Holocaust Blog #1: How Can Human Beings Be Capable of so Much Evil?

Artifact 1: Illustration from "The Poisonous Mushroom"

 Artifact 2: Adolf Hitler quote regarding German youth

"These boys and girls enter our organizations [at] ten years of age, and often for the first time get a little fresh air; after four years of the Young Folk they go on to the Hitler Youth, where we have them for another four years . . . And even if they are still not complete National Socialists, they go to Labor Service and are smoothed out there for another six, seven months . . . And whatever class consciousness or social status might still be left . . . the Wehrmacht [armed forces] will take care of that." -Adolf Hitler, 1938

Artifact 3: "Appell (Roll Call)" by Jan Komski

The events that took place during the Holocaust are what spearheaded the term, "crimes against humanity." There are certain practices that, while terrible, are acceptable during war. Up until the Holocaust, acceptance of these practices was generally the case, and were inevitable consequences of war. The Holocaust represented a fundamentally different practice in war: mass genocide. This was beyond Adolf Hitler simply working his hardest to win the war. Rather, this was a systematic attack on a people.

 This systematic attack begs the question, how could this even happen? How can humans, who have a natural biological instinct to be against the murdering of their species, allow so much death and destruction? Further, can the Holocaust really be blamed on only a select few, including Hitler, or can the blame be expanded to cover everyone who was involved, such as everyday Germans who stayed loyal to their government?

In his speech in 2005 at a 60th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz, German chancellor Gerard Schröder went so far as to claim that ordinary Germans were the ones to blame for the Holocaust. "The evil of the Nazi ideology did not come out of nowhere. The brutalisation of thought and the lack of moral inhibitions had a history," he said. "One thing is clear: The Nazi ideology was willed by people and carried out by people." (For more information, see the full article at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jan/26/germany.secondworldwar.)

In order to address the overarching essential question and formulate a more solid opinion about Schröder's rather bold claim, it is important to look at actual evidence from the Holocaust itself: primary sources. The first artifact posted above comes from an illustration in the German pro-Nazi children's book (I can't believe I actually typed those few words next to each other...) entitled "The Poisonous Mushroom." The title derives from the Nazi propaganda tactic of juxtaposing Jews with mushrooms. In the illustration, a teacher who has an eery resemblance to Adolf Hitler watches as a child points to a "6" on the chalkboard. The "lesson" is that Jews typically feature noses that curve a bit like a number six. Something to note is that all of the students depicted in the illustration exemplify Hitler's "ideal race," which has blond hair and blue eyes. With respect to the essential question, after seeing the kind of material that was readily accessible and likely encouraged for German youth, can blaming ordinary Germans, particularly those who grew up with this kind of a culture of propaganda, be blamed for the atrocities of the Holocaust? In other words, based solely off this artifact, the question really isn't if human beings are "capable" of doing so much evil; they are. But the only reason the ordinary German citizen did is because they, frankly, knew nothing different. The kind of propaganda that this artifact features is so "in your face" that most Germans couldn't even fathom the concept of ignoring or questioning it.

The second artifact posted above serves to substantiate the above claims. The quote is from Adolf Hitler regarding youth, and he essentially describes the training (read: brainwashing and unification) process that German youth were put through. The most important part of the quote is how Hitler alludes to the fact that any class consciousness or social status that may be left in the trainees is ultimately "taken care of." This sounds familiar. In Maus, Anja's family, which was wealthy and well-known, was given a certain level of priority in the beginning in terms of treatment by others, but very quickly thereafter, everything they had worked up to be was stripped away, and in the end, Anja's family was exactly the same as whatever family was next to them. In other words, Hitler practiced unification on both the victims of the Holocaust and the participants of the Holocaust. And while a very, very valid argument against "ordinary Germans" can be made for why they didn't actually step up against Hitler, the force in which Hitler -- this single person -- carried out his programs, as evidenced by the aforementioned quote, shows that the human instinct to simply follow direction clearly outweighed the human instinct of pure evil. In the third artifact, a piece by Jan Komski, this acceptance of direction is evidenced by the Nazi guards' clear, orderly, and direct compliance with their orders in organizing the Jews. It would be difficult to claim that these guards are simply evil. Rather, they were going along with what they were forced to do. Were they capable of it? Sure. But it's not that they were "capable" of evil -- they just didn't have a choice.

To properly address this essential question, one really must look at how we're defining "evil." Does "evil" mean simply going along with practices that were forced upon them? If it does, then the Germans were clearly capable and compliant with carrying out so much evil. But if it means considering the meaning behind what one is doing, and really feeling the fundamental urge to carry out the Holocaust atrocities, the typical German wasn't evil, and they probably wouldn't even be capable of such evil. Only a select few were.