How Could This Happen

by Dan McMillan

  Social Darwinist racism met the needs and reflected the fears of ruling elites in many countries, and Germany was no exception. In Germany, ideas of inborn superiority could justify social inequality and thereby serve as a weapon against the growing socialist movement. Promoting the idea of German racial superiority, German elites hoped that they could undermine socialism by getting the German lower classes to see themselves not as workers but rather as Germans, distracting them from their conflict with the propertied classes by fostering antagonism toward German Jews and toward allegedly “inferior” nationalities. (Of course, they probably didn’t help their cause when they also argued that German workers were inferior to them and should accept their authoritarian rule.) Elites intensified their anti-Semitic propaganda by asserting that Jews were not just a religious minority, but rather a race, with uniquely harmful inborn qualities. The radical nationalist Heinrich Class insisted that Jews were a race, and “the race is the source of the dangers.”10

  After 1900, the most influential of the nationalist pressure groups, the Pan-German League, became a hotbed of racist thinking. The League’s journal became the most important public forum for racial theories in Germany. The Pan-Germans warned ceaselessly against the mortal danger posed by Jews, who allegedly threatened to pollute German “blood” through intermarriage, undermine the family by fostering the women’s movement, weaken Germany in the struggle against the Slavic “race,” and set off violent revolution by instigating the rise of socialism. The Pan-Germans, and much of the rest of the country’s elite, also feared and despised the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe. According to German racists, the Slavic peoples had much higher birthrates than Germans and might overwhelm Germany through sheer force of numbers. A highly influential physician and researcher on heredity, Alfred Ploetz, wrote in 1913: “Poles, Hungarians, Russians, and South Slavs—nationalities with strong Asiatic traits—have an extremely high birthrate such that they are everywhere successfully pushing westward.” He warned that “the preservation of the Nordic race is severely threatened as a result.”11

  The retired German cavalry general Friedrich von Bernhardi gave the application of Social Darwinism to foreign policy its best-known expression in his 1912 book, Germany and the Next War, a publishing sensation and instant bestseller that quickly ran through several printings. Bernhardi’s grim message of inevitable war in the near future was rapidly amplified in the right-wing press through countless reviews, editorial commentaries, and excerpts from his book. Bernhardi had served for three years as a senior officer of the prestigious Army General Staff, which lent his book a quasi-official respectability, although the German government denied that his views reflected policy.12

  Bernhardi vehemently attacked all peace movements, declaring that war was a “biological necessity” because it made a “selection” between superior individuals who survived and inferior men who perished. The same progress through destruction marked relations between peoples. “Without war, all too easily inferior or degenerate races would overgrow the healthy, vigorous elements, and a general decline would have to result.” Bernhardi argued that “vigorous, healthy and thriving peoples increase in population” and needed to acquire more land. Consequently, “the right to conquer is also generally recognized.” When two nations went to war, the stronger was automatically in the right, because “strength is the highest law.” War, as the ultimate test of strength, decided the question of justice: war “always reaches a biologically just decision, because its decisions come from the nature of things.”13

  Bernhardi counted Germany among the “vigorous, healthy and thriving peoples” who needed to expand their territory. Yet he believed Britain would block any German effort to acquire new colonies. Anticipating the world war that would break out two years later, Bernhardi predicted that Russia and France would fight at Britain’s side. This coalition of enemies would be militarily superior to Germany and her ally, Austria-Hungary, but the war was inevitable: “We must fight it out, cost it what it will.”14

