One of the best-known postulates for why individuals participate in mass murder is the putative bureaucratic mindset. This claim was put forward by Hannah Arendt, who used the phrase “the banality of evil” to characterize Adolf Eichmann and has been picked up by theorists of modernity, exculpators of Germans, and by many who know little of what actually happened during the Holocaust or in mass annihilations more generally. The argument boils down to an anyone will do it postulate. It’s simple: In the modern world, bureaucracies create a performance-for-performance’s-sake mindset, so bureaucrats do what bureaucrats do, a job well done, regardless of the attitude toward the task itself that he might otherwise have. This is different from the obedience-to-authority postulate, which holds that government authority either convinces people that a task is good and necessary or that they have a higher duty to obey government authority than their consciences. The bureaucratic postulate treats the individual as having turned off his conscience and being incapable of exercising judgment in the first place.
The problems with this explanation of Eichmann in particular, who (amazingly) was Arendt’s single example justifying her claim, and of the perpetrators in general, are legion and disqualifying. The real Eichmann was an intense, proud antisemite. He explicitly described himself as internally motivated by the rightness of his deed, which is what produced his fanaticism:And so the Jews are actually right. To tell the truth, I was working relentlessly to kindle the fire wherever I thought there was a sign of resistance. Had I been just a recipient of orders, then I would have been a simpleton. I was thinking matters over. I was an idealist. When I reached the conclusion that it was necessary to do to the Jews what we did, I worked with the fanaticism a man can expect from himself. No doubt they considered me the right man in the right place. . . . I always acted 100 per cent, and in the giving of orders I certainly was not lukewarm.
Even more, Eichmann boasted of his mass murdering of the Jews. A few months before the war’s end he told his deputy: “I [shall] laugh when I jump into the grave, because of the feeling that I have killed five million Jews. That gives me a lot of satisfaction and pleasure.”6 Are these the words of a bureaucrat mindlessly, unreflectively doing his job about which he has no particular view?
Those who worked for Eichmann were also antisemitic true believers in the need to annihilate Jews. Alois Brunner, a “functionary” who was one of Eichmann’s chief assistants and oversaw deporting Jews from many countries and regions, wrote in 1943 to a “comrade” a revealing letter from Saloniki, Greece, from where he was soon to deport the area’s Jews to Auschwitz:The weather is growing more and more beautiful and our work proceeds fabulously. On February 25 the yellow stars [the identifying mark the Germans forced Jews to wear visibly on their clothes] began to sparkle here. And the Greek population is so happy with the marking of the Jews and their ghettoization that I said to myself that it is a crime that the appropriate measures had not been taken before. The inflation and the black market would have never assumed its proportions if one had properly watched the Jews. At present, there is no store without a plaque saying “Jewish store” affixed to its exterior. And when we begin to get going with them [deporting the Jews to Auschwitz], Greeks will break out in jubilation.
Hans Safrian, who has studied Brunner and others working with Eichmann, comments: “One cannot speak here of ‘misguided fulfillment of duty’ and ‘bureaucratic corpse-like obedience’—with unmistakable satisfaction and joy Brunner reports about the ‘sparkle of the yellow star’ and his ‘fabulous’ ‘work.’” Safrian adds that Brunner’s letter conveys “an impression of the customary daily tones of the men around Eichmann.” 7 If Arendt had presented these and many other facts about Eichmann, which she pointedly did not (Eichmann’s boast about laughing while going to his grave knowing he had killed five million Jews appeared in one of Time magazine’s most famous interviews ever!), then her startling claim would have never seemed even superficially plausible, and this vast, empirically empty edifice of thought about the bureaucracy of killing or bureaucratic killing would have been bereft of its foundation of this solitary example of Eichmann. Arendt’s false rendering of Eichmann’s greatest irony is that Eichmann, by his own proud account, is the exemplar of the opposite of the thoughtless bureaucratic implementer of any orders. Motivated by his ideals, he was a thinking, self-reflective, dedicated, and fanatical executioner of Jews.
