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

by Ervin Staub

  Raoul Wallenberg was a Swede, a citizen of a country that was neutral in the Second World War.51 His example shows the multiplicity of experiences and influences that at times join in leading to extreme altruism. He had a Hungarian business partner whose relatives were in immediate danger. He knew the relatives from business trips to Hungary, so he had a personal connection to people in need. His familiarity with Hungary also gave him some competence. While working in Palestine, he had seen refugees arriving from Hitler’s Germany; this direct contact with victims must have contributed to his concern and caring. He was asked to go to Hungary by representatives of the American War Refugee Board; this request may have helped to define for him what was right and activate important values. Finally, Wallenberg was one-sixteenth Jewish.

  Wallenberg was a member of a poor branch of an influential Swedish family. He had wide experience in work and travel under the guidance of his diplomat grandfather. At one point, his grandfather urged him to join the family bank, but he refused. Later his grandfather died, his connection to the family was weakened, and when he changed his mind, he was not allowed to join the bank. His work as a partner in an export-import firm was less than fulfilling for him. Because he was not fully involved in pursuing a goal important to him, he was more open to other goals; the request was more likely to activate a desire or obligation to help.

  In Hungary he started to help by creating a document, impressive from the bureaucratic standpoint but of questionable validity, that gave thousands protection. He threatened, bribed, and cajoled high-level Hungarian officials. He personally intervened in many ways that required great courage, exposing himself to assassination attempts and the guns of Nazi guards. He showed great courage and self-confidence in dealing with Nazi officials, including Eichmann. His sense of invulnerability may have been inspired by his aristocratic background. Wallenberg and Schindler developed total commitment to saving Jewish lives. These men may be regarded as “good fanatics,” people with an overriding commitment to a goal to which they subordinated all others. Their aim was not to improve “humanity” but to help human beings.

  In conditions of extreme danger, people need support to evolve and maintain the motivation to help. As they begin to help, they also begin to create their own environment, their own context. They build connections to a community that supports them. Schindler was supported by the people he helped and also by outside contacts he made through his actions in behalf of Jews. For example, a delegation of Hungarian Jews asked him to come to Hungary to convince the skeptical Jewish community there of the existence of the camps and killing operations. This had to reinforce and support his identity as an ally, a helper of Jews; acceding to the request contributed to his evolution. As I wrote elsewhere, many rescuers were connected to “an elaborate network of people, required for the practical aspects of helping, but in my view also essential in giving emotional support and confirmation.”52

  Because the potential power of bystanders is great, so is their obligation, an obligation only occasionally fulfilled. How can we enlarge compassion, the awareness of responsibility for other lives, and the feeling of obligation to act? These questions are considered in Part IV.53

  * * *

  a A striking claim by the sixty- to seventy-five-year-old Germans was that they knew nothing about the persecution of the Jews until Kristallnacht, in 1938. (Only one woman clearly acknowledged prior knowledge: she reported that her father, who rented out rooms, was directed by the authorities not to rent to Jews.) In conflict with this claim, some of them expressed the belief that the German people accepted the anti-Jewish actions. Given the highly public persecution, the perhaps “tentative” awareness might mean false reporting or psychological defense, but probably reflects lack of concern. In the overall context of the period, the fate of the Jews was unimportant to people, especially to youth, and probably barely penetrated awareness.

  b Some have suggested that one reason for the refusal to believe early reports about the killing of Jews was their similarity to reports about German atrocities in World War I. World War I reports were mostly propaganda. However, this is a partial explanation at best, given the very minimal response to the Jews’ fate during the preceding years and after their ongoing extermination was conclusively confirmed.

  c An interesting example of cooperation with the Nazis was the replacement of two Jewish athletes on the 4 x 400 meter U.S. relay team in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin (New York Times, Aug. 10, 1986, p. 95). This was done without any direct pressure by the German organizers. The world’s participation in the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 was itself a statement of acceptance of Nazi policies.

  d Consider the experience of one of my students, which she described in a paper for a course. A man pulled a knife on her and forced her to follow him to a park, where he talked about himself for a while and then raped her. A couple of days later she and her boyfriend were leaving her apartment when, playfully responding to something he did, she held up her fists and said, “Do you want to fight?” He said in response, “Why didn’t you fight the other day?”

  e The story of a woman born in Austria is consistent with many of the themes in this chapter. Now a Canadian citizen, she was fifteen years old at the time of the Anschluss, the German takeover of Austria in 1938. She and her family felt well-regarded and well-treated members of the community. Immediately upon the German entry they became nonpersons. Schoolmates stopped talking to her. Austria had a history of intense anti-Semitism, which, as conditions changed, immediately came to the fore. (We can contrast this with the Danes’ loyalty to Jews after they were occupied by the Germans.)

  Her family, especially her father, refused to believe that the Nazi actions were aimed at all Jews, innocent Jews. When they witnessed the Gestapo taking away a neighbor’s son, her father thought that he must have done something terrible. Even as he himself was arrested, he claimed it had to be a mistake.

