If you were a relatively young adult in Germany during the height of Nazi power, do you think you would have participated in the death camps if you were drafted or recruited? By participated, I mean somewhat directly. Your job could be packing trains full of Jews for shipment to physically turning on the showerhead gas chambers or being a concentration camp guard. Packing rations for the troops in a factory somewhere else wouldn’t count. Keep in mind that avoiding this would probably mean fleeing the country and putting your remaining family in danger or remaining and suffering severe consequences for yourself.
Speaking for myself, I would say that I probably would have participated including operating the gas chambers. I am very supportive of Jewish culture from where I sit now but I doubt that would have been the case if I was deluged with propaganda that stated that they were a threat to my way of life. Also, going against a power structure that was about to lead a new world domination wouldn’t have seemed that smart.
Stanley Milgram’s psychological experiments in this area suggest that the average person is capable of much cruelty than they would ever realize when directed by an authority figure.
Probably. I was 10 or 11 years old when Hitler was made Chancellor. People that age tend to adopt the views of those around them and there isn’t a lot of doubt that Hitler was considered a savior by most Germans of the time.
I really don’t think that we are all that much different from the ordinary, run-of-mill German.
There are plenty of jobs now that are similar to “death camp” jobs (minus the death). I wouldn’t be a good jailer and I wouldn’t want a job that puts me in contact with “criminals” (as the Jews must have been treated / called).
I think only maybe 10% at the very most were True Believers.
Other than the Roma, Jews, Gays, etc. being actively persecuted, a very, very small percentage actively resisted; less than 1%.
Most people just kept their heads down and tried to live as normal a life as they could. They pretty much did nothing more than try to do the best they could for their immediate families and didn’t worry about anyone else. Speaking out could have meant death. Also, being an Aryan in Nazi-land was better than being under Soviet control.
Culture has changed a bit and people are much more likely to resist authority now than they were in the 1930’s-1950’s. I don’t think that Milgram would get the same results today. It’s hard to say though.
From a very young age, I have been one to question people in authority. I’ll only believe them if they can prove it to me. Their word is never good enough. My time spent in the “office” when I was in public school, and Hebrew school for that matter, is a testiment to that.
I don’t think so. Think about this … if, worst-case-scenario, America turned into a fascist state over the next 15 years, would you be willing to gas “ay-raybs”, knowing what you know now? I think most here wouln probably say “no.” In the America of 2004, there’s the threat of an Arab scapegoat to blame for all our ills, and IMHO we’re handling it much better than pre-Hitler Germany, where there was a great deal of vurilent anti-Semitism. Despite what I – we might think about the Bush administration, I think we’re hearing more messages of tolerance towards Arabs and Islam than hate.
I read “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” by Daniel Goldhagen several years ago, and I got the impression that those who didn’t want to work in the death camps were excused from such duty; nobody was forced to work there if they didn’t want to, even those in the military. The objectors, for lack of a better word, found another meaningful role to play in society; they and their families weren’t threatened. There were more than enough ordinary Germans willing to turn on the showers.
It depends on how hard it was to get out of the job. I would not want to work in such a place, but if I was “forced” to I probably would.
That said, I don’t think that it would have been too hard to get out of the job. The problem is that it almost certainly would have meant a frontline transfer. The need for fighting men was extreme and I imagine that was one of the motivations for those who guarded the camps. Some people would keep themselves safe at any cost to others.
That has always been one of the scariest things about the Third Reich. It perpetrated truly monstrous acts by what were originally ordinary men from ordinary backgrounds.
I doubt anybody here is going to say that they would have. That doesn’t mean that people wouldn’t, though. I hope I wouldn’t have, and, as most other respondents no doubt will, I’d like to think that I would have been some kind of hero or resistance fighter - but how can I actually say what I’d do?
Firstly, nobody knows what it was like to be a 1930s German, and how the brainwashing, combined with pre-existing prejudices, made otherwise normal people behave.
Secondly, I would hazard that the kind of person on this board who would advocate turning the Mid-East into a parking lot, or would advocate ethnic cleansing as a political solution to territorial disputes, would be the most likely candidate. Were their personality type transferred to 1930s Germany and given the resultant antisemitism that was almost innate at the time in many quarters, I’d imagine they’d give their tacit support for that kind of barbarism, if not participate.
Once peoples are dehumanized (regardless of the veracity of the motives for dehumanization), then those who dehumanize them can be persuaded to do all kinds of horrible things. Look at the number of people who got swept away by a movement and joined the Red Guard, or the Stasi, or the Khmer Rouge, or any number of other horrendous groups.
