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EVEN AFTER the extermination camps were liberated and the full extent of the Nazi murders began to emerge, the world at first refused to acknowledge that so many millions could have been systematically slaughtered. When the evidence became unassailable, men still refused to believe that other men, like themselves, had operated the gas chambers and crematory ovens at Buchenwald and Auschwitz, had scheduled the trains for Maidanek and Treblinka, had compiled the lists of deportees in Lodz and Budapest. By stripping the Nazis of humanity, the rest of mankind seemed to believe that it could absolve itself from guilt and free itself of the nagging question: would anyone have acted differently in the same situation?

Recently, however, the desire to escape responsibility for the catastrophe has taken a new turn: these incredible events, it is said, happened, in part at least, because of some deficiency in the people who suffered from them. The victims themselves were at fault and contributed to their own destruction.

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