  Such application of Darwinian thought to foreign policy may have been especially dangerous in the hands of Germany’s paranoid elite, but it was hardly unique to Germany. When the United States took the Philippines from Spain in an unprovoked war of aggression in 1898, and in the much bloodier war against Filipino independence that raged for the next five years, Albert Beveridge rose in the Senate to justify America’s dictatorial rule over the Filipinos. Senator Beveridge argued that the United States needed the Philippines in order to dominate the Pacific Ocean. “Most future wars,” Beveridge declared, “will be conflicts for commerce. The power that rules the Pacific, therefore, is the power that rules the world.” America, implied Beveridge, needed the Philippines in order to prevail in the Darwinian struggle for survival among nations. As for the Filipinos, of whom perhaps 100,000 died fighting against Americans for their freedom, Beveridge dismissed them as “children.” “They are not capable of self-government. How could they be? They are not of a self-governing race. They are Orientals, Malays, instructed by the Spaniards.” The British prime minister, Lord Robert Cecil, put the matter with unabashed brutality in another context: “One can roughly divide the nations of the world into the living and the dying.”15

  Seeking to improve the populations of their own countries, doctors, biologists, and other academics created a new science in the late nineteenth century that was known as “eugenics.” Francis Galton, a geographer, statistician, and cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the name, describing it as “the right to be well-born.” His leading American disciple, Charles Davenport, defined eugenics as “the science of human improvement by better breeding.” Eugenicists studied the alleged hereditary transmission of diseases, moral traits (especially bad ones), and intelligence. They hoped to solve social problems, such as poverty, crime, and alcoholism, by encouraging citizens with “good” genes to have larger families, and by preventing “inferior” members of society from reproducing. The eugenics movement was prominent in most Western countries during the first four decades of the twentieth century, with scientists from the United States, Britain, and Germany taking the lead.16

  In the United States, eugenicists advocated for laws, wrote popularized books and pamphlets, promoted exhibits, sponsored fitter family contests and eugenic sermon competitions, and funded eugenic films. Eugenics found its way into most major high-school textbooks from the 1920s to the 1950s. During World War I, the Harvard psychologist Robert Yerkes persuaded the government to administer the first mass intelligence test, which was given to 1.75 million American soldiers. According to Yerkes, this test proved that the “darker peoples of southern Europe and the Slavs of eastern Europe are less intelligent than the fair peoples of western and northern Europe,” while “the Negro lies at the bottom of the scale” of intelligence. Eugenicists later played an important role in enacting the 1924 American immigration law, which drastically limited further immigration from southern and eastern Europe. American eugenicists also managed to push through laws that made it possible to forcibly sterilize the inmates of prisons, sanatoriums, and mental hospitals. By 1935, some thirty states had enacted involuntary sterilization laws to improve the genetic health of the population. Grounds for sterilization included “habitual criminality,” “sexual perversion,” and “low moral sense.” More than 21,000 people had been sterilized under such laws by 1935, and a full 64,000 by the early 1960s, by which point eugenics had been thoroughly discredited within the scientific community.17

  The Nazi government that took power in 1933 applied eugenics in even more radical ways, moving beyond forced sterilization to mass murder. Not only did the regime sterilize 320,000 to 350,000 people against their will, but in the summer of 1939 Hitler set his aides to work on a new program that would replace sterilization as the means for weeding the “unfit” from the gene pool, the goal being to reduce the “burden” imposed on society by its “unproductive” members. In October of that year a secret order from the Leader finalized
the so-called euthanasia policy, a nationwide program to murder mental patients. Epileptics, schizophrenics, and even the “feeble-minded” or sufferers from “senile illnesses” were targeted. Buses with darkened windows visited hospitals and asylums on a regular basis, gathering up patients who had been hastily selected for death, and bringing them to centralized killing centers. There they were murdered in sealed rooms using bottled carbon monoxide gas, their bodies burned. Over 70,000 had died this way by August 1941, when Hitler ended the gassing following public protests by prominent Catholic clergy. The protests probably influenced Hitler’s decision, but ultimately accomplished little: doctors continued the program in a decentralized fashion, murdering patients at hospitals and asylums all across Germany.18

