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

by Ervin Staub

  Keneally offers a glimpse of another individual path.

  Poldek Pfefferberg was told about the list by an SS NCO named Hans Schreiber. Schreiber, a young man in his mid-twenties, had as evil a name as any other SS man in Plaszow, but Pfefferberg had become something of a mild favorite of his in that way that was common to relations – throughout the system – between individual prisoners and SS personnel. It had begun one day when Pfefferberg, as a group leader in his barracks, had had responsibility for window cleaning. Schreiber inspected the glass and found a smudge, and began browbeating Poldek in the style that was often a prelude to execution. Pfefferberg lost his temper and told Schreiber that both of them knew the windows were perfectly polished and if Schreiber wanted a reason to shoot him, he ought to do so without any more delay. The outburst had, in a contradictory way, amused Schreiber, who afterward occasionally used to stop Pfefferberg and ask him how he and his wife were, and sometimes even gave Poldek and apple for Mila. In the summer of 1944, Poldek had appealed to him desperately to extricate Mila from a trainload of women being sent from Plaszow to the evil camp at Stutthof on the Baltic. Mila was already in the lines boarding the cattle cars when Schreiber came waving a piece of paper and calling her name. Another time, a Sunday, he turned up drunk at Pfefferberg’s barracks and, in front of Poldek and a few other prisoners, began to weep for what he called “the dreadful things” he had done in Plaszow. He intended, he said, to expiate them on the Eastern Front. In the end, he would.25

  It seems that when Pfefferberg refused to react as a helpless victim, but reacted with an intensity and humanness not fitting the victim role, Schreiber slipped out of the role of executioner. Pfefferberg’s anger awoke in Schreiber a human response. That, and his subsequent kindness to Pfefferberg, nurtured in him a consideration for others. One reason for the effectiveness of Oskar Schindler, who saved 1200 Jews, and Raoul Wallenberg, who saved tens of thousands, was that they reacted contrary to the expectations of the SS and Hungarian Nazis.26 In facing Nazis accustomed to fear and trembling, they acted with self-assurance and authority, sometimes even demanding help in helping Jews.

  As the SS became a large, complex, partly bureaucratic elite, more men became members who were not self-selected or selected by authorities for their ability to fulfill task requirements. At one point the whole German equestrian society was incorporated into the SS. Most of these new members became socialized into the SS system. Some late joiners, however, made an incorrect self-selection; they were unaware of some of the requirements of membership or did not anticipate their own reactions to them. These reactions, based perhaps on “inclusive” moral values, inhibited their evolution and resulted in a gap between the role and the person. There were probably few such members in the SS, owing not only to initial self-selection and socialization into the system, but also to dismissal and quitting. Those who did not fit the requirements of SS training, such as extreme obedience and physical courage, were screened out.27 Those whose values and world view did not fit them for membership could drop out.

  A few SS men were relatively humane, at least at times.28 Prisoners reported that on occasion their lives were saved by SS guards. We can imagine that even very small, causal acts of humanity would have great impact on prisoners searching for humanity in an overwhelmingly cruel, inhumane system.

  Only in a very few reported instances was the motivation of a kind SS member clearly to save a Jew. Keneally tells the story of an SS guard who accompanied two children and their fathers from Schindler’s camp to Auschwitz and then accompanied three hundred women from Auschwitz back to Schindler’s camp, acting in a humane, friendly, helpful manner all the way, at one point even crying in response to their sorrow.29 All this happened, however, near the end of the war, when the footsteps of the western Allies on one side and the Russians on the other could almost be heard. We do not know to what extent the behavior of this man (and others) was the result of a changed perspective due to changed circumstance that led him to think about his own culpability and to fear retribution.

  The extermination camps: Auschwitz

  I will use information provided by Robert J. Lifton about Nazi doctors to interpret their psychology as perpetrators in the framework of this book.f30 These Nazi doctors played an important role at Auschwitz. They selected the many Jews who were to be killed immediately and the few who were to work in the camps. Their cars and ambulances, marked with red crosses, lulled new arrivals at the station of Auschwitz-Birkenau into some feeling of hope and security; the doctors took the gas to the gas chambers and determined the required amount for each gassing, they decided when to open the door to the gas chambers and checked to make sure that those inside were dead. The doctors also selected for killing those who had become useless for work or potentially harmful to the “ecology” of the camp (e.g., a potential source of epidemics); for example, they periodically lined up Jewish prisoners and sent the weak to the gas chambers, making space for stronger new arrivals.

  Most of this became practically and psychologically routinized. Whatever initial reservations doctors had, they came to view these activities as “normal duty,” as a “regular job.” In fact, they fought to retain the right to do the selections, apparently psychologically the most difficult of their jobs, as a sign of their power and status.

  A number of the doctors were shocked when they arrived at Auschwitz. I would expect there was less initial shock among doctors at the other extermination camps, because those doctors were transferred from the euthanasia killing centers. Auschwitz was established later and the doctors sent there, not having participated in the euthanasia project,31 missed steps along the continuum of destruction that would have prepared them.

