Wallenberg managed to buy houses into which people with letters of protection could move. Although there were constant raids on these houses by Hungarian Nazis (the Arrow Cross), many women and children survived. (My father was in a forced labor camp. He escaped when his group was on its way to Germany and was its sole survivor. He hid with us in the protected house and was undetected during several raids on the house.)
I was also powerfully influenced by a Christian woman who worked many years for my family. I love her and consider her my second mother. Maria Ggn took my sister and me into hiding at one point, when it seemed that all Jews would be collected for “deportation” (that is, taken to Auschwitz for extermination). She procured food for us and the others in the protected house. In the midst of cruelty and violence she risked her life for others, not only for our family, but even for strangers.
These early experiences are one source of my intense and lifelong concern with kindness and cruelty. But even after I had begun to integrate my past experiences with my scholarly interests, I remained reluctant to mention them in lectures or articles. I thought that the origins of my concerns should not matter, and I feared that audiences and readers might discount the validity of what I had to say. I hope that readers will see such experiences as motivating my study of the issues discussed in this book, but not as determining my conclusions.
I have several reasons for mentioning my childhood experiences here. In 1985 I published an article about the psychology of perpetrators and bystanders.3 Reviewers, who recommended publication, objected that I analyzed the Holocaust along with seemingly much lesser cruelties, for example, the disappearances in Argentina, where between nine and thirty thousand people were tortured and then killed. The Holocaust literature confirms my sense that some readers, given their own personal suffering and identification with victims, may feel that the tremendous tragedy of the Holocaust is diminished when it and other genocides and mass killings are studied together.
I deeply appreciate the horrors of the Holocaust: the Nazis’ obsession with eliminating the Jews as a people, the murder of six million in factories of death, and the great brutality with which victims, who in no way provoked the perpetrators, were treated. Still, extreme evil defies comparisons of magnitude. What is the degree of evil in the act of torturers who insert a tube into a man’s anus or a woman’s vagina and seal into it a rat, which then tries to get out by gnawing its way through the victim’s body? This method of torture was used in Argentina. I intend to make no comparisons of the magnitude of horrors; I do wish, however, to enhance our understanding of the commonalities (and differences) in the psychological and cultural origins of mass killings and genocides.
I also fear that some readers may see me as exculpating killers; I have no such intention. Understanding the motives of those who perpetrate genocide may seem to blunt outrage because the individual and group changes that lead to increasingly vicious acts may become not only more comprehensible, but even seemingly natural. Although outrage is easier to feel in the face of uncomprehended evil, to understand is not necessarily to forgive. In fact, understanding can increase our awareness of the culpability of perpetrators of great evil because we can see them as human beings, not as beasts without moral capacity.
Perpetrators make many small and great decisions as they progress along the continuum of destruction. They choose leaders, adopt ideologies, create policies and plans, and engage in harmful and violent acts. Their circumstances and characteristics (which themselves evolve) move them in certain directions. But human experience is always multidimensional and other directions are possible. Other aspects of the self and of experience can be guides to contrary choices. Choice clearly implies responsibility. We must maintain a double vision that both searches for understanding and acknowledges human responsibility. (These issues are discussed at several points, especially in Chapters 2 and 10.)
In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, people wondered whether the special characteristics of Germans as a people led them to perpetrate the Holocaust. However, the many atrocities committed by many states since World War II have led to a view that “Germanness” is no explanation. Many now doubt that cultural characteristics determine such conduct. In this book I reassert the importance of culture – not the old notion of “national character,” but a certain pattern of characteristics that enhances the potential for group violence. The psychological processes leading to extreme destructiveness arise when this pattern combines with extreme difficulties of life.
Although this book includes a great deal of historical material, it is primarily a psychological work that attempts to draw on history in the service of psychological understanding of how genocides and mass killings come about.
I want to mention another bit of personal history. I was invited to give a lecture on the psychology of genocide at the University of Trier, in West Germany, in June 1987. At my request, my hosts very kindly arranged for me to talk with a group of students and with a group of people who lived under Hitler. A scheduled two hours with a group of twenty 60- to 75-year-old men and women turned into an intense four-hour discussion of their experiences in the Hitler era. We spoke in German, which I learned when I lived in Vienna between 1956 and 1959 and to my surprise remembered well. I am grateful for the willing participation of members of this group. I will refer in a few footnotes to this discussion and to a ninety-minute discussion with a larger group of students.
Acknowledgments
A book reflects many influences on the