  With the euthanasia program, the regime had crossed a critical moral and psychological threshold to mass murder. It had also created and used a technology that would claim the lives of millions of victims in the Holocaust. The men who ran the killing centers of the euthanasia program soon found similar employment elsewhere: ninety-two of them went on to staff the death camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, where they murdered more than 1.5 million Jews using the carbon monoxide in engine exhaust.19

  Just as racist thinking radicalized German domestic policies in the 1930s, so, too, did it shape foreign policy in fateful ways. World War I and the ensuing peace settlement had further intensified the anti-Slavic racism and Social Darwinist glorification of war already established on the right wing of German politics. The terror of communism, following the Russian revolution in 1917, worsened racist hostility toward Russians and Jews. When the victorious Allies recreated an independent Poland, they awarded large regions of eastern Germany to the new Polish state, including areas with substantial German populations. No German government accepted the loss of these territories, and for many on the political Right, it was an article of faith that Poland had to disappear altogether. Leaders of the Steel Helmet, a combat veterans’ organization, openly called for war against Poland. The Steel Helmet also echoed the right-wing Nationalist party in its vague demands for expanded “living space” for Germany’s alleged surplus population. At the Nationalists’ 1931 convention, their leader, Alfred Hugenberg, declared that the German people could gain “freedom and space” only through “energetic self-help,” and not through a “hypocritical pacifism.” Hugenberg demanded a colonial empire for Germany in Africa, as well as new land for settlement of Germany’s “vigorous race” in the East, contending that “the reconstruction of the East, far beyond Germany’s old borders, is only possible by Germany.” “Energetic self-help” was a euphemism for war, praised in unmistakably Darwinian terms.20

  Adolf Hitler tied the strands of this radicalized thinking together in his manifesto Mein Kampf (My Struggle, 1925–1926). In a lengthy tirade against pacifism, which he termed “Jewish nonsense,” Hitler explained his Darwinian view of international relations: “Whoever would live, let him fight, and he who does not want to do battle in this world of eternal struggle, does not deserve life.” To oppose war was to ignore “the laws of race” and to “prevent the victory of the best race,” which was “the precondition of all human progress.” In Hitler’s view, Germany was too small and too lacking in “living space.” It faced the danger of “perishing from the Earth” or serving other nations as a “slave people.” Consequently, “Germany will either become a world power, or cease to exist altogether.”21

  Hitler fused his fear of communism, his demand for living space, and his beliefs about the racial inferiority of Russians and Jews into a comprehensive vision for Germany’s foreign policy. Germany could annex its needed living space from Russia, because that country was “ripe for collapse.” The “inferior” Russians had become a great power only because they had been led by a Germanic ruling class, but the communists—who in Hitler’s mind were necessarily Jews because he believed that Jews had instigated communism—had “almost completely exterminated” this Germanic element. “The Jew,” according to Hitler, “is the eternal parasite, a bloodsucker, which spreads ever more widely like a harmful bacillus,” a microbe that kills its host. The Jews who allegedly controlled communist Russia could therefore not maintain a stable government, and Germany could easily conquer the Soviet Union.22

  In Hitler’s mind, Germany needed to destroy the Soviet Union not only in order to gain the land and resources that would make Germany a great power, but also in order to eliminate the threat of Jewish-inspired communism. This threat was “constantly present,” because it was “an instinctive process, i.e., the Jewish people’s drive for world domination.” “The Jew,” wrote Hitler, “follows his path, the path of infiltrating other nations and hollowing them out, and he fights with his usual weapons, with lies and slander, pollution and disintegration, escalating the struggle to the bloody extermination of his hated opponent.” Hitler insisted that “the Jew” had always, down through the centuries, sought world domination by undermining other peoples from within. Russian communism was only the latest page in this dark history. These beliefs led Hitler to launch a genocidal war against the Soviet Union in which as many as 25 million Soviet citizens died, and they also moved him to order the complete extermination of the Jewish people. The German military would actively support both policies.23

