Phillippe Sands, a noted International human rights lawyer, has written three books that each in its own way explore the lives of Nazi middle managers deeply involved in mass murder and genocide. The third book dealt with one of those Nazis who escaped to Chile and became involved with Augusto Pinochet’s death squads and torture centers that Pinochet set up after his coup overthrowing Allende in late 1973.
None of the individuals Sands investigated got their hands bloody. All of them gave orders, one made a killing machine but none of them picked up a gun or pushed men and women into cattle cars.
Human nature is such that some portion of every nation contains those who will fund, promote and organize mass murder – ambitious men and women eager to get ahead, those filled to the brim with resentment for their place in life and eager to blame others and finally, the true believers in whatever ideology or cult leader has captured the zeitgeist.
These motivations are not a surprise, but I wanted to know how they become those people.
For many years, going back before the last awful eleven, I think I have been searching for a grand unified theory of State sponsored and controlled evil.
In dozens of Posts on this site and in applications of my teaching over many years, I’ve tried to figure out not only how evil comes into the world, but why it takes the forms that it does and how sane individuals decide to embrace it. I have become especially interested in how evil infiltrates government or swallows it whole. In light of what is currently happening in the United States (and has happened in China, Russia, North Korea and many other places), those questions are permanently consequential.
The Holocaust being the pre-eminent example of State sponsored evil, I decided to place my attention there.
In his book The Hell of Treblinka, Vasily Grossman asks four questions: “How could this happen? Was it something organic? Was it a matter of heredity, upbringing, environment or external conditions? Was it a matter of historical fate or the criminality of the German Leaders (183)?”
In trying to answer that question, I’ve looked at how Sands examines the careers of three managerial Nazis, Hans Frank, Otto Wachter and Walter Rauff.
