Was Auschwitz easy?

When I first saw the article, really just a blurb on (strangely enough) the new elevator video newsfeed, I felt the need for a rant. The headline blurb read something like " (Auschwitz) ...the recurring theme is just how easily it happened".

My first reaction was it was not "easy" at all. It was a stupendous culmination of meticulous logistical planning and political will and "sowing the seeds" of psychological acceptance of genocide from the first publication of Mein Kampf to the last gold filling extracted from human remains. The second reaction was that the implication that "Auschwitz was easy" was that without the vigilance of let's say, the media, that perhaps Abu Gharib would have morphed into Auschwitz.

When I actually read the article, which is a reviewed by David Von Drehle in the Sunday, January 23, 2005 Washington Post of AUSCHWITZ: A New History by Laurence Rees, I had to turn down my rant-o-meter at least regarding the second reaction. While in the last account, that might be a subliminal message that journalists and academics may be useful in a defense against genocidal tendencies, I actually can't disagree with that. In Germany, so much of independent thought was stifled and yes the Fourth Estate and the ranting of even the most leftist professors is a display of our free speech and a necessity of the accountability of our government to the people.

But I still must disagree with the concept of Auschwitz was "easy". Some genocide may be easy to implement perhaps - most of the deaths in Darfur are not direct raids and rapes and pillage, but the threat and harassment resulting in dislocation and deprivation causes starvation and disease. Sometimes acts of genocide are even accidental such as China's metal recycling program I believe in the sixties that resulted in millions of deaths and tens of millions of dislocations from simply stripping the farms and villages from everything from farm implements, wiring, tools etc as part of the "Great Leap Forward" that micromanaged agricultural policy into unmitigate disaster. And yet it achieved its end, by driving millions into the cities to achieve urban and industrial goals, which was the beginning of the economic exporting colossus that China has become. But enough of this side-story.

My point is at the heart of genocide is a goal to subordinate a society to become something it currently is not. Then it must change the philosophy of the culture. There will be an elite (the Gestapo, the camp guards etc, the Zylon industrial wizards that will be trained / conditioned to carry out atrocities but the society as a whole must learn to at least passively accept and often tacitly assist in carrying out the planning of the events of the Holocaust.