My scant knowledge of what happened in Nazi Germany is fueling this question. Last night my wife and I watched The Pianist. And from memory other films most notably Schindler’s List, and author’s like Elie Weisel have shaped my image of what it was like in Nazi Germany. With in a few years I believe 37’-40’ Jews were labeled, placed in Ghetto’s and systematically annhilated through the Holocaust. The Pianist was about a man in Poland and the horrors there. What I want to know is this:
If a common everyday German citizen (Human Being) was recruited into the army or what ever, SS; then how did they see fit to arbitrarily murder people in the street, in their homes, in front of children?
I am speaking of pre-and-post ghetto life. A jew, didn’t matter what age or gender could be shot in the street for any reason?
Were German army that brainwashed?
I put myself in their shoes for an instant. I’m a German Officer with a wife and kids…I am told to kill as many Jews at what ever time. Bar none. I don’t know how I would be able to arbitrarily walk up to a group unprovoked and shoot a woman in the head. Or a child or Pregnant woman. It would take some serious beyond words conditioning to wire my brain to do that. Even now, I know it could not be done for me.
I understand the mechanics behind brainwashing. In one of my lessons we teach a unit on *“Thought Reform Programs and the Production of Psychiatric Casualties” * cite. I can underatnd the fundamentals therein. But I also know that cognitively we have sensory gating systems, usually working on pain sensors i.e making a fingernail cross on a mosquito bite.
But we also have emotonal gating systems that work on our perception of objects and emotional awareness. Example: A first time hunter at age 14 takes aim at a large whitetail Buck. For an instant he feels remorse for the animal. In the passing instant he feels power to take over it and slight happiness for pleasing his father whose looking over his shoulder. If he hit’s on par, you could have a hunter for life. If he misses he can still be trained.
I wonder about everyday Nazi soldiers. How were they trained to do such horrible things for so long?
But this quote does not describe all. What about the grunt soldier. The man told to go shoot that elderly fellow over there? What about him? I am not fascinated at all by Hitler’s reich. I am inquiring after the means to which everyday Germans were numbed to the atrocity and murder. Don’t tell me they couldn’t smell the burning flesh outside Auschwitz.
The Stanford Prison Experiment shows something really unpleasant about human nature, and IMO goes a long way to explain how abominations like Nazi Germany are possible.
People were recruited to SS death squads precisely for their mentality, many were fanatical party-supporters others were just psychopaths.
Even then they didn’t find the work easy, one of the motivations for finding a more efficent means of killing people in large numbers than shooting was the psychological toll it had on the men who carried out the shootings, who would spend much of the time in a state of drunken oblivion trying to forget their work.
You have to remember that not everyone was in on the final solution, though the German public weren’t completely oblivious to it, places like Auschwitz (which was in occupied Poland) remained a rumour, which many refused to accept as true.
Also the killing wasn’t carried out in a random, uncontrolled manner as the OP suggests, it was very tightly controlled and carried out by selected SS units.
Didn’t we have this discussion just a short whille ago?
My point then was:
‘It wasn’t your every day German doing the actual killing.’ ‘It’s your every day street mugger put into a uniform.’
Special people, with certain pre-dipositions, were selected into special units for this kind of thing.
It didn’t go like, ‘Hmm we need to clean this gettho. Let’s see who’s near? Ah, the 346th Infantry battalion, they will do nicely.’
In Univeristy I read a very facinating book in my German History class. I can’t recall the exact title now but it was a case study of the Nazification of a small Bavarian town.
Essentially looking at the gradual change of a group of simple farming villiagers to a loyal Nazi supporters. It was an inch by inch process which I’m sure applies to the folks you refered to.
If you want people to go from acting like A to acting like Z you must first make them accept the letters between one at a time .
“Hitler’s Willing Executioners - Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.”
It describes the actions of “Police Brigades” made up of older Germans that were too valuable to use as front line troops. They were educated. Doctors, Lawyers and Small Business Owners. The average age was in the 50’s, IIRC. They were used to go through towns in Poland and exterminate the Jewish populations. Individuals were allowed to not participate in the killings and suffered no punishment if they refused. Very few did. Overall the book gives a chilling look at human nature.
May I recommend Daniel J. Goldhagen’s "Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust."
I found it very insightful.
The following quote is from the New York Times book review.
“Goldhagen argues that thousands of Germans, even though told by their superiors they could refuse orders to kill Jews, eagerly participated in the slaughter, and killed zealously, with unnecess-ary brutality.”
He does cite example of members of the Einsatzgruppen who could not participate in the mass slaughter of the Jews in eastern Europe.
The men were not punished or transferred to the Russian front.
He also explores the mentality of the death marches at the end of the war.
It’s interesting albeit very frightening.
Yes, there were organized pogroms in Germany instigated by the SA, but the killing didn’t really take place on the street but in the ghettoe’s and camps.
