It’s 1932. You’re a young poverty-stricken working class German with a starving family. You haven’t had a job for months, your savings have been wiped out, you’re about to be evicted. You fought and saw the unimaginable during the First World War. Two million of your countrymen – including men you and your family knew – died, often horrifically. 1.5 million disabled veterans struggle to survive up and down the country. Addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, and suicide are all endemic. Germany has been made to sign a humiliating peace treaty, pay unreasonable and economically devastating reparations to America, Britain, and France, and cede territory on all of its borders. Then, to top it off, the Great Depression hits. Liberalism and democracy are failing. Hyperinflation reaches 1000% per month. Even money is becoming worthless. Election after election fail to reach a majority and parliament – the Reichstag – is unable to govern. Conservatives, liberals, communists, authoritarians, the Church, and the army are all competing for power. Moral values and attitudes are blurred. Religious belief continues to decline. Women’s liberation sweeps Europe, morals loosen, the Jazz scene hits, and to many all of this depravity seems to be contributing to what’s happening: Germany is at risk of extinction.
Enter Adolf Hitler. Charming, charismatic, seemingly brilliant; after being elected in 1933 he quickly revitalises the German economy. Problem after problem seem to be miraculously fixed. You get a job, roads are built, reparations are halted, a wave of euphoria sweeps across the nation; life in Germany becomes good again. Why? Because Hitler and the National Socialists stand firmly against all of the things that were causing its destruction – the greedy capitalists, godless communists determined to overthrow the state, vindictive enemy countries abroad and an enemy within that connects all of these things, that’s responsible, and that wants you dead: the Jews.
For almost ten years you’re surrounded by anti-Semitic propaganda and conspiracy theory. The Jews control Wall Street, Hollywood, America, Britain, the Soviet Union. The war starts. Those threaten to take it all away from you. You’re too old to fight in the army but you’re drafted into the reserve police force.
One morning – on duty in occupied Poland – you’re roused from your bed and are driven to a nearby village.
Your commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp – known to you affectionately as Papa Trapp – is pale faced, has a choking voice, and tears in his eyes. He informs you of your orders. Remember, he says, back home bombs are falling on your wives and daughters too.
The Jews in the village were involved with the partisans, the enemy. It’s us or them. They must be rounded up and taken to the work camp. But those not able to work – women, children and the elderly – must unfortunately be shot.
Trapp makes an offer: you can be excused from this task if you wish. You look briefly at your friends but don’t take up the offer.
Instead you step forward, take the men, women, and children into the forest, order them onto the floor, aim, and pull the trigger.
Two million men, women, and children would be murdered in this way and at least 4 million more in the death camps and gas chambers. And statistically speaking, you would become a murderer in that way too. You would participate in the Holocaust.
What drives ordinary everyday people to become mass killers? Men and women – but usually men – like you and me?
The Holocaust was not perpetrated solely by a few sadistic psychopaths but by tens of thousands of everyday Germans, Poles, Frenchmen, Austrians, Slovakians, and, in fact, much of Europe took part.
If any of us could be motivated under the right conditions to become mass killers, how can we protect ourselves against the threat? How might we inoculate our societies and cultures from descending into genocide?
One estimate puts the number of victims of democide – that’s murder by government – and genocide at 169 million in the twentieth century alone. Stalin, Mao, the Khmer Rouge, Rwanda, the Congo, the Ottomans – what’s undeniable is that we’re a disturbingly violent species.
And there are even more distressing questions. What makes the twentieth century – the most advanced century – the most genocidal? As the journalist Mark Bowden has put it, ‘the Holocaust disturbs so much because none of the things we associate with modern civilization – peace, industry, technology, education – free us from the dark side of the human soul’.
He said, ‘just as there is evil in the heart of every man, there is evil at the heart of even the most ‘‘civilized’’ human society’.
The German philosopher Jurgen Habermas said that ‘a veil of naivete was torn up’ with the Holocaust, something that happened that was unimaginable until then. It ended the optimism of what seemed like the inexorable progress of western enlightenment.
I want to focus on a kind of inoculation against that evil. A moral vaccine. Social psychologist Thomas Blass puts it like this: ‘what psychological mechanism transformed the average, and presumably normal, citizens of Germany and its allies into people who would carry out or tolerate unimaginable acts of cruelty against their fellow citizens who were Jewish, resulting in the death of six million of them?’
But first, a definition. A UN resolution in 1948 defined genocide as ‘acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical [sic], racial, or religious group, as such: a) killing members of the group, b) causing serious bodily harm or mental harm to members of the group, c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life to bring about its destruction in whole or in part, d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’.
