How Ordinary Men Became Genocidal Killers in the Holocaust
Introduction
The Second World War was a watershed even in the history of the world. Over a period of six years, the War brought to the fore some of the worst excesses of mankind in a purgatory of hate and violence in the form of the Holocaust. The Final Solution, mass extermination of the Jews, left deep scars in the psyche of humanity.
While the contours of the Holocaust may have been the product of the skewed brains of Adolf Hitler, the sole blame of the entire saga of mass murder cannot be left at Hitler’s doorstep alone. Millions of ordinary Germans were a party to the atrocities against Jews in some form of the other. The question of how ordinary people of Germany turned into violent and cruel human beings has been one of the most researched topics in history.
Alternate Perspectives
The question of how ordinary Germans were transformed into Nazi killers has been addressed through many perspectives. A generic and holistic approach considers the transformation of Germans as mass murderers a part of a historical continuum. A narrower approach considers the immediate triggers for the transformation from within Germany’s history of the period between the two World Wars. It would be instructive to observe the broader historical and psychological contours before addressing the narrow historical reasons for the change in the German psyche.
Broader Contours
A perspective that looks at the broader contours of how events coalesced into the violent days of the Final Solution takes the position that the root of events that transformed ordinary Germans into killers did not originate in recent history. Prominent thinkers hold the position that the process of modernization and colonization that enslaved the world under the European powers concealed within itself the spark that came aflame in the Holocaust. In this viewpoint, Germany is not an especially evil case; rather, Germany was the country where the process of dehumanization occurred most radically (Gerwath and Malinowski). An inability to see the act of the Final Solution as a continuum in the world’s history of excesses would render it impossible to learn from the lessons of the past so that future tragedies are avoided (Bloxham).
Prominent intellectual critics of colonization have pointed out the enduring ‘psychological deformation’ that colonial masters underwent. According to these critics, fascism was merely the horrors of colonialism turned inward. According to W.E.B. Dubois, there was no Nazi atrocity that had not been previously practiced in the colonized lands. According to this interpretation, the Holocaust could not have occurred without the prior experience of Germany in the lands it colonized. The willingness to exterminate certain groups of people was the ‘ultimate taboo violation’ that had its roots in Germany’s colonial history. Therefor, the transformation of German society was not as rapid and, therefore, as surprising as it would appear if the slide into villainy was considered to be only the Inter-War years (Gerwath and Malinowski).
In the same vein, the socio-cultural transformation that brought the Nazis to power and converted the German people to killers could be traced to a deeper European urge towards modernity. The forces of urbanization of society and the rise of an interventionist nation state provided positive optimism amongst the ruling classes of Europe. At the same time, prominent thinkers imbued European thought with concerns about the ineradicable conditions of illness, disease and death. Such thoughts are likely to have propelled ideas of exclusivity, racism and extermination. The duality of ideas regarding optimism and illness were manifest in the Wilhelmine era of Germany. Misguided thinkers of Hitler’s ilk attributed Wilhelmine liberalism to be the root cause of ‘misplaced humanitarianism’ that supported the ‘biologically unfit’ and weakened the natural biological mechanisms of ‘natural selection’ of the German race (Sweeney). From this viewpoint, it was to be only a short walk to convince the multitudes of Germany about any radical project to cleanse the genetic stock of the German people.
Historical Reasons from the War Years
The broader impulses of colonialism and arguments towards a cleansing of the German race came to climactic manifestation in Hitler’s Germany. The face of Hitler’s atrocities was his Nazi Party. Therefore, in order to understand how ordinary people became killers, it must be understood as to how the German people came to support the Nazi Party.
Support for the Nazi Party. The Nazi Party, under Hitler, proposed a solution to every problem ailing German society after the Second World War. The Nazis exploited the popular myth that Germany had lost the First World War because it had been ‘stabbed in the back.’ Support for this perception swayed people away from democracy (Bailey).
The Nazis also advocated that the Treaty of Versailles be abolished. They held that the terms of the treaty, such as abolition of conscription, demilitarization and massive damages as reparations were humiliating. Germans saw the Nazis as a political tool to abrogate the Versailles Treaty (Bailey).
Hyper-inflation after the First World War affected the fortunes of millions of Germans. The Nazi Party was able to convince the public that the travails of the German economy were due to the Social Democrats. With the economy sliding into the recesses of the Depression, membership of the Nazi Party swelled. The Nazis’ electoral breakthrough in 1932 could be attributed to the global economic depression that had taken root since 1929 (Bailey).
Fragmentation of Society. The extreme poverty in the 1930s caused many farms to fail. The traditional model of members of the rural community helping one another failed due to harsh economic conditions. Communities began crumbling. With reducing social support in the villages, people found the promise of camaraderie and familial support of the Socialist Party to be alluring. The countryside converted to the cause of National Socialism that beat the drums of ‘blood, land and national unity’ (Bailey).
Anti Communist Impulse Amongst the Bourgeoisie. The German middle classes were relatively isolated from the economic collapse and its repercussions on the poor. However, the middle classes had a different set of reasons to move into the folds of the Nazis. The Reichstag had begun to recognize Socialist and Communist parties. The communist agenda of redistribution of wealth frightened the German middle class. Therefore, the German Middle Class decided to support the Nazi Party in order to thwart the rise of the communists (Bailey).