  After he was released, a shadow of his former proud self, and the family accepted the reality of their situation, they had no place to go. No country was willing to accept them. Ultimately, they succeeded in getting to Palestine. (I am grateful to Michael Shandler, who made available to me an interview of his mother, taped for a documentary.)

  f This point is illustrated by the famous story of the dancer who was recognized by a Nazi officer in the line leading to the gas chamber and told to dance. As she danced, she grabbed the officer’s gun and shot him. By becoming a dancer again she had regained her identity and capacity to resist.

  Part III

  Other genocides and mass killings

  In this section I examine three more cases of genocide and mass killing: the Armenian genocide, the “autogenocide” in Cambodia, and the disappearances in Argentina. The description and analysis will be detailed enough, I hope, to show that the conception presented in Part I promotes the understanding of a broad range of such tragic and horrible events. I briefly describe difficult life conditions, cultural preconditions, and steps along the continuum of destruction. This will enable the reader to judge the extent to which the influences I posited in Part I were present in these genocides and mass killings as well as in the Holocaust.

  12 The Turkish genocide of the Armenians

  Historical (life) conditions

  When the First World War began, the Ottoman Empire had been losing power and territories for more than a hundred years. Once a great military power that ruled over many countries, it was called the Sick Man of Europe by Czar Nicholas of Russia in the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1877-78 it lost a war against Russia, and Russia annexed parts of Turkish Armenia. Turkey lost additional territories in the Balkan wars, between 1911 and 1913.

  Turkey was also commercially and industrially backward and dominated in these realms by other nations. In 1875 the Ottoman Empire went bankrupt. A Public Debt Administration was set up by the great powers with representatives of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Turkey to control Turkey’s finances,
and 12 to 15 percent of Turkey’s revenues were ceded to this organization.1

  Within Turkey, commerce, trade, and finance were largely in the hands of foreigners or of non-Muslim minorities such as Greeks, Armenians, and Jews.2 “Capitulations,” which were extraterritorial agreements between the Ottoman Empire and foreign nations, granted judicial and economic privileges to foreigners. Partly because of the Islamic belief that law is derived from religion, so that only believers can participate in it, and partly for other cultural and historical reasons, foreigners were judged and protected by their own laws. They were exempt from all taxes except export and import duties, which had ceilings specified by capitulations. Foreign products flooded into Turkey, inhibiting industrial development.3

  The Ottoman Empire continued to repress its many minorities. Reforms announced in 1839 and 1856 that would have provided rights to all citizens and others promised later (partly under foreign pressure) were not carried out. A constitutional government was created in 1876 but dissolved in 1878 by Sultan Abdul Hamid. A long reign of repression and terror followed.

  Foreign powers continuously exerted influence on Turkey, military and political. Russia was consistently belligerent, partly because it wanted to acquire Turkish territories and reduce Turkish power. England’s prime concern was the containment of Russia. Western powers and Russia were also interested in protecting the rights of Christian minorities in Turkey, but realpolitik usually won out. In exchange for promises of reform, England supported Turkey in its conflicts with Russia. After Russia’s victory in the war of 1877-78, England intervened to shape a treaty that would minimize Russia’s gains. The promises of reform remained unfulfilled.

  In 1908 a revolution compelled Abdul Hamid to restore constitutional government. In 1909 the revolutionaries, who called themselves the Committe of Union and Progress but who were also known as the Young Turks, gained complete power. Initially, the revolution was widely welcomed. The Young Turks promised universal rights, freedom, and equality. However, political disorder, internal upheavals, internal violence, especially against Armenians, and losing wars continued. There was a counterrevolution and interventions by the military, but the Young Turks retained power.4 Three months after their revolution, on October 5,1908, Bulgaria proclaimed complete independence, and in the Balkan wars, between 1911 and 1913, the Ottoman Empire lost Greece. By 1913 it was effectively eliminated from Europe.

  Probably to a large degree as a result of these conditions, an ideology of Pan-Turkism, or Turanism, became dominant, its aim to enhance the power of the Ottoman Empire and to purify the nation, making it Turkish in language, customs, and religion. The Young Turks abandoned the alliance with England in response to political and material support from Germany. In the hope of regaining lost territories or conquering new ones, the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War on the side of Germany. Immediately, it suffered heavy losses to a massive Russian invasion. Although it also won a victory over the British at Gallipoli, the possibility of its losing the war at this early point was real.

  Before the war, poverty, hunger, disease, an influx of refugees from lost territories and their conflicts with minorities added to life problems. The loss of provinces in Europe caused substantial migration of Muslims into Turkey, especially Anatolia. After the war of 1877-78 more than a million people moved into Turkey.5 There was conflict between the newly arriving Muslims and Armenians living in the territories that they had moved into. After the revolution strife between Armenians and Young Turks further contributed to political instability and violence.