So what are the psychological, cultural, social, and political factors that might lead ‘ordinary men and women’ to commit crimes of this scale? We’ll look at a number of factors: propaganda, out-grouping, rationalization, authority, conformity, and compartmentalization or distancing. But, rather than the Nazi leaders, those ordinary people might be a good place to start.
That scene of Major Trapp tearfully informing his men of their duty did happen. Trapp was a police officer who commanded Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the Order Police. He was executed for war crimes in 1948.
The Order Police was made up of ordinary Germans, too old to be conscripted into the army -around 33-48 years old – predominantly working-class, but also too old to have only known Nazi propaganda as they were raised in the democratic era of the Weimar Republic.
These ordinary policemen joined SS units called the Einsatzgruppen who were tasked with following the army into occupied territories in the East – particularly the Soviet Union and Poland. They were to assist the SS in a number of jobs, and as their name suggests, keep order, rounding up Polish soldiers, guarding camps, organizing equipment, and, ultimately, executing enemy soldiers, partisans, and Jews.
Stalin had given the order for partisan warfare, and this made it easier politically for Hitler to order communists in occupied territories of the USSR to be immediately executed, since it made them a threat. Germany, he argued, was being attacked from all sides. Germany was at war and, as one order noted, the ‘men are to be instructed continuously about the political necessity of the measures’.
In June 1942, Police Battalion 101 were sent for guard duty to a city called Lublin in Poland where around 40,000 Jews lived.
In July Major Trapp was ordered to round up the 1800 Jews living in a nearby village. Working-age men were to be sent to a labour camp. The elderly, women, and children were to be immediately shot . When Trapp’s lieutenant was informed of the order he requested another assignment, insisting that he would not participate in an action in which defenceless men and women would be shot.
Before being told of the details, the men were informed they would be doing some difficult work. One sergeant told them ‘he didn’t want to see any cowards’.
They arrived at the village at dawn; Trapp assembled his men and said that any of the older men who didn’t feel up to it could step down. One man stepped forward, another ten or twelve followed. They were dismissed. Almost 500 men remained. They were to round up the Jews and take them to the marketplace.
Trapp did not join his men. He couldn’t bear the sight. One of the men reported hearing Trapp say ‘oh, god, why did I have to be given these orders’. He apparently paced back and forth. Another officer reported that Trapp had told him that the job didn’t suit him but that ‘orders were orders’. One said that when he and Trapp were alone he sat on a stool and ‘wept bitterly… The tears really flowed’. Another confirmed that ‘he wept like a child’.
Meanwhile, the air was filled with gunshots and screams. A doctor explained to the men that shooting victims above the shoulders into the backbone would result in an instant death.
The executions lasted all day. Alcohol was supplied. Many aimed too high or too low. One man said that when he shot ‘the entire skull exploded… brains and bones flew everywhere’. Another said ‘the entire skull or at least the rear skullcap was torn off, and blood, bone splinters, and brains sprayed everywhere’.
After a while, many of the men couldn’t take it anymore. One policeman simply ‘slipped off, another avoided his turn shooting. Those who resisted were called ‘weaklings’ but suffered no consequences for not participating. Some hid in the priest’s garden. Another said after one shooting ‘his nerves were totally finished’. One man said he ‘had become so sick that I simply couldn’t anymore’. Another ran into the woods and vomited. Many were sick, the word ‘repugnant’ was used a lot, and one said he’d go crazy if he had to do it again. Some shot ten or twenty Jews before they were asked to be relieved. One man said his comrade was such a terrible shot that the backs of heads were torn off and brains sprayed everywhere. He simply couldn’t watch any longer’. This is the testimony of some 200 men tried in a German court after the war.
When the men were finished, the bodies were left in the woods and the men returned to the barracks ‘depressed, angered, embittered, and shaken’. None of them talked, none ate, and they simply drank.
In court it was said that ‘after only a brief period, the commandos of the Einsatzgruppen got into considerable difficulties. . . . The members . . . were in the long run not up to the mental strain caused by the mass shootings. . . . There were disputes, refusals to obey orders, drunken orgies, but also serious psychological illnesses’.
Even Heinrich Himmler – commander of the SS and one of the architects of the Holocaust – was distraught after watching the execution of 100 men in Minsk. Another SS officer said to him ‘look at the eyes of the men in this Kommando, how deeply shaken they are! These men are finished for the rest of their lives…’
But the men soon got used to killing. By the end of 1942 they’d executed at least 6500 Jews and deported 42,000 more to the gas chambers. Once the initial massacres ended the ‘Jew hunts’ began; the searching for runaways in the villages and forests. They were so frequent that the men described them as their ‘daily bread’. By the time the war was over, only a minority – 10-20% – of Police Battalion 101 abstained from the killings.
