B002QX43GQ EBOK

by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah

  • Forcing the Jews to run the gauntlet

  • Torturing Jews with electric shocks

  • Compelling Jews to stand for hours barefoot in the snow, after waking them with blows

  • Public hangings, which terrorized the Jews still more than unseen executions

  Of the forty-six members discussed during the postwar legal investigation of the camp’s personnel, survivors indicate only three who departed from these cruel practices, one beating them only when under supervision, which shows that the others, able to do the same, chose not to. Day after day, time after time, they chose to be cruel and torture the Jews.79 When German perpetrators testify that beating Jews was, in their common phrase, their “daily bread,” they convey how regularly and reflexively they beat them. In another sense, beating Jews was, like bread for their bodies, daily nourishment for their psyches, sating their seeming persistent need to make the Jews suffer. If a person innocently surveyed the Germans’ treatment of Jews in camps, their constant physical and symbolic degradation and cruelty toward utterly helpless and defenseless people whom they had, by starving them, turned into barely alive, skeletal, and sore-infested creatures, he might have concluded, if judging just by the evidence of his senses, that the Germans kept the Jews alive to gratify a desire to make them suffer or, since their conduct appeared to have no other rational purpose, to satisfy some unknown cosmological principle requiring Jews’ suffering akin to the Aztecs’ belief that daily human sacrifice was necessary to make the sun rise.

  The Germans’ cruelty toward Jews was more frequent and intensive than their also brutal—often extremely brutal—treatment of other victim peoples. The Germans’ cruelty is so significant analytically because it demonstrates definitively that the perpetrators’ varying conceptions of the different victim groups systematically and commensurately govern their relative brutality and cruelty toward victims. From camp to camp, outside camps across different settings and different units, the same uncoordinated pattern of hierarchical brutality toward different victim groups emerged during the Germans’ continent-wide predations. Paralleling different groups’ differing mortality rates in camps, the Germans’ general treatment of and cruelty toward the Jews, the putative antihuman demons, was the worst; toward the Russians, those putative Bolshevik-bearing subhumans the next worst; other putatively subhuman Slavic peoples the next worst; Western Europeans better; Nordic Northern Europeans the best. So where the same structural conditions existed, in a given camp and then in camp after camp, of the German perpetrators as absolute lords equally over all the defenseless incarcerated peoples, the Germans treated the different victims markedly differently, the Jews receiving such manifestly worse treatment that even non-Jewish prisoners comment on it.

