Supervisors info:
Γεράσιμος Κουζέλης, καθηγητής. Σχολή Οικονομικών και Πολιτικών Επιστημών. Τμήμα Πολιτικής Επιστήμης και Δημόσιας Διοίκησης. Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμίο Αθηνών
Κύρκος Δοξιάδης, καθηγητής, Σχολή Οικονομικών και Πολιτικών Επιστημών. Τμήμα Πολιτικής Επιστήμης και Δημόσιας Διοίκησης. Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών.
Βίκυ Ιακώβου, Επίκουρη Καθηγήτρια. Πανεπιστήμιο Αιγαίου, Τμήμα Κοινωνικής Ιστορίας και Ανθρωπολογίας
Summary:
The purpose of the work is not only to capture and to make a simple analysis of the number of victims of the Nazi atrocities that took place within the "civilized" and dressed in the "spirit of Enlightenment" Europe but to present and analyze its culture Nazi violence which was imprinted in the most inhuman and brutal way in social, historical and collective memory. Moreover, a second reason for writing the work is not only the social-philosophical treatment of the camps by Arendt and Traverso but the analysis and representation of concentration and extermination camps through the literature and testimonies of the individuals who survived (physically and spiritually) Nazi barbarism. In short, Cambodian literature comes not only to interpret but to analyze and capture in writing the whole system of destruction and objectification of man himself. Primo Levi, Jean Amery, Jorge Sembern, Robber Adelm, Sloom Venetsia, and Margarete Boomer Neumann, through their different approaches, contribute to a satisfactory degree to understand the whole operation and structure of the camps.
Like the other concentration camps, Auschwitz was traced to the memory of survivors and future generations as the emblematic place of detainment, impersonal death, and annihilation of humanity. Auschwitz, as Enzo Traverso says, "did not change the forms of civilization: if gas chambers are perceived today as a cultural breakdown, it is precisely because they were the moment when it revealed the contradictions of civilization, its destructive potential. The brutality of the Nazi machine for the biological reformation of humanity has received such great extensions where we have the right to talk about the historical uniqueness of the Jewish genocide. The systematic and irrational extermination of both Jews, Sinti and Roma and other social groups such as Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, Serbs, homosexuals, political prisoners, Jehovah's Witnesses for a homogenized and racially-evolved Europe and Germany was point of discussion around many academic circles. As the political philosopher Hannah Arendt states in Eichmann's work in Jerusalem, "the Nazis wanted to decide who should and who should not live on this planet."
In this racially imagined3, the Jews4 are not so much a "race" as a "race" responsible, dangerous and destructive to the social "health" of both other people and Germany itself, a threat to life itself or worse a parasite, a bacillus (as Hitler mentions in Mein Kampf, My Games). The struggle for the human existence and survival of the stronger has transformed the war into a modern slaughter and carcass factory as battlefields are transported to cities where thousands of civilians are exterminated, injured, murdered prisoners, raped, tortured, maimed, burned , children, women, elderly are performed. All this translates into a violent outburst of hatred, contempt and destruction. As George Orwell says, "totalitarianism is the system in which power is (if not exclusively) organized, continuous and generalized violence."
Rika Benvenite through Raul Hilberg says: "Raul Hilberg said he was afraid of the big questions that made small answers, and prefers how big of them." This work attempts, in short, to show how and why humanity itself has been guided by acts that are highly anti-human and prohibitive to the human spirit itself. The rise of totalitarian regimes reminds us of the profoundly anomalous nature of modernity.