More generally, this bureaucratic view relies on the notion that modern bureaucracy, particularly under so-called totalitarian systems, can blunt people’s moral faculties so much that they can be brought to kill. Another version of this bureaucratic view holds that modern bureaucracy so splits up a task that no one believes himself responsible, and therefore that a disapproving person can contentedly make his contribution to it. For mass murder’s perpetrators this view is patently absurd. To attain even superficial plausibility, it mischaracterizes and misdescribes the killers, redefining them into something they manifestly are not. Perpetrators of mass murder, particularly at the point of attack, are not bureaucrats. They do not work in bureaucracies. The task they undertake is not split up among many people. Their deeds’ real character is not opaque to them. Mass murder’s perpetrators know precisely what they do. They slaughter people, slaughter children, often face-to-face, by shooting them at point-blank range, or by hacking or beating them to death, bespattering themselves with their victims’ blood, bone, and brain matter. It is wrong for us to pretend that such a perpetrator’s position vis-à-vis his deed is akin to a bureaucrat in Ohio, Bavaria, or Lancashire implementing a tax measure from Washington, Berlin, or London he might not fully understand or like. Here are a few examples:
A German businessman in Nanjing relates one after another “hair-raising” personalized Japanese brutality he witnessed or eyewitnesses reported to him: Japanese soldiers, after dispossessing about fifty former Chinese soldiers whom they tricked into stepping forward from a crowd, they “tied [them] up together in groups of five. Then the Japanese built a large bonfire in the courtyard, led the groups out one by one, bayoneted the men and tossed them still alive on the fire.”8 A Bosnian woman, like so many others forced to witness Serbs killing family members, in her case her grandfather, describes what was a fairly typical face-to-face manner of the Serbs’ slaughtering: “They cut off his ears, then his throat. They threw him behind the house.”9 A Rwandan Tutsi describes the final mass murderous assault upon him and many other Tutsi holed up in a church, surrounded for eight days by their soon-to-be murderers. It exemplified the Hutu’s killing mode and personal intimacy: “At about 11:00 a.m., soldiers and interahamwe, including some women came. Somebody threw something at the door and then there was this cloud which made us cough and choke. Your eyes burned as if on pepper. Then the attackers entered. With nothing to fight with, some young men broke off pieces of the seats and threw them at the attackers. Soldiers shot these young men dead. There was a huge mob of interahamwe, including many of our neighbours. They came in and began to machete. They macheted, macheted and macheted.”10
Such instances of personal, face-to-face killing and torturing, where the perpetrators (it should go without saying) knew exactly what they were doing, could be multiplied a thousand-, a millionfold, and presented from virtually every mass extermination and elimination of our time. The official Guatemalan historical commission explains that in Guatemala,the counterinsurgency strategy not only led to violations of basic human rights [of Maya], but also to the fact that these crimes were committed with particular cruelty, with massacres representing their archetypal form. In the majority of massacres there is evidence of multiple acts of savagery, which preceded, accompanied or occurred after the deaths of the victims. Acts such as the killing of defenseless children, often by beating them against walls or throwing them alive into pits where the corpses of adults were later thrown; the amputation of limbs; the impaling of victims; the killing of persons by covering them in petrol and burning them alive; the extraction, in the pr
esence of others, of the viscera of victims who were still alive; the confinement of people who had been mortally tortured, in agony for days; the opening of the wombs of pregnant women, and other similarly atrocious acts, were not only actions of extreme cruelty against the victims, but also morally degraded the perpetrators and those who inspired, ordered or tolerated these actions.11
Heaps of dead Chinese in Nanjing
Personalized, conscious, and willful killing and brutality has been the norm in the vast majority of mass murders. This includes the Holocaust, for which the bureaucratic postulate (and the other faulty ones analyzed here) was invented. One German perpetrator relates a scene from a search-and-destroy mission to kill hidden Jews: “Today I still remember exactly that we were already right before the bunker when a five-year-old boy came out crawling. He was immediately grabbed by a policeman and led aside. This policeman then set the pistol to his neck and shot him. He was an active policeman who when with us was employed as a medical orderly.”12
Describing these and our age’s mass murderers as bureaucrats is akin to discussing soldiers in a firefight or hand-to-hand combat as if they are sitting safely at home requisitioning equipment. But this is precisely what the bureaucratic postulate’s proponents do.c The bureaucratic postulate’s second component, that killers have no view as to whether their deeds, including slaughtering children, are right or wrong is not only psychologically implausible but also without empirical foundation, as not even the perpetrators themselves say this.
The problems with the bureaucratic postulate are still more extensive. It is erroneous even for actual bureaucracies. It is based on an account of bureaucrats and bureaucracies that an extensive body of empirical social science has demonstrated to be wrong, and that virtually anyone ever working in a large institution, public or private, knows to be wrong. Bureaucrats and administrators are hardly empty, passive vessels. They often have well-formed views about what is desirable and feasible. They spend their professional lives immersed in areas about which they are especially competent and inevitably form views, often deeply considered and passionate ones. Thus armed, bureaucrats—and this includes members of police forces—often take initiative to formulate policy and to implement it in their own manner—often partially, ineffectually, late, or not at all.13 Police in all countries frequently fail to effectively enforce laws with which they disagree, or to observe the legal constraints placed on them. Police corruption and criminality is widespread, if highly variable, everywhere and is so acute in some countries that people fear calling on them. Yet the bureaucratic postulate declares that the “bureaucrats” perpetrating mass murder are, alone among those working for state and governmental institutions, incapable of judging the rightness of policies, incapable of taking initiative, incapable of wanting to or actually disobeying orders.
Bureaucrats and others working in hierarchically organized institutions, including police, operate under constraints, but they are not the robots the Arendtian caricature has cast them as, cloaked in the mind-deadening catchphrase banality of evil. People working in bureaucracies have no less a view of what is right and wrong when in their offices during the day than at home at night, or than their friends do who are not bureaucrats. We can safely assume, and an overwhelming body of evidence suggests, that such people do have views about whether it is right to slaughter people by the thousands or millions, whether killing a given peoples’ children is right.