  While the Germans demonstrate that the structural conditions of complete freedom and domination do not produce eliminationist onslaughts’ differing brutality and cruelty, they also show that such conditions do not instigate the brutality. There are two parts to this point: First, wildly different structural conditions are compatible with enormous brutality. As we know, the German perpetrators, the overwhelming majority being not SS or Nazi Party members, came from all social backgrounds and constituted a representative cross-section of German society, making them ordinary Germans of their time. They also traveled widely varying institutional paths to becoming mass murderers. They served in the most varied range of killing and eliminationist institutions and settings, in camps, ghettos, mobile units of various kinds, search-and-destroy missions, death marches, and more. They did so in geographically and politically disparate locations, in Germany itself, in occupied countries, as part of, in proximity to, and isolated from neighboring communities’ peoples. Despite all these different factors, the perpetrators treated Jews in the various institutions of killing nearly uniformly cruelly, always or nearly always with immense surplus physical brutality, symbolic degradation, and mockery. As the other factors vary, only their common demonological conception of the Jews can explain the Germans’ relatively uniform conduct. Second, similar structural conditions, such as of guards having absolute power over victims in camps, have not produced similarly widespread and intensive cruelty everywhere. As brutal, harsh, and deadly as the gulag’s living, sanitation, and nutritional conditions were, incessant cruelty paralleling the Germans’ cruelty toward the Jews, and to a lesser extent putative subhumans, was absent. The Germans manning camps, as in Majdanek, Lipowa, and many others, literally walked around with whips in hand, using them liberally. This was unthinkable for the gulag’s guards. A far more brutal and, for the guards, behaviorally permissive ideational regime governed the Germans’ camps, but the gulag personnel’s comparative restraint toward the prisoners did not artificially result from imposed regulations holding back hate-filled guards chomping at the bit. The perpetrators’ variable treatment of victims in the same structural conditions, their fundamental capacity to govern their own cruelty, and the ideational sources of both cruelty and its variability could be seen repeatedly in the gulag, as former prisoners attest: The guards “were, like everyone, all different,” explains Galina Smirnova. “There were sick sadists, and there were completely normal, good people,” reports Anna Andreeva. The gulag’s guards who were brutal to the prisoners were so because of what they believed the prisoners to be and to deserve. Not being so ideologized as the Germans were toward Jews, the gulag’s personnel were able, more quickly or slowly, to see reality: The prisoners were not as the regime’s ideology portrayed. Even the worst guards, at first acting “like beasts,” grew to treat the prisoners better, as Irena Arginskaya, a former prisoner, explains, because “after a time they began to understand—not all of them, but a large part—and they often changed.”80 Once altering their own conception of the victims, they, governing their own conduct and cruelty, concomitantly diminished their treatment’s severity. More generally, though the gulag’s guards were very hard on the prisoners, as befit their status, they did not make gratuitous torture a constituent part of the prisoners’ daily world. Ilyich conveys how little he and the others feared such cruelty, explaining that the guards, not even carrying weapons in the camp, left the prisoners alone when not at work. Those accompanying them to work “could be cruel, and they often were.” But for actual infractions—not gratuitously: “If there weren’t any violations about which they had warned, then everything was pretty calm.”81 The same can be said of the otherwise brutal and highly lethal Chinese Laogai, whose guards are “rarely described as intentionally cruel.”82

  In the same eliminationist assault, the baseline cruelty and brutality varies somewhat according to settings, the eliminationist institutions’ character, and local perpetrator cultures. The baseline cruelty also varies owing to individual perpetrators’ personalities, taste for violence and suffering, and relationship to the victims, including the variations in their individual conceptions of them. Such onslaughts obviously open the door for sadists to express their sadism, for those hating the victims that much more to inscribe their wrath in the victims’ bodies and souls, and for those seeing overt enthusiasm in their common destructive enterprise as an avenue for promotion to mix business with pleasure. The Hutu’s butchery of Tutsi was attended by perpetrators’ cruelty that was Nazi-like, and in the frequency of wanton, literal butchery, exceeded what the Germans did to Jews. Yet, the existing record reveals that, as with the Germans toward the Jews and as with the overwhelming majority of perpetrators of mass slaughters, the Hutu’s individual cruelty was almost always voluntary. Élie Mizinge, a Hutu killer, explains: “Making someone suffer was up to each person, as long as he did his job. The intimidators gave no particular order to encourage or discourage it. They repeated, ‘Just kill, that is the main thing.’ We didn’t care. If a colleague had to play around with a victim, we kept going.”83 Every exterminationist and eliminationist assault has its own particular baseline level of excess cruelty, its own “taste for barbarity,” its own, so aptly put by Élie, “play[ing] around�
�� with victims, with the cruelty perpetrated in a given individual killing institution and by individual perpetrators varying, sometimes enormously, from that baseline.

  Surveying the vast world of perpetrators’ excess cruelty suggests five central kinds, which can be called Conradian, Zimbardoian, condign, vengeful, and Machiavellian.

  Conradian cruelty, after Joseph Conrad’s antihero Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, is the cruelty of the beast within humans unleashed. Remove civilization’s restraints, so goes the thinking, and man (or woman) lets loose upon his victims his basest, primordial passions. This sort of cruelty, it seems, has unreflectively been assumed to be at work in all exterminationist and eliminationist assaults in a more or less expected and undifferentiated way, so much so that the need to investigate excess cruelty’s nature and incidence has all but escaped our analytic view. But this assumption cannot hold. As we know, not all people harbor such beasts, or are all equally beastly—in particular there is variation in beastliness across cultures and subcultures. Nor do all people visit their base impulses upon all victims equally. That is one reason excess cruelty varies enormously from one eliminationist assault to the next and also across a given eliminationist program’s terrain. Nevertheless, Conrad correctly identified some people’s behavioral metamorphosis when civilization’s restraints are unloosed, especially against people considered subhumans.