  The people experienced much hardship. Agricultural methods were primitive, and the yield was poor. Peasants had difficulty paying their taxes and lived in many areas in houses without sanitation, “without hope or ambition.”6 The peasants had feudal obligations to landlords and were forced to serve in the army, where they were poorly fed, rarely paid, and kept in active service beyond the legal period.7 Cholera epidemics continued until the end of the century.8 Eighteen percent of the Muslim population in Anatolia died during World War I, from starvation and disease as well as fighting. Two-thirds of the dead were civilians.9

  These were the circumstances in which the genocide of the Armenians began in 1915. The loss of power, prestige, and influence as a nation and the tremendous life problems within Turkey had to result in powerful feelings of frustration and threat in both the people and the leaders and to give rise to the needs and motives that lead a group to turn against a subgroup of society.

  Cultural preconditions

  The devaluation of minorities and Christians. Devaluation of the Armenians had several sources. First, the Ottomans devalued and mistreated all their subject peoples. According to Toynbee, the concept of rajah (cattle) was applied to them.10 In 1922 the Encyclopedia Britannica described the status of non-Muslims in Turkey the following way:

  The non-Mussulman subjects of the Sultan had indeed early been reduced to such a condition of servitude that the idea of their being placed on a footing of equality with their Mussulman rulers seemed unthinkable. Preserved merely as taxpayers necessary to supply the funds for the maintenance of the dominant and military class, according to a foreign observer in 1571, they had been so degraded and oppressed that they dared not look a Turk in the face. Their only value was from a fiscal point of view, and in times of fanaticism or when anti-foreign sentiment ran high even this was held of little account, so that more than once they very nearly became the victims of a general and state-ordered massacre.11

  Although this statement may have been affected by the genocide of the Armenians, earlier sources are consistent with it.

  Subject status and religion coincided. The treatment of non-Muslims was based on the Koran and Ottoman culture. The Koran has many passages prescribing the correct relationship between Muslims and “infidels.” The legal rights of Dimmis (non-Muslims) were restricted. A Dimmi was allowed to give testimony in court, but the testimony was not weighted as heavily as a Muslim’s. When the two testimonies conflicted, the Dimmi’s was disregarded.12 A Muslim who killed a Dimmi would not receive a death penalty; a Dimmi who killed a Muslim would. A male Dimmi could not marry a female Muslim, but a male Muslim could marry a female Dimmi. For a long time Christians were forbidden to own guns or ride horses; the possession of a gun was a serious crime.13 They had to pay extra taxes and board migratory Kurdsmen, who beat their hosts, raped their daughters, and looted their property.14 The Armenians in particular were constant prey. At international conferences they repeatedly requested protection from the violence of Kurds and Circassians.

  Religious and cultural devaluation of Christian minorities was thus maintained and strengthened by discrimination and constant mistreatment. After the Balkan wars the Armenians were the only large Christian minority left, a potential target for scapegoating and violence.

  Orientation to authority. The Ottoman regime was theocratic. Islam ruled the masses, whose deep respect for authority had a partly religious basis. The sultan was both a worldly and a spiritual leader.15 The society was still feudal and hierarchical. In 1896 Muray Bey, expressing the views of the Young Turks, held that the population’s crime was blind obedience to authorities, although obedience in general is a virtue.16 In the Young Turk revolution, officers of the army gained the support of common soldiers partly because of unquestioning military obedience and partly by claiming that the sultan was in the hands of bad advisors.17

  The Ottoman Empire was a monolithic society in which Islam and the Ottoman Turkish values, culture, and power structure held sway. Despite the many ethnic groups and religions, true pluralism did not exist. In 1856-57, a committee of Armenians attempted to redefine the Armenians’ rights and responsibilities. Ottoman authorities rejected this and rewrote the Armenian constitution so that it reaffirmed subservience; for example, the election of the Armenian patriarch and of political and religious councils had to be approved by the sultan.18

  The removal of the sultan and other political changes and
upheavals must have added to the many-faceted life problems and intensified the people’s need for authority, for a positive self-concept, and a world view that offered guidance and hope.

  Steps along the continuum of destruction

  Devaluation and increasing mistreatment. In some ways the Turkish image of the Armenians was strikingly similar to the German image of Jews. The two minoritiers had a similar status in society and had developed in similar ways over centuries of persecution. Because of their religious beliefs and a tradition of militarism, the Turks devalued and avoided commerce, finance, and other middle-class occupations. These as well as low- and middle-level administrative positions were open to the Armenians.19 Foreigners preferred minority group members as trading partners because of their better education, shared religion, and contacts with Europeans. The Armenians were hardworking, capable, and intelligent. Many were successful, and some became wealthy. They became essential for the maintenance of the country. The result was the two-sided devaluation familiar from our discussion of German attitudes toward Jews: Armenians were seen as of low character, as cunning and treacherous, and as parasites, exploiters who plotted against Turks.

  Aside from their “unofficial” victimization by Kurds and Circassians, Armenians were also subject to violence directly inspired by the authorities, which intensified under Abdul Hamid. In 1894-96, special troops composed mainly of Kurds, the Hamidaya, massacred over two hundred thousand Armenians in the midst of an apparently approving population.