And over the course of their service they became increasingly efficient killers. The massacre at Jozefow was typical of an early problem for the Nazis. The men seemed to find killing innocent humans repugnant and difficult. Even Himmler struggled with the sight of the killings, so it was quickly established that later executions would involve a division of labour, so as to ease the ‘psychological’ burden. This, as the historian Christopher Browning writes, allowed the men to ‘become increasingly efficient and calloused executioners’.
The literature on genocide research in general supports this: that initial executions are usually distressing but the distress subsides with each subsequent death. Even worse, while in the minority, some actually develop a pleasure from it over time.
Himmler ordered the gassing of victims, whether in mobile gas vans or in the death camps, so that there would be less direct stressful involvement for the men. Division of labour reduced the burden as some worked on the trains, some were guards, others filled the gas, some worked on accounts while others moved the victims into chambers. The shootings by the Einsatzgruppen were divided too. Some would round up, others would strip the prisoners, and the actual shooting was often done by Eastern Europeans under German occupation. Making men cogs in the machine diminished individual personal responsibility.
Similarly, historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has argued that the steps towards genocide were incremental so as to reduce the resistance that would have been felt if all of them had been carried out an once. These were: verbal assault and physical assault – both the result of millennia of anti-Semitism in Europe; legal and administrative measures – like the 1935 Nuremberg laws depriving Jews of rights and forbidding the marrying of Jews and Germans; pushing Jews to emigrate; forced resettlement; physical separation in ghettos – one study has shown that murder rates were higher in the more ghettoized areas; starvation, debilitation, disease; slave labour. And so on.
Compartmentalizing, as well as incremental escalation, reduces individual responsibility in an act that is much larger than you.
But does this explain much? Men and women still knew what they were doing, what they were partaking in, and they still pulled the triggers. Maybe they were simply following orders?
Commandment 1 of the Nazi Youth: the leader is always right.
In his classic study of the French Revolution, Gustav Le Bon argued that crowd psychology differs from individual psychology for two reasons.
First, anonymity can result in the diminishing of personal and individual responsibility. Responsibility is shared so each individual is more protected. The Nazis, for example, decreed that their soldiers in the USSR would be automatically absolved of any wrongdoing when executing anyone suspected of being anti-German. Anonymity and the protection of the group meant the feeling of personal responsibility shrank.
The second factor he identified was mimesis; that in a crowd, actions by individuals – shouting, chanting, clapping, attacking, seemed to be copied more readily. Psychologist Irvin Janis coined the word ‘groupthink’ in the 1970s. He described groupthink as ‘a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action’.
There’s a human tendency to want to agree, to conform, with your in-group. If a group is deciding on a takeaway or a restaurant you don’t want to be the one to object. You don’t want to be the one to cause a problem. The sociologist George Simmel has described how the desire to stay in an in-group motivates the fear of being censored or excluded by that group. But this has another effect. It also increases the chance that individuals will want to distance themselves from an ‘out-group’ so as to prove loyalty to the ‘in-group’.
The desire for conformity seems to be a universal of human experience, and when that conformity is compounded with authority the impulse to obey increases.
In his study of Police Battalion 101, Christopher Browning draws on Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments in which participants are ordered to give supposedly painful shocks to actors ‘screaming’ in the next room. If the participants hesitated, the phrase ‘the research requires that you continue’ was enough to convince 64% of them to continue to shock those wired up to the highest possible pain threshold.
Milgram was influenced by the Holocaust. He concluded after the experiments that ‘men are led to kill with little difficulty’, which fits nicely into the narrative that many were ‘only following the law of of their country’ – only following orders.
During his trial in Jerusalem, one of the architects of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, who was tasked with organizing transport across the Reich, claimed that he was only following orders. The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote when commenting on his trial that most of the killers ‘were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out those who derived physical pleasure from what they did’. Most were normal, everyday men and women, complying with the law of their country.
Milgram’s approach is what social psychologists call ‘situational’ – that individuals are moved by the external pressures of the situation they find themselves in. If a scientist asks you to shock someone for an experiment you’re likely to conform because the scientist is a trusted symbol of authority and wisdom.
But there’s a problem here. The participants in Milgram’s experiment clearly thought what they were doing was right. That it was a scientific experiment about learning, that the pain was secondary to the benefit of what was being learned. That they didn’t think they were permanently harming someone. That there was a greater good. That the scientists are trustworthy.
