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

of making victims seem less than human. Inmates were kept hungry and helpless; they were forced to live in filth and urinate and defecate on themselves. One purpose was to reduce the will to resist by weakening them physically and destroying their former identity and sense of dignity. Another purpose was to diminish the victims and “help” the SS distance themselves from them. Gita Sereny asked Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka: “If they were going to kill them anyway, what was the point of all the humiliation, why the cruelty?” “To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies – to make it possible for them to do what they did” was the answer.¹⁸

The interweaving and merging of role and person

Given the initial self-selection, the progressive identification with the institution, the evolution of the SS into a system devoted to mass murder in the context of changes in the larger system of Germany, and learning through participation, the psychological condition of many SS members came to fit the role they were to fulfill. They became well adapted to their functions, following the rules and operating procedures and treating their victims as contaminated material to be disposed of.

The “ideal” SS man was not personally brutal and did not enjoy the suffering of victims. He could even treat individual Jews well while serving the machinery of their murder. This level of development is demonstrated by a fictional character, O’Brien, in George Orwell’s 1984. O’Brien, the torturer of Winston Smith, inflicts indescribable pain and terror, but does so in a kindly manner, as if it is a necessary task against his inclination. Dr. Wilhelm Pfonnerstiel, professor of hygiene at the University of Marburg and SS lieutenant colonel, reporting after the war on a wartime visit to the concentration camp at Belzec said: “I wanted to know in particular if the process of exterminating human beings was accompanied by any act of cruelty. I found it especially cruel that death did not set in until 18 minutes had passed.”¹⁹ He was also concerned about the welfare of the SS men administering the extermination.

Not all SS members became “perfect.” Even in a total organization like the SS, some traveled unique paths. Despite self-selection some had initially greater capacity for empathy for Jews, whereas others had deep-seated hostility or found pleasure in harming people. As a result, what they learned from experience differed. Some SS may have brutalized victims to maintain a dehumanized view of them and their own commitment to murder. Although worse for the victims, this may represent a shakier commitment, a lesser capacity to accept murder as a normal operating procedure. Others were provoked by the victims’ helplessness and their lack of response to beatings and humiliations. People who need to experience power over others require a response or they will escalate violence.²⁰

In his book Schindler’s List, Thomas Keneally describes the behavior of Amos Goeth, the commandant of the labor camp (later concentration camp) at Plaszow.^e21 He would come out onto the balcony of his villa in the morning with a rifle and binoculars and scan the campground. When he saw a prisoner doing something that displeased him – pushing a cart too slowly, standing rather than moving, or committing some other unfathomable crime – he would shoot the prisoner. The life of any Jew in contact with him was in constant danger. He beat his Jewish maid mercilessly if he found the slightest speck of dirt or if his soup was not the right temperature. According to the reports of survivors Goeth believed, at least in his sentimental moods, that this Jewish maid, Helen Hirsch, and others who worked for him were “loving servants.” This is also attested by the tone of a note asking her to send clothes and reading material when the SS arrested him for black marketeering. This man, who was even more cruel and sadistic than his SS role required, apparently had no capacity to see his behavior from the perspective of others.

Research has shown that one type of incestuous father is an authoritarian tyrant who regards his wife and children as chattel. In addition to incest, he physically abuses members of his family.²² Amos Goeth may have been this kind of person, run amok in a system that has run amok. He was unable to appreciate that his prisoners, these “objects” in his possession, had feelings and needs of their own that did not fit his needs and preferences – a not uncommon human blindness but in this case extreme in degree.

While understanding the perpetrators as individuals is important, an essential truth is that they acted in a system that allowed and encouraged behavior like Goeth’s. Jan Karski, a representative of the Polish Civil Directorate, witnessed even more random violence when he infiltrated the Warsaw ghetto in October 1942 to gain first-hand knowledge of the conditions he was to report to Allied and Jewish spokesmen in London and the United States. He found everywhere “hunger, misery, the atrocious stench of decomposing bodies, the pitiful moans of dying children, the desperate cries and gasps of a people struggling for life against impossible odds.”²³ Once a companion seized his arms and rushed him into a building, to a window:

“Now you’ll see something. The hunt. You would never believe it if you did not see it yourself.”

I looked through the opening. In the middle of the street two boys, dressed in the uniform of the Hitlerjugend, were standing. They wore no caps and their blond hair shone in the sun. With their round, rosy-cheeked faces and their blue eyes they were like images of health and life. They chattered, laughed, pushed each other in spasms of merriment. At that moment, the younger one pulled a gun out of his hip pocket and then I first realized what I was witnessing. His eyes roamed about, seeking something. A target. He was looking for a target with the casual, gay absorption of a boy at a carnival.

I followed his glance.