Belief in the sanctity of “the German family”, meaning traditional sex roles with women having no place but “kinder kuche kirche” (sorry no umlauts)
Fervent opposition to organized labor. You should work or starve, and should accept all employer’s conditions for work; the state should in fact be run by industry, period, that’s what national socialism is all about. GM as government.
Law and order. The right of the police to do whatever they think they need to do to insure public safety. To hell with pansy stuff like individual rights, none of that stuff, only criminals would care about their “rights”.
Equation of the state with religious (specifically Christian Protestant) doctrine and righteousness. State Christianity.
Manifest destiny regarding expansion of territory. Lebensraum. After getting butts kicked in WW I, Germans owe it to themselves to grab some and if necessary snarl.
Let the weak starve. Homeless, mentally ill, gay, unemployed, probably all bad genes best eliminated from the gene pool. Eugenics. Meritocracy with a vengeance.
Equivocation: any who disagree must be steenking commie pigs leftie jewish faggots. OK, not a party platform so much as party PR tactics.
With that as a starting point, there wasn’t much left to go wrong. (Maybe the appointment of some guy named Ashcroft to make the picture complete?)
I think that if you put people into organizations that have killing as their main business; with a rule that orders are to be obeyed; and which control the information available to the members, this sort of thing becomes routine.
A couple of examples.
Areas marked with red crosses were supposed to be “off limits” for attack in WWII. Along near the end of the war we were briefed for a mission. During the briefing we were told that the Germans had been using red crosses to hide military targets so we were to ignore red crosses in the area and drop bombs anyway.
All we knew was what we were told. We had no independent source of information as to the truth of the assertion that red crosses were being misused. And the penalty for not obeying orders was somewhat severe.
It turned out that the mission was aborted before we ever took off, but if it had been flown, bombs would have been dropped as ordered.
8th AF fighters were allowed to drop down and expend their remaining machine gun ammunition on the way back after danger from German fighters was past. In doing this they shot up anything that moved. 9th AF fighters were used for ground attacks throughout the war. A recent History Channel program followed a 9th AF P-47 group during the last months of WWII. Gun camera films showed them shooting at anything and everything. A single horse cart on a country road is not exactly a supply convoy, but they got straffed.
All of our crews and the fighter pilots were just plain ordinary folks in the middle by an ethic that allowed for and even encouraged such actions.
The main body of my post above was a verbatim repost from what I posted to the AOL SDMB back in 1988 in a similar thread and I didn’t proofread for anachronisms. On this board I can do ümlaüts now, see? and more to the point I should correct the reference to “specifically Christian Protestant”, as it was at some point brought to my astonished attention that Herr Hitler’s Christianity was actually of the Catholic variety.
Actually, Goldhagen advances one primary reason for the mass acceptance of the German populace and that is the pervasive anti-Semitism of the 1930’s.
The Jews were sub humans and by killing them, you were performing as public service.
Incorrect
Exactly the other way round it’s National Socialism, i.e. Socialism on a national scale as opposed to international communism.
Nazi Germany was very socialistic, the state ran things.
Although in practice buisiness was kept intact and not nationalised.
Essentially,yes. ‘A-social elements’ were to be kept under lock and key, away from the people.
Incorrect.
The majority of Nazis were fervent atheists.
But, like with the buisiness power houses, the churches were kept intact.
Replace ‘getting butts kicked’ with ‘Betrayel of Versailles’ and you get the sentiment right.
Social Darwinism at work. In order to keep the race strong, don’t artificially keep the ‘abborations’ alive.
Homeless don’t belong in that category, though.
How about the American Jews. Were there any American Jew’s pushing an American Attack. At what point did the USA begin their campaign? And how long was that after the first jews wee thrown in ghetto’s ?
Don’t know much about Jewish lobbying in the States but, in general, most Jews in most other countries just kept a low profile.
No rocking the boat, maybe this will just blow over.
You must keep in mind that the Germans were not unique in their perceptions of ‘International Jewdom’. Anti-semitic sentiments were very common in most countries. Also, most people thought the Jews were just being relocated or something.
Really, people did not know what was actually happening right up to the end. Only after the war did the actual horrors become general knowledge.
America had a fairly anti-Semitic culture at the time as well-hence the refusal of the government to allow the St Louis to dock and the popularity of Father Coughlin.
The killings in Poland were not happily executed by the soldiery. I don’t think we can exempt the Wehrmacht, but to think that just placing a gun in soldier’s hand and telling him to go about executing Poles was enough, is probably wrong.
Here’s a quote from the book The Order of the Death’s Head by Heinz Hoehne:
The East became a sort of lawless free for all, where the most brutish fantasies of people like Himmler could be lived out in its most grotesque permutations. And with the sanction of Hitler, The Wehrmacht’s protest against the killings were useless.
and more to the point I should correct the reference to “specifically Christian Protestant”, as it was at some point brought to my astonished attention that Herr Hitler’s Christianity was actually of the Catholic variety.