Anti Semitism. Anti-Semitism was not new to Germany. The Nazi Party only fanned the flames. They brought public attention to a document, ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ which purportedly depicted Jewish plans for world domination. In reality, the document was a forgery by the French to implicate a spy. However, the Czar of Russia declared that the document was genuine and relied on it to support his anti-Semitic drive in the 1920s. Hitler, with his skewed logic, held the document to be true precisely because the Jews would vehemently oppose having authored such a document. Hitler set in motion a deluge of nationwide propaganda painting the Jews as dark characters. The Nazi propaganda magazine, Der Strumer, depicted Jews as rapists and ‘vampires and rapists’, and helped to channel public perception against the Jews (Bailey).
The Aryan Ideal. Hitler exploited his oratory to convince the German people that they belonged to the physically and intellectually superior Aryan race. Hitler suggested that the Aryan race was morally superior to other people as well. After having suffered in the throes of cynicism during the Weimar republic, the German people readily consumed the notion of Aryan supremacy (Bailey).
Propaganda. Propaganda played a role in whitewashing the German psyche. Hitler was adept in the employment of mass media to brainwash people’s perceptions and to shape public opinion. Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, believed that the role of propaganda was to move the people into a position of active support to the Nazi Party by making them addicted to the party apparatus (Bailey).
Propensity to Obey Orders. Propaganda could be construed as only part of the cause of turning the German people into putty in the hands of Hitler. According to a theory, the German tradition for obedience of orders was channelized towards unyielding respect for Hitler’s authority and charisma. This blind faith in Hitler, shaped by Hitler himself using propaganda, fanning the fears and raising fantastic hopes for attaining global supremacy, pushed in the German people into an unquestioning mode (Bailey).
Stanley Milgram, in a series of psychological experiments, has tried to corroborate the fact that the willingness to confirm and to obey authority are powerful motivators that can impel people to carry out tasks that they would normally desist from doing. Milgram brought groups to students together for his experiments. In each experiment, he would attach electrodes capable of delivering electric shock of upto 450 volts onto one participant who would be invisible to another who held the controls to deliver the shock. The participant who held the controls was called the ‘teacher’ and the participant on whom the electrodes were attached was called the student. The ‘teacher’ was told that he could switch on his controls to deliver electric shock to the student if the student did not learn commands given during the experiment. As the experiment progressed, the student was given increasingly different tasks to perform that he failed to do. At this juncture, the teacher was told to deliver increasing amounts to electric shock. Milgram found that a majority of the participants had no qualms in generating electric shock to their fellow participants who were performing the role of students. Milgram ascribed this conditioning to the framework of the experiment, where the ‘teacher’ would get immersed into the framework long before the situation was arrived at where he had to deliver the electric shock (Zimbardo).
In many ways, the Milgram experiments replicate the events on the ground in Nazi Germany. Long before the German people were coopted into delivering the ‘Final Solution’, they had been incorporated in delivering small doses of ‘electric shock’ to their fellow countrymen. Therefore, they had already been oriented to confirm and obey, and did not find it difficult to extend their obedience in ways more evil than they could have normally imagined.
Threat of Punishment. With their increasing influence, the Nazi Party became all powerful and began to dictate the local discourse in the neighborhoods and communities. The German people were coerced into action as it suited the Nazi goals through threats of punishment for insubordination. The threat of punishment, however, would be only a partial answer to the degeneration of the German people into killers (Bailey).
The Impetus to Conform. Perhaps the biggest motivator for ordinary Germans to follow the mob and indulge in violent and criminal acts was the human impulse to conform to the wider world. Acting as a part of a group, people participate in acts that they would not have carried out if told to do on their own. As a result, German soldiers in uniform and German citizens in towns and cities got swept away by the national events and became puppets in the hands of the Nazis (Bailey).
The idea that men tend to confirm. to organizational situations is corroborated by the ‘conformity’ experiment by Salomon Ash. In the experiment, a subject is placed in a situation when all those around him unanimously affirm the wrong choice out of a set of options given to the person. It was observed that the participant invariably took the wrong option, in conformity with the confederates planted in the experiment (Browning)
This view, however, is critiques by commentators. They cite the examples of German officers who managed to obtain duties other than the killing of Jews. In time, their superiors would pass direct orders to the subordinates of such German officers to carry out the killing of Jews. Such instances serve to prove that there was scope in Nazi Germany to find ways and means to avoid killing Jews. Only a miniscule percentage of the German population chose to take a stand (Goldhagen).
