Εκδήλωση για την παρουσίαση του βιβλίου του Saul Friedländer «Η ναζιστική Γερμανία και οι Εβραίοι»

Friedländer: It does makes a considerable difference whether the Nazis murdered millions of people who didn’t know what was going to happen to them or killed people who had already assumed the worst.

SPIEGEL: Because it explains why the extermination process went so smoothly?

Friedländer: Yes.

SPIEGEL: The opposite position was held by the recently deceased Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg. “The best way to grasp the reality of the situation,” he said, “is to reconstruct events from the perspective of the perpetrators.”

Friedländer: I have great respect for Hilberg. He was the classic expert on the machinery of extermination. But he only worked with documents left by the perpetrators and thought that the victims had gone to their deaths like lambs to the slaughter. If you read between the lines, you can even sense the rage with which he writes about the Jews’ lack of resistance. But they simply didn’t know what was happening. […]

[απόσπασμα συνέντευξης του Saul Friedländer στο περιοδικό Der Spiegel το 2007]