The following is from the Daily Mail UK:

A peculiar German inferiority complex allied to a lust to ‘get on’ led to the country’s collective moral collapse which allowed the Holocaust of six million Jews to happen, a new book in Germany claims.

Götz Aly, an esteemed historian and social commentator, says their berserk social climbing led the ordinary people, far removed from the extermination camp system, to partake in the plunder of the Jews without troubling their consciences.

His book Why The Germans? Why The Jews? comes at a time when Germany is once more in the crosshairs of critics across the continent as the euro crisis lurches from bad to worse.

It is portrayed as bullying, domineering and inflexible as it tries to impose rigid, German-style rules on nations which do not share its social, political and economic ethics.

Most important Aly gets away from the ‘evil Nazi’ comfort zone that so many postwar Germans have wallowed in.

The central thesis of his book is that the Holocaust happened “because people like you and me allowed it to.” And he says it can happen again.

It was the middle class fear of coming down in the world following defeat in WWI, the hyper-inflation and joblessness of the Weimar years, that allowed people to blind themselves to the excesses of the Nazis as they pledged to restore Germany to greatness.

Those who would pay the most for that greatness were the Jews; the culprits, said Hitler, behind the war.

Social climbing became an almost impossible thing during the jobless, moneyless days of the Weimar Republic: the Nazis brought it back into vogue with uniforms, work and, ultimately, plunder.

Massive auctions were staged every week throughout the lifespan of the Third Reich in Hamburg and several other cities of stolen Jewish goods.

Massive ships docked regularly at the city’s port bringing furniture, silver, furs, tapestries, rugs and glassware that had been taken from Jews in the occupied countries.

‘The Social Democrats and the trades unions wanted property too,’ said Aly.

‘The ‘bad one’ was the Jew in all this.’

Therefore, the common man reasoned, it was no bad thing for his or herself to advance themselves at the cost of this societal bogeyman.

Aly also says coupled with the German envy complex was a deep-seated fear of true freedom; it had not existed under the Kaiser and democracy under the Weimar Republic had brought the country to its knees.

The Nazis, he said, were a catchment basin for socially envious people and people with inferiority complexes.

He went on: ‘I see in the Germans a substantial self conditioning for the murder of the Jews that developed from these feelings of national inferiority.

‘The Holocaust can repeat itself. One should not believe that the anti-Semites of yesterday are completely different human beings to the ones of today.’

(Source: Daily Mail UK)