This is clearly not the same as the murder of defenceless children. But it could be argued that the pressure to conform to authority during war in Nazi Germany was much greater than in Milgram’s laboratory.
Conformity is a powerful force. Those who didn’t partake in the killings were leaving their comrades to do the dirty work. They risked being ostracized, rejected, isolated, losing their support network – in a horrific war. And authority – punishment, court marshalling, the threat of death for not complying – was surely difficult to resist.
Except, after decades or research and trials, absolutely no cases have been found of anyone being punished for refusing to follow orders to kill Jews. Zero. In fact, as we saw with Police Battalion 101, many were able to avoid killing. So the argument that the desire to conform to authority was total here is insufficient.
And even for those that did, questions remain: who did they think they were conforming too? Did they believe it was evil but conformed anyway? Or did they think their superiors were wise and knew what they were doing, like Milgrim’s scientists? Does the aggressor still not have to believe that they’re making the right choice in pulling the trigger? After all, every action – good or bad – requires some kind of mental justification.
There is always some kind of rationalization, a belief that the action or the authority that convinces you to act is legitimate in some way.
Milgram argued that hierarchy and authority lead participants to adopt their superiors’ ‘definition of the situation’. In doing so, some of their moral responsibility is passed to them in the same way personal responsibility is diminished in a crowd. Individuals are just following orders of someone they trust because of some greater good.
So ultimately conformity and authority simply don’t explain enough. Beliefs – what the individuals think – is obviously important too. Compartmentalisation, conformity, and authority provide parts of the answer. But there is always a context, always a rationalisation.
Goering said at Nuremberg that ‘it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country’.
Murder can always be rationalized in some way. All wars are ‘justified’ by those involved, the participants convinced of the righteousness of what they’re doing.
But what does it mean to rationalize something? To rationalise is to justify an action with logical reasons. To fit it into a larger framework of what ‘correct’ behaviour is.
There were a number of ways the men rationalized what they were doing, and a whole ideology that rationalised the war.
Most obvious was the justification that they ‘were at war’, that it is ‘us or them’. That ‘they’re bombing your wives and children back home’. These were often powerful motivators. Sometimes it was even argued that killing prisoners was the ‘humane’ thing to do as food was short or prisoners wouldn’t survive through the winter.
Train cars were torturous and many died on journeys. Forced marches led to many perishing. In the summer there were long hot days without water and in the winter short cold days without warmth. One officer told a policeman in battalion 101 that ‘nothing could be done with such people’. Another said that ‘the jews were not going to escape their fate anyway’. One justified killing a child because they wouldn’t survive without their mother.
Most perversely, ‘health’ itself could be rationalised not as the health of the individual but the health of the nation.
Before the war, the Nazis began the T4 programme, euthanising and murdering men and women with incurable diseases and mental illness. These were described as ‘mercy killings’. The death camps in Poland were run by doctors drafted from the T4 programme who had already been using gas because it was cheap, quick, and ‘unalarming’ for victims who thought they were going for a shower.
Eichmann’s lawyer described the gas chambers as a medical matter. When questioned on this by the judge he said, ‘it was indeed a medical matter, since it was prepared by physicians; it was a matter of killing, and killing, too, is a medical matter’.
In these ways, executions were often rationalized as the the most humane thing to do for people who wouldn’t survive anyway. But again, twisted rationalisations like this were not enough. The justifications for Nazi ideology and anti-semitism went much deeper and had dominated Germany since Hitler came to power in 1933.
So how powerful was Nazi ideology and propaganda as an incitement to murder? Propaganda, philosopher Jason Stanley writes, ‘uses the language of virtuous ideals to unite people behind otherwise objectionable ends’.
The Order Police undertook a basic training that included a month-long course in ideological education. Topics included ‘maintaining the purity of blood’, and the ‘Jewish Question in Germany’. Pamphlets and training films were distributed to troops throughout the war. Before being sent into the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen were given special training with SS figures who gave them ‘pep talks’ on the ‘war of destruction’, one with SS leader Reinhard Heydrich himself.
But the Nazi propaganda machine had existed long before the war. When the Nazis came to power they immediately created a new Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, the RMVP. Hitler, the artist-leader of the new Reich, was the chief storyteller and Joseph Goebbels ran the ministry.
The RMVP included the press, publishing houses, writers, theatres, radio, film, music; in fact, all culture. At noon everyday, a press conference issued press directives and topical ‘words of the day’ dictating which stories could be covered and details like the presentation and language to be used.
