The roots of evil: The origins of genocide and other group violence

by Ervin Staub

Authoritarian child rearing has not been restricted to Germany.38 But it was extreme in Germany and apparently declined there more slowly because of the cultural proclivity for obedience to authority.

  Deep feelings of hostility and insecurity result from such childhood treatment. People are seen as dangerous. A strong, independent individual identity does not evolve. The result may be an antisocial value orientation, which has to be carefully controlled, may be largely unconscious, and gains expression only when the group or authorities clearly define permissible objects of hostility.39 Persons raised in this way may differentiate sharply between outgroups and the ingroup that provides security and self-definition. They also prefer hierarchical systems, with sharp distinctions between people in superior and inferior positions.

  Interviews with SS men imprisoned for their participation in mass killings showed that they had unsatisfactory family relations with authoritarian fathers who practiced corporal punishment.40 Research on a larger group of SS men, which I will discuss in Chapter 10, showed that they were more authoritarian in personality than regular German soliders.41

  In a postwar study, German preadolescents reported more reluctance than American ones to deviate from adult standards under peer influence. Moreover, they presented themselves as much more obedient to adult rules and guilty about misconduct when a teacher was present while they filled out the questionnaire than they did when alone. In contrast, the presence of a teacher had no effect on American preadolescents.42 Another postwar study, published in 1980, showed fewer German than American infants (or infants of other nationalities) securely attached to their mothers.43 Secure attachment appears to be the outgrowth of a loving, comfortable relationship between infant and caretaker and is later associated with effective and satisfying peer relations. These findings probably result from the persistence of authoritarian schools and socialization practices. German mothers allow their children less autonomy than American mothers.44 German children are more likely to trust authorities and advocate strong leadership than American children.45

  The life conditions in Germany after World War I would be difficult to bear for any people, but especially for a people who had learned to value and need strong authorities. The sudden inadequacy of their world view and the group’s inability to provide security, order, and status profoundly threatened Germans.

  The influence of Nietzsche

  I have already noted trends in German intellectual thought that contributed to the cultural preconditions for genocide. I will discuss others, especially “biomedical thinking,” later. The specific influence of Nietzsche is important: many Nazi beliefs and ideals seem to be highly similar to those expressed by Nietzsche. The following discussion is not a review and evaluation of Nietzsche’s thought or the exact meaning of the views he expressed, about which there is disagreement between “tough Nietzscheans” and “tender Nietzscheans.”46 As Nietzsche himself wrote, people can take from a book only what their experience prepares them for; I will focus on ideas that seem to have influenced Hitler and the Nazis.

  In Nietzsche’s view, there are no givens, no absolutes, whether in human nature or by the dictate of God – who is dead. Nietzsche despised the traditions of the past, especially the beliefs and way of life propagated by Christianity, which in his view elevates what is least desirable in humans – vulnerability, timidity and submission that is paraded as love. Humans define and create themselves. Values are relative; man needs culture and must create it, together with the values the culture is to fulfill. The capacity to generate culture and to produce and impose values distinguishes humans. While producing values and faith in them and commitment to them are themselves central values, Nietzsche does not directly say what is “desirable,” what are the right values. Some are implied, however, in his views of human beings, society, and human relations.

  The creation of values requires creative, committed, strong men. The clash of cultures is inevitable and each will strive to assert its values in the only possible way, that is, by overcoming others. Wars are inevitable and desirable. All this requires special men (noble men, or supermen), who constitute a small aristocracy. Only they have the requisite qualities.

  Nietzsche regarded ordinary human beings as “botched and bungled” and had no objection to their pain and suffering. He did not believe in equality in any respect. True virtue can be characteristic only of the aristocratic minority. Strength of will and the will to power are outstanding virtues. Compassion and weakness are to be combatted. He writes about slave-morality and master-morality. What happens to the mass of people is of no consequence; only what happens to the superior few counts. “The object is to attain the enormous energy of greatness which can model the man of the future by means of discipline and also by means of the annihilation of millions of the bungled and botched, and which can yet avoid going to ruin at the sight of suffering created hereby, the like of which has never been seen before.”47

  Noble man recognizes duty only to equals, will not spare other people as he acts for his cause, allows himself to be violent and cunning in war, and practices inexorable discipline. He has the capacity for cruelty; almost everything we call “higher culture” is based upon the spiritualizing and intensifying of cruelty.

  Bertrand Russell points out that if noble man becomes so as a result of education, it would be difficult to exclude the masses from the advantages for which they are qualified by their potential. Hence, Nietzsche’s thinking implies biological superiority, or at least the Nazis could easily interpret it that way. He wrote that “no morality is possible without good birth.” Russell also suggests that such a philosophy must arise from fear – a reasonable suggestion in understanding a feeble, sickly professor who admires only strength, all that is military, whose heroes are all conquerors, foremost among them Napoleon. He deals with his own great timidity in relation to women by profoundly devaluing them.