  The initial shock was expressed in conversations – often drunken – with other doctors. The doctors condemned the “filthy” business of the camp, by which they meant not the killings themselves, which they took for granted as necessary, but the overall atmosphere. They were affected by the women and children sent to the gas chambers, the ever-present filth of emaciated, starving inmates, the whole “anus mundi” (the anus of the world) environment, as one Nazi doctor called it.

  The expression of such feelings was probably encouraged as part of the initial adjustment. It did not necessarily imply a concern for the victims. German doctors (and other SS men) valued cleanliness, good manners, and good appearance. They were accustomed to using euphemisms and continued to do so in the camp, keeping reality at a distance. The conditions in the camp evoked their discomfort and even disgust. In later years they may have used this discomfort – even to themselves – in self-serving apologias as if it expressed concern about the victims rather than self-concern.

  The initial expressions of feeling served many functions. Hoess, the commander of Auschwitz, said that noncommissioned officers “ ‘regularly involved in selections’ poured out their heart to him” about the difficulty of their work.32 They may have sought support or a way to show their devotion (especially because they were told by their superiors that they were doing difficult work requiring great sacrifice). Some may also have sought to transfer responsibility to the commander. If so, it shows that they felt some guilt or apprehension.

  The doctors also sought justifications and rationalizations. New doctors were told that gassing saved inmates from suffering, from “croaking in their own shit,” and helped them go to heaven in a cloud of gas. They made absurd comparisons, pointing out, for example, that doctors working at the front had to make choices about whom to save and whom to let die. The doctors and presumably other SS members in the camps made a very speedy adjustment. The comments, questions, and doubts stopped soon after arrival. One doctor kept a diary in which there is no mention of difficulty in adjustment after the first few days.

  The attention of doctors and other SS men focused on their tasks and on “technical” problems. Their task was to render the killing both effective and “humane.” To find “humanitarian [methods in the face of].. .general overl
oad of the apparatus – that was the problem.”33 Doctors would discuss for days such questions as “Which is better: to let mothers go with their children to the gas or to select the mothers later by separating them from their children.” The issue arose because women criminal capos (camp functionaries drawn from the German criminal population) “found it much less difficult to handle arriving mothers whose children were with them.”34 In the spring and summer of 1944, another practical problem arose when about four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews were brought to Auschwitz. Although the gas chambers had sufficient capacity to kill, the crematoria did not have sufficient capacity to burn all the bodies. Therefore, bodies were also burnt in large trenches. However, naked bodies do not burn well. The whole SS contingent, including the doctors, was preoccupied with finding a good practical solution.

  Lifton asks how the Nazi doctors could do what they did and at the same time (some of them) show kindness to inmates, treat prisoners who were pressed into work as doctors with professional courtesy, and go home to be kind husbands and fathers. His answer is that the Auschwitz environment forced them to adapt. They did so by doubling. This is a process whereby two opposing selves are created, one of which is responsible for evil. The two selves seem encapsulated, walled off from each other to avoid internal conflict. Auschwitz, the “atrocity-producing situation,” created the Auschwitz self. Lifton implies that the Nazi doctors had no choice. “They found themselves [in Auschwitz] in a psychological climate where they were virtually certain to choose evil: they were propelled, that is, towards murder.”35 They adapted to this climate by doubling. Evidence for doubling apparently includes occasional kindness to prisoners and Hoess’s account of how noncommissioned officers bared their souls to him.

  Doubling is an appealing concept and may accurately describe some perpetrators. It suggests, however, that human beings are incapable of such evil while acting out of their “ordinary” selves. It suggests that the killers acted independently of or contrary to their ordinary selves. But SS doctors sent to Auschwitz were not innocent, uninvolved persons thrown into an extreme environment to which they had to adapt to ensure their own physical and psychological survival. They were ideologically committed Nazis who had undergone substantial resocialization. Their devotion to the Nazi cause and exclusion of Jews from the moral universe prepared them for Auschwitz.

  The psychology of perpetrators: individuals and the system

  To understand the psychology of perpetrators, we must consider their personality, the forces acting on them, and the system they are part of.g All Germans shared the life problems and culture that gave them a common inclination, a societal tilt, to experience certain needs and to find certain ways of fulfilling them. The earliest Nazis probably had characteristics that intensified these needs and desires – a wish to relinquish a burdensome identity, authority orientation, anti-Semitism – and that made the means of their satisfaction offered by Hilter especially congenial. Doctors in particular may have been attacted to the “biological” aspect of Nazi ideology and its scientific racism.

  Once the Nazis came to power, average Germans were led to become semiactive participants. The internal and external forces acting on those who joined the Nazis were even greater. Their experiences resocialized both average Germans and perpetrators. Dramatic changes in the system led to substantial personal changes, which made further change in the. system possible. The system required devotion to Nazi ideals. The people, especially Nazis, were to become “autonomously” moral in Durkheim’s sense; adopting Nazi values and ideals, they were to pursue them as their own. The world view, ideals, self-definition, and motivational hierarchy of people who joined the Nazis changed substantially over time.