Yes, I’m sure I would have. I’m an intelligent, skeptical woman. But, if they meaning the government, threatened my friends, or my SO, I would certainly do it. If I felt like there was a potential of us being carted away in the night, then we would.
I’m not ashamed of this. This is a natural human reaction: better than them us. I’d like to think I’d be better, but under such extreme situations - no news except what they told you. No Internet, remember.
All of it is moot, since we would be marched off to the death camps anyway - an Indian and a Chinese. People forget that while Hitler killed 6 million Jews, he also killed about 6 million *other * people. I’m not saying this lessens the plight of the Jews in any way, BTW.
Sorry, rereading, that makes me sound like I advocate dehumanization. What I was trying to say was that even if certain members of a group have or have not done the things that they are being accused of, dehumanizing the entire group may still lead to barbarism.
Great answer! And it doesn’t only apply to this board. I find that no matter how civililzed people think they are, these violent emotions are always percolating beneath the surface, and not that far beneath.
In response to the question, I don’t think I would have the stomach for concentration detail, but given the choice between death at the front and a relatively cushy job in the camps, I’ll probably take the camps.
You are a young solider in a highly authoritarian society, and your country orders to go to the death camps and do as you are told , or if you disobey you will be imprisoned or shot.
Anyone on this board telling you that they, in that social context and circumstance, would not have been gassing, incinerating and burying Jews left and right if ordered to do so, is indulging themselves some idle fantasy that there would have been “choices” available to them in that situation.
Same here. According to the racial purity laws of the Third Reich, because my father was born Jewish, I’m unclean. Considering that I was christened as an infant, and raised Catholic all my life, I have trouble understanding how I’m Jewish by any rational standard.
I remember in college reading about Socrates’s trial and the professor asked who in the class would have voted that Socrates be condemned.
I was the only one who put up my hand. Not because Socrates deserved to die, really, but because I think if I were a product of his times, I would have thought he did. And on top of that, he was really really annoying.
So, would I have been gassing people? I don’t know. But I understand myself well enough to doubt that I’d be all sacrificing and noble and heroic. I am a product of my times.
You need to add in that they would have grown up in a climate of at least some anti-Semitism and racism, without any of the benefit of our society’s “political correctness”. Hitler came to power in 1933, but the death camps didn’t get rolling until much later. It was a relatively gradual transistion. If you were an 18 year old ordered to work at Auschwitz in 1944 it would have meant that you’d been hearing at least some bad things about these people since you were seven years old and probably participated in the Hitler Youth. It’s hard to believe that, without some other influence, you wouldn’t have followed whatever orders your authoritarian government offered.
On the other hand, I was under the impression (perhaps wrong?) that the death camps were staffed by the SS, so it wasn’t something that you’d be “drafted” into, you’d have been handpicked, no?
But a large portion of the german military DID refuse such orders. The Wermacht (The regular german army) often stated that they were “Soldeirs, not executioners.” They stated this A LOT after the war. After the invasion of Poland, the Nazis introduced the mobile gas vans. The soldiers who had to deal with the cleanup on these details were so scarred by the experience that the Wermacht refused at all levels to perform such activities, especially since they needed all their fighting men at the front. Consequently, Nazi higher-ups decided to do the killing at camps. These were staffed with men picked because of their willingness to do whatever they were told.
By the way, the Wermacht HATED the SS. The wermacht considered itself the “real” army made up or professional soldiers. They felt that the SS was a bunch of fanatical thugs who got all the best equipment. And yes, many in the Wermacht had the same opinion of the SS’s activities that we have. In that, the Wermacht is guilty of non-opposition, since they allowed an evil to continue by not trying to stop it.
At the Nuremburg trials there were many defendants who tried the “I was afraid to refuse orders” defense. This did them no good since it was pointed out that many men had refused such duties without retribution.
Some say that this is further proof that the Nazis knew that what they were doing was wrong. Why were refusers not punished? Because the authorities did not want the subject made public. Better to just quietly send the refuser off to another job and find a willing thug.
If I were in Germany under Hitler, I would have found myself in a ghetto and then on my way to the camps, for the more than one reason. But if I were a nice blonde haired, blue eyed German girl, I wouldn’t have been a part of the camps. It isn’t in my nature to blingly accept fate, or to watch others suffer. However, if it were possible to be drafted as a soldier, than I would have served, most likely, as I would have felt that as my civic duty. It’s one thing to be a soldier shotting at other soilders. It’s another thing entirely to be a “soldier” dealing with the deaths of civilians.