  A second type of cruelty is Zimbardoian, after the prison experiments Philip Zimbardo conducted at Stanford University showing that when college students were assigned roles as prison guards and prisoners, the guards, in order to control the noncompliant prisoners, instituted a strict and brutal regime. Structural conditions within camps, or even of rounding up victims and deporting them, can produce excessive cruelty serving operational domination. And although Zimbardo’s experiment was too artificial, brief (six days), and limited in number (twenty-four) and type of participants (Stanford University undergraduates) to know much about its general validity or what it actually reveals, the structural situation it sought to capture can clearly produce conduct in some people having no prior animus toward the victims.

  For several reasons, Zimbardoian cruelty is probably a less frequent kind during eliminationist assaults, and it could not possibly be (as is commonly postulated) the general source of perpetrators’ brutality. In many eliminationist assaults, including Indonesia, Burundi, and Rwanda, the perpetrators’ task is to kill their victims immediately. This requires no Zimbardoian control mechanisms. Yet, they torture, beat, degrade, and taunt their victims anyway. In fact, in killing their victims, which by definition has nothing to do with establishing dominance for present and future control, the perpetrators of these and other mass murders often butchered them in maximally painful ways, deriving pleasure from their suffering. Eliminationist programs’ most nonexplicitly murderous aspects—in Turkey, German-dominated Europe, Japanese-dominated Asia, the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Guatemala, Sudan, and elsewhere, whether they are employing camps, death marches, or other mechanisms—usually have perpetrators controlling or herding a weakened, overwhelmed, unthreatening, and pliant population (including children). The actual or psychological need to respond to victims’ challenges or even to preemptively dragoon them is simply nonexistent. So a mechanism predicated on such a need’s existence could not produce the perpetrators’ actual vast and gleeful cruelty. In many eliminationist settings, even in camps (ironically, the institutions most approximating the “prison” Zimbardo constructed), the utterly powerless and defenseless prisoners—unlike Zimbardo’s actively rebellious Stanford University student “prisoners,” soon to return to their privileged existences on their country-club campus—are as a rule cowed and compliant. Finally, if a Zimbardoian mechanism (or some other social-psychological mechanism or setting) generally generates the perpetrators’ cruelty, then each individual eliminationist assault and the variety of eliminationist assaults should generate substantial variation in cruelty, according to the Zimbardoian character of the setting of each small group of perpetrators. Even a cursory knowledge of eliminationist assaults shows this is false.

  The third kind of cruelty, condign, emerges from the perpetrators’ belief that the beings they confront and are eliminating deserve to suffer. In this case, excess cruelty in all forms—beatings, systematic torture, inventive, even playful, painful use of the victims, actual and symbolic degradation, verbal taunting and mocking—are not the individual expression of human nature exposed, as in Conradian cruelty, or of human nature awry, as in individual psychopathology. Condign cruelty is begotten of the normative view that treating the victims in this manner is right and fitting, and desisting from inflicting pain on them would violate what the victims’ inherent nature requires. Flowing from the perpetrators’ conception of the victims, this kind of cruelty could also be called ideological cruelty. But it is a specific kind of ideological cruelty with a strong normative core suggesting to the perpetrator that he fulfills a moral imperative to make the victims suffer.

