How could this happen, the genocide of six million, the mass murder of countless millions? How do functionaries of the nation reach the point where they willingly participate in systematically destroying other human beings?
Heredity had nothing to do with it. No intrinsically evil people exist. There is no ‘evil’ gene. Germans are no more uniquely evil than Americans are uniquely good. Upbringing and environment can be contributing factors. Let a populace swim in culturally and politically acceptable and encouraged mass hatreds, and many malleable human beings will also hate those declared nemeses. One’s own fate may sometimes be genetically determined or predisposed to a singular path as in certain cancer-causing genes, but a nation’s path? I don’t know how one would even begin to measure or evaluate that possibility. Finally, the criminality of a nation’s leaders is absolutely a determining factor. A leader can declare day after day personally or through propaganda outlets that he is the law, he is the State, he is the moral arbiter of his people. Whatever he says is right. Whatever he does is right. It cannot be a criminal act if he does it or declares it to be true. In this way criminality becomes a norm and the leader’s hubris becomes national destiny.
However, most of the ‘middle manager Nazis were educated men, often cultured, who had a deep and sincere appreciation of beauty. They had souls, up to a point. They also had agency. No one is an automaton. One chooses to believe or not to believe, to support or to oppose.
All of them were raised in a Germany that had lost a war and, in a century’s old milieu of antisemitism. They grew up suffused with a desire to strike back against enemies and to be a part of a national renewal. Make Germany Great Again.
Often history operates in echoes. The adulation of one man as a political and racial savior, the investment by multitudes in hysterical adoration of him as a person, the refusal to question but to only obey, the rush to make his resentments and hatreds one’s own – these are the qualities of fanaticism. We’ve seen them often in both the 2oth and 21st centuries.
Ready made enemies, the Jews, were all around them. Once the Nazis took power in ‘33, they began to strike at the enemies closest to them. Fanaticism requires enemies the way we require oxygen. Without enemies, its purpose dissolves. Fanatics must always be in a fight against a threat — no threat, no rallying around their chosen one and thus a diminishment of their power.
The degradation of enemies may be “a given fact of the …species: The enemy must be … dehumanized, degraded to less than full human status. Collectively, [the target] population … must become “gooks,” “Nips,” “Krauts,” or “Huns,” [or Kikes, Yids, Scum].”**
The perpetrators took their cue from Hitler. No Hitler, no Holocaust. No Idolatry of Hitler, no Idolaters, no worker bees, no bureaucrats, no managers, no Holocaust. That said, only gradually did the Final Solution itself evolve. It required several years and total war to harden into an exterminationist resolve.
A critical point: These managers were able to morally separate themselves from the killing. They continued to love their children, wives, mistresses, and animals. Loving others did not stop them from overseeing mass murder or from believing that they were justified in doing so. Mass murderers are still nuanced human beings.
All of them believed in the hierarchical nature of humanity. In their obscene ‘blood science”, they were the supreme example of human beings – the purest strain. Slavs, gypsies, blacks, Russians, the mentally ill, the mentally handicapped; all were enemies of purity. First, isolate the enemies. Make them into the perpetual “other”, the foreign element in the midst of the righteous; thieves, criminals and subhumans. Then exile, then kill. The mass killing with the opening of the Russian Front where war gives partial cover to the exterminations. Catastrophes, even manufactured ones, give cover to atrocities.
Fanaticism, racial hatred, vaulting ambition and a desire to be a part of something larger, of a mass movement, will invariably produce types of behavior and moral compromises that are similar in other cases of authoritarian or fascist regimes.
In order to remain true to its nature, fanaticism must be allied with a refusal to think deeply. A cult, and true Nazis formed a cult, makes room only for narrow bands of rhetoric. One may not speak outside of those narrow bands and remain one of the chosen. The leader and his propaganda outlets create the boundaries of those bands.
Democracy and the rule of law are the enemies of fanaticism. Fanatics will actively subvert, debase, and corrupt democratic norms and procedures until they kill the thing itself. In some instances, it may appear to retain its outward practices — candidates, voting, etc., but true democracy has been gutted.
Such regimes always make room for bright young men (and now women) who enact their professions of faith to the leader all the way to the point of actively planning and giving orders for crimes against humanity.
There are no exceptional peoples. There are no wise peoples. No nation has an immunity to tyranny or mass killing. Our only defense against a leader or government bent on both is constant vigilance and the rule of law and a refusal to become equally fanatical. We can never begin to “refuse to think.” We can never become pitiless. In the presence of grotesque inhumanity, we must remain human.
**from Achilles in Vietnam by Jonathan Shay, 103.
