Tales of affect, 'Thick' and 'Thin': on distantiation in Holocaust historiography

Holocaust historians and trauma scholars have opened up a range of inquiries that focus on the differing motivations for non-Jewish populations to intervene, stand by, or participate in the atrocities against the Jews. A bystander's failure to step in if someone is attacked might be driven by self-preservation, or hostility towards the victim. To understand the dynamics of thick and thin is to recognise that one individual's or group's thin affect might marginalise and exacerbate another's precarity. Citations of massacres in Ukraine and Poland expose the functionalist approach that antisemitism was a powerful motivation for sadism against the Jews