Here’s another paper that I wrote for a political science course. Whereas my previous paper focuses primarily on solutions to the problem of genocide, this paper focuses more on the roots or causes. I wrote this because it is easier to remedy a problem when you understand what the fuck is going on and why. Like in medicine. Thanks for reading.
Genocide represents the very worst of what humans are capable of doing to each other.[1] It is tempting to imagine perpetrators of genocide as psychologically abnormal, as inhuman monsters. When Hannah Arendt observed the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, she encountered not the monster she expected but a normal man.[2] Christopher Browning made a similar observation about Polish Reserve Battalion 101, which lead him to ask, “If the men of the Reserve Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?”[3] It is comforting to think that if genocide were to happen outside our own front doors, we would not participate in the evil going on around us. This might not be true. The Jewish Holocaust happened in a society much like our own, and that atrocity was accomplished through the coordinated efforts of thousands. To understand why so many people participated, we should shift our focus from “why did the Germans kill the Jews” to “why did the individual German participate in the massacre.”[JBG1] [4] The psychological experiments of Stanley Milgram and Philip G. Zimbardo demonstrate that ordinary people are more than capable of doing terrible things to each other in the right circumstances, but a more nuanced look at their results might lead us to a conclusion which is less deterministic. We can better understand why ordinary Germans participated in the Holocaust by acknowledging that the Nazis were not monsters, but ordinary people, and examining what factors bring out that behavior in an ordinary person in psychological studies and in the context of the Holocaust.[JBG2]
The pseudoscientific premise of eugenics is that it is to improve the human race by removing carriers of defective genes from the gene pool. At issue is what constitutes a defective gene. Out of sheer collective narcissism, people of European descent thought of other races as naturally inferior, and wanted to prevent “contamination of their bloodline” with genes from other racial groups, also the physically or psychologically disabled, homosexuals, alcoholics, delinquents, etc..
Also at issue is how far we ought to be willing to go for the sake of “improving the human race.” Eugenics is most dangerous combined with the philosophy that “the end justifies the means,” the rationalization of necessary evil for the sake of the greater good. In the United States, from which Germany learned many things, “racial hygiene” was enforced through public policy and medical practices like segregation, limits on immigration for certain groups, stigmatization of inter-racial marriage, forced sterilization, etc. Under post-WWI Germany’s “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Disabled Offspring,” the Aktion T-4 program was created to euthanize infants and children with disabilities.[5] The program was later expanded to children up to seventeen years old. They were a “burden on society,” and their lives were not considered worth living. Children were taken away and killed without parents’ consent. When the public found out, moral outrage ensued, and the program was allegedly shut down. Six killing institutions for disabled adults continued until the end of WWII. Technology used for the euthanasia program was later used in killing camps.
That “end justifies the means” logic requires ignoring the sacredness of the things we find it necessary to violate. We might comfort ourselves with notions like “some lives add more value to this world than others,” or that “there may be a point past which life is no longer worth living.” Allowing one’s conscience to be guided by preconceived notions without paying attention to the details of real life is irresponsible, but that irresponsibility is entirely predictable.
Speaking of overreliance on preconceived notions to justify violation of the sacred for the sake of the greater good, the Holocaust could not have happened without the old and pervasive tradition of anti-Semitism in Europe. Slight, arbitrary differences in outward appearance between Jews and other Germans were only the beginning. Differences in religious and cultural practices, ethnic history, folklore, socio-economic status became the basis for potent stereotypes. Because of theological differences with Christianity, Jews were allegedly blamed for the death of Jesus. A long history of persecution, as well as a rich doctrine of cultural practices which set them apart, meant that Jews tended to live together in separate communities. Jewish financial practices helped them emerge as outstanding in the financial sector, and when states were in economic turmoil after much expensive war-making, blaming the folks who managed the banks was much easier than repaying their debts. Karl Marx had Jewish ancestry, which allowed Nazis to connect the Jews to the Bolshevik threat. The Jewish identity knew no borders, and the existence of such an identity group within a war-torn Germany was seen as a threat to popular loyalty to the state.
