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a thick moral wall virtually impenetrable to merely abstract' arguments. Persuasive or insidious the intellectual stereotype may be, yet its zone of application stops abruptly where the sphere of personal intercourse begins. The other' as an abstract category simply does not communicate with 'the other' / know. The second belongs within the realm of morality, while the first is cast firmly outside. The second resides in the semantic universe of good and evil, which stubbornly refuses to be subordinated to the discourse of efficiency and rational choice.

Social suppression of moral responsibility

We know already that there was little direct link between diffuse hetero-phobia and the mass murder designed and perpetrated by the Nazis. What the accumulated historical evidence strongly suggests in additon is that mass murder on the unprecedented scale of the Holocaust was not (and in all probability could not be) an effect of awakening, release, prompting, intensification, or an outburst of dormant personal inclinations; nor was it in any other sense continuous with hostility emerging from personal face-to-face relationships, however soured or bitter those might have been on occasion, there is a clear limit to which such personally-based animosity may be stretched. In more cases than not, it would resist being pushed beyond the line drawn by that elementary responsibility for the other which is inextricably interwoven in human proximity, in 'living with others'. The Holocaust could be accomplished only on the condition of neutralizing the impact of primeval moral drives, of isolating the machinery of murder from the sphere where such drives arise and apply, of rendering such drives marginal or altogether irrelevant to the task.

This neutralizing, isolating and marginalizing was an achievement of the Nazi regime deploying the formidable apparatus of modern industry, transport, science, bureaucracy, technology. Without them, the Holocaust would be unthinkable; the grandiose vision of judenrein Europe, of the total annihilation of the Jewish race, would peter out in a multitude of bigger and smaller pogroms perpetrated by psychopaths, sadists, fanatics or other addicts of gratuitous violence; however cruel and gory, such actions would be hardly commensurable with the purpose. It was the designing of the solution to the Jewish problem' as a rational, bureaucratic-technical task, as something to be done to a particular category of objects by a particular set of experts and

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specialized organizations - in other words, as a depersonalized task not dependent on feelings and personal commitments - which proved to be, in the end, adequate to Hitler's vision. Yet the solution could not be so designed, and certainly not executed, until the future objects of bureau­cratic operations, the Jews, had been removed from the horizon of German daily life, cut off from the network of personal intercourse, transformed in practice into exemplars of a category, of a stereotype -into the abstract concept of the metaphysical Jew. Until, that is, they had ceased to be those others' to whom moral responsibility normally extends, and lost (he protection which such natural morality offers.

Having thoroughly analyzed the successive failures of the Nazis to arouse the popular hatred of Jews and to harness it in the service of the 'solution to the Jewish problem', Ian Kershaw comes to the conclusion that

Where the Nazis were most successful was in the depersonaliz-ation of the Jews. The more the Jew was forced out of social life, the more he seemed to fit the stereotypes of a propaganda which intensified, paradoxically, its campaign against 'Jewry' the fewer / actual Jews there were in Germany itself. Depersonalization increased the already existent widespread indifference of German popular opinion and formed a vital stage between the archaic violence and the rationalized 'assembly line' annihilation of the death camps.

The 'Final Solution' would not have been possible without the progressive steps to exclude the Jews from German society which took place in full view of the public, in their legal form met with widespread approval, and resulted in the depersonalization and debasement of the figure of the Jew.ⁿ

As we have already noted in the third chapter, the Germans who did object to the exploits of SA hoodlums when the Jew next door' was their victim (even those among them who found the courage to make their revulsion manifest), accepted with indifference and often with satisfaction legal restrictions imposed on the Jew as such'. What would stir their moral conscience if focused on persons they knew, aroused hardly any feelings when targeted on an abstract and stereotyped category. They noted with equanimity, or failed to note, the gradual disappearance of Jews from their world of everyday life. Until, for the young German soldiers and SS men entrusted with the task of liquidation' of so many Figuren, the Jew was 'only a "museum-piece",

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allowed to create deliberately intolerable conditions and states of emergency and then to use them to legitimize even more radical steps

And thus the final act, annihilation, was in no way a revolutionary departure. It was, so to speak, a logical (though, remember, unanticipated at the start) outcome of the many steps taken before. None of the steps was made inevitable by the already attained state of affairs, but each step rendered rational the choice of the next stage on the road to destruction. The further away the sequence moved from the original act of Definition, the more it was guided by purely rational-technical considerations, and the less did it have to reckon with moral inhibitions. Indeed, it all but ceased to necessitate moral choices.

The passages between the stages had one striking feature in common. They all increased the physical and mental distance between the purported victims and the rest of the population - the perpetrators and the witnesses of the genocide alike. In this quality resided their inherent rationality from the point of view of the final destination, and their effectiveness in bringing the task of destruction to its completion. Evidently, moral inhibitions do not act at a distance. They arc-inextricably tied down to human proximity. Commitment of immoral acts, on the contrary, becomes easier with every inch of social distance. If Mommsen is right when he singles out as the anthropological dimension' of the Holocaust experience 'the danger inherent in present-day industrial society of a process of becoming accustomed to moral indifference in regard to actions not immediately related to one's own sphere of experience'²¹ - then the danger he warns about must be traced to the capacity of that present-day industrial society to extend inter-human distance to a point where moral responsibility and moral inhibitions become inaudible.