After a bit of Googling…
Here is a page dedicated to “The Wave” and the high school experiment that led to the novel.
The original nonfiction book written by Ron Jones, the teacher who crafted the experiment, is titled No Substitute for Madness: A Teacher, His Kids, and the Lessons of Real Life, and is apparently out of print, but available through Amazon.
Well, sort of. From the little I’ve read, the original plan was to just move the undesirables out of Germany (“Germany,” of course, meaning the actual country plus Austria and the Sudetenland and whatever else). When more and more of Europe was being conquered and the problem of moving them became too inconvenient, the Final Solution was devised. None of which makes it any less sick. Personally, I have big concerns with the way Jews are singled out. Within the confines of the truth, you can’t overstate the tragedy that occurred, but I’m concerned about attempts to monopolize it.
Absolutely. Not inherently. (I’ve never looked at it this way before so this is all on the fly: ) There was this great society being created, the 1000 year Reich, and there was this prototype of German (or Aryan.) Racially pure, intellectually and physically superior, impervious to pain, total allegiance to the Party…this people had to be created somehow, it wasn’t going to occur naturally. Unnatural, brainwashed, etc = “different.”
I think the story of Goebbel’s wife explains it all: Germany’s defeat was imminent, so she poisoned her six kids and then agreed to be shot by her husband. “They were under tremendous pressure”…yes, so is everyone else at one time or another.
I don’t know whether this proves or disproves something. It occured nowhere else but in areas of Europe occupied by Nazis where (I assume) there was already a foundation of anti-Semitism. OTOH, we have skinheads here, people with similar genetic make-up, background, intellect as I have, who could be persuaded to run concentration camps. What’s their excuse?
Milgrams expt doesnt explain everything but it points out how hard it is to resist authority even if you do think whats being done is wrong.
Combine that with the many people who thought it was ‘right’ or ‘regrettable but necessary’, out of sight out of mind factors, personal gains, and the like and it explains a fair bit.
There were also cultural variations found in the percentage who complied, from memory the US was a fair way up there as was Germany. I dont think there was any culture tested where the majority didnt comply though.
Otara
When the Nazis were trying to deal with the Jewish problem, they experimented with several approaches on a small scale. Simply shooting Jews was ruled out due to the extremely negative effects on disipline and moral. Soldiers who performed such executions were generally worthless in actual battle afterwards.
To carry out a genocide, a government must do two things: dehumanize the target and diffuse responcibility among the killers. Psychological experiments on conformity and obediance get pretty freaken scary and have shown that if you structure the situation properly, you can get nearly anyone to participate in nearly anything. The important thign to remember about the holocaust is that no indvidual ever needed to take personal responcibility for the genocide. Only a tiny fraction of the soldiers worked the actual machinery of death and they could take “comfort” in the knowledge that, if they refused, they wold be punished (executed?) and someone else would do it in their place and also in the utterly impersonal nature of gas chambers.
cases like Rwanda and the balkans during WWI, where the genocide was face to face, illustrate dehumanization. The victims were denigrated, “cochroaches” in Rwanda, and the killers were mobs, with the members swept in emotion and drawing from each other a sense of confidence in the rightness of their actions from each other.
“To explain is not to excuse”
Remember the period immediately following 9/11, when NOBODY dared utter anything the least bit critical of Bush? All of a sudden we had a common enemy, and Bush was the leader of the free world, and anything critical of him was VERY slow in coming. Remember what happened to Bill Maher?
And remember how Arabs, or anyone perceived to be Arabic, were treated by some very “ordinary” Americans? And it’s still going on.
Now imagine the state of mind of a country virtually destroyed by war and economic disaster, and along comes a leader to save the day. And this leader puts the blame on certain people, and all the “ordinary” people rally behind him. How many people do you think had the guts to come forward and challenge Hitler, and what do you suppose happened to them?
Before WWII, Germany was considered an advanced, enlightened, civilized country. If it happened there, it can happen here. Easily.
