| COPY OF DOCUMENT L-73 Source: Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Vol.VII. USGPO, Washington, 1946, pp. 818-839 [Affidavit of Bruno
Bettelheim Concerning Patterns of Adaptation of Concentration Camp Inmates] 34. This outside world which continued to live as if nothing had happened was in the minds of the prisoners represented by those whom they used to know, namely, by their relatives and friends. But even this hatred was very subdued in the old prisoners. It seemed that, as much as they had forgotten to love their kin, they had lost the ability to hate them. They had learned to direct a great amount of aggression against themselves so as not to get into too many conflicts with the Gestapo, while the new prisoners still directed their aggression against the outer world, and-when not supervised-against the Gestapo. Since the old prisoners did not show much emotion either way, they were unable to feel strongly about anybody. 35. Old prisoners did not like to mention their former social status or their former activities, whereas new prisoners were rather boastful about them. New prisoners seemed to try to back their self-esteem by letting others know how important they had been, with the very obvious implication that they still were important. Old prisoners seemed to have accepted their state of dejection, and to compare it with their former splendor-and anything was magnificent when compared with the situation in which they found themselves-was probably too depressing. 36. Closely connected with the prisoners' beliefs about, and attitudes toward, their families were their beliefs and hopes concerning their life after release from camp. Here the prisoners embarked a great deal on individual and group daydreams. There was a marked difference between the daydreams of the new and the old prisoners. The longer the time a prisoner had spent in camp, the less true to reality were his daydreams. They were convinced that they would emerge as the future leaders of Germany at least, if not of the world. This was the least to which their sufferings entitled them. These grandiose expectations were coexistent with great vagueness as to their future private lives. In their daydreams they were certain to emerge as the future secretaries of state, but they were less certain whether they would continue to live with their wives and children. Part of these daydreams may be explained by the fact that they seemed to feel that only a high public position could help them to regain their standing within their families. 37. The hopes and expectations of the new prisoners about their future lives were much more true to reality. Despite their open ambivalence about their families, they never doubted that they were going to continue to live with them just where they had left off. They hoped to continue their public and professional lives in the same way as they used to live them. 38. Most of the adaptations to the camp situation mentioned so far were more or less individual. The changes discussed below, namely, the regression to infantile behavior, was a mass phenomenon. Whereas the prisoners did not interfere with another's daydreams or with his attitudes to his family, they asserted their power as a group over these prisoners who objected to deviations from normal adult behavior. They accused those who would not develop a childlike dependency on the guards as threatening the security of the group, an accusation which was not without foundation, since the Gestapo always punished the group for the misbehavior of individual members. This regression into childlike behavior was, therefore even more inescapable than other types of behavior imposed on the individual by the impact of the conditions in the camp. 39. The prisoners developed types of behavior which are characteristic of infancy or early youth. Some of these behaviors developed slowly, others were immediately imposed on the prisoners and developed only in intensity as time went on. Some of these more or less infantile behaviors have already been discussed, such as ambivalence to one's family, despondency, finding satisfaction in irrealistic daydreaming rather than in action. 40. I am convinced that these behavior patterns were deliberately produced by the Gestapo. I mentioned that during the transportation the prisoners were tortured in a way in which a cruel and domineering father might torture a helpless child; here I should add that the prisoners were also debased by techniques which went much further into childhood situations. They were forced to soil themselves. In the camp the defecation was strictly regulated; it was one of the most important daily events, discussed in great detail. During the day the prisoners who wanted to defecate had to obtain the permission of the guard. It seemed as if the education to cleanliness would be once more repeated. It seemed to give pleasure to the guards to hold the power of granting or withholding the permission to visit the latrines. (Toilets were mostly not available.) This pleasure of the guards found its counterpart in the pleasure the prisoners derived from visiting the latrines, because there they usually could rest for a moment, secure from the whips of the overseers and guards. They were not always so secure, because sometimes enterprising young guards enjoyed interfering with the prisoners even at these moments. 41. The prisoners were forced to say," thou" to one another, which in Germany is indiscriminately used only among small children. They were not permitted to address one another with the many titles to which middle-and upper-class Germans are accustomed. On the other hand, they had to address the guards in the most deferential manner giving them all their titles. 42. The prisoners lived, like children, only in the immediate present; they lost the feeling for the sequence of time, they became unable to plan for the future or to give up immediate pleasure satisfactions to gain greater ones in the near future. They were unable to establish durable object-relations. Friendships developed as quickly as they broke up. Prisoners would, like early adolescents, fight one another tooth and nail, declare that they would never even look at one another or speak to one another, only to become close friends within a few minutes. They were boastful, telling tales about what they had accomplished in their former lives, or how they succeeded in cheating foremen or guards, and how they sabotaged the work. Like children they felt not at all set back or ashamed when it became known that they had lied about their prowess. 