic of eviction from the realm of moral duty (or, to use the concept suggested by Helen Fein,¹⁹ from the universe of obligations).

Definition sets the victimized group apart (all definitions mean splitting the totality into two parts - the marked and the unmarked), as a different category, so that whatever applies to it does not apply to all the rest. By the very act of being defined, the group has been targeted for special treatment; what is proper in relation to 'ordinary' people must not necessarily be proper in relation to it. Individual members of the group become now in addition exemplars of a type; something of the nature of the type cannot but seep into their individualized images, compromise the originally innocent proximity, limit its autonomy as the self-sustained moral universe.

Dismissals and expropriations tear apart most of the general con­tracts, substituting physical and spiritual distance for past proximity. The victimized group is now effectively removed from sight; it is a category one at best hears of, so that what one hears about it has no chance to be translated into the knowledge of individual destinies, and thus to be checked against personal experience.

Concentration completes this process of distantiation. The victimized group and the rest do not meet any more, their life-processes to not cross, communication grinds to a halt, whatever happens to one of the now segregated groups does not concern the other, has no meaning easy to translate into the vocabulary of human intercourse.

Exploitation and starvation perform a further, truly astonishing, feat: they disguise inhumanity as humanity. There is ample evidence of local Nazi chiefs asking their superiors for permission to kill some Jews under their jurisdiction (well before the signal was given to start mass killings) in order to spare them the agony of famine; as the food supplies were not available to sustain a mass of ghettoized population previously robbed of wealth and income, killing seemed an act of mercy - indeed, the manifestation of humanity. 'The diabolical circle of fascist policies