I think this pretty much sums it up
T
here are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
– (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
I have to object to the notion that Magda Goebbel’s suicide and poisoning of her children explains anything at all about ‘German pyschology’. The family was about to be captured by the Red Army and as a ‘political’ target would be passed to the hands of the NKVD. Before this, she and her elder daughters could expect to be raped (all of the women captured in the bunker were), afterwards her husband faced trial and execution as a war criminal, and her own fate and that of her children would depend on the mercy of Stalin, not a prospect anyone would relish. Life wasnt looking rosy for her, and trying to extrapolate beyond her personal desperation to ‘German pyschology’ doesnt look wise to me. Its also worth pointing out that the fate of Mussolini’s mistress was known to her, and she too was linked with a hated man. Saying “we are all under pressure at some time” is just glib, almost no-one is under that level of pressure.
Re the OP, I dont think the Germans were somehow pyschologically different from the rest of mankind. Soldiers of any other nation will act that way as Deir Yassin and My Lai demonstrate. What is different is the attitude of government towards such actions. If the US government today formed units with the specific purpose of killing Iraqis and encouraged and ordered its soldiers to do so, then kill they would. Not every soldier will, but enough will that it would happen.
Yes. All you need is the following:
-Take a group of people based on some arbitrary, easily identifyable characteristic - nationality, color, school, fraternity, sports team affiliation, eye color, whatever.
-Tell them "you are here because you have x,y and z. We only accept superior people and people with x,y and z are superior so therefore YOU are superior.
-Treat them as if they were superior. Find some arbitrary group and label them as “inferior”. (ie Springfield Rules!, America Rules! State College Rules!! vs Shelbyville Sucks!! Canada Sucks!! A&M University Sucks!!) and so on
-Relieve them of any responsibility or accountibility.
At this point you can pretty much get them to do anything.
People have a natural inclination to respect authority. It’s been ingrained into us since birth (listen to your parents, teacher, boss, policeman, etc). People want to belong. They want to feel validated and like they are part of the team. If everyone is doing it, it must be ok!
The problem that I have with either a “German” explanation or even a “living for years under the Nazis” explanation is that so many people who participated in the Final Solution were not German and had not undergone any extensive propaganda or brainwashing. Certainly, the Poles should not have been receptive to Nazi propaganda, and, if we speculate that they were in some sort of shock after the destruction of their country, were are faced with the participants from Vichy France who never saw any combat until 1944 and who rarely saw any Germans until the Allied forces invaded the South of France.
I am afraid that I am left with a feeling that humans are quite capable of horrible acts under a variety of circumstances. I also fear that treating the Nazis (or the Khmer Rouge or the Rwandans or any number of other groups) as “special cases” only serves to try to falsely separate us from their actions. If we view them as “different” then we are more likely to fail to take steps to prevent ourselves, or our society, from falling into the same evil.
What scares me the most is that this same situation is happening again. All too many times I’ve heard various fundamentalist Christians proclaim that we have to do what the Bible says because it’s God’s Word and, well, God is God. This abrogation of any critical thinking on their part is truly scary! :eek:
Apologies for chopping up your quote. Magda Goebbel faced nothing that the rest of her countrymen weren’t facing - Jews and others beforehand, Nazis and collaborators after. It’s just as likely she was a Party fanatic until the end and died for the cause.
“party fanaticism” would be a component of the psychology of the Germans in question. Obviously many Germans didn’t share this.
That kind of thing happens in any war fought by anybody. It happened to Arabs, Muslims, or anyone who looked Arab or Muslim (Sikhs and Hindus have been harrassed, or murdered, as well) during the Afghan War, during Gulf War I… We all know what happened to Japanese-Americans during World War II. Populations seen as connected to the enemy get that kind of treatment.
Uh, if what Eolbo posted is true, you’d be wrong.
That’s just not true. As bad as life was for Germans in 1945 the average German housewife was unlikely to be handed over to Stalin’s secret police and her husband executed. These are prospects that will play on someone’s mind, and the news of Clara Petacci’s corpse being strung up in a marketplace isnt going to help either. I’m not condoning it I’m just viewing it as desperation in the face of a very bleak future with some husbandly pressure on top. I have not read she personally was a nazi fanatic but even if she was that’s less reason to take her peculiar circumstances and extrapolate about German psychology as most Germans werent nazi fanatics. She just wasnt in the typical German woman’s position. Very few women are married to men hated all around the world and subject to the consequences that will bring.