43. Another factor contributing to the regression into childhood behavior was the work the prisoners were forced to perform. New prisoners particularly were forced to perform nonsensical tasks, such as carrying heavy rocks from one place to another, and after a while back to the place where they had picked them up. On other days they were forced to dig holes in the ground with their bare hands, although tools were available. They resented such nonsensical work, although it ought to have been immaterial to them whether their work was useful. They felt debased when forced to perform "childish" and stupid labor, and preferred even harder work when it produced something that might be considered useful. There seems to be no doubt that the tasks they performed, as well as the mistreatment by the Gestapo which they had to endure, contributed to their disintegration as adult persons. 44. All changes produced by living in the camp seemed to force the prisoners back into childhood attitudes and behaviors and they became in this way more or less willing tools of the Gestapo. 45. The final adjustment to the life in the camp. A prisoner had reached the final stage of adjustment to the camp situation when he had changed his personality so. as to accept as his own the values of the Gestapo. A few examples may illustrate how this acceptance expressed itself. 46. The prisoners found themselves in an impossible situation due to the steady interference with their privacy on the part of the guards and other prisoners. So a great amount of aggression accumulated. In the new prisoners it vented itself in the way it might have done in the world outside the camp. But slowly prisoners accepted, as expression of their verbal aggressions, terms which definitely did not originate in their previous vocabularies, but were taken over from the very different vocabulary of the Gestapo. From copying the verbal aggressions of the Gestapo to copying their form of bodily aggressions was one more step, but it took several years to make this step. It was not unusual to find old prisoners, when in charge of others, behaving worse than the Gestapo, in some cases because they were trying to win favor with the Gestapo in this way, but more often because they considered this the best way to behave toward prisoners in the camp. 47. Practically all prisoners who had spent a long time in the camp took over the Gestapo's attitude toward the so-called unfit prisoners. Newcomers presented the old prisoners with difficult problems. Their complaints about the unbearable life in camp added new strain to the life in the barracks, so did their inability to adjust to it. Bad behavior in the labor gang endangered the whole group. So a newcomer who did not stand up well under the strain tended to become a liability for the other prisoners. Moreover, weaklings were those most apt eventually to turn traitors. Weaklings usually died during the first weeks in the camp anyway, so it seemed as well to get rid of them sooner. So old prisoners were sometimes instrumental in getting rid of the unfit, in this way making a feature of Gestapo ideology a feature of their own behavior. This was one of the many situations in which old prisoners demonstrated toughness and molded their way of treating other prisoners according to the example set by the Gestapo. That this was really a taking-over of Gestapo attitudes can be seen from the treatment of traitors. Self-protection asked for their elimination, but the way in which they were tortured for days and slowly killed was taken over from the Gestapo. 48. Old prisoners who seemed to have a tendency to identify themselves with the Gestapo did so not only in respect to aggressive behavior. They would try to arrogate to themselves old pieces of Gestapo uniforms. If that was not possible, they tried to sew and mend their uniforms so that they would resemble those of the guards. The length to which prisoners would go in these efforts seemed unbelievable, particularly since the Gestapo punished them for their efforts to copy Gestapo uniforms. When asked why they did it they admitted that they loved to look like one of the guards. 49. The identification with the Gestapo did not stop with the copying of their outer appearance and behavior. Old prisoners accepted their goals and values, too, even when they seemed opposed to their own interests. It was appalling to see how far formerly even politically well-educated prisoners would go in this identification. At one time American and English newspapers were full of stories about the cruelties committed in the camps. The Gestapo punished the prisoners for the appearance of these stories true to their policy of punishing the group for whatever a member or a former member did, and the stories must have originated in reports of former prisoners. In discussions of this event old prisoners would insist that it is not the business of foreign correspondents or newspapers to bother with German institutions and expressed their hatred of the journalists who tried to help them. I asked more than one hundred old political prisoners the following question : "If I am lucky and reach foreign soil, should I tell the story of the camp and arouse the interest of the cultured world?" I found only two who made the unqualified statement that everyone escaping Germany ought to fight the Nazis to the best of his abilities. All others were hoping for a German revolution, but did not like the idea of interference on the part of a foreign power. 50. When old prisoners accepted Nazi values as their own they usually did not admit it, but explained their behavior by means of rationalizations. For instance, prisoners collected scrap in the camp because Germany was low on raw materials. When I pointed out that they were thus helping the Nazis, they rationalized that through the saving of scrap Germany's working classes, too, became richer. When erecting buildings for the Gestapo, controversies started whether one should build well. New prisoners were for sabotaging, a majority of the old prisoners for building well. It seems that the majority of the old prisoners had realized that they could not continue to work for the Gestapo unless they could convince themselves that their work made some sense, so they had to convince themselves of this sense. 