As I have noted, psychological research shows that a single deviation from group behavior can greatly diminish conformity.41 In emergencies the likelihood of helping greatly increases when one bystander says the situation is serious or tells others to take action.42 When a society begins to mistreat some of its members, resistance by bystanders, in words and action, will influence others and inhibit the personal changes that would result from passivity.
Even the behavior of governments can be strongly affected by bystanders–individuals, groups, or other governments. Repeatedly when they faced substantial opposition, the Nazis backed away. They did not persist, for example, when Bulgaria (where the people protested in the streets) refused to hand over its Jewish population or when, within Germany, relatives and some institutions protested the killing of the mentally retarded, mentally ill, and others regarded as genetically inferior.43 Public protest in the United States greatly affected the war in Vietnam. Amnesty International groups have freed political prisoners all over the world simply by writing letters to governments.
A lack of protest can confirm the perpetrators’ faith in what they are doing. Hitler saw the lack of response both in Germany and in the outside world to the persecution of Jews as evidence that the whole world wanted what only he had the courage to do. A refusal to cooperate can raise questions in the minds of perpetrators. According to Helen Fein, resistance in Denmark, Italy, and Bulgaria raised doubts in the minds of some Nazi functionaries in those countries.44 Perpetrators may question not only whether they can get away with it, but also whether what they are doing is right.
Why then are bystanders so often passive and silent? Sometimes silence results from fear, but that is not the whole explanation. Everywhere people tend to accept a definition of reality provided by “experts,” their government, or their culture. Lack of divergent views, just-world thinking, and their own participation or passivity change bystanders’ perception of self and reality so as to allow and justify cruelty.
Outsiders may also respond little, although they have less to fear. They too are subject to these processes of change. They too are affected by the propaganda or ideology used to justify mistreatment. Before World War II, for example, anti-Semitism increased in many countries.45 Hitler’s propaganda joined with an existing anti-Semitic base and just-world thinking and enabled people in economic trouble to blame Jews.
Ideological conceptions and romantic notions of what is good can mislead us. Very few people, in retrospect, glorify the violence of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. But at the time, some voices in the United States celebrated this “rejuvenation” of the revolution.
Another reason for outside indifference is that governments usually do not see themselves as moral agents obliged to endanger their interests by interfering in the “internal affairs” of other countries. With rare exceptions they protest only when they see their self-interest endangered (see Chapters 16 and 17).
a There was no control or neutral condition, so it is uncertain to what extent rewarding in itself led to a positive evaluation and punishing to a negative evaluation. The change in evaluation did not occur when participants only role-played rewarding or punishing another (imagined) person. But even under these conditions, the increase in rewards or punishments occurred.
Part II
The Nazi Holocaust
7 Hitler comes to power
Genocide and “insanity”
The Holocaust if often called incomprehensible, partly because of the magnitude of the killings and partly because of the impersonal, technological methods used: the factories of death, which were new in world history. Any genocide might be seen as a form of insanity possessing normal human beings. That people would be gathered in great squares or on street corners, by force or by intrigue – with the promise of resettlement and a better life, or a piece of bread, or simply by threat of force – then herded into freight cars to be transported over hundreds and thousands of miles, taken to a camp and told to undress and go into showerlike chambers, where they were gassed to death, and their bodies burned in huge ovens; millions of people murdered in this way and tens of thousands devoted to the organized killings, in the midst of a losing war in a progressively, devastated country – all this seems like madness.
But the people who participated in this mass murder were normal by conventional standards of mental health. Interviews and psychological testing found no evidence of mental illness or psychological dysfunction in the Nuremberg defendants and SS criminals. Large-scale murder and mistreatment are commonplace in human history. Understanding the sources is our task; labeling it madness does not provide such understanding. In this section, I apply the model offered in Part I to a detailed analysis of the Holocaust, extending it in the process.
Life conditions: loss of war, the Treaty of Versailles, and economic and political chaos
When Germany lost the war in 1918, the peace treaty imposed on it, the Treaty of Versailles, demanded substantial reparation, allowed Germany only a very small army, and took away territories. Germans experienced the loss of war and the treaty as great humiliations, and both were widely seen as the result of betrayal, a “stab in the back” by internal enemies: Red revolutionaries, republicans, Jews. This suited the Germans’ collective view of themselves as strong, superior, and militarily powerful. They could not accept the reality, given its discrepancy with their self-concept. A contributing cause was that the military and government had lied about the progress of the war. The collapse seemed sudden and inexplicable. Prussian officers and government leaders could not possibly lie; the legend of the stab in the back was the alternative.
The Treaty of Versailles amputated Alsace-Lorraine on the west and a part of Poland on the east. Under military occupation Germany was humiliated and reduced to the rank of a second rate power. The new liberal regime was opposed on all sides and was openly considered to be a Judenrepubliq. For the ultra-conservative circles the burning question arose: How was the sudden cruel
