At first glance, you see a bunch of young people mugging for the camera. Then you see the uniform. What you may not know, and what makes this image so important, is that the women here are office workers at Auschwitz. They are spending a day at the SS Rest Camp a few miles east of the Lager. Who would guess that their business is mass murder? After all, apart from the uniform, they look like any other group of young people having fun. And that is the point of this post. It contains, I think, the central question for us today. How do quite normal people find it "normal" to do terrible things? If we can answer this question, then we can see how easy this is and so guard against this happening again.
How does it become normal to be part of the Holocaust?
I think it becomes normal over time.
It starts with the inherent human fear and dislike of "The Other". This is not confined to White people and is common in all societies as we see in China or in the Indian subcontinent. In Europe, anti semitism is just under the surface and historic. Fear of the "Other" or "Strangers" is I think hard-wired into humans.
The crucible for all of this is victimization. Germany had lost the war. There was deep seated and general shame. It had to have been someone's fault. Then the middle class had been wiped out in depression. This was as bad as losing the war. It had to be someone's fault. It had to be the fault of an "other". Then along came a man who identified with this shame. Who told Germany that they were indeed victims and that it was someone who was not a real German's fault.
All the wrongs of the host are given to the scapegoat - the scapegoat is the guilty one that allows the "victim" to avoid any thought about their own reasons for failure and to hold onto the simple issue of blame the "other".
The true danger begins when the state begins to play on these inherent and deep-seated fears that exist in all of us. Hitler said that he was going to make Germany Great Again. To do that blame had to placed on the Jews. In Rwanda, the state and the state media had a long campaign that branded the Tutsi as "Cockroaches" that had to be exterminated as vermin. By having a scapegoat, the Hutu elite avoided their own culpability in a failing state.
Once this story is incorporated in the system of a state, then the scapegoat is in real danger. Once the Nazis took power in 1933, they began an ever increasing state-backed onslaught that began with messaging, then with the taking away of rights and property and later with internment and later still with death. Over a decade they conditioned the German people to become willing accomplices to the Final Solution.
These young women may have been 8-10 years old in 1933. They would have been fed the message that Jews were dangerous enemies that posed a threat to their way of life and future for at least a decade before this picture was taken.
Victimhood is the culture of our present time. As society fails, it has to be someone's fault. Scapegoating is normal. It's the immigrants. It's old white men. It's gays. It's straight society. It's women. It's even Jews! Take your pick. Today as both the UK and the US face elections, it is normal again to talk about the "other" as being dangerous threats. Violent language towards the other has become "normal" in the political landscape. I fear that this normalization of violent language on both the left and the right is a first step in a pathway to extreme danger.
People ask, why did not people speak out? How do you speak out against the social trends today? Don't want to vaccinate? You are a murderer. Don't agree with gender fluidity? You are a bigot. Pick your own social death. Speaking out against the mainstream view of victimhood is social suicide. In Germany, in the 1930's, it was even worse. Speak out and your neighbor will inform on you and you will go to a concentration camp. So by 1939 there was total compliance.
The next step, is when the state itself, and not just competing ideology, takes on the role of persecutor of the "other" or the scapegoat. Now persecution becomes legal. Being the "other" or defending the "other" becomes a crime. We saw this happen once Christianity became state religion after Constantine. The religion of peace and love, that had itself been persecuted, now enforces its position with the full backing of the state. Millenia of sanctioned persecution begins. Do we not see this now with the "Woke" agenda. In many countries it is now a crime to speak certain things? It's no longer just social suicide today. Increasingly, saying the wrong thing will mean that, at best, you lose your job or worse be fined or end up in jail.
Once the state is involved, then bureaucratic process enters the equation as it did in Germany. Even at the best of times, there is no mercy in a bureaucracy. We all have experienced how heartless a bureaucracy can be. One of the ways that they are so heartless is that one of the features of any bureaucracy is that no one is responsible. So the normal rules of human behavior no longer apply. Everyone simply follows policy and the rules. "I was only following orders" is how all bureaucrats justify their legal actions. Hoess's memoirs are filled with his bureaucratic fears and issues. It is easy to imagine the pillow talk in the Hoess's comfy home at the Lager.