51. The satisfaction with which some old prisoners enjoyed the fact that, during the twice daily counting of the prisoners, they really had stood well at attention can be explained only by the fact that they had entirely accepted the values of the Gestapo as their own. Prisoners prided themselves of being as tough as the Gestapo members. This identification with their torturers went so far as copying their leisure time activities. One of the games played by the guards was to find out who could stand to be hit longest without uttering a complaint. This game was copied by the old prisoners, as though they had not been hit often and long enough without needing to repeat this experience as a game. 52. Often the Gestapo would enforce nonsensical rules, originating in the whims of one of the guards. They were usually forgotten as soon as formulated, but there were always some old prisoners who would continue to follow these rules and try to enforce them on others long after the Gestapo had forgotten about them. Once, for instance, a guard on inspecting the prisoners' apparel found that the shoes of some of them were dirty on the inside. He ordered all prisoners to wash their shoes inside and out with water and soap. The heavy shoes treated this way became hard as stone. The order was never repeated, and many prisoners did not even execute it when given. Nevertheless there were some old prisoners who not only continued to wash the inside of their shoes every day but cursed all others who did not do so as negligent and dirty. These prisoners firmly believed that the rules set down by the Gestapo were desirable standards of human behavior, at least in the camp situation. 53. Other problems in which most old prisoners made their peace with the values of the Gestapo included the race problem, although race discrimination had been alien to their scheme of values before they were brought into the camp. They accepted as true the claim that Germany needed more space (" Lebensraum"), but added "as long as there does not exist a world federation," they believed in the superiority of the German race. It should be emphasized that this was not the result of propaganda on the side of the Gestapo. The Gestapo made no such efforts and insisted in its statements that it was not interested in how the prisoners felt as long as they were full of fear of the Gestapo. Moreover, the Gestapo insisted that it would prevent them from expressing their feelings anyway. 54. Among the old prisoners one could observe other developments which indicated their desire to accept the Gestapo along lines which definitely could not originate in propaganda. It seems that, since they returned to a childlike attitude toward the Gestapo, they had a desire that at least some of those whom they accepted as all-powerful father-images should be just and kind. They divided their positive and negative feelings, strange as it may be that they should have positive feelings, they had them toward the Gestapo in such a way that all positive emotions were concentrated on a few officers who were rather high up in the hierarchy of camp administrators, but hardly ever on the governor of the camp. They insisted that these officers hide behind their rough surfaces a feeling of justice and propriety; he, or they, were supposed to be genuinely interested in the prisoners and even trying, in a small way, to help them. Since nothing of these supposed feelings and efforts ever became apparent, it was explained that he hid them so effectively because otherwise he would not be able to help the prisoners. The eagerness of these prisoners to find reasons for their claims was pitiful. A whole legend was woven around the fact that of two officers inspecting a barrack one had cleaned his shoes before entering. He probably did it automatically, but it was interpreted as a rebuff to the other officer and a clear demonstration of how he felt about the concentration camp. Conclusions: 55. Based upon my knowledge of the Gestapo, and my confinement in Dachau and Buchenwald for one year, which furnished the personal experience and laboratory for the foregoing observations, I have reached certain conclusions as to the Nazi reasons for setting up the concentration camps and the results which they sought to achieve by conducting such camps in the manner which I have described. The conclusions are as follows:
56. Some additional comment on these conclusions is indicated. With respect to (a) above-the spreading of terror among the rest of the people-that objective does not appear to have been an original purpose of the concentration camp device. When the concentration camps were first established the Nazis detained in them their more prominent foes. Pretty soon there were no more prominent enemies available, because they were either dead, in the jails, the camps, or had emigrated. Still, an institution was needed to threaten the opponents of the system. Too many Germans became dissatisfied with the system. To imprison all of them would have interrupted the functioning of the industrial production, the upholding of which was a paramount goal of the Nazis. So if a group of the population got fed up with the Nazi regime, a selected few members of this group would be brought into the concentration camp. If lawyers became restless, a few hundred lawyers were sent to the camp, the same happened to physicians when the medical profession seemed rebellious, etc. The Gestapo called such group punishments "actions" and this new system was first used during 1937-38, when Germany was first preparing to embark on the annexation of foreign countries. During the first of these "actions" only the leaders of the opposition group were punished. That led to the feeling that just to belong to a rebellious group was not dangerous, since only the leaders were threatened. Soon the Gestapo revised its system, and selected the persons to be punished so that they represented a cross-section through the different strata of the group. This new procedure had not only the advantage of spreading terror among all members of the group, but made it possible to_ punish