I’m not talking about the officers who ordered it or the bureaucrats who organised it. I mean the actual, on-the-ground guards who had to run the camps on a daily basis.
Have many former guards ever come forward to tell their stories? If so, where could I find information?
Dead mostly at this point I would reckon. If you were 20-30 years old in 1940-1944 you’d be approximately 80-90 years old in 2006.
Beyond this how morally culpable as a “perpetrator” are you going to hold a 20 something prison camp guard for following the orders of this superiors? If the guard was especially sadistic or brutal (and it could be proved) that might be something to take special notice of, but most lower level soldiers were simply following orders.
Holocaust museums archives have vast collections of all things Holocaust. That might be the place to start.
Thank you for that link. The reason I’m curious isn’t because I expect to see them brought to justice, but simply becasue I think that their stories would give a new light to one of history’s greatest tragedies. We have countless survivors’ stories, but far fewer tales from those who did the killing.
Considering the examples of the Demjanjuk Case, and the zeal with which the Israelis hunted down suspected “perpetrators” I think most of them would have good reason to keep their mouth shut even if they were a low level solider.
Interesting - per the current google links apparently they’re still trying to deport Demjanjuk
The defense “I was only following orders” was rejected at the Nuremburg trials. I remember in ethics class we went into that issue in depth. The conclusion: You can’t evade moral responsibility or legal cupability that way.
Fortunately, social science experiments in the last 50 years have invalidated the idea of an entire evil hierarchy of people. The Stanford Prison Experiment and Stanley Milgram’s Obedience experiments show that most of the people that were hands-on in the Holocaust were ordinary people like you and me.
They couldn’t see the whole picture, there was no good way for them to get out of it without risk to self and family, and they were forced to do what they did. As much as you may not like to believe it, you would have almost certainly done the same thing had you been there. I am pretty sure I would have.
The Nuremburg trials only reflects high-level officials, it says nothing about everyday Germans that were swept
To say otherwise, implies biogtry towards Germans and an ignorant views about the nature of human psychology. German officials merely mastered principles common to us all that they could exploit.
You might try and get a hold of The German Trauma : Experiences and Reflections, 1938-2001 which has some interviews with former SS guards.
No fucking way.
Denial is easy sitting next to a computer. I can’t prove that you would have but the vast majority of people would as shown by experiments.
What would you have done if you were an 18 year old military conscriptee at a time when not only your country but also most of the continent was being controlled by the movement? Resistance would have meant horrible consequences not only for you, but also for your loved ones.
Here is a poll I started on this a while ago.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=280481&highlight=nazi
You are one of the biggest proponents on the board of people being products of their age. That applies to everything.
Actually, just to be clear, what those experiments showed was that people are very likely to follow the commands of an “authority figure/s”, even to the point of causing significant harm - and in the Stanford experiment, that simply being seperated into “authority” and “non-authority” groups promotes a sense, and follow-through actions, of superiority of the authority over the non-authority. So yes, while it does support the notion that most people probably would act in a similar way, the conclusions don’t actually say anything directly about the Holocaust.
Interestingly, Milgram’s study was done to prove the opposite of what he found - that Germans during the war were horrible, evil people, or particularily gullible and easy to lead, and that their deeds during that time were not ones that good ol’ Americans would have done. IIRC correctly, 63% of people got to the point where they were administering life-threatening shocks in the original study. Makes you think, really.
I read this study in an ethics class in college. It’s a pretty sobering report. It’s worth noting that the participants were not being paid. There was no punishment that could be levied on non-cooperative subjects, aside from the displeasure of the experiment’s supervisor. If there were a threat of punishment (as was the case for the German soldiers) the percentage of people who cooperated would probably have been even higher.
Er, conscription was used to fill out the ranks of the regular Army. Death camp guards were there because they volunteered for the job (precisely because the authorities wanted to be sure they wouldn’t have a problem doing it).
The nizkor project is to the holocaust what talk.origins is to evolutionary biology. It contains a great deal of reference material, including testaments from the German death camp guards you seek.
However, there is perhaps not as much as you’re expecting, for several important reasons. First, only two concentration camps accounted for the vast majority of Final Solution victims: Auschwitz II (Birkenau), which accounted for 1-2 million, and Treblinka which accounted for 0.5-1 million. Many millions more died in many other camps, but these are perhaps the only two which could strictly be called Death Camps in that their main purpose was to exterminate people as efficiently as possible. They were both in Poland, out of sight and mind of Germany proper, and the true nature of these two camps was not widely known. Nor were there that many German personnel at the two camps themselves - a few hundred or thousand perhaps, and many of the top ranks (or those handful of guards who actually handled the Zyklon B itself) were either hanged after Nuremberg or comitted suicide. In addition, the very worst jobs, of stripping and disposing of bodies, were carried out by Jews threatened with death (and indeed, their life expectancy was only marginally shorter than the Jew-in-a-Death-Camp standard, but who here would not grasp such a straw, really?): Sonderkommandos.
also pls bear in mind the recent atrocities committed by us staff in iraq prisons …
while lacking the most extreme level of cruelness of the nazi wards - the underlying principle is pretty much the same …
the ability to excert absolute power over a victime that is not perceived to be “as human” as the ward…
food for thought
al
margunall longer, I beg your pardon.
Yes, it’s very easy to perfunctorily dismiss the idea that we could have behaved in such a manner. But we’re carrying our mindset back into the past. Many of the German concentration camp guards would have been taught, and sincerely believed, that the Jews and Slavs were subhuman, almost on the level of animals. A crazy belief, of course, but when the whole panoply of the state, including teachers, scientists, etc, is constantly hammering the idea into your young mind, such a notion would be hard to resist.
The Milgram volunteers, on the other hand, knew that they were dealing with fellow humans, which, one could even argue, makes their behaviour the more culpable. (An appalling notion, of course.)
And a futher erratum it seems that there are six recognised death camps, not two. However, the two I mentioned are still top in their grim statistic.
[Moderator hat ON]
I’d appreciate it if we can keep responses in GQ pointing towards an answer to the OP. Side issues can be and have been debated in other fora.
Thanks for your cooperation.
[Mod hat OFF]
Aside from the camp guards being volunteer professionals, fairly ordinary Germans, including older and younger Germans (organized into non-combat groups under military command) with no history of violence or sadism were not only eager in following orders, they created several massacres in Eastern Europe without any command. I can’t recall the name of the book which studied the history of these groups, but it wasn’t pleasant. Will see if I can find it again.