About Heinz Kohut's reluctance to address the holocaust I cannot comment in
detail‹I would wish to know much more about what he said, the context in
which he said it, and his own involvement in the event. His closest
colleagues and loyal disciples (Anna and Paul Ornstein) are themselves
holocaust survivors. I do not know (although I could ask them) if they ever
spoke with Kohut about this issue. Perhaps in contrasting the Nazis'
behavior to cruelty he was trying to capture an indifference to the humanity
of the other which transcends even ordinary cruelty. Cruelty is the specific
mistreatment of another human being which retains a "pleasure" precisely
because that other human feels mistreated. Maybe this is what Kohut was
driving at.  A great deal of the Nazi enterprise went beyond ordinary
cruelty by its utter indifference to the humanity of those it tortured and
killed. The Jew was (often, not always) not hurt for pleasure or sadistic
engagement; rather he/she was "exterminated" ---a word not ordinarily even
applied to one's fellow humans.

Every person who enters into a discourse regarding the holocaust or its
parallel contemporary calamities inevitably becomes implicated in its
impenetrable depths. That is to say, there is no outside to this, only a
plethora of unbearable involvements. One must be very careful.

With respect to Milgram, when I first learned of his experiments (back in
the 1960's in college) where he invited human subjects to become torturers I
was horrified. Not horrified merely by the ease with which an authority can
induce such terrible behavior, but especially by the totalitarian figure of
a person who would design and execute such an experiment. In the name of
studying terror, he became a terrorist. This is what I mean by saying that
there is no outside to such events. If indeed, one wishes to say, "I will
never", and I do believe one must say this with every intention of sticking
to the promise, then one must be willing to exercise extraordinary care with
power as it happens to fall into one's hands. For Milgram, the experiment he
designed was as cruel as the behavior of his manipulated subjects. Milgram
lacked care.

With respect to Heidegger (and German humanistic philosophy more generally)
the relationship between these noble,  humane ideals  and his tolerance of
(perhaps involvement in) National Socialism is highly complex, disturbing,
and I believe resistant to easy resolution. Much of Western history
(colonialism, slavery, the decimation of America's indigenous population)
entwines themes of enlightenment and barbaric mistreatment of those deemed
Other. How do our humanistic philosophies (like Milgram's belief in
scientific discovery) so easily slip into the abyss? I think this is the
most important question of our times. But it has no simple answer. Whatever
answer we might propose would have to begin with a willingness to be
self-reflective, and an ongoing vigilance regarding our own capacity to
fall.

Paul Hamburg MD