On Killing

aggression and hostility of a very hostile world.

The Impact of Hate in Nazi Death Camps

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.

— Victor Frankl, Nazi concentration-camp survivor

Perhaps a deeper understanding of the power of the buffeting of hate can be obtained from a study of survivors of Nazi concentration camps. Even the briefest review of available literature reveals that these individuals did suffer from great, lifelong, psychological damage as a result of their experiences in concentration camps, even though they did not have any obligation or ability to kill their tormentors.[11] Among bombing victims, POWs under artillery fire, sailors in naval combat, and soldiers on patrols behind enemy lines we do not find any large-scale incidence of psychiatric casualties, but in such places as Dachau and Auschwitz they were the rule rather than the exception.

This is one historical circumstance in which noncombatants did suffer a horrifyingly high incidence of psychiatric casualties and post-traumatic stress. Physical exhaustion is not the only or even the primary factor involved here. And neither is the horror of the death and destruction around them principally responsible for the psychic shock of this situation. The distinguishing characteristic here, as opposed to numerous other noncombatant circumstances marked by an absence of psychiatric casualties, is that those in concentration camps had to face aggression and death on a highly personal, face-to-face basis. Nazi Germany placed a remarkable concentration of aggressive psychopaths in charge of these camps, and the lives of victims of these camps were completely dominated by the personalities of these terrifyingly brutal individuals.

Dyer tells us that concentration camps were staffed, whenever possible, with “both male and female thugs and sadists.” Unlike the victims of aerial bombing, the victims of these camps had to look their sadistic killers in the face and know that another human being denied their humanity and hated them enough to personally slaughter them, their families, and their race as though they were nothing more than animals.

During strategic bombing the pilots and bombardiers were protected by distance and could deny to themselves that they were attempting to kill any specific individual. In the same way, civilian bombing victims were protected by distance, and they could deny that anyone was personally trying to kill them. And among the POWs who were subject to bombing (as we saw earlier) the bombs were not personal, and the guards were no threat to the POWs as long as they played by the rules. But in the death camps it was starkly, horribly personal. Victims of this horror had to look the darkest, most loathsome depths of human hatred in the eye. There was no room for denial, and the only escape was more madness.

It is here, in this sordid account of man’s inhumanity to man, that we see the flip side of the aversion to killing in combat. Not only does the average soldier’s psyche resist killing and the obligation to kill, but he is equally horrified by the inescapable fact that someone hates him and denies his humanity enough to kill him.

The soldier’s response to the overtly hostile actions of the enemy is usually one of profound shock, surprise, and outrage. Countless veterans echo novelist and Vietnam veteran Phillip Caputo’s first reaction to enemy fire in Vietnam. “Why does he want to kill me?” thought Caputo. “What did I ever do to him?”

One Vietnam-era pilot told me that he was largely undisturbed by the impersonal flak around him, but he was memorably disturbed when he once focused on one lone enemy soldier “standing casually next to his hooch [hut], carefully firing up at me.” It was one of the rare times he had ever been able to distinguish an individual enemy soldier, and his immediate response was an indignant “What did I ever do to him?” Then came a hurt and angry “I do not like you Sam I Am, I do not like you one damned bit.” And he then directed all the resources and assets of his aircraft to kill this one individual and “blow up his little hooch.”

An Application: Attrition Versus Maneuver Warfare

In the field of strategy and tactics the impact and influence of the Wind of Hate have been widely overlooked. Numerous tacticians and strategists advocate attrition warfare theories, in which the will of enemy forces is destroyed through the application of long-range artillery and bombing. The advocates of such theories persist in such beliefs even in the face of evidence, such as the post-World War II U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which, in the words of Paul Fussell, ascertained that “German military and industrial production seemed to increase — just like civilian determination not to surrender — the more bombs were dropped.” Psychologically, aerial and artillery bombardments are effective, but only in the front lines when they are combined with the Wind of Hate, as manifested in the threat of the personal infantry attack that usually follows such bombardments.

This is why there were mass psychiatric casualties following World War I artillery bombardments, but World War II’s mass bombings of cities were surprisingly counterproductive in breaking the enemy’s will. Such bombardments without an accompanying close-range assault, or at least the threat of such an assault, are ineffective and may even serve no other purpose than to stiffen the will and resolve of the enemy!

Today a few pioneering authors such as William Lind and Robert Leonhard have focused their research and writings on the field of maneuver warfare, in which they attempt to refute the advocates of attrition warfare and understand the process of destroying the enemy’s will to fight rather than his ability to fight. What maneuver warfare advocates have discovered is that over and over in history, civilians and soldiers have withstood the actuality of fear, horror, death, and destruction during artillery bombardments and aerial bombardments without losing their will to fight, while the mere threat of invasion and close-up interpersonal aggression has consistently turned whole populations into refugees fleeing in panic.

This is why putting unfriendly troop units in the enemy’s rear is infinitely more important and effective than even the most comprehensive bombardments in his rear or attrition along his front. We saw this in the Korean War, in which, during the early years of the war, the rate of psychiatric casualties was almost seven times higher than the average rate for World War II. Only after the war settled down, lines stabilized, and the threat of having enemy in the rear areas decreased, did the average rate go down to slightly less than that of World War II. The potential of closeup, inescapable, interpersonal hatred and aggression is more effective and has greater impact on the morale of the soldier than the presence of inescapable, impersonal death and destruction.

Hate and Psychological Inoculation

Martin Seligman developed the concept of inoculation from stress from his famous studies of learning in dogs. He put dogs in a cage that had an electric shock pass through the floor at random intervals. Initially the dogs would jump, yelp, and scratch pitifully in their attempts to escape the shocks, but after a time they would fall into a depressed, hopeless state of apathy and inactivity that Seligman termed “learned helplessness.” After falling into a state of learned helplessness the dogs would not avoid the shocks even when provided with an obvious escape route.

Other dogs were given a means of escape after receiving some shocks but before falling into learned helplessness. These dogs learned that they could and would eventually escape from the shocks, and after only one such escape they became inoculated against learned helplessness. Even after long periods of random, inescapable shocks these inoculated dogs would escape when finally provided with a means to do so.

This is all a very interesting theoretical concept, but what is important to us is to understand that this process of inoculation is exactly what occurs in boot camps and in every other military school worthy of its name.