Adolf Hitler was an eloquent populist who blamed Jews for the loss of WWI and promised to “make Germany great again.”[6] He combined ancient anti-Semitism with new eugenics pseudoscience and called for the “purification of the German race.” Jones writes that Hitler once told a journalist, “Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews.”[7]
Anti-Semitic propaganda like Mein Kampf at once preyed on and worsened existential fear in Germany. Wherever there is uncertainty and turmoil, shaken people find solace in belonging to a group. Identity groups are defined in terms of who doesn’t belong, and insecurity strengthens wariness or indifference towards outsiders.[8] We “assuage our fear of death through the death of the other.” Hitler’s conviction that Germany would be better off without Jews swayed Germans because prejudice towards outsiders was heightened, and the promise of a better world for their families was comforting. Jews were outside of the in-group identity that was German loyalty to the state.
Nationalism was rampant, fueled by Hitler’s rhetoric and the third Reich’s anti-Semitic propaganda campaign. More Germans voted liberal in their semblance of a democratic system, but the socialists were so busy fighting the communists that the left lost an election to the Nazis. After the Nazis took control of the government, public policy quickly became blatantly anti-Semitic. The Nuremburg laws stripped Jews of their citizenship; they couldn’t vote or hold public office. The “Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor” made eugenics and “racial hygiene” into public policy. Intermarriage or partnerships between Jews and other Germans was forbidden. “Any action could be taken to enforce these laws.” Many Jews were sterilized.
As Germany expanded in WWII, so did their Jewish population. Germany relocated Jews to hundreds of ghetto communities, but the sheer numbers of people made relocation to livable conditions difficult. Bureaucrats managing refugees protested, “we’ve got too many of these people, don’t send any more!” and “how long do we have to live with this?”[9] Nazis considered exploiting Jews for labor, but many were unfit to work.
A direct order to exterminate all Jews was never given.[10] At the Bonzi Conference, high-ranking Nazi officials settled the “Final Solution” to the problem of what to do with these people, a problem which the Germans entirely created for themselves. Letting the Jews go, allowing them to live freely in Germany, may not even have crossed their thoroughly indoctrinated minds. After the abuse Jews had already suffered and witnessed, and with the popularity of Nazi ideology in full swing, the risk of catastrophe was high. But it would have been a catastrophe either way.
Killing millions efficiently required progressively refining methodologies. Einstatzgruppen rounded up, massacred, and buried the Jews in mass graves, but routinely shooting thousands of people point blank took a toll on firing squads. Gas vans and gas chambers distanced perpetrators from victims. In the camps, those not sent to the gas chambers were exploited for their labor, worked to death under abysmal conditions. Some were forced to dispose of the bodies of other victims.
Among the Nazis, there were a few sociopathic monsters who joined up purely for the fascination of inflicting pain on others. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” at Auschwitz, helped select which people should go to the gas chambers when they arrived.[11] He performed experiments on twins, “without anesthesia and without their consent.”[12]
For most people, it is “difficult to look another human being in the eye and kill or torture them.” To bypass social inhibitions, Nazis thought of Jews as only seeming human, not “human on the inside, where it matters.”[13] One holocaust survivor recounted being forced to dig up mass graves, and being forbidden to refer to the dead as human.[14] A German doctor who refused to experiment on Jews was asked by a colleague, “How can you look at them and see someone who is like you?” to which she replied, “there are many people who are not like me, especially you.”
Something happens when one group is given complete dominance over people they are conditioned to see as inferior, sinister, different, alien, or wrong which may help us understand how ordinary people can do these things to each other. Philip G. Zimbardo studied the social behavior of Stanford college students in a simulated prison environment. Students were arbitrarily assigned the role of “guards” who had authority and responsibility to keep “prisoners” in line, enforcing rules designed by the experimenters to dehumanize prisoners. The resulting brutality of the guards towards the prisoners was so severe that the experimenters stopped the study prematurely.[15] As Wilson says, “If you give a person power over someone else who is powerless, someone who has been demonized or made to seem less human, then that absolute power corrupts absolutely.”[16] The blatant anti-Semitism of Hitler’s propaganda, rhetoric, and policy demonized the Jews and made them seem less human. Giving Nazis absolute power over the Jews created a permissive environment for unspeakable atrocities to take place.
