The completion tendency: killing till the very end
The SS continued killing Jews until the end of the losing war. Most of the Jews of Hungary were killed in the summer of 1944. Adolf Eichmann was still trying to transport Jews out of Hungary when Russian troops were at the gates of Budapest. In the extermination camps, the killings continued until near the end of 1944; then killing facilities were dismantled in an attempt to eradicate evidence. Cruel forced marches of inmates of abandoned camps killed more. Even in the last six months of the war, with the enemy closing in on many fronts, the Germans spent enormous resources on killing Jews. Inertia of the system is a partial but insufficient explanation. Are there others?
As I have noted, Ernest Becker proposed that human being are incapable of accepting their animal nature and its corollary, mortality. Out of the need for immortality much violence arises. The practice of human sacrifice, widespread in ancient times, was an affirmation of godlike power over life and death. As the edifice of superiority the Nazis had built was collapsing over their heads, they reaffirmed their immortality and power by intensified killing.39
My similar but less radical explanation is that power gives people a feeling of invulnerability that is especially needed at times of danger. The greatest power over others is the power of life and death. Threatened with the loss of the war, their sense of superiority, and even their lives, many SS men reaffirmed their power and invulnerability by continued killing. They could also find “rational” justifications: to complete the job and eliminate the traces of their actions.
To many SS, the extermination of Jews was a clear, specific embodiment of Nazism. From this perspective, Kurt Lewin’s notion of the goal gradient is another useful explanation of the feverish murders at the end. According to Lewin, the closer people are to a goal, the more intense their involvement with it and their effort to reach it.40 The Nazi goal required the abandonment of ordinary human morality. To accomplish it the goal had to acquire great importance and special intensity. The SS went a long way toward fulfilling it, investing not only enormous effort, time, and resources, but also their identity. As Himmler said, they sacrificed much for it. The goal acquired a life of its own, and the motivation to reach it became even greater when, near its achievement, its fulfillment was threatened.
Eichmann remained in Hungary until Budapest fell, continuing his efforts to kill the last large group of surviving Hungarian Jews. He even tried to hunt down individual Jews so that they would not escape. The goal of completing the extermination had supplanted even the elementary need for self-protection, for survival.
a Obviously, this version was used after Hitler became chancellor.
b The Nazi essays collected by Theodore Abel indicate that many members of the Nazi Party before 1933, especially stormtroopers, enjoyed violence already before they joined. Of the 581 respondents 337 were stormtroopers, and probably a large majority were members of the less well trained and less deadly efficient, although violent, SA (see later in this chapter), which was much larger at that time than the SS. In looking at their youthful “postures” Peter Merkl put them into a number of categories. “Politically militarized youth” had a great urge to fight and to march and a desire for good fellowship, but little concern about the movement’s ideology (in his classification, 39.9 percent of the stormtroopers but only 6.2 percent of Nazi Party members in general belonged to this category). “Fully politicized youth” were highly ideological and politically oriented, more interested in organizing than fighting (10.3 percent of the stormtroopers, 9.8 percent of party members). “Hostile militants” showed intense hostility to certain groups and to societal authority and heavily engaged in violence (12.8 and 7.2 percent, respectively). Authoritarians had an obsession with law and order and were attracted to the leadership cult (4.3 and 6.2 percent). Finally, there were two relatively undifferentiated groups, “prepolitical, parochial, or romantic” (10.2 and 22.2 percent) and “others, including people of no youthful association” (22.5 and 46.4 percent).8
This classification is based on limited information that is selective in two senses: first, in that only a small group of Nazis responded to Abel’s essay contest, and second, that those who responded necessarily saw fit to provide only certain information. Its nature makes it difficult to judge personality dispositions, such as a potentially antisocial orientation. Nonetheless, Merkl notes an “openness” in the answers to the questionnaires, and they have great value in that they were collected before Hitler came to power and the large-scale Nazi violence.
The last two groups are undifferentiated: their essays suggested no clear categorization. This may be due to lack of information. Or it may be that intense, persistent life problems lead young people without strong personal predisposing characteristics, especially when there are cultural predispositions, to join extreme movements that fit their cultural predispositions. Once they are members, a process of resocialization begins.
c The pressure of authority can result in a relatively sudden shift of attitude, as exemplified in the story of a Vietnam veteran (personal communication from Seymour Epstein, who interviewed this veteran). Flying over a group of civilians in a helicopter, he was ordered to fire at them, an order he did not obey. The helicopter circled over the area and again he was ordered to fire, which again he did not do. The officer in charge then threatened him with court-martial, which led him to fire the next time around. He vomited, felt