  Vengeful cruelty merges passion with self-righteousness. A striking feature of eliminationist assaults is that the perpetrators and the social groups they come from, represent, and in whose name they act regularly conceive of themselves as reacting rather then acting. Believing that the victims have already perpetrated or intend to perpetrate great injury upon them, they understand their assault as essentially defensive, necessary to forestall further harm, rather than as offensive against an unthreatening party. Perpetrators’ and their supporters’ ease in convincing themselves they are justly giving the victims what the victims had inflicted or would inflict upon them, when it is overwhelmingly evident that this is wrong, demonstrates human beings’ great vulnerability to prejudices and ideologies positing that a disparaged, hated, or alien group poses a dire threat. This sense of victimhood, the rage it induces, and the perpetrators’ self-righteousness in administering hard justice combine to produce an appetite for vengeance and pleasure in meting it out: vengeful cruelty. Analyzing the Khmer Rouge perpetrators, Von reports that “ninety-nine percent of them were cruel.”84 Why? “They just want[ed] to revenge [themselves] on the new people.” By ideological definition, the new people were rich, imperialist exploiters of the true Khmer. Thus, as Uong explains, the Khmer Rouge took “revenge against them. . . . [They] just enjoyed torturing those rich people that live the easy life. You know, the imperialist . . . people.”85 Soviet-front newspapers urged soldiers to record in a “book of revenge” their and their families’ suffering to ready themselves to treat the Germans as they supposedly deserved. The Supreme Soviet military commander Marshall Georgy Zhukov’s orders to his armies before a major offensive in January 1945 echoed this theme: “Woe to the land of the murderers,” the orders told the men. “We will get our terrible revenge for everything.” In an archetypical way, Soviet road signs in eastern Germany encouraged the already willing soldiers to exact their personal tolls on the Germans whose country and army (but not the individual women whom the Soviets raped in enormous numbers) had made the Soviet peoples suffer: “Soldier: you are in Germany, take revenge on the Hitlerites.”86 With a cruel teacher’s relish to a recalcitrant and transgressive student, perpetrators whip their victims, shouting, “You will learn.” What will the victims learn? What it means to suffer as they supposedly made others suffer. What it means to be subjected to the wrath of their betters, their masters. What truth and justice, in the perpetrators’ eyes, means.

  Eliminationist perpetrators frequently practice vengeful cruelty, though, as with cruelty’s other forms, variably. While excess cruelty’s other forms seem to contain rage at the victims for not bending to the perpetrators’ will or for (owing to the victims’ own putative misconduct) obliging the perpetrators to act in an ordinarily antisocial and punishable way, vengeful cruelty contains this rageful element constitutively. There appears to be a basis grounded in the nature of experience and in neurology for this excessive rage (even according to what the perpetrators claim to h
ave suffered) and its excessive application, which context and other emotions amplify.87 Suffering, real or imagined, to the perpetrator himself, or through identification with that of his family, social circle, or wider community, becomes amplified because it is his suffering, always more intensely felt, more real in effect and more powerful in impact, than other people’s suffering. Even if the perpetrator seeks to mete out mere rough justice, exactly proportionate to his own suffering, he will subject his victim to considerably more pain because experientially only an added hefty dose seems to equal his own. But, as we know, the perpetrators do not choose to practice strict proportionality, but to make their victims suffer according to their own liberally cruel intellectual, psychological, and emotional needs. Even so, owing to this and other cognitive and psychological mechanisms, the perpetrators underestimate their victims’ suffering. Thus, to achieve the retributive satisfaction they crave, they brutalize their victims still more. And the more the victim comprehends he deserves this suffering and the more intense it is, the more satisfying its infliction is.

  Finally, there is Machiavellian cruelty, which, true to Niccolò Machiavelli’s clear-eyed, heartless advice to rulers in The Prince, is politically calculated brutality to advance cogent strategic or tactical goals. Perpetrators use such cruelty to terrorize targeted peoples, to bend them to the perpetrators’ eliminationist will, or to systematically scar the victims physically and emotionally so as to diminish them and their putative danger. Classic instances are torturing a person to extract information, flogging camp inmates before the assembled prisoners, to convey the price of resistance or disobedience, and publicly torturing members of targeted communities so others know what awaits them if they do not heel or, as in eliminationist expulsions, cooperate and flee.