The roots of evil: The origins of genocide and other group violence

were volunteer military units guided by conservative views and anticommunism. The Wandervögel was a youth movement that began with an emphasis on enjoying nature but eventually became highly nationalistic. The Burschenschaften were student groups that stressed Germanness and volkish views. The Freikorps were in part an outgrowth of such nationalistic and at times violent German youth groups. There were two million young Germans in various youth groups before World War I. It is not surprising, given the life problems and resulting needs, that by 1927 their number was five million. They supplied members to the private political armies (and to the Nazi Party; some party members reported that their youth group joined the party as a group).⁵³ There are indications here of both cultural continuity and evolution toward the Nazi stormtroopers. Almost two-thirds of the Nazi stormtroopers in the Abel questionnaires who had been youth group members had been involved in violence, either battles in the streets and meeting halls or the organized Freikorps-type violence.

Most of the early Nazi doctors were members of Burschenschaften. The most “unregenerate” Nazi doctor interviewed by Robert Lifton for Nazi Doctors followed family tradition and joined a Burschenschaft, then the Freikorps. He described this experience as profoundly important to him, a cementing of the blood of members, a struggle to restore German glory.⁵⁴

^a Direct economic interest was also apparent in the lynching of black people in the South. A black man’s lynching sometimes was instigated with a rumor of wrongdoing put in circulation by a white man who had a competing business.⁴ The death squads in Guatamala and the kidnappers in Argentina were partly motivated by material gain.⁵ When persecution and murder become acceptable, they can be used to fulfill self-interested motives.

^b Herder emphasized the value of all cultures and probably elevated Germanness because there was no German nation as an entity. Contemporary writers in America refer to Herder’s views in stressing the value of ethnicity as a source of cultural diversity and enrichment.¹⁵ In Germany, as the idea of Germanness evolved, it fueled a feeling of specialness.

9 Nazi rule and steps along the continuum of destruction

Once in power, the Nazis created order, stability, and material well-being. Germans who were not opponents or victims of the system lived increasingly comfortable, satisfied lives under the Nazis until the Second World War began. In my many conversations with Germans who lived through that period, they have talked about Hitler’s “mistakes” but have also stressed the good they believe he accomplished. In such conversations Germans seem to go beyond defending their country from the image produced by Nazi wrongdoings and express a positivity based on personal experience. I mentioned in the Preface my discussion with a group of sixty- to seventy-five-year-old Germans. They spontaneously returned again and again to the benefits and satisfactions of the Hitler period, mentioning obvious things like government-created jobs and emotional experiences like sitting around campfires with other young people. A quote from Craig’s book The Germans well expresses this. In a speech on

April 28, 1939, Hitler had boasted that he had overcome the chaos in Germany, restored order, increased producation in all branches of industry, eliminated unemployment, united the German people politically and morally, “destroyed, page by page, that treaty which, in its 448 articles, included the most shameful oppression ever exacted of peoples and human beings,” restored to the Reich the provinces lost in 1919, returned to their fatherland millions of unhappy Germans who had been placed under foreign rule, restored the thousand-year-old unity of the German living space, all without shedding blood or inflicting the scourge of war upon his own or other peoples, and all by his own efforts, although, twenty-one years earlier, he had been an unknown worker and soldier. This outburst, Haffner commented, was “nauseating self-adulation,” couched in a “laughable style. But zum Teufel!, it’s all perfectly true – or almost all!.. .Could people reject Hitler without also giving up everything that he had accomplished, and were not all of his unpleasant characteristics, and his evil deeds as well, mere blemishes compared with his accomplishment?”

. . . Provided they were not Jews or Communists (a dreadful proviso that they preferred not to think about), most Germans profited materially and psychologically from the first six years of Hitler’s rule, and they were quick to point this out when criticism of any kind was leveled against the Leader.... but the continuing loyalty of many Germans was a personal one, a willingness to believe, in the face of all the facts, that the man who had done so much for them in his first years could do no wrong and would somehow emerge, victorious and immaculate, to confound his enemies and detractors.¹

Huge numbers of Germans were enthusiastic about Hitler’s rise to power and even more about his subsequent rule. A distinguished American theologian, Professor Littell of Temple University, described how his German church father felt about Hitler.² In 1939, this high functionary in the German church, after an impressive array of anti-Jewish actions and one year after the Kristallnacht, described Hitler as God’s man for Germany. He praised Hitler for improving the morals of German youth. The youth of Germany drank, smoked, and engaged in debauchery until Hitler came along. He gave them discipline and a sense of purpose. The evil in the Nazi system did not touch this clergyman. His theological anti-Semitism, combined with German cultural anti-Semitism, made it possible for him to ignore the persecution of the Jews. Nazi repression and totalitarianism also left him unaffected.

In the case of the Holocaust, as in some other genocides and mass killings, steps along a continuum of destruction had already been taken in earlier historical periods. Many of the steps against Jews were taken by the church, but acted upon in Germany with special zeal.³ The Synod of Elvira of 306, for example, forbade intermarriage and sexual relations between Christians and Jews. The Synod of Claremont, in 535, decreed that Jews could not hold public office. The Fourth Lateran Council of