Hacia la solución final

A classic question about the Holocaust is how was the discrimination and subsequent systematic extermination of European Jews possible within a cultured and advanced society like Germany?. In his pioneering study, published in 1978, the historian George Mosse explained it by tracing the intellectual and popular path of racism and anti-Semitism in European culture. Far from being a passing, marginal aberration, or the creation of Hitler and his followers, modern racist culture, originating in the Enlightenment, successfully appropriated all major ideas and movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, including science, aesthetic taste, middle-class morality or nationalism, and had enormous influence not only in Germany, but in countries like France and the United Kingdom. Faced with the uncertainty generated by modernity and pluralism, racism gave each individual their place in the world, ordering it and making it intelligible. When a modern mass political movement such as Nazism took control of the German state, in a country shaken by World War, revolution and instability, the racist tradition had established the conditions for the implementation of the Final Solution.