In the aughts, once the US torture programs started getting public attention around 2003, I did my obsessive thing on the German Reich and the Holocaust.
During Operation Barbarossa, the SS was experimenting with eradication methods. The most common was the pogrom, endorsing the locals to massacre the undesirables. When they weren’t undesirable enough or it was the whole village, the einsatzgruppen (death squads) had to come do it, usually forcing them to dig a mass grave and then executing them along the side.
It was messy and brutal and gross, and there was high turnover among the death squads (the US has a similar problem with its combat drone operators). And this was a major problem.
The SS experimented with other ideas, including deathwagons that would pipe the vehicle’s exhaust into an enclosed chamber to kill dozens at a time, but even that was too harsh and too slow.
This is how the prototype genocide machine was made at Auschwitz. The program was contrived so no one who interacted with the live prisoners also interacted with the dead corpses. The guy who pushed the execute button was two persons removed in the chain of command from the guy who signed off on the execution order, and none of those people had to face the prisoners or the outcome. The point specifically was to make the process of massacre less stressful for the people involved.
It’s funny, I had the opposite reaction, I see this as pretty strong evidence of our decency. It’s really, really hard to get most people to behave this way, and the ones who do wind up fucked up from it (as they should).
There was a Sonderkommando of Jews in Auschwitz forced calm down inmates before murdering them and to rob and cremate them afterwards. Exactly to keep the psychic toll lower on the SS and to ensure fewer witnesses.
Everyone: “It seems we, as humans, have a pretty strong dislike of executing other humans. A biological aversion to commiting genocide, one might say.”
Nazis: “Halten Sie mein Bier!”
But in all seriousness, your comment reminded me of “The Banality of Evil”.
For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain.’ Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.
— Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
In the aughts, once the US torture programs started getting public attention around 2003, I did my obsessive thing on the German Reich and the Holocaust.
During Operation Barbarossa, the SS was experimenting with eradication methods. The most common was the pogrom, endorsing the locals to massacre the undesirables. When they weren’t undesirable enough or it was the whole village, the einsatzgruppen (death squads) had to come do it, usually forcing them to dig a mass grave and then executing them along the side.
It was messy and brutal and gross, and there was high turnover among the death squads (the US has a similar problem with its combat drone operators). And this was a major problem.
The SS experimented with other ideas, including deathwagons that would pipe the vehicle’s exhaust into an enclosed chamber to kill dozens at a time, but even that was too harsh and too slow.
This is how the prototype genocide machine was made at Auschwitz. The program was contrived so no one who interacted with the live prisoners also interacted with the dead corpses. The guy who pushed the execute button was two persons removed in the chain of command from the guy who signed off on the execution order, and none of those people had to face the prisoners or the outcome. The point specifically was to make the process of massacre less stressful for the people involved.
My opinion of humanity was already so low…
It’s funny, I had the opposite reaction, I see this as pretty strong evidence of our decency. It’s really, really hard to get most people to behave this way, and the ones who do wind up fucked up from it (as they should).
True. It’s hard to make people kill, but it’s much too hard to teach soldiers to refuse an amoral order.
There was a Sonderkommando of Jews in Auschwitz forced calm down inmates before murdering them and to rob and cremate them afterwards. Exactly to keep the psychic toll lower on the SS and to ensure fewer witnesses.
Everyone: “It seems we, as humans, have a pretty strong dislike of executing other humans. A biological aversion to commiting genocide, one might say.”
Nazis: “Halten Sie mein Bier!”
But in all seriousness, your comment reminded me of “The Banality of Evil”.
— Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil