When leaders are ready for elimination and the kill, they activate people’s otherwise inert eliminationist beliefs by announcing themselves or through surrogates, publicly or only within eliminationist institutions, that the onslaught is necessary and about to begin. Depending on how much people have contemplated what to actually do to the targeted groups, different reactions greet the eliminationist announcement or notification.
To those believing in the necessity of dealing somehow with the acute problem the victims putatively pose, yet who themselves have not dwelled on solutions, especially the most radical ones, learning of an eliminationist campaign comes as an epiphany or relief. Upon their leader’s or government’s decision to expel or kill the despised and feared group, or upon witnessing the onslaught itself, many react with satisfaction and approval. They finally apprehend what was always within them about how they must proceed. Just as, in the words of the critic Roger Fry, an artist with a great artwork can teach people something new about themselves, so too can the leader who offers a new way of looking at and solving a commonly agreed-upon problem: “We feel that he has expressed something which was latent in us all the time, but which we never realized, that he has revealed us to ourselves in revealing himself.”97 A heady sense of righteousness and mission can also accompany this epiphany, which coalesces into a person’s determination to contribute to the heroic enterprise. Kristallnacht, the proto-genocidal nationwide assault in 1938 upon Germany’s Jews, their synagogues and communal institutions, their businesses and homes, initially shook Melita Maschmann, a teenager fully subscribing to the demonological image of Jews in Germany. Then belief’s logic took hold:For a space of a second I was clearly aware that something terrible had happened there. Something frighteningly brutal. But almost at once I switched over to accepting what had happened as over and done with and avoiding critical reflection. I said to myself: the Jews are the enemies of the new Germany. Last night they had a taste of what this means. Let us hope that World Jewry, which has resolved to hinder Germany’s “new steps towards greatness,” will take the events of last night as a warning. If the Jews sow hatred against us all over the world, they must learn that we have hostages for them in our hands.98
Another class of people is not surprised because they have had foresight or a self-articulated desire for a concrete eliminationist solution. Upon learning of the actual eliminationist program, they react more matter-of-factly, which does not mean without jubilation, but without experiencing an epiphany. For them, it’s about time. Let’s get on with it. Finally. A Hutu executioner, Pancrace Hakizamungili, explains: “The first day, a messenger from the municipal judge went house to house summoning us to a meeting right away. There the judge announced that the reason for the meeting was the killing of every Tutsi without exception. It was simply said, and it was simple to understand.” Fulgence, a comrade, concurs: “The judge told everyone that from then on we were to do nothing but kill Tutsi. Well, we understood: that was a final plan. The atmosphere had changed.”99
Arkan (Željko Ražnatović) with his Tigers
Others chomping at the bit have been waiting to act upon long-standing wishes. When the enabling orders come, they can finally have a go at the enemies, give the hated people what they deserve and more. Such reactions are found among the shock troops of murderous leaderships, such as the SA and SS in Germany, the students of China’s Cultural Revolution, the Khmer Rouge’s cadres, Iraq’s Republican Guards, the Serbs’ Arkan Tigers, the Hutu’s Interahamwe, and others. Like eager, impassioned soldiers primed for battle, these people understand that their leaders have been pointing them, sometimes explicitly, toward eliminating their enemies, want it to happen, and, when it does, finally let loose their pent-up hatred. Many such people are already in institutions that mobilize for killing. Others are among the larger pool of potential perpetrators, in other words, the general populace governed by eliminationist prejudices.
That is why some popular assaults, sometimes called pogroms or riots, are initially so wild and frenzied. Often, they are analyzed misleadingly as “mob psychology” or “crowd behavior.” If we see such assaults not as the mob’s licentiousness somehow magically taking over people, but as sudden activating, unleashing, and channeling of people’s preexisting, pent-up animosities and desires toward their targets, then we can understand such explosions and their frenzied quality. Mob or crowd psychology’s clichéd account is inapplicable to eliminationist assaults, or, if applicable, then at most to an insignificant part of them. People’s prior beliefs and hatreds’ activation and validation, their satisfaction of acting upon them, and their immediate social reinforcement from their collective participation in a common valued project characterize these initial popular responses to the announcement of exterminationist and eliminationist assaults. Mob psychology cannot be what is driving them to act, because in so many cases, the people continue, after the initial spasm of violence, to brutalize and kill the targeted group, or to support those who do. The person in the “crowd” thinks or says I did something I never imagined myself doing, but he does not say I suddenly had my views of the people I assaulted utterly and forever changed, and for the first time saw them to be so pernicious as to deserve what they got.
Among those believing that the people targeted for elimination in principle deserve their fate are those nevertheless disapproving of a given punishment, particularly mass annihilation, because they deem it immoral. This attitude—belief in a person’s guilt, belief in the need for severe punishment, but opposition to killing—characterizes in many societies people opposing the death penalty, even for criminals committing the most heinous acts. Thus, some people animated by great prejudice against a group balk at the most final eliminationist solutions. This moral inhibition may come from a person’s individual moral sense or be culturally derived from various sources, especially religion. Religious leaders sharing in their society’s or group’s prejudices and hatreds often support eliminationist onslaughts, even lethal ones. But others resist acting upon their beliefs’ logic because of the values informing their understanding of the human and divine order. Many Catholic clergy, while agreeing with Germans and many other Europeans regarding the Jews’ supposed pernicious nature and guilt, and the need to eliminate them and their influence from European society, balked at mass murder. The Vatican’s authoritative journal Civiltà cattolica in 1937, before the systematic mass murder began, explicitly expressed this when contemplating what ought to be done with the Jews. It was “an obvious fact that the Jews are a disruptive element because of their dominating spirit and their revolutionary tendency. Judaism is . . . a foreign body that irritates and provokes the reactions of the organism it has contaminated.” The journal discussed solutions to the “Jewish Problem” ambivalently and explicitly considered various forms of, in its own formulation, “elimination” as functional equivalents. Civiltà cattolica thereby indicated that the different solutions were, in principle, compatible with its assessment of the Jews’ evil and their supposed threat to Christian society. In addition to “segregation” (not categorized as “elimination”), it discussed undertaking the Jews’ “expulsion.” The Vatican’s authoritative journal also proposed a still more extreme solution to the putative problem of the Jews, which it called the “clearly hostile manner” of “destruction.”100
The need to eliminate the Jews was self-evident to and stated as a matter of course by the Catholic Church’s leaders. After all, it was a long-standing doctrinal position and robust discourse grounded in it. The Church’s prominent intellectual leaders publishing Civiltà cattolica articulated to its readership, the Church’s leadership, almost matter-of-factly, that mass slaughter was in principle a logically thinkable solution to the Jewish problem as they conceived it, though in this article they rejected wholesale killing as un-Christian. Not surprisingly, the Church’s leadership across Europe welcomed eliminationist policies against the Jews short of mass murder, because such policies concorded with their elimin
ationist beliefs without violating their ethical views.
Those explicitly approving in principle of a policy of mass annihilation or elimination’s justness or deservedness might think it impractical or unwise, as von Schlieffen did, regarding the Herero. He wrote to Chancellor Bernard von Bülow, “One can agree with [von Trotha’s] plan of annihilating the whole people or driving them from the land. . . . The intention of General von Trotha can therefore be approved. The only problem is that he does not have the power to carry it out.” So von Schlieffen recommended to von Bülow, who viewed the annihilation as un-Christian, economically injurious, and harmful to Germans’ reputation among Europeans, that von Trotha’s annihilation order be rescinded. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who himself had declared Christian principles invalid for dealing with heathens and savages, after weeks of foot dragging, finally did so. The eliminationist means changed from total annihilation, but not in favor of expulsion (the Herero, according to von Schlieffen, “would present a constant threat”). Instead, they settled for another of the interchangeable eliminationist options: chaining and turning those surrendering into slaves, including by branding each one’s body with a GH for gefangene Herero, “captured Herero.”101 The Germans’ formal halt of mass killing, because it was born of practicality, was only partial. They continued their annihilationist practices against the rebellious Nama, slaughtering an estimated 75 percent of them and depositing most of the rest in camps as forced laborers.
