How The Holocaust Happened

What drives ordinary everyday people to become mass killers? What are the psychological mechanisms and cultural factors that lead to genocide? What were the causes of the Holocaust? Can we theorize a psychology of genocide? A theory of genocide?

The Holocaust was not perpetrated solely by a few sadistic psychopaths but by tens of thousands of everyday Germans, Poles, Frenchmen, Austrians, Slovakians, in fact, much of Europe took part.

If any of us could be motivated under the right conditions to become mass serial killers, how can we protect ourselves against the threat? How might we innoculate our societies and cutlures from decending into genocide?

There are a number of factors that lead to the Holocaust. Compartmentalization, euphemism, conformity, authority, rationalization, propaganda, anti-Semitism, victimhood, and association, in particular.

Gustav Le Bon, for example, argued that individuals are more likely to conform in a crowd because of anonymity and mimesis. Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments looked at conformity to authority. This combined with rationalisations like ‘its either us or them’ or ‘they won’t survive through the winter anyway.’

There was still a system of belief – an ideology – and almost a decade of propaganda disseminated by the Nazi Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (RMVP). Years of anti-Semitism in Germany and Europe led to conspiracy theories about Jewish world domination. While Britain, the USSR, and America were all consistently associated with ‘Jewish aggressors’.

When a person perceives themselves as a victim and a prisoner as an aggressor in a war of survival and we combine this with the pressure to conform and submit to authority the probability for murder increases. In Nazi Germany, everything was made to fit this formula.

Ervin Staub proposes a model of genocide that has three initial stages:

First, there’s the frustration of basic needs.
Second, An out-group is identified that’s the cause.
Next, The in-group is motivated by a ‘utopian vision’ that excludes a certain group.

And Herbert Kelman has also argued that the requirements are threefold: authorization, routinization, and dehumanization.

How does all of this fit together?

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Credits:

Milgram Experiment Diagram - Fred the Oyster, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/..., via Wikimedia Commons

Milgram video - Movie S1 from Slater M, Antley A, Davison A, Swapp D, Guger C, Barker C, Pistrang N, Sanchez-Vives M, Rustichini A. "A Virtual Reprise of the Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiments". PLOS ONE. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0000039. PMID 17183667. PMC: 1762398. (Creative Commons 3.0)

Sources:

Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men

Laurence Rees, The Holocaust

Donald G. Dutton, The Psychology of Genocide, Massacres, and Extreme Violence: Why “Normal” People Come to Commit Atrocities

Ervin Staub, The Origins and Prevention of Genocide, Mass Killing, and Other Collective Violence in the Journal of Peace Psychology

Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Years, http://www.schirn.de/glanzundelend/di...

Joseph Goebbels, The Jews are Guilty, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/...

Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During WWII & The Holocaust

Frank McDonough, The Hitler Years

Thomas Blass, Psychological Perspectives on the Perpetrators of the Holocaust: The Role of Situational Pressures, Personal Dispositions, and Their Interactions

Henri Zukier, The Twisted Road to Genocide

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Peter Cohen, The Architecture of Doom,    • The Nazi Philosophy of Beauty: The Ar...