| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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the Auschwitz community. Men pull together for the
“common good,” even for what was perceived among Nazi doctors as
group survival. Drinking enhanced the meeting of the minds between old-timers,
who could offer models of an Auschwitz self to the newcomer seeking entry into
the realm of Auschwitz killing. The continuing alcohol-enhanced sharing of
group feelings and group numbing gave further shape to the emerging Auschwitz
self.
Over time, as drinking was continued especially in connection
with selections, it enabled the Auschwitz self to distance that killing
activity and reject responsibility for it. Increasingly, the Jews as victims
failed to touch the overall psychological processes of the Auschwitz self.
Whether a Nazi doctor saw Jews without feeling their presence, or did not see
them at all, he no longer experienced them as beings who affected him —
that is, as human beings. Much of that transition process occurred within days
or even hours, but it tended to become an established pattern by two or three
weeks.
The numbing of the Auschwitz self was greatly aided by the
diffusion of responsibility. With the medical corpsmen closer to the actual
killing, the Auschwitz self of the individual doctor could readily feel
“It is not I who kill.” He was likely to perceive what he did as a
combination of military order (“I am assigned to ramp duty”),
designated role (“I am expected to select strong prisoners for work and
weaker ones for ‘special treatment’”), and desirable attitude
(“I am supposed to be disciplined and hard and to overcome
‘scruples’”). Moreover since “the Führer decides upon
the life and death of any enemy of the state,”42 responsibility lay with him (or his immediate
representatives) alone. As in the case of the participant in direct medical
killing (“euthanasia”), the Auschwitz self could feel itself no more
than a member of a “team,” within which responsibility was so shared,
and so offered to higher authorities, as no longer to exist for anyone on that
team. And insofar as one felt a residual sense of responsibility one could
reinvoke numbing by means of a spirit of numerical compromise: “We give
them ten or fifteen and save five or six.”
Numbing could become
solidified by this focus on “team play,” and “absolute
fairness” toward other members of the team. Yet if the “team”
did something incriminating, one could stay numbed by asserting one’s
independence from it. I have in mind one former Nazi doctor’s denial of
responsibility for the medical experiments done by a team to which he provided
materials from his laboratory, even though he showed up on occasion at a
concentration camp and looked over experimental charts and subjects. That same
doctor also denied responsibility for the “team” (committee) decision
to allocate large amounts of Zyklon-B for use in death camps though he was
prominent in the decision making process because, whatever other members of the
team knew, he had not been informed that the gas would be used for killing. In
this last example in particular, we sense that numbing can be willed and clung
to in the face |
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