The free press ceased to exist almost immediately. Two hundred social democratic newspapers and twenty-five communist papers were closed down. Otto Dietrich – the Nazi press chief – placed all other publications under government control. Editors had to be Aryan. Moreover, the Nazi Party actually purchased newspapers and publishing houses themselves and by 1939 controlled 82% of newspapers. The Franz Eher publishing house became the largest publisher in the world.
Large ‘word of the week’ posters were designed to be displayed in public squares, kiosks, and shop windows. The posters, officials were informed, ‘must not be absent anywhere… the word of the week must penetrate every last community in the nation’ and ‘should always be in the pedestrians field of vision’.
The propagandists drew on Hitler’s Mein Kampf, drawing up the ‘basic laws’ of Hitler’s ideology: simplification, repetition, appeal to the emotions, contrasting simple good and evil. Lines, one designer wrote, must express ‘simple emotional rhythm’.
In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote that, ‘all propaganda should be popular and should adapt its intellectual level to the receptive ability of the least intellectual of those whom it is desired to address. Thus it must sink its mental elevation deeper in proportion to the numbers of the mass whom it has to grip… The receptive ability of the masses is very limited, and their understanding small; on the other hand, they have a great power of forgetting. This being so, all effective propaganda must be confined to very few points which must be brought out in the form of slogans’.
Posters, leaflets, were produced in their millions. All soldiers were made sure they had access to a radio. In short, for seven years before the war Nazi propaganda was ubiquitous in an environment where Hitler could be seen to do no wrong.
Propaganda was central to the dissemination of Nazi ideology, which, at its core, was an ideology of purity and unification. The Nazis believed that a pure German nation led by the singular will of the leader would rid it of division, producing a natural, efficient and utopian society. National socialism was the doctrine of blood, soil, and race. Goebbels wrote in his diary that the ‘Jew is the enemy and destroyer of blood-based unity’.
Instead of a pure nation, Goebbels wrote in his most famous essay – Why We Are Enemies of the Jews – that Germany had ‘become an exploitation of colony of international Jewry’. Jews could have no place – and would have no shared-interest – in a unified and cohesive German community.
Of course, anti-Semitism is mankind’s oldest prejudice, dating back to the foundations of Christianity. The Jews – ‘Christ-killers’ – rejected Jesus and the teachings of the New Testament; as an older and out-of-date religion that Christianity was meant to supersede, the Jews became a natural out-group for Christians.
An early leader of the church, John Chrystotom, wrote in the 5th century, ‘where Christ-killers gather, the cross is ridiculed, God blasphemed, the father unacknowledged, the son insulted, the grace of the spirit rejected….If the Jewish rites are holy and venerable, our way of life must be false. But if our way is true, as indeed it is, theirs is fraudulent’.
Jewish people were stateless, had no allegence to the nation, to the Church, to the race, lived in a cultrally different way and so over the centuries became an easy lightening rod, scapegoats. Jews have been banished, tortured, converted, and killed across Europe in countless episodes over centuries. Pogroms in Russia, for example, were motivated by conspiracy theories that Jews murdered Christian children.
But it took Social Darwinism and racial ideology – the survival of the fittest race – eugenics and the desires for racial purity in the 19th century for anti-semitism to develop into the modern form it took in Germany.
The Nazis were not only motivate by the idea of the natural necessity of racial purity but by a powerful conspiracy theory that Jews were plotting to take over the world.
Anti-Jewish policies were often portrayed as being a response to Jewish aggression, giving the impression that it was the Jews that were the aggressor and Germany that was the victim.
In 1933, the first year of Hitler’s rule. an anti-Nazi boycott was organized by Jewish groups around the world as a response to the Hitler’s rise to power. Hitler responded with an official boycott of Jewish shops and storm troopers stood menacingly at shop doors. The Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935, forbidding the marriage of Jews and Germans.
And in 1937, a German diplomat was murdered by a 17 year old Jewish refugee whose family had been persecuted by the Nazis. The response was Krystallnacht – the night of broken glass – a widespread pogrom across Germany that saw almost 100 Jews murdered, countless synagogues and Jewish businesses vandalised, torched or destroyed and 3000 Jews taken to concentration camps ‘for their own protection’.
Anti-Semitic actions then were presented by Hitler as defensive. The Nazis were simply heroes, preventing the Judeo-Bolshevik domination of the world. Jews were depicted as having total control of the Soviet Union, of the American government, Wall Street, and Britain. The trick was to consistently associate Jews with the aggressors and Germans as being in a heroic battle, surrounded on all sides, victimised by the rest of the world.
