It is a blessing to governments,
that human beings do not think for themselves
Adolf Hitler
How could it happen? How could one single person, Adolf Hitler, succeed in staging a whole world according to his own personal world view with death and destruction as the appalling consequence? How was it possible to convince so many millions of his divine status that they were willing to sacrifice both their own life and the life of other human beings for this faith?
The Fuehrer committed suicide on April 30, 1945, in order to make the Fuehrer Myth live on. He had then succeeded in transfering his own war trauma into a collective trauma for the whole world. He had demonstrated the shadow side of modern, industrial mass society and left an inheritage that puts a questionmark to the very view of human nature in our cultural tradition and civilization. The inheritance var the knowledge that it had been possible to carry out the systematic genocide on European Jewry.
In an attempt to confront this trauma the world community signed a convention in 1948 with the intention of preventing new genocides. Nevertheless, all over the world there are to-day wars going on against society groups who according to the men in power do not belong to their society. These wars have often a genocidal charakter because the 20th century has become the century of total war and genocide, where war no longer are carried out between armies alone, but still more consequently are aimed at the civilian population - or parts of it - which is pointed out as the enemy by the men in power.
Our century has been called the century of the media. It is especially the century of the visual media - the century of the eyes. With our own eyes we can see and follow what other people see. We can see the same pictures as others see - or wish us to see. The pictures can arouse happiness or fear within the individual viewer, because what we see has a decisive influence on our perception of the world, we live and act in.
This is the key to the knowledge of how Adolf Hitler succeded in transfering his own traumatic hate to Jews into a systematic mass-murder, carried out by others. It was with his eyes that the Fuehrer fascinated his closest followers to believe in his self-imposed role as saviour of a nation - and it was with his eyes that he experienced confirmation after confirmation from the outside world of the truth in his world view. And it was the recollection through photographs and films that knocked the Fuehrer Myth together inside Adolf Hitler himself - and within his followers.
In particular it was the abillity of the filmmedium to produce and reproduce the world of reality that changed his private hate to Jews from an inner instinct to a conscious decision. It was the "close-to-reality" reproduktion of his private images of Jews that legitimized Holocaust to him and made Auschwitz into a neccessity, if his Gesamtkunstwerk - the Third Reich - should survive. And it was the combination of Fuehrer Myth and this reproduktion of "reality" that created that genocidal mentality that made it possible for the perpetrators and other accomplices to believe that they were doing something good while killing.
The Nazi propaganda activated existing images of the enemy and traumas in the population - and the fear for the effects of anti-Semitic propaganda still exists in modern Germany. Neither Der ewige Jude nor Jud Süss are allowed to be shown in public, and only three minutes of each can be shown in television programmes*. In order to be able to confront a trauma it is, however, neccessarry to know it in all its uncomfortable features and to discuss it openly. Only then it is possible to outweight the relation between human behaviour in general and the concrete historical situation that aroused it. Otherwise it will continue to stay deep in man's mind as an unsolved trauma which will surface again when cynical politicians can use it as a means in their political struggle for power.
The parallel between the Holocaust and the Genocide in former Yugoslavia is depressing for all those who had hoped that our civilisation had learned from the Nazi genocide. It was the media in the former Yugoslavia that created - or at least activated - the genocidal mentality within the conflicting parts. It was especially the television that made the old ethnical enmity between the different groups to a topic for everybody - in particular through activating the under Tito's rule repressed trauma of the atrocities committed by Croat ustasjies and Serb chetniks during World War II.
In a similar way in Germany between the wars it was the untreated trauma of the lost World War I with the many fallen soldiers that together with the traditional enemy picture of Jews that created the fundamental premises for Hitler's private war aginst the Jews to become a genocide.
The world community has not succeeded in banning armed conflicts. The struggle for resources still arouses war; war new collective traumas that can be activitated by politicians to engage in new wars. We have not learned from the Holocaust - and maybe we can't because emotions often are stronger than sense.
Modern warfare has become industrialized and this industrialization helps removing the responsability of taking other people's lives from the individual soldier. At the same time the media created image of the enemy he has been ordered to kill becomes a growing importance which also in turn helps efface the responsability from the individual soldier. It simply has become easier to repress responsability for the person that pulls the tricker.
This back side of modern mass society becomes clear when one looks upon the complicated process that led to the Holocaust. The course of events points to that the real responsability - if it is a relevant way of saying so - is to be placed with Joseph
Goebbels that passed the theshold to genocide on October 16th, 1939, when he saw the slaughtering scenes he himself had ordered to be part of his "film document" about the Jews. Then the radical anti-Semite put pressure on the Fuehrer for him to take the ultimate consequence of his own world view. The Minister of Propaganda was only an adviser, not the decision-maker, although he with his actions highly provoked decisive political decisions within the Jew-policy of the Third Reich.
Adolf Hitler was the real decision-maker and began passing the theshrold of active genocide when he on May 20, 1940, approved Der ewige Jude for public screening. The Fuehrer, however, needed more confirmations on his own role as Fuehrer before he took the conscious decision of the physical destruction of European Jewry. When he delegated the assignment to Heinrich Himmler, he immediately started to blurr his own responsability because it was not Adolf Hitler, but "Foresight" in the feature of his inner voice - the Fuehrer Myth - that wished to remove Evil. And because the Fuehrer allways had had right in his prophecies he would also this time be right. The prophecy turned out to give him right.
Everything seems to show that it was with very mixed feelings Heinrich Himmler accepted the task, the Fuehrer put on his shoulders. Reichführer-SS found it "un-German" to exterminate whole people, but he nevertheless accepted the task because he put his oath of fidelity to Adolf Hitler as Fuehrer higher as his inner moral voice. Instead his prize to do it was as high as it could be in the Third Reich: Heinrich Himmler was promised the very society constituing Fuehrer Myth after the death of the Fuehrer.
Reichsführer-SS then tried to repress his gnawing doubt through delegating the organizing responsability to his right hand, Reinhard Heydrich, who was used to take care of the more dirty work that belonged to building up the Third Reich. The Chief of Reichssicherheitshauptamt could on one hand claim that he acted according to an order given to him through Himmler. On the other he cynical used the power it gave him in the struggle for power with others. Neither he nor his collaborators in Berlin murdered Jews themselves. They had others to do it; and these could also after the war claim that they just had followed orders.
Hannah Arendt concluded her analysis of the process against Adolf Eichmann - one of the key persons in the bureaucratic process where human beings were reduced to mere figures - in her famous book on The Banality of Evil in 1961 with the following words:
"The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifying normal. From the point of view of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied ... that this new type of criminal, who is in fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that makes it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong."
With this famous characterization Hannah Ahrendt merciless points to the sore feature in our modern society where the media-created 'reality' more and more replaces - and in good and in bad creates the frame-work for - that reality that arises out of the personal encounter of human beings. The story of the propaganda film Der ewige Jude is an ominous example of what can happen when the media-created 'realitity' is conceived as the 'real' reality and thereby creates conditions which make it impossible for the individual to discern between "Good" and "Evil".
The use of media-created 'reality' in the civil war in former Yugoslavia unfortunately demonstrates both the range of and the continuing topicality in the analysis of Hannah Arendt which perhaps more rightfully should have been called
The Normality of Evil.