"How was your day dear?"
"Terrible. We are having problems with those new furnaces. They don't do the volume that they promised. We are falling behind on the quota and unless I can find a solution, I am going to get in trouble with Himmler."
Hoess's fears throughout his time as Kommandant are along these lines and never about what is right or wrong.
Hannah Arendt goes further when pointing to bureaucracy as a danger.
"The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them."
With state sanction comes the issue of putting "little " people into a uniform and giving them power. Again we have all experienced this in airport security. Imagine if such people could also kill you at will and have the sanction of the state behind them? The Camps were the perfect place for these types of people. Imagine having the full power of the state behind you to persecute the people that you had learned to hate. Imagine swapping "war stories" with your colleagues over dinner in the mess about what you had done that day? Imagine, with total power, how your soul would be corroded?
Another factor is scientific ideology. In the 1930's Eugenics was an established field of science and was especially strong in the US.
The idea of racial differences was at the foundation of science at the time. The common story about Mengele as a doctor in the KZ is that he was some kind of madman doing independent Frankenstein experiments on twins. In fact he was a research subordinate of one of the premier scientists of the time, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, who was director of the Institute for Genetic Biology and Racial Hygiene from 1935 to 1942 and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics from 1942 to 1948. Mengele was working for Verschuer and constantly sent him samples and his reports. Verschuer managed to avoid being made complicit in this and continued to hold prestigious scientific appointments after the war. The Institute itself was renamed the Max Planck Institute.
Scientific orthodoxy is a powerful support to any ideology based on "science". It gives comfort to those that act upon it and makes it hard to refute by the layman. There was no scientific institute more prestigious than the KWI. In fact it was so prestigious that one of its major backers was the Rockefeller Foundation.
In the picture below we see Verschuer examining a pair of twins. The thrust of the research was to find a way of helping Aryan mothers to have twins as a matter of course, thus growing the "Pure Race'. Mengele was part of this program.
In summary, by mid 1941 and the invasion of the Soviet Union, the German people were ready to take the final step in the Final Solution. They were ready to kill.
Reinforcing this was how a bureaucracy works by taking away personal responsibility and giving the full legal force to whatever a bureaucrat does.
Reinforcing this was the wearing of a uniform in the conduct of these "duties".
Further reinforcing government dogma and permission was that the full weight of the then current scientific beliefs about race were behind this decision as well.
Lastly we come to social pressure.
Here we see members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 marching people to their death in the Soviet Union. These are among the men who shot over a million people in 1941/2. These units were filled with middle-aged policemen. Men who months before were directing traffic and dealing with minor crimes in Germany's cities. Men who returned after the war to the very same jobs. How did they do this?
First of all they were subject to all the forces that I have summarized above. But none of these forces add up to being enough to pull the trigger.
These men were not forced into this. A tiny few refused and were sent to other units. Peer pressure was the primary force. Most of the men felt that they could not step aside from their peers. And then every time they pulled the trigger it got easier.
So my final point is this. By simply labelling all those who participated in the Holocaust as being "evil", we fail to understand how these people did these things. Yes there were truly evil people involved. Defined as people with no conscience and who enjoyed this. But most were people like you and I who had descended into evil by being manipulated by evil people.
My fear today is that many of the preconditions that enable regular people to make this descent are in place. Victimization is the core of our conversation. As a result, demonizing "The Other" is at the centre of all political life today from both left and right. The state and the supporting bureaucracy has already begun to adopt, of course for the best of reasons, much of this ideology, and so mindlessly is able and does prosecute "the other" in the name of what is best. It's all for the general good. Dissent is social suicide. To dissent is to be a traitor.
I fear that we are not far away from the conditions where taking "Aktion" to deal with the whatever you choose problem.
Viktor Frankl, a survivor, how I hate the overuse of this word, says in his great book, Man's Search for Meaning, that "...we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two - the "race" of the decent man and the "race" of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere, they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people......Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths. Is it surprising that in those depths we again found only human qualities which in their own way were a mixture of good and evil? The rift dividing good from evil, which goes through all human beings, reaches into the lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom of the abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp."
In my next post we look at a man who in all of this chose to be a force for decency and good. Surprisingly, he is a Kapo.