The perpetrators of genocide often see themselves as the victims.
After the First World War, Germany was forced by America, Britain and France into what many historians have called a harsh, unfair, and punishing agreement to pay reparations for the war. The Treaty of Versailles stipulated that Germany take full responsibility for the war, make repayments to the Allies, and cede German land at its borders to France, Poland and Czechoslovakia. This was one of the catalysts for Hitler’s rise to power.
On top of this, throughout the 1920s and early 1930s Germany was in chaos. In election after election, no majority or coalition could be formed between competing parties. Liberals, conservatives, authoritarians, communists are the army all vied for power. After Hitler was elected, the setting on fire of the Reichstag gave the impression that the country was on its knees. We just have to imagine the Capitol or the Houses of Parliament being burned down today.
On top of this, the war came. Destruction, death, poverty, hunger, desperation.
Psychologist Ervin Staub’s research on genocide shows that periods like this are a consistent factor in its occurrence. During this phase, Staub writes, ‘difficult life conditions frustrate basic human needs’. These needs can be the need for security, a feeling of control, the need for a positive identity and social connections, and of course, the need for food, water, shelter. But this alone doesn’t lead to violence.
The ‘frustration of basic human needs’ is almost always experienced relative to some other group. In this context, a vision, an ideology, a politics, a ‘definition of the situation’ as Milgram put it, is more likely to be offered that proposes a particular solution while excluding the status quo factors that seemed to have led to crisis.
In Nazi Germany, liberalism, democracy, Britain, France and America, and of course, the Jews, were all obvious targets to blame for Germany’s problems, creating numerous ‘out-groups’.
Because the problems were so urgent, the potential for friction and hostility towards out-groups increased. Any history of antagonism or prejudice against a particular out-group like Jews is likely to be drawn upon. Sometimes in-grouping and out-grouping manifests itself in simple disagreements, and other times it can escalate so that out-groups become enemies. Sometimes the out-group can be depicted as evil, and occasionally the relationship can become a zero sum game, a matter of survival – it’s either us or them.
In this context, everything good can be associated with the in-group and everything bad with out-group.
When a person perceives themselves as a victim and perceives a prisoner as an aggressor, in a war of survival, and we combine this with the pressure to conform and submit to authority, the probability for murder increases. In Nazi Germany, everything was made to fit this formula.
The Jews were not only meant to be everything that was wrong within Germany, but were a powerful aggressor attacking the country on all sides.
Entire academic works were dedicated to associating Jews with Germany’s enemies. Nazi Historians like Peter Aldag wrote histories like ‘the jews in England’. The film Why War with Stalin argued that the war was a pre-emptive defensive battle to stop the Bolshevik extermination of Germany. It was a ‘conspiracy of Jews and democrats, Bolsheviks and reactionaries’, with a goal to plunge ‘Germany into powerlessness and suffering’.
A 1941 headline of Der Vokische Beobachter – the Nazi Party newspaper – declared that ‘Roosevelt Main Tool of Jewish Freemasonry; Sensational Document Reveals Connections of the Warmonger with the International Clique; Where Roosevelt’s Hebraic Hatred of Germany Comes From’.
It published a so-called ‘secret’ photo of Roosevelt with Jewish Freemasons. Another story in 1942, entitled ‘The Mask Falls’, featured a photo of Roosevelt and his advisers, with each advisor labelled as a Jews underneath. When Churchill brought the left-leaning Stafford Cripps into his government it became a sign of the Bolshevisation and therefore the Jewification of the British government.
The same year, Goebbels wrote an essay titled ‘Mimicry’ which informed readers that Jews were masters of deception, at adapting to their surroundings, and hiding in plain sight. The Jew, Goebbels wrote, ‘is the master of the lie’. A photo collection – Jews in the USA – was published that included evidence of this mimicry – Jews looking ‘normal’ and blending in when necessary, juxtaposed with photos that depicted Jews with stereotypical Jewish features.
Once a global conspiracy involving millions of people is defined, evidence can always be found to justify it.
In 1941, Theodore Kaufman, an unknown Jewish American author, published a book titled Germany Must Perish. The Nazis misleadingly depicted Kaufman as being an influential figure in America, despite publishers refusing to publish his book, which, when published by Kaufman himself, was universally panned.
A headline in the Volkish Beobachter inexplicably linked the author to the foreign policy of the United States, announcing that, ‘Roosevelt Demands Sterilization of the German People: The Germans are Supposed to Be Exterminated in Two Generations’. The book was even published in pamphlets distributed in Germany. Kaufman’s face was used often in propaganda. The caption under a photo of Kaufman in Jews in the USA read ‘He Demands the Complete Extermination of the German People’.