As virtually everyone knows, furthermore, real-life bureaucrats and bureaucracies, as opposed to Arendt’s caricature, are not slavishly devoted to implementing any orders, let alone with enormous energy, but are difficult to get to implement a regime’s policies they think profoundly wrong. Germans in the Weimar civil service and justice system consistently sabotaged the democratic system, its laws, and its governments. The truth then, and the truth generally, is that it is immensely difficult to move bureaucrats and bureaucracies against their will. People in Western and non-Western societies, in advanced industrial and developing societies alike, see real-life bureaucrats not as Arendtian robotic, superzealous order implementers but as unmotivated, relatively inefficient foot-draggers: “Bureaucrats” and “bureaucracy” are synonyms for not getting things done. Bureaucrats are not always that way, but they can be and often are. This makes it that much more curious that in only one area does the image of the bureaucrat deviate from the norm and deviate so much as to become the opposite: those taking part in mass murder, especially, and sometimes only, the Germans who did so. And remember, the vast majority of the perpetrators were not bureaucrats and what they were actually doing can only falsely be depicted and conveyed by the word “bureaucrat.” Moreover, in many mass murders and eliminationist onslaughts—in Turkey, Uganda, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Darfur, in our era’s dozens and dozens against indigenous peoples, and many others—many or most of the killers were not organized in anything resembling a classically well-governed and -regulated bureaucracy animated by Max Weber’s idealized modern bureaucratic ethos.
In light of our age’s extensive record of face-to-face mass murdering by the most “civilized” Europeans (including Belgians, British, French, Germans, Italians in Ethiopia, and Portuguese in Africa) and also by the peoples of African, Asian, and Latin American countries mainly within their own countries, it is strange that people would ask the pseudo-profound, seemingly paradoxical question, as a rhetorical question, of how Germans, Europe’s most literate and civilized people, could produce the Holocaust, and then incant one of the even more pseudo-profound answers: “authority” or “bureaucracy” or “modernity” or “peer pressure.” A mere four decades prior to the Holocaust in very premodern and unbureaucratic-like circumstances, the “civilized” Germans in South-West Africa had shown that Germans had no trouble hunting down and mercilessly slaughtering, by shooting or bayoneting, men, women, and children they considered subhuman. The French had brutalized and killed with similar ease in French Equatorial Africa, the Belgians in Congo, the British in Kenya, and earlier the Americans during their continental conquest and the elimination of Native Americans. It is amazing that anyone not wishing to exculpate the German perpetrators, or not thinking Europeans are intrinsically morally or culturally superior, or people of color count less than whites, could put forth these preposterous notions, which were developed with tunnel vision fixated on the Germans as a way out of the Holocaust’s fictional paradoxes and which our time’s many dozens of mass murders and eliminations so belie.
Another claim about what moves the perpetrators to kill holds that they personally benefit from killing, so much so as to lead them to murder, to mass murder, men, women, and children whom they have no reason to think deserve to die. Instances of the perpetrators’ booty or added benefits are pointed to or imputed to exist, as supposed and sufficient evidence that material gain is the motive moving the killers. In some mass murders and eliminations—in Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda—many perpetrators (as opposed to the regime or bystanders) stole or plundered the victims’ belongings. Yet even in these, there is no good reason to think the perpetrators believed the victims undeserving of their fate and self-consciously chose to slaughter, often to butcher, so many people merely to steal some things from a few of them.
This plunder postulate is inadequate for several reasons, starting with the obvious: We would naturally expect and see as hardly remarkable that people slaughtering or expelling others they hate or see as threatening would also dispossess them. After all, the victims’ homes and possessions are now for the taking, and someone will get them. Who would expect the many perpetrators, especially in poor countries, to, like ascetic monks, turn their backs on the possessions of people they had just killed? In Rwanda, where there was much plundering, the same Hutu mass murderers recounting their fellow Hutu’s looting the victims’ possessions are also emphatic that they hated and feared the Tutsi, believing they ought to die.14 Such enrichment is far more likely the by
product of executing people the perpetrators believe deserve of death than an impetus for them to mass murder men, women, and children they think innocent. As, the Hutu killer Adalbert Munzigura commented when discussing the killing logistics, as a secondary matter “the lucky ones could look around for chances to loot,” of which there was a great deal, as the Hutu perpetrators selfsatisfyingly report.15
The plunder view of mass murdering has two versions or components: Plundering is the prime motive for initiating mass murder, or is what moves the killers on the ground. Neither, however, can account for the basic facts, including the perpetrators’ choices. This view ignores that the perpetrators could just rob the people without killing them. It cannot explain why the perpetrators kill women and children. Or why they did not adopt lesser eliminationist means, such as expulsion, which as Berthe Mwanankabandi, a Tutsi survivor, points out, the perpetrators certainly know they could: “Those who only wanted to steal our land could have simply chased us out, as they did to our parents and grandparents in the North. Why cut us as well?”16 And the general psychological objection applies here: Would people without animus for the targeted people, believing them wholly undeserving of death, slaughter them by the thousands, kill children sometimes living in their neighborhood, town, or region, just for a few dollars, or whatever booty they might pillage? Would you?
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