A bureaucracy was established. Questionnaires haphazardly filled out, at times hundreds of them within a few hours, were used to select victims. Overdose of drugs, injections, starvation, and eventually gassing were used. Doctors filled out the questionnaires, made the selections, and did the actual killing, establishing many of the procedures later used in killing Jews. The procedures served both practical and psychological ends. For example, medical leaders of the euthanasia project praised doctors for sacrifices demanded by the killing process; later on Nazi leaders praised the SS killers for the sacrifices and hardships endured in fulfilling their “task.”
The medical system was placed in the service of killing. A submissive orientation to authority was even stronger among doctors than in the rest of the German population. Their training and organization were authoritarian and they had a long tradition of seeing themselves as servants of the state. Medical training and practice may have made them believe that they had power over life and therefore the right to decide about life and death. The belief in euthanasia and the authority orientation of German doctors created an affinity for the Nazi ideology. The doctors who killed were self-selected or selected by the authorities for their reliability as Nazis.
Systems tend to be self-prepetuating. When a system is well established, members stop questioning its basic assumptions. The relatives of people killed and then the whole population became aware of the killings, and in response to protests by people and institutions, the program was officially terminated. Nevertheless, some killings continued, with the killing of children relatively widespread. Instead of being gassed, they were now starved to death on “special diets” or given drug overdoses. The ideas that justified the killings were unchanged, and the perpetrators were still in their jobs. Nothing happened to eliminate the motivations for the killings or to counteract the personal evolution of the perpetrators. They evidently came to believe in eliminating “genetically inferior” and “incurable” people. Continued killing expressed their investment in this goal and perhaps also provided a form of self-justification.
As I noted, several paths leading to destruction converged. Together they made the extreme destructiveness of genocide possible and, for many of the perpetrators, perhaps even relatively easy (see more about this in the next chapter). The methods of the euthanasia program were directly transferred to the extermination camps, along with the facilities for gassing and many of the personnel, including doctors.
It is important to note that all this took place in a framework of Nazi ideology and a cultural ethos that served it. Ideas and methods were created that moved, in their indirect but far from haphazard way, toward the fulfillment of the ideology. Not only medical doctors but also many other intellectuals, academics, and scientists elaborated a vision that ultimately served genocide. In 1940 Konrad Lorenz, the famous ethologist, wrote:
[I]t must be the duty of racial hygiene to be attentive to a more severe elimination of morally inferior human beings than is the case today.... We should literally replace all factors responsible for selection in a natural and free life.... In prehistoric times of humanity, selection for endurance, heroism, social usefulness, etc. was made solely by hostile outside factors. This role must be assumed by a human organization; otherwise, humanity will, for lack of selective factors, be annihilated by the degenerative phenomena that accompany domestication.23
As group consciousness moves in a certain direction, a generative process may emerge that serves this movement.
The power of giving oneself over to a group, an ideal, or a leader
As I have noted, people may find great satisfaction giving themselves over to a group, an ideal, or a leader. Deprivation, distress, a search for solutions, and an environment that creates high levels of excitement and emotional contagion can lead to the abandonment of self, as in the miraculous cures at Lourdes.24 People attracted to movements (or to contemporary cults and extremist groups) are often people searching for solutions to basic questions about who they are and what life is about, often in response to difficulties in their lives.
The Nazi mass meetings were also occasions for conversion. The Nazi marches, street fights, and rituals both expressed and bred commitment. Proselytizing was an important duty of party members; persuading others also furthers commitment. Feelings of loneliness, vulnerability, failure, and uncertainty gave place to a sense of comfort, comradeship, shared destiny, admiration of a leader, and unquestioned certainty.
Commitment to the group, whether the result of conversion, evolution, or both, gives it great power to guide the interpretation of events, the definition of reality. As I noted, people are powerfully influenced by groups even in their perception of physical reality, which is more objective and verifiable than social reality. Values and “facts” about human beings (such as the evil nature of a minority) are much more subjective. Therefore, conformity is easier to bring about in the social realm. Sometimes people conform to others’ definition of the meaning of an event just to avoid conflict or social embarrassment. Extensive research findings indicate that bystanders often accept the definition of events offered to them and act accordingly.25 They may calmly disregard, without apparent conflict, calls for help seemingly arising from serious physical distress once someone says it is not real and does not require attention, or they may respond speedily when spurred on by words or actions of other bystanders.26
If this happens even among strangers, the mutual influence of members of an authoritarian group will be even greater. To people who intensely identify with the group or who seek its acceptance (like those who joined the Nazi Party late, after Hitler came to power), deviation from the group in action will seem highly risky, and inner deviation difficult to resolve. An inner alignment reduces conflict. Even though they