At the end of 1941, Goebbels declared in a radio broadcast that ‘the historical guilt of world Jewry for the outbreak and expansion of this war has been so extensively demonstrated that there is no need to waste any more words on it. The Jews wanted their war, and now they have it’.
And in his article ‘the Jews are Guilty!’, Goebbels wrote that ‘all Jews by virtue of their birth and their race are part of an international conspiracy against National Socialist Germany… If we lose [the war], these harmless-looking Jewish chaps would suddenly become raging wolves. They would attack our women and children to carry out revenge… The Jews are a parasitic race that feeds like a foul fungus on the cultures of healthy but ignorant peoples. There is only one effective measure: cut them out’.
He wrote that the Jews were responsible for every German soldier’s death, that they were the enemy’s agents within Germany, and referred to the Jews’ gradual extermination as being brought on themselves.
The Jews were also associated with laziness, dirtiness and exploitation. An early Nazi manifesto asked who are we ‘fighting against?’ The answer is, ‘against all those who create no value, who make high profits without any mental or physical work. We fight against the drones in the state; these are mostly Jews; they live a good life, they reap where they have not sown’. If something wasn’t done about the virus spreading throughout the world and within Germany, then Germany’s destruction would be inevitable.
But there’s a problem here: it was hardly ever admitted in the post-war trials of ordinary German soldiers that anti-Semitism was a motivating factor for murder. Furthermore, many psychologists today have pointed to the limitations of propaganda as a method of influencing views.
One officer of Police Battalion 101 said during interrogation that ‘under the influence of the times, my attitude to Jews was marked by a certain aversion. But I cannot say that I especially hated Jews’. Many made similar claims.
Browning has argued, though, that this is probably because admitting anti-Semitism in court was enough to be convicted of murder rather than homicide. And many claimed that some of the more sadistic officers were anti-Semites out of ‘conviction’. Is it any surprise that this wasn’t admitted? But still, one Auschwitz inmate insisted that ‘nothing would be more misguided than to believe that the SS were a horde of sadists’. Another inmate estimated the sadists at not more than 5-10% of the total troops.
But as we’ve seen, you don’t have to be sadistic to be convinced to kill. You just have to be able to rationalize what you’re doing. And within the economic, social, and cultural conditions of Nazi Germany, plenty of rationalizations were provided by years of dogmatic propaganda.
During Adolf Eichmann’s trial the prosecution tried to depict him as a ‘monster’, but six psychiatrists at the trial all described him to be ‘normal’, and ‘a man with very positive ideas, who personally had nothing against the Jews. As the defence argued, was simply following the law’.
It seems then, that in the majority of cases, the aggressors simply had to accept some version of the Nazi ‘definition of the situation’. The extent to which that was motivated by anti-Semitism, conformity, duty, or authority clearly differed from case to case.
And while its difficult to assess with any certainty, many Germans clearly believed the Nazi’s anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Goebbels and Hitler certainly believed what they were saying. Many doctors, judges, philosophers, teachers, and lawyers all joined the party. One study that took place in the 1990s found that interviewees that lived through the Nazi era had two to three times more anti-Semitic views than those who did not.
And propaganda works in another way too. Nazi politics were built upon a strict chain of authority from the Fuhrer, down through the ranks to each citizen. The propaganda machine represented this unbroken chain of authority – the Fuhrer’s word was law. We’re back to Milgram’s scenario in which the scientist knows best.
It’s in this way that anti-Semitism, authority, rationalisation, and conformity combined into a potent motivator to kill. As history Jeffrey Herf has concluded, the central justification for the war and the Holocaust was the depiction of Jewry as a ‘powerful international anti-German conspiracy’.
In 1942 Hitler gave a speech in Berlin. He said: ‘the Jews in Germany once laughed about my prophecies. I don’t know if they are laughing today or if the laughter has already gone out of them. I can promise only one thing. They will stop laughing everywhere. And with this prophecy as well I will be proved right [vociferous expressions of agreement from the audience]’.
The response puts the idea that propaganda isn’t effective into doubt.
So let’s recap. In short, we have compartmentalization, incrementation, conformity, authority, propaganda, victimhood, and association.
The process described here has attempted to work backwards from an event – a murder – by peeling back the layers of an onion to understand how the onion functions as a whole, while hoping to get to some kind of core, a seed, a series of central factors and primary causes that lead to its growth.
The pulling of the trigger happened in the context of an order, authority, conformity, and simple rationalization, but those factors weren’t enough, there were deeper motivators that had already been planted. The motivations of ordinary men and women had to be structured within an ideological framework, what Milgram described as a ‘definition of the situation’. This framework was developed in the periods of economic chaos, and then a Nazi rule that was based on conspiracy theory. It presented a simple way out of a difficult period. A good vs evil story of victims and aggressors.
Ervin Staub proposes a model of genocide that has three initial stages: First, there’s the frustration of basic needs. Second, an out-group is identified and labelled to be the cause. Next, the in-group becomes motivated by a ‘utopian vision’ that excludes a certain group.
And Herbert Kelman has also argued that the requirements are threefold: authorization, routinization, and dehumanization. He says that, ‘through processes of authorization, the situation becomes so defined that standard moral principles do not apply and the individual is absolved of responsibility to make personal moral choices. Through processes of routinization the action becomes so organized that there is no opportunity for raising moral questions and making moral decisions. Through processes of dehumanization, the actor’s attitudes toward the target and toward himself become so structured that it is neither necessary nor possible for him to view the relationship in moral terms’.
Inoculation should stop a disease before treatment is necessary. In this case, at the core of the onion. The most obvious warning sign is economic difficulty or, as Staub phrases it, ‘the frustration of basic needs’.
The next warning sign is multiple social groups with different social statuses or economic positions living in a single environment, especially groups with pronounced religious, cultural, or social differences. When these first two factors combine there’s the potential for the in-group/out-group dynamic to deepen.
This, as we’ve seen, can be particularly powerful when the in-group is, or at the very least feels, victimized, and has lost prestige or their dominant status in the world.
In the case of the Holocaust, the factors seemed most fertile when the aggressors were made to feel both powerful and victimised at the same time. Both strong in a group that protected them and under the threat of forces that they believed could become too powerful for them later on.
Conspiracy theories have the potential to take hold in this context, conspiracies that are often directed at an out-group. Similarly, ideological visions that exclude certain groups and associate them with negative traits, as enemies, as dangerous, lazy, or labelling them with euphemisms like ‘virus’ that intend to dehumanise them.
Group psychology, as we saw, leads to the pressure to conform, individual anonymity, and shared responsibility that could lead to increasingly violent acts. The group does not have to be a physical group necessarily, but under the above conditions larger social groups and movements organize as a result of these factors.
These are the factors that led to the Holocaust. Inoculation, in this case, should be both political and cultural. It means shining a light on these factors when they occur, calling them out at their root, and warning of their consequences. It means education, media responsibility, press standards, and an ethical baseline with an emphasis on the fundamental equality between all people.
Currently, the genocide early warning project considers at least 30 countries around the world to be at high-risk for genocide, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, China, and Turkey.
It is often thought that the warning signs would be there well in advance, that there would be plenty of time to stop going down that road, or that it couldn’t happen here.
Ilse Stanley wrote in her memoirs that, ‘a concentration camp, for those on the outside, was a kind of labor camp. There were whispered rumors of people being beaten, even killed. But there was no comprehension of the tragic reality. We were still able to leave the country; we could still live in our homes; we could still worship in our temples; we were in a Ghetto, but the majority of our people were still alive. For the average Jew, this seemed enough. He didn’t realize that we were all waiting for the end. The year was 1937’.
What we’ve seen is not a philosophy of evil – a biblical tale of black and white, or angels and devils – but a theory of the incremental development of evil – a study of the causes of minor changes. Within this, there must be an admission that evil is not external to us all, but that its seeds live within each of us. ‘Cruelty has a human heart’, William Blake wrote. Evil is moulded and twisted into shape gradually. No person wakes up one day with hate in their heart – it has to be learned. Which means we all have a responsibility to inoculate ourselves and our own cultures from what always lurks within.
Sources
Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men
Laurence Rees, The Holocaust
Donald G. Dutton, The Psychology of Genocide, Massacres, and Extreme Violence: Why “Normal” People Come to Commit Atrocities
Ervin Staub, The Origins and Prevention of Genocide, Mass Killing, and Other Collective Violence
Ingrid Pfeiffer and Hirmer Verlag, Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Years
Joseph Goebbels, The Jews are Guilty
Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During WWII & The Holocaust
Frank McDonough, The Hitler Years
Thomas Blass, Psychological Perspectives on the Perpetrators of the Holocaust: The Role of Situational Pressures, Personal Dispositions, and Their Interactions
Henri Zukier, The Twisted Road to Genocide
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Peter Cohen, The Architecture of Doom