Well, to a certain extent I agree that there was some sort of special psychological mindset, due to living under Nazi worldview. Not to the level suggested though and more of a Zeitgeist feeling than a uniquely German psychological make-up.
As already pointed out there is nothing uniquely German or Nazi about the ability of humans to commit wholesale slaughter.
The Nazi influence (plus technological superiority and the rapid successes at the start of the war) certainly gave a superiority complex to the avarage German. I don’t think that part is much different from superiority feelings all around the world, however. And a racial factor is very often an ingredient in those as well.
As for the super-human qualities on a practical level, you don’t need to look very much further than the gung-ho Marine to see the exact same martial mentality elsewhere.
“Party fanatacism”. Yes there were many that couldn’t live with the idea of a defeated Germany, at the mercy of the ‘barbaric hordes’ and their culture destroyed. Many fought to the death in the rubble of Berlin. But how is that different from the fanatical resistance put up by the Russian population against the germans at Leningrad f.i.?
Do you think there wouldn’t be the same things occuring if the U.S. were overrun by a foreign culture?
I’m always reminded in these instances of some old book I had on WOII. It had a picture of a Soviet child-soldier with a caption like:“The heroic population of the S.U. rose en masse against the Nazi menace”
The exact same book had a picture of a Hitler Youth in the last days of Berlin. With a caption like:" The deprived Nazi’s even went so far as to send children to fight for their corrupt regime."
Lord of the Flies comes to mind…
Then again, the Nazis weren’t always in power. There had to be a mindset for Hitler to attract followers, gain enough to be a major player in German politics, and then expand, run the country, etc. I don’t think any kind of “special psychological mindset” explains all that.
Indeed, fascism was a ‘thing of the times’. Spain had it, Italy had it… hell even the KKK (in a fascist form) nearly won the elections in the 1920’s.
If you stare yourself blind at the external trappings of the atrocities, you are in danger of missing the signs of it happening again.
‘Oh my God, that skinhead is wearing a swastika, arrest him!!’
"Hmm, what… Kossovo?’
I remember a social studies type class in college that touched on these themes.
As part of it we were shown a copy of documentary from (I think) the fifties. I forget the title but it was about a class of children in an american school (not The Wave, it was a female teacher).
As an experiment/lesson in racism and prejudice she would make up rules like “brown haired people are inferior because of [insert something plausible to pre-pubescent kids]” and therefore they not allowed to do X, or must do Y all day. After a couple of days it would be blonde hair or all girls or some other arbitrary group.
It was revealing to see how easily almost all of them mistreated each other based on these rules. Except for one kid who I remember refused to cooperate with any of it and questioned everything. I was rooting for him all the way.
Not the sort of thing you could get away with doing in today’s classrooms, although it might be a good lesson to have.
I’ve long forgotten the title of the film, but would really like to try and find it again if anyone knows it.
MC: I’m confused. First you say -
Then you say -
Does your last quote mean that the Nuremberg laws were interpreted by the Nazis to apply to the Roma? [Which they were, btw:](http://www.holocaust-trc.org/ sinti.htm)
I fail to understand your first claim that the Nuremberg laws did not affect the Roma when the evidence makes it clear that they did.
Regarding the Romani version of Alton Towers you mentioned, I’d be really suprised if you can provide a cite for it. I do know of an idea that Himmler threw around to keep a couple of ‘pure’ tribes, that had been sterilized of course, for antropological research. But you can bet your arse that the idea was rejected.
IIRC, there was also a recommendation that some Romani people who had remained sedentary for two years or so be spared. But that recommendation was ignored.
To clarify something else for me regarding your statement that the Roma and Sinti were targetted as antisocial: Are you saying that they were not targeted for racial reasons, but because they were criminals?