Hunger for Money and Power. Many commentators have striven to prove that the Milgram experiments and the pressures to ‘confirm’ and ‘obey’ actually hid the deeper motivations amongst ordinary Germans- that of power and perks. The motivation of money and power is likely to have motivated prison guards and bureaucrats to shed their humanity. All low and high officials sought to get ahead in the vast Nazi bureaucracy. The best thing to do n such a situation would be to keep a low profile, follow the course charted by the broader Nazi Party so that power and perks could follow (Bailey). Some of the most apt examples of the hunger for power come from the lives of the architects of the Holocaust. Adolf Eichmann was only a traveling salesman before he was absorbed into the deadly Secret Service. Dr Carl Clauberg was a ‘white coated scientist’ who wished to advance his theories of reproductive technology. He made an arrangement with Himmler and received thousands of Jewish women to experiment on. He was so steeped in his infamous work that when he heard of the advance of the liberating Russian army, he only asked to be shifted to a secret location with a handful of his subjects (Mandel). Even amongst the relatively unglamorous police force, it was observed that the policemen felt an aura of institutional authority when affiliated to Nazism. Therefore, it would stand to logic that all people working with varying degrees of authority found their standing buttressed by Nazism. Such people would have done whatever was in their power to perpetuate the power of the Reich (Mann).
Lack of the Big Picture. One argument attempting to understand the psyche of the German populations rationalizes the behavior of the Germans with the logic that most Germans did not know the bigger, composite picture. Therefore, at the individual level, hardly any German was aware of the extent of atrocities being imposed on the Jewish population. Most Germans saw the war only through the prism of their own countryside and villages. At the local level, Germans gave vent to their centuries old pent up feelings of anti-Semitism. However, because each German was unaware of the composite picture, they could not comprehend the scale of the horrors they had unleashed at the individual level (Bailey).
Anti-Semitism as the Primary Motivator. William Goldhagen refutes the multitude of reasons that attempt to justify how the bulk of peace loving German people became violent murderers. According to Goldhagen, anti-Semitism would have moved thousands of ordinary Germans to act in ways they could never have fathomed for themselves. Goldhagen holds anti-Semitism as the biggest instance of bigotry in history. The German society, while resembling the rest of European society, radically differed in the extent of anti-Semitism seeping into all corners of society. Germans considered the Jews to be the manifestations of Satan –evil incarnate who used the blood of Christian children during rituals and were in league with the Devil. Anti-Semitism had never been absent from the German discourse. It only took Hitler’s distorted genius to allow the German population to freely express this latent anti-Semitism in the worst possible manner. Germans were not far removed from medieval concepts of how the Jews, by not accepting Christ as their savior, were guilty as non-believers. To the German mind, either the Messiah was false or the Jews had gone astray. Therefore, the Germans carried a long and complicated package of grudges against the Jews, which they manifested in violence against the Jewish population (Goldhagen).
Quantitative Corroboration
The reasons brought forth by scholars and commentators as to why ordinary citizens became killers in Nazi Germany bring forth two views that are in contradiction to each other. The first view is that the ordinary citizens were swept away by the force of events to become bigoted killers. The opposing view is that the people were necessarily evil and were ideological killers. To arrive at a definitive conclusion as to which camp the majority of Germans belonged to, Michael Mann carried out a study of 1500 biographies of men and women involved in Nazi genocide. The study showed that most of the Sudetenland Germans, the women, and foreign ethnic Germans who were ‘liberated’ by the Wehrmacht appeared to be ordinary German folk caught up in the flow of the times. However, amongst the remaining ninety percent of the population, two thirds were long term Nazis and a third were extremists from the days before the war had begun. It was observed that the perpetrators involved in the more gruesome activities came from the core Nazi constituencies. This is corroborated from the manner the genocidal institutions grew. To start with, there was strict screening of people who were to man the death camps. Only the thoroughly indoctrinated Nazis were inducted into the camps. Only when the numbers required to man the camps multiplied exponentially, quality control norms were relaxed and common Germans were brought in to operate the levers in the death camps (Mann).
While the study revealed that thoroughly indoctrinated persons handled most of the really evil jobs, the study fails to take into account the actions of the infamous Auxiliary Police Battalion 101. This relatively inexperienced battalion of reservists was called upon to kill thousands of Polish Jews, and the battalion went about its task without much demur. The fact that most of the members of the battalion were reservists raises into question the assumption that only the indoctrinated people handled the killings in the initial phase. The only plausible explanation that could be ascribed to the actions of the police battalion would be the fact that the battalion composed of police officers who were looking forward to careers in the Nazi Party. Therefore, they would have been motivated by the possibility of assimilation and promotion (Browning).
Conclusion
Over the last six decades, there have been scores of studies and interpretations about the nature f motivations of the ordinary Germans who descended into brutality and lost their humanity in Hitler’s Germany. A number of reasons have been put forward. The reasons begin with the overarching pattern of western imperialism, which created character traits in Europeans that abetted violence and subjugation. The broader historical impulse coalesced into a focus on the elimination of Jews in Hitler’s Final Solution. Ordinary Germans who formed part of Hitler’s Nazis were likely to have been motivated by a number of factors, ranging from an impulse to obey, a lure for personal gain, genuine anti-Semitism and the absence of the big picture. The inherent dichotomy in such disparate motivations is addressed by an empirical study, which reveals that most of the Nazis who performed the abhorrent tasks were specifically chosen for the same.
Therefore, it could be said that the majority of Germans who participated in Nazi killings were thoroughly indoctrinated. Those who were incorporated in the death camps towards the end of Hitler’s reign were the ordinary citizens.
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