With backwards logic, some guards blamed the prisoners for their own abuse. i.e., “if you weren’t breaking the rules, I wouldn’t have to keep you in line. I don’t want to do this. It’s your fault that I have to do these things to you.”[17] Blame creates desire for retribution, which makes it easier to justify abuse.
The question of how Nazis got their power over the Jews is difficult. The narrative that the victims went “meekly to their deaths”[18] is too simple. Aside from notable resistance[19] and uprisings, consider what it must have been like from their perspectives. The shock of being taken from one’s home and community and everyday life, the fear and denial and dread of getting off a train in an unfamiliar place and being separated from families and not knowing what was happening or why, disorientation and exhaustion of living and sleeping in poor conditions without adequate sustenance.[20] It was brutal. In Prague, there is a museum at the old synagogue, and on display they have children’s drawings which were salvaged from the ghettos and carefully preserved.[21] That there were people trying to go on with the everyday business of giving the kids something to do, in conditions like this, is in itself a profound kind of resistance.
Still, there is the problem of the Judenrate, the Jewish councils whose job it was to ensure that Nazi orders were carried out in the ghettos.[22] They helped round up and select which people should go to the camps, distributed rations, and enforced rules. Purely from a logistical perspective, their assistance helped make the coordinated mass killing possible. If they had somehow refused to cooperate, it might have slowed the process down. They were choosing the lesser of two evils: dying and subjecting other victims to the whims of the Nazis, or living and at maintaining a small amount of power over the treatment of innocent people, at least for a while. Alternatively, they might have enjoyed having power for power’s sake, or perhaps they were obeying authority because they felt they had no other choice.
One unsettling possibility is that ordinary people – victims and perpetrators alike, although the line between those two things isn’t always clear – participated in the Holocaust because they were “just doing their jobs” and failed to stand up to authority. Milgram’s experiments tested the limits of human obedience when we are told to harm another person. On the false pretense of studying the relationship between punishment and learning, subjects were told to shock a stranger with increasingly strong jolts from a generator when he made mistakes. The majority “obeyed the orders of the experimenter to the end, proceeding to punish the victim until they reached the most potent shock on the generator.”[23] Ordinary Germans participated in the Holocaust because of a psychological tendency to defer to authority, even when that authority is wrong. Those who opposed the Nazi régime were vulnerable to being executed or sent to concentration camps, so this tendency not to question authority was likely compounded by fear.[24] This might help explain the sheer number of people who were involved with the coordinated annihilation of a group, who didn’t stand up and say, “I refuse to do this, this is wrong.”
In Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen chastised Christopher Browning for portraying Holocaust perpetrators as devoid of individual agency, helplessly swept along by circumstance. It is harder to hold people accountable when we don’t acknowledge the role of their own agency in their behavior. Goldhagen focused on the image of Nazis as ideological zealots motivated by bigotry and hate and blood-lust. His “famous answer to ‘why did the Germans kill the Jews’ was ‘because they wanted to.’”[25] To his point, members of Reserve Battalion 101 in Poland were allegedly free to stop the killing and go home whenever they wished. Most of them chose to stay.
To some extent, indoctrination is a matter of circumstance. The Nazis were not born, they were made. Through experience, through exposure to ideological perspectives through parents, classmates, teachers, friends. Through books, food, and tradition, through conversations and stories and lyrics of songs. Through the state of the word they were living in. Everything that happens to a person from that first gasp of air and light and cold to the moment when she finds herself staring down the barrel of a gun at a mother holding a child at the edge of a ditch, or carefully writing down a list of names, or selling dark hair and small shoes and gold teeth to the highest bidder. Everything that has ever happened in her life has made her what she is.