Such initial disquietude with eliminationist assaults occurs mainly when the policies are new, or newly publicized. Once mass extermination and elimination becomes a country’s common practice and a political norm, such reactions likely further diminish except perhaps among children upon becoming conscious of the destruction. Particularly in societies with working camp systems or with eliminationist assaults under way, as in Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia, such initial reactions give way to the new common-sense political reality: killing just is. It is, like other central features, part of these societies’ taken-for-granted, natural order.
Because perpetrators typically believe they are performing a historic, difficult, and extraordinary, albeit radical, act by slaughtering, expelling, or incarcerating their people’s enemies, and that they act in the name of their nation or ethnic or religious group, their need for approval from people of their society or group, the bystanders, is important for their sense of self-justification. The principal exception to this has been communist regimes’ perpetrators, who conceive of their peoples as not mature enough to understand the communist future’s necessity. Their educational dictatorships must force, often with violence, their people to build and join the communist promised land. But perpetrators not beholden to such a self-inoculating ideology are situated differently socially. If their own people actually condemned the eliminationist program, it would powerfully undercut their rationale for acting and their confidence in their views’ rightness. Being seen as a mass murderer and heinous criminal by one’s people and community is not an inviting prospect. Most exterminationist and eliminationist perpetrators know that this fate does not await them. It did not happen in Turkey, Japan, Germany, Burundi, or Rwanda (among Hutu), Serbia, and elsewhere.
Our investigation of the perpetrators suggests that we must be similarly skeptical of received views and must ask the same kinds of probing questions about bystanders’ critical role. Instead of closing down the investigation before it has begun, accepting the hollow cliché of bystanders’ impotence, we must similarly ascertain the bystanders’ stances to an eliminationist onslaught. The first and most critical issue is whether and how much bystanders identify with the perpetrators’ actions. If bystanders support them, if they believe that the annihilation is just, good, and necessary, then, even without further tangible aid, they already provide the social lubricant easing the wheels of slaughter by affirming to the perpetrators that they serve a necessary, even noble purpose and will be welcomed, perhaps feted, upon returning to their communities. If bystanders support perpetrators’ eliminationist goals, then questions about the putative or real coercion or terror that supposedly stops them from aiding victims are rendered moot, exposed as diversionary exculpatory discourses, parallel to the ones for the perpetrators. A Hutu who hid eleven Tutsi, when asked if he knew of others who hid Tutsi, said no. When further asked why others had not been like him, he did not intone the exculpatory clichés about coercion or fear or peer pressure. Instead this former policeman knowingly replied: “People don’t have the same mind.”102 They did not apprehend the Tutsi extermination as he did. Only when bystanders actually condemn, as this exceptional Hutu did, the ongoing mass annihilation, expulsion, or incarceration do questions become relevant about the opportunities and risks of acting on the victims’ behalf.103
Most bystanders during many eliminationist onslaughts so evidently identify intensely with the perpetrators that the victims (and others) hold them responsible or guilty together with the actual perpetrators. After all, people watching their countrymen corral, brutalize, and slaughter or drive from their homes other people whom they despise often demonstrate their approval, even by jeering or lording it over the victims—that is, when not taking initiative to lend a hand themselves. The victims’ accumulated experience of the bystanders’ general identification with the perpetrators’ eliminationist projects was true for Armenians of Turks, for Jews of Germans (and Poles, Lithuanians, and others), for other victim peoples (Poles, Czechs, French, Dutch, and others) of the German occupiers and ethnic Germans among them, for Bosnian Muslims of Serbs, and for Tutsi of Hutu that it became a kind of common sense for these (and other) mass murders and eliminations. A similar such identification of bystanders with perpetrators is absent among many communist regimes’ victims, because these victims knew that large portions of their societies were the regimes’ targets or potential targets.