  Some of Nietzsche’s ideas are contrary to those adopted by the Nazis. He did not believe in the state but in the noble individual; he was not a nationalist and did not admire Germany and was against totalitarianism. Some of the views I described can be interpreted as primarily the advocacy of the overthrow of tradition and of freedom of creation. But ideas are absorbed selectively, and Hitler’s needs and his own fears may have been greatly served by Nietzsche’s megalomaniacal thoughts. For Hitler, racially pure Aryans became supermen with the highest culture. Given the cultural predisposition – the superior societal self-concept, the preference for authoritarian rule, and German militarism – Nietzsche’s ideas could also serve the needs of many Germans suffering from difficult life conditions.

  Rationality versus sentimental romanticism

  Germans were split between rationality, which was exemplified in problem solving, concern with technological excellence, and authoritarian structures, and irrationality, in the forms of romanticism, emotionality, sentimentality, and mysticism. Kren and Rappaport propose that public behavior was “rational,” and private life “irrational.”48 Wagner’s operas, with their sentimental advocacy of the supremacy of love and elevation of Teutonic chivalry, represent this private Germanness. Kren and Rappaport suggest that morality was relegated to the emotional and sentimental private world.

  This in itself is not unique to Germany: the interests of states are often considered predominant and morality irrelevant to their behavior. In my view, the split between realms in which moral considerations do or do not apply was primarily based on ingroup-outgroup distinctions, ideology, and the perpetrators’ experience and evolution in their roles. With regard to the private-public split, probably a spillover from the private to the public was most significant. German romanticism, mysticism, and the tendency to “idealize” made a special contribution to the concepts of volk and Germanness. This allowed preference, desire, and yearning to become a basis of “scientific” racism and public policy.

  The psychological effects on German youth of World War I and the postwar period

  Thi
s is not a cultural precondition but an emergent psychological condition. German fathers left to fight the war; some did not return and others returned defeated, unable to make a living and offer security. Some of their authority was inevitably lost. If they were authoritarian, their authority lacked legitimacy. Young people faced material deprivation and a chaotic world. Some authors argue that these experiences created psychic needs that Hitler offered to satisfy.49 The psychological effects of difficult life conditions described in Part I would be more intense and wider-ranging in children whose family system was disrupted by the war, with change in family relations and socialization practices.50 Security needs would increase and the possibility of their fulfillment would decrease. With an authoritarian father whose authority is insecure or illegitimate, the needs for authority may be generated but unfulfilled.

  In The Mass Psychology of Fascism Wilhelm Reich noted that the Nazis addressed the psychosocial needs of German youth, and the communists did not. The Nazi ideology and world view fit German myths and culture better. Thus, joining them would better satisfy the needs created by the war and later conditions.51

  Nevertheless, communists and socialists also won substantial support. As I argued in Part I, different subgroups of society have different needs and are differently affected by life problems. The communists offered an ideology aimed at the needs and experience of the working class. Their appeal would have been stronger and broader, in my view, if they had built more on elements of German culture.

  Another consequence of the war was an upheaval in values and a loss of legitimate authority. The weak Weimar Republic was besieged from all sides by movements that aimed to overthrow it. Black marketeering and loose sexual morality were supplanting traditional German respect for public order and the family. Young people were not offered moral guidance, although their authoritarian childhoods made their need for it great.

  I discussed earlier another important effect of war, posttraumatic stress. Like Vietnam veterans with posttraumatic stress syndrome, many German combat soldiers must have suffered from low self-esteem, loss of meaning, lack of goals, anger and hostility, loss of faith in the benevolence of the world and in legitimate authority, restlessness, and a need for excitement and adventure. Many German veterans were therefore especially sensitive to the promises of the Nazi movement: new meaning, new authority, a feeling of superiority, and targets for hostility. The Abel collection shows that before 1933 veterans made up 53 percent of the Nazi Party membership (with official party statistics showing a somewhat lower percentage).52

  Youth groups and military groups after World War I

  Violence became a way of life for many groups in Germany after World War I. Paramilitary organizations participating in warlike battles served the needs of both veterans and youth. Kren and Rappaport call this way of life “heroic nihilism.” It was a bridge to the exaltation of violence by the SA and SS, and part of the evolution toward genocide.

  The Freikorps were volunteer military units guided by conservative views and anticommunism. The Wandervögel was a youth movement that began with an emphasis on enjoying nature but eventually became highly nationalistic. The Burschenschaften were student groups that stressed Germanness and volkish views. The Freikorps were in part an outgrowth of such nationalistic and at times violent German youth groups. There were two million young Germans in various youth groups before World War I. It is not surprising, given the life problems and resulting needs, that by 1927 their number was five million. They supplied members to the private political armies (and to the Nazi Party; some party members reported that their youth group joined the party as a group).53 There are indications here of both cultural continuity and evolution toward the Nazi stormtroopers. Almost two-thirds of the Nazi stormtroopers in the Abel questionnaires who had been youth group members had been involved in violence, either battles in the streets and meeting halls or the organized Freikorps-type violence.