In the Stanford Prison Experiment, some of the guards were kinder to the prisoners than others. A significant minority of Milgram’s subjects were given the chance to harm innocent people and chose not to. Subjects cheated and administered lower shocks when the experimenter wasn’t looking, and if even one other person in the room refused to cooperate, others were more likely to follow. When one Milgram subject was told that he had “no other choice” but to continue, he replied, “excuse me, but I do have a choice. I’ve probably gone too far already.”[26] It’s no coincidence that this man worked as an electrical engineer, and knew what it felt like like to be shocked at a high voltage.
The circumstances which turned some people into monsters brought out the best in others. We know there were ordinary people who protected the Jews,[27] who gave them money or food or somewhere to hide or the necessary paperwork and a safe path to safety. Would-be accomplices refused to cooperate when they realized what they were being asked to do. Even within the ranks of the perpetrators, there were those who tried to help victims wherever they could. Afterwards, many said things like, “I did what anyone would have done,” or “I didn’t have a choice,” or “they would have done the same for me.”[28] The characteristics which set this kind of person apart, or perhaps makes them truly extraordinary are: a “universal sense of the altruistic bond,” a keen sense of their own autonomy, and often had a[29] personal acquaintance with some of the people who are being targeted.
In hindsight, it is possible to pick out the large-scale political, economic, and social forces which culminated in the genocide, but explanations for these forces are best understood in terms of each of the people who were making all of the small, individual decisions working in tandem. The massive coordinated effort to destroy the Jews could not have happened without the participation of thousands of devastatingly ordinary people – and the same can be said of the resistance which did everything from saving lives to making a few moments of the life of a child living in a ghetto a little more easy to bear.
Given the catastrophic evil that happened in spite of that resistance, we might think that there is good in this world, it’s just that this time it wasn’t enough. But tell that to the innocent person who survived because there was somebody there who was willing to help him. As Loren Eiseley once wrote, “it made a difference to that one.” Imagine for a second what this world would be like, if what goodness we’ve got wasn’t here.
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
Baum, Stephen K. Psychology of Genocide: Perpetrators, Bystanders, and Rescuers.
Browning, Christopher. Ordinary Men: The Reserve Police Battalion 101.
Browning, Christopher. “The Nazi Empire,” The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies.
Dudai, Ron. “Understanding perpetrators in genocides and mass atrocities.”
Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl.
Goldhagen, David. Hitler’s Willing Executioners.
Jones, Adam. Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction.
Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah.
Milgram, Stanley. “Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.”
Pierson, Frank. Conspiracy.
Paxton, George. Nonviolent Resistance to the Nazis.
Waller, James. Becoming Evil.
Zimbardo, Phillip G. “The Stanford Prison Experiment: A Simulation of the Psychology of Imprisonment.”
[1] Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction
[2] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
[3] Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
[4] Ron Dudai, Understanding Perpetrators of Genocide and Mass Killing
[5] Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction
[6] 45th president of the United States
[7] Jones, Genocide. pg. 247
[8] Stephen K. Baum, Psychology of Genocide
[9] Conspiracy.
[10] Jones, Genocide
[11] Marcus Parks,
[12] Personal notes taken at Auschwitz I Museum
[13] David Livingstone Smith, “On Dehumanization,” Unmuted. Transcripts of interviews by Myisha Cherry.
[14] Shoah.
[15] Zimbardo, “Stanford Prison Experiment”
[16] David Wilson as quoted by Jones in Genocide, 402
[17] Jones, Genocide.
[18] Jones, Genocide.
[19] George Paxton, Nonviolent Resistance to the Nazis
[20] Eli Wiesel, Night.
[21] Personal notes on visit to The “Old Synagogue” in Prague, Czech Republic
[22] Jones, Genocide.
[23] Jones, Genocide.
[24] George Paxton, Nonviolent Resistance to the Nazis
[25] Dudai, “Understanding perpetrators.”
[26] Jones, Genocide, 400
[27] George Paxton, Resistance to Genocide
[28] Stephen K. Baum, Psychology of Genocide
[29] Baum, Psychology. See also Diary of Anne Frank.
[JBG1]Excellent
[JBG2]Superb introduction!