When victims closely identify bystanders with perpetrators, they regularly make the accusation of “collective guilt” (meaning that the perpetrators’ nation, people, or group are criminally guilty). This charge has a powerful experiential foundation in the overwhelming support the victims see the broader populace giving to the eliminationist enterprise, so that those opposing it appear to be rare exceptions. The gross error of the collective-guilt charge is typically not in its experiential basis, but, as I argue in Hitler’s Willing Executioners and then at great length in A Moral Reckoning, in the victims’ conceptual elaboration of that experience. Victims and other contemporaries know that bystanding compatriots or ethnic or racial clansmen by and large support the mass murders and eliminations. That is correct. But moving from this fact to charging collective guilt is based upon some combination of three errors: that all members of the perpetrators’ group are implicated (instead of only those, perhaps very many, who committed actual transgressions); are implicated merely owing to their membership in that group (instead of each person’s individual acts); and are legally implicated in the eliminationist acts themselves and therefore guilty, instead of being only morally blameworthy for the eliminationist acts they themselves did not commit but merely supported, which is a different culpability from legal guilt. People can be deemed guilty only as individuals for their individual acts (guilt cannot be inherited by subsequent generations) and, guilty in a legal sense, only when those acts are crimes. It has been the case, certainly, that many Turkish, German, Serbian, and Hutu perpetrators were collectively guilty in that as perpetrators they brutalized, expelled, and murdered in concert, but this is different from saying all Turks, Germans, Serbs, or Hutu are guilty because they are members of peoples that broadly supported the perpetrators of eliminations. Individual Turks, Germans, Serbs, and Hutu should be held legally culpable for their individual criminal deeds (which can include membership in criminal organizations) but deemed morally blameworthy for their individual moral positions.104
To be sure, some bystanders, like some perpetrators, materially benefit from their neighbors’ destruction or expulsion.
People who hate other people and see them as a mortal danger are often happy to improve their own material or professional lives when their self-conceived enemies are eliminated. Yet there is little evidence that personal benefit has been a widespread or determinative motive leading bystanders to support mass murder and elimination or that absent such material benefits, they would oppose them. (If such an acquisitive motive were operative, it would mean that these same bystanders would approve of the extermination or expulsion of any group, any neighbors, including men, women, and children, merely to gain a few material possessions, a position that is, on its face, untenable, just as it is about the perpetrators’ willingness to commit their deeds.) In all mass murders, expulsions, and incarcerations, only a certain (often small) percentage of the people stand to enrich themselves. Support for the perpetrators appears to be equally widespread among bystanders who gain nothing and those who benefit materially, because the perpetrators are their people’s, or large portions of their people’s, representatives in that they share a common conception and hatred of the victims and common goals.
While the perpetrators implement the leaders’ will and the bystanders support the deeds out of conviction, they, as we see, develop their varying views about the deed’s justice and desirability in different ways. Perpetrators also react differently (as do bystanders) when learning of the eliminationist campaigns that are consonant with the logic of their prejudices and hatreds. Whether because of the general disregard for the lives of noncommunal members, because of hatreds forged in the heat of conflict, because of ideologically derived eliminationist visions, or because of long-standing eliminationist bigotry that is activated, the perpetrators (and, as a rule, bystanders from among their own group) come in some way to approve of the deed. Whether surprised, relieved, or enthused when learning of the intended acts, the bearers of eliminationist sentiments’ various reactions are nevertheless predicated upon their shared approval for those acts. Differences in how the approval is generated help us understand the eliminationist assaults, but only in part. The actual beliefs, as distinct from the mechanisms producing them, need also to be analyzed, because they vary significantly and their variations are critically important for explaining why the perpetrators in different eliminationist onslaughts conduct themselves differently. These many themes are taken up in Part II.
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