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For Goldhagen, Germans were not apathetic and indifferent but “pitiless,” “unsympathetic,” and “callous,” and their silence should be interpreted as approval.
attempts to harness concentration camp labor productively continued to founder throughout the war on the resistance of concentration camp personnel stubbornly hostile to economic rationality. The concentration camp culture proved difficult to alter in this regard, whatever the ethnic identity of the prisoners involved.
Nazi regime changed its policy to murder all Jews and changed its policy not to starve all Soviet POWs is more a measure of the ideology, priorities, and obsessions of Hitler and the Nazi leadership than of the attitudes of German society.
The staggering fatality rate of Soviet POWs in the first months suggests above all the regime’s capacity to harness ordinary Germans to murder limitless numbers of Soviet POWs if that had remained its goal. The continuing mass death of Soviet POWs into the spring of 1942 demonstrates that killing institutions are not turned off and the attitudes and behavior of their personnel are not altered instantly, even when policy changes.
at Hadamar the killers threw a party to celebrate the milestone of 10,000 victims!
Indeed, too many instances of cruelty transcend a purely functional explanation.
But we are still left with an unresolved question that cannot be solved by simple assertion: Is a culture of hatred the necessary precondition for such a culture of cruelty?
methodology that can scarcely do other than confirm the hypothesis that it was designed to test is not valid social science.
Heavy drinking helped: “most of the other men drank so much solely because of the many shootings of Jews, for such a life was quite intolerable sober.”
“nothing helped the Nazis to wage a race war so much as the war itself,”
a propensity to follow orders and unthinking obedience to authority were prominent elements of German political culture.
one incident does not make a country’s history or characterize its political culture.
the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism inculcating hatred of Jews in Germany can also be found in support of the notion that Germany had a strong tradition of authoritarianism inculcating habits of obedience and antidemocratic attitudes.
the most outspoken anti-Semites in Germany were also antidemocratic and authoritarian.
The relationship between authority, belief, and action is not only complex, but it is also unstable and can change over time.
The search for understanding the motivations of the Holocaust perpetrators is not confined to a limited set. The scholar’s quest is not a multiple-choice exam. Or at the very least there must always be another choice: “None of the above.”
I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce “ordinary men” to become their “willing executioners.”
“Moral unburdening” was found in collective identity.
how and why did the “normative frames of reference” in Germany change so quickly and totally after 1933, and why were almost all “ordinary men” in units like RPB 45 willing to kill, even if they did so with varying degrees of enthusiasm, indifference, or distaste?
the perpetrators, when confronted with their killing task, did not have to overcome moral scruples or inhibitions, because they had already internalized the new “frame of reference” that decoupled the killing of Jews from criminality. Their killing actions were essentially a reflection of the beliefs they had adopted in previous years.
“Nothing makes people stick together better than committing a crime together,”
In Himmler’s extraordinary memorandum of December 12, 1941, the Reichsführer-SS himself explicitly recommended quiet evenings of cultural activity as a soothing antidote to the stresses of mass killing and the preferred alternative to heavy drinking.
But they do reflect a moral numbness, a routinization of destruction as everyday work that speaks less to the motivation of the policeman than to the impact of their actions on themselves.