  Although few officers may have fully accepted Hitler’s theories about Jews, very many embraced anti-Semitism, racist beliefs about the Slavic peoples, and militant anticommunism. Almost none registered any dissent as the German Army rolled into the Soviet Union in June 1941, murdering POWs by the millions and ruthlessly confiscating the civilian food supply. Addressing the top commanders of the invasion army in March of that year, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch emphasized that “the troops must understand that this struggle is being fought race against race, and that they must proceed with the necessary harshness.” In May 1941, the tank general Erich Hoepner explained the war’s meaning to his troops: “The war against Russia is an essential chapter in the German people’s battle for survival. It is the old struggle between the Germanic peoples and the Slavs, the defense of European culture against muscovite-Asiatic invasion, the defense against Jewish communism.” The war, Hoepner continued, had to be fought “with unheard-of hardness,” inspired by “the iron will to achieve complete, merciless annihilation of the enemy.”24

  As German soldiers stood poised to invade the Soviet Union and crush the “Jewish-communist” conspiracy in June 1941, the army’s Bulletin for the Troops justified the ruthless methods soon to be used against the enemy. The article focused especially on the communist party’s political officers in the Soviet army, a high percentage of whom were supposedly Jewish. “It would be an insult to the animals,” the author remarked, to describe these Jews as animalistic. “They are the embodiment of the infernal, the personification of insane hatred against all of noble humanity,” and “the rebellion of the sub-human against noble blood.”25

  When Hitler subsequently decided to murder not only the Jews of the Soviet Union, but the entire Jewish population of Europe, he found that German civilian elites were willing to join their military counterparts in carrying out his plan. Without the help of tens of thousands of civil servants, university-trained professionals, corporate managers, and some academics, the Holocaust would not have been possible. Many, if not most, of these elites were not Nazis, but they shared enough of the Nazis’ racism, anti-Semitism, and paranoid anticommunism to see the murders as morally justifiable, or at least tolerable. What made their participation easier was that they were not asked to dirty their hands with the actual killing; instead, they “murdered from behind a desk.” The victims died out of their sight, in Poland and the Soviet Union, and these men could therefore deny their own responsibility, at least in their own minds. However, thousands of men who were neither Nazis nor members of Germany’s ruling class were drafted into the shooting squads that ultimately murdered 1.5 million Jews. These men would have to kill in a way that was up close, persona
l, and very bloody. Unlike the bureaucrats back in Germany, the members of the death squads could not ignore the moral implications of their acts. Very many were family men, with wives and children at home. When asked to murder defenseless civilians, including women and small children, what would they do?26

  CHAPTER 11

  THE ABSENT MORAL COMPASS

  No one wants to be thought a coward.

  —A member of a German shooting squad, explaining why he had helped murder thousands of Jewish civilians1

  The causes of the Holocaust discussed in the preceding chapters help explain why Hitler ordered the murders and why his immediate subordinates, and countless Nazi true believers, did his bidding. They also explain why many tens of thousands of educated men in the civil service, professions, business world, and military also participated in the murders, if not directly in the killing. However, many murderers were neither members of the Nazi Party nor even, in many cases, especially anti-Semitic. Why did they kill? To answer this question one must look to patterns of behavior that are common to the human condition, and not specific to Germany or even Europe. And after all, the Holocaust has not been the only genocide. The sad fact is, any dictator who wants to murder civilians can easily find men to do the job.

  To explain why thousands of ordinary Germans—not to mention ordinary Turks, Cambodians, Rwandans, and a few Americans—have committed mass murder, psychologists and historians have studied a cluster of three closely related human behaviors: automatic obedience to authority; conformity to the behavior of a group; and adaptation to a role and situation. The experiments of social psychologists demonstrate the power of these mechanisms to swiftly and drastically alter people’s ideas of what is right and wrong. Put another way, most human beings lack a moral compass and quickly rewrite their moral code to fit their circumstances.