  Most of the early Nazi doctors were members of Burschenschaften. The most “unregenerate” Nazi doctor interviewed by Robert Lifton for Nazi Doctors followed family tradition and joined a Burschenschaft, then the Freikorps. He described this experience as profoundly important to him, a cementing of the blood of members, a struggle to restore German glory.54

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  a Direct economic interest was also apparent in the lynching of black people in the South. A black man’s lynching sometimes was instigated with a rumor of wrongdoing put in circulation by a white man who had a competing business.4 The death squads in Guatamala and the kidnappers in Argentina were partly motivated by material gain.5 When persecution and murder become acceptable, they can be used to fulfill self-interested motives.

  b Herder emphasized the value of all cultures and probably elevated Germanness because there was no German nation as an entity. Contemporary writers in America refer to Herder’s views in stressing the value of ethnicity as a source of cultural diversity and enrichment.15 In Germany, as the idea of Germanness evolved, it fueled a feeling of specialness.

  9 Nazi rule and steps along the continuum of destruction

  Once in power, the Nazis created order, stability, and material well-being. Germans who were not opponents or victims of the system lived increasingly comfortable, satisfied lives under the Nazis until the Second World War began. In my many conversations with Germans who lived through that period, they have talked about Hitler’s “mistakes” but have also stressed the good they believe he accomplished. In such conversations Germans seem to go beyond defending their country from the image produced by Nazi wrongdoings and express a positivity based on personal experience. I mentioned in the Preface my discussion with a group of sixty- to seventy-five-year-old Germans. They spontaneously returned again and again to the benefits and satisfactions of the Hitler period, mentioning obvious things like government-created jobs and emotional experiences like sitting around campfires with other young people. A quote from Craig’s book The Germans well expresses this. In a speech on

  April 28, 1939, Hitler had boasted that he had overcome the chaos in Germany, restored order, increased producation in all branches of industry, eliminated unemployment, united the German people politically and morally, “destroyed, page by page, that treaty which, in its 448 articles, included the most shameful oppression ever exacted of peoples and human beings,” restored to the Reich the provinces lost in 1919, returned to their fatherland millions of unhappy Germans who had been placed under foreign rule, restored the thousand-year-old unity of the German living space, all without shedding blood or inflicting the scourge of war upon his own or other peoples, and all by his own efforts, although, twenty-one years earlier, he had been an unknown worker and soldier. This outburst, Haffner commented, was “nauseating self-adulation,” couched in a “laughable style. But zum Teufel!, it’s all perfectly true – or almost all!.. .Could people reject Hitler without also giving up everything that he had accomplished, and were not all of his unpleasant characteristics, and his evil deeds as well, mere blemishes compared with his accomplishment?”

  . . . Provided they were not Jews or Communists (a dreadful proviso that they preferred not to think about), most Germans profited materially and psychologically from the first six years of Hitler’s rule, and they were quick to point this out when criticism of any kind was leveled against the Leader.... but the continuing loyalty of many Germans was a personal one, a willingness to believe, in the face of all the facts, that the man who had done so much for them in his first years could do no wrong and would somehow emerge, victorious and immaculate, to confound his enemies and detractors.1

  Huge numbers of Germans were enthusiastic about Hitler’s rise to power and even more about his subsequent rule. A distinguished American theologian, Professor Littell of Temple University, described how his German church father felt about Hitler.2 In 1939, this high functionary in the German church, after an impressive array of anti-Jewish actions and one year after the Kristallnacht, described Hitler as God’s man for Germa
ny. He praised Hitler for improving the morals of German youth. The youth of Germany drank, smoked, and engaged in debauchery until Hitler came along. He gave them discipline and a sense of purpose. The evil in the Nazi system did not touch this clergyman. His theological anti-Semitism, combined with German cultural anti-Semitism, made it possible for him to ignore the persecution of the Jews. Nazi repression and totalitarianism also left him unaffected.

  In the case of the Holocaust, as in some other genocides and mass killings, steps along a continuum of destruction had already been taken in earlier historical periods. Many of the steps against Jews were taken by the church, but acted upon in Germany with special zeal.3 The Synod of Elvira of 306, for example, forbade intermarriage and sexual relations between Christians and Jews. The Synod of Claremont, in 535, decreed that Jews could not hold public office. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 decreed that Jews must mark their clothing with a special badge. Other decrees prohibited Jews from walking on the streets during certain holiday periods and prohibited their obtaining academic degrees (in 1434).4 Persecution of the Jews was especially harsh in Germany, and this provided a cultural blueprint for the Nazi mistreatment of Jews.5

  By 1900 German Jews were relatively assimilated, and in spite of increasing anti-Semitism remained so until Hitler came to power. Judging from the social climate in the early twentieth century, one might not have expected intense persecution. However, this view does not take account of the deep structure of the culture and the community as described here, which created a persistent potential for scapegoating and persecution.

  Increasing mistreatment of Jews

  On coming to power in 1933, Hitler immediately moved against the Jews. Jews were dismissed from jobs in government and the military. The first “mild” decrees allowed exceptions, for example, for Jewish war veterans. Why this slow start? The Nazis may have meant to reward the loyalty of German Jews who fought in the war, as Hilberg suggests.6 But we must also consider the psychology of perpetrators and bystanders. The Nazis had to move from words to the psychologically more demanding realm of actions. They also had to consider effects on the German population. A process of habituation was necessary, for the Nazis themselves and for the German people.