It was the paralysis of that public which failed to turn into a mob, a paralysis achieved by the fascination and fear emanating from the display of power, which permitted the deadly logic of problem-solving to take its course unhampered. In Lawrence Stoke’s words, ‘The failure when the regime first set insecurely in power to protest its inhumane measures made prevention of their logical culmination all but impossible, however unwanted and disapproved this undoubtedly was.’

—Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 74.