and destroy the group without necessarily touching the leader if that was for some reason inopportune. Though prisoners were never told exactly why they were imprisoned, those imprisoned as representatives of a group came to know about it. Prisoners were interviewed by the Gestapo to gain information about their relatives and friends. During those interviews prisoners sometimes complained that they were imprisoned while more prominent foes of the Nazis were at liberty. They were told that it was just their bad luck that they had to suffer as members of a group, but if their fate did not teach the group to behave better, they would get a chance to meet them all in the camp. 57. Moreover, the Gestapo saw to it that the rest of the population learned of these "actions" through the newspapers. For purposes of intimidation not all news about the terror of the concentration camps was suppressed. Newspapers were permitted to reprint foreign reports on the concentration camps. The fact that the tortures were planned not only for breaking down the prisoners' ability to resist, but also for intimidating the rest of the population was demonstrated at the beginning of my experience with the Gestapo. When boarding the train for Dachau the SS men butchered several prisoners on an exposed platform. Hundreds of spectators viewed this incident from the windows of adjacent houses. 58. I learned from fellow prisoners how they were used as hostages. They had learned from letters that their release had been promised to their relatives if both prisoner and relatives would behave better, would be more loyal Nazis. The release was again and again postponed with the explanation that some relative was not a "good" Nazi. 59. A further example of (b) above, namely, the concentration camp as a training ground for Gestapo members in which they are so educated as to lose all human emotions, was afforded by the studied arrogance of Gestapo personnel in the presence of prisoners. The Gestapo considered, or pretended to consider, the prisoners the scum of the earth. They insisted that none of them was any better than the others. One of the reasons for this attitude was probably to impress the young guards who received their training in the camp that they were superior to even the most outstanding prisoner and to demonstrate to them that the former foes of the Nazis were now subdued and not worthy of any special attention. If a formerly prominent prisoner had been treated better, the simple guard would have thought that he is still influential; if he had been treated worse, they might have thought that he is still dangerous. This was in line with the desire to impress the guards that even a slight degree of opposition against the Nazi system led to the destruction of the person who dared to oppose, and that the degree of opposition made no difference in this respect. 60. The fact that these young SS men were not only permitted but encouraged to use former secretaries of state, generals, university professors as their slaves taught them not only to disrespect superiority, but to become convinced of their being "supermen." 61. Tortures were, moreover, such common occurrences in the camp that they no longer evoked any reaction in the guards. To kick and whip prisoners became to them a nearly automatic response. If a prisoner passed a guard he expected to be hit or kicked, since this seemed to be the "conditioned" response of these fledgling "supermen." Finally their daily contact with the undernourished prisoners accustomed them to feel no pity with a starving population. 62. An example of the use of the camp as a laboratory for experimentation in minimum food requirements (conclusion (c) above) were frequent changes in food rations. Bread rations were increased and decreased. On some days no food was distributed, on other days no food other than bread. This was particularly true in Buchenwald where the prisoners' weight was regularly checked. 63. To recapitulate, it is apparent that the concentration camp had an importance reaching far beyond its being a place where the Gestapo took revenge on its enemies. It was the main training ground for young Gestapo soldiers who were planning to rule and police Germany and all conquered nations; it was the Gestapo's laboratory where it developed methods for changing free and upright citizens not only into grumbling slaves, but into serfs who in many respects accepted their masters' values. The "old" prisoners still thought that they were following their own life goals and values, whereas in reality they accepted the Nazis' values as their own. 64. Moreover, what happened in an extreme fashion to the prisoners who spent several years in the concentration camp happened in less exaggarated form to the inhabitants of the big concentration camp which was formerly greater Germany. The system seemed too strong for an individual to break its hold over his emotional life, particularly if he found himself within a group which had more or less accepted the Nazi system. It seemed easier to resist the pressure of the Gestapo and the Nazis if one functioned as an individual; the Gestapo seemed to know that and therefore insisted on forcing all individuals into groups which they supervised. Some of the methods used for that purpose were the hostage system and the punishment of the whole group for whatever a member of it did; not permitting anybody to deviate in his behavior from the group norm, whatever this norm may be; discouraging solitary activities of any kind, etc. The main goal of the efforts seemed to be to produce in the subjects childlike attitudes and childlike dependency on the will of the leaders. Thus, it was very difficult, if not impossible, for individuals to resist the slow process of personality disintegration produced by the unrelenting pressure of the Gestapo and Nazi system. 65. Further eIaboration of the data, statements, and conclusions contained herein is to be found in an article which I wrote for an American publication, the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (1943, Vol. 38, pp. 417452). An authentic copy of such Article is annexed hereto as Exhibit A and made a part of this affidavit. [signed] Bruno Bettelheim Subscribed and sworn to before me this the 10th day of July 1945.
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