  The characteristics and functioning of perpetrators

  According to the conception of motivation and action discussed in Part I, human motives can be arranged in a hierarchy. This hierarchy includes personal goals and even unconscious wishes. As a result of their experiences, the motivational hierarchy of the Nazis, and especially the SS, changed substantially. The importance of old motives declined and new motives emerged. Very high in the hierarchy was the desire to fulfill the goals of the Nazi system. Subordinate goals and values included “dealing” with the Jews, “hardness” (dismissal of human feelings for the sake of the cause), and being a good member of the group. Personal advancement was tied to success in working for these group goals. There were also negative goals. For example, the doctors led a privileged life in the “anus mundi” environment of Auschwitz. A transfer would force them to relinquish it and risk being sent to the Russian front. This happened to the only doctor who asked for reassignment.

  There are two types of common moral values: a personal, or prosocial, morality focusing on human welfare and a rule-oriented morality stressing obligation, duty, and the necessity of living by rules.36 The latter was dominant in the authoritarian culture of Germany. The former value was weakened in perpetrators by their experience in the Nazi system and became inapplicable to Jews and other devalued groups.

  People do not always act to fulfill goals high in the hierarchy. What goal is actively sought at a particular time also depends on the nature of the environment. The environment may activate – call attention to, call forth, or offer the opportunity to satisfy – goals lower in the hierarchy. Moreover, circumstances may activate several conflicting goals and values. To resolve the conflict, people often use rationalizations and justifications that strengthen one motive or value and weaken the other.

  The Nazi system and subsystems such as Auschwitz were strong activators of motives that had already moved high in the hierarchy of the perpetrators. People function best when they can integrate their goals by living and acting in ways that combine the fulfillment of important motives. The Nazi doctors in Auschwitz combined old personal and medical motives with Nazi motives, even when this required denial or other psychological maneuvers. They focused on their professionalism and devoted themselves to improving medical care even while camp inmates were being starved to death and murdered. They performed cruel and often useless experiments on inmates to further “medical knowledge.” They preserved their sense of importance and high status by wearing impeccable, elegant uniforms and carrying themselves with dignity.

  Behavioral shifts

  There was strong overall consistency in the personal motives of the SS and the motives called forth by the camp system.37 Because certain stimuli were too powerful or an SS member had not been completely resocialized (or both), occasionally a conflicting goal or value was activated. The starving, skeleton-like inmates and the naked bodies of the dead sometimes activated feelings of responsibility. Seeing naked bodies, especially, made it hard to maintain the discrimination between human beings and “subhuman” Jews.

  As I noted, motives lower in the hierarchy become active when events or circumstances make them important and offer their fulfillment. Certain stimuli can also break down learned discriminations. This explains some of the seemingly out-of-character behavior of SS men – their occasional human response to Jews. In the example cited earlier, a Jewish prisoner’s self-assertiveness activated motivation not usually called forth.

  Lifton describes an incident in which an inmate made a request of an especially cruel Nazi doctor, and the request was granted. Apparently the inmate’s unusual behavior activated some motivation low in the hierarchy – politeness, correctness in responding to a request, perhaps even compassion. A book of “Hassidic tales” of survival tells the story of a man who hears a familar voice as he progresses to the selection. It is a German neighbor whom he used to greet customarily with a hearty “Good morning, Herr.. . . “ Automatically, he blurts out the same greeting, and (perhaps in response) the SS man sends him to the line of those selected for labor instead of gassing.38 Perhaps a remnant of the old connection had been reawakened in the SS man as well.

  I am not suggesting that if all Jews in the camps had behaved in these ways, their fate would necessarily hav
e been better. The predominant motivation to kill and abuse had become too strong by that time. The Nazis would simply have learned better discrimination; an ordinary human action would no longer have brought forth a human response. The overwhelming influence of the system and its consonance with the resocialized motivational system of individuals would have permitted nothing else.

  Thus instances of kindness have limited significance. Life was cheap and the SS could grant favors and act kindly without coming into serious conflict with their dominant goals. Their family life is understandable in the same framework: the family environment activated different motives. Complex processes give rise to particular motives and actions. Variations in the behavior of the SS can be understood in the same way as in anyone else’s; for example, a driver may ignore a hitchhiker at one time and give him a ride at another time. An already-active motive limits attention or response to the environment.

  While splitting of realms can develop into doubling, people tend toward integration. As they evolve, most perpetrators develop unitary selves by changes in their motives, world views, and beliefs and by achieving highly differentiated orientations to different groups of people.

  Moral equilibration, choice, and responsibility

  I have described a situation in which people who start with varying degrees of predisposition act increasingly destructively, changing along the way and contributing to the evolution of an increasingly destructive system. This does not exclude responsibility. Along the way, there are many opportunities for choice. Unfortunately, choosing often takes place with-out awareness or conscious deliberation. To make a true choice when facing a conflict between a motive and a moral value that prohibits the actions required a fulfill the motive, a person must be aware of the conflict. Then the person must bring in additonal considerations – further values and norms that tilt the balance in favor of moral restraint (or moral action) or reasons, rationalizations (reasons that would not seem valid to impartialoutside observers), and justifications that tilt the balance against moralvalues. This “work of choosing” places demands on cognitive processing and may involve intense feelings.