| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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kill not just Jews but all Jews. As I suggested in
chapter 6, there is evidence that a specific order for the Final Solution was
issued by Göring to Heydrich on 31 July 1941 but was actually requested by
Heydrich and drafted by Eichmann.65 Much of
the impetus for the order may have come from below the highest levels of Nazi
authority, but always as expressions of known desires of Hitler and the people
around him. One plausible view is that Hitler, without issuing any such decree
under his name, made fully clear to close subordinates that he wanted the
threshold crossed, wanted to implement the genocide of Jews. In this
combination of drift and deliberation — and it is significant that
scholars are uncertain about whether a single order bringing about the Final
Solution can be identified66 — a point
is reached at which a collective understanding takes shape that the designated
group is to be annihilated. Collective understanding quickly becomes collective
will as perpetrators join in the process on the basis of perceptions of what is
expected of them, calling forth prior inclination and adaptive doubling. With
the Nazis, that genocidal process was probably well under way before the
introduction of a systematic plan for the genocide, as reflected in
Himmler’s discussions with Höss about creating a Jewish death factory
in Auschwitz.
That genocidal threshold requires extensive prior
ideological imagery of imperative. One has to do this thing see it through to
the end for the sake of a utopian vision of national harmony, unity, wholeness
When Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that this world belongs only to the
forceful whole man and not to the weak half man he was speaking for the special
virtue of those who are strong, hale and healthy, cured.*
That vision
was more fundamental for the Nazis than was any single myth about the Jews
(such as that of the world-destroying intent of the Elders of Zion) as a
warrant for genocide. The warrant is developed more broadly from many sources
that feed the image which associates destruction of the entire collectivity of
designated victims with the robust revitalization of one’s people and
race. There is likely to be a prefiguring or rehearsal in the form of a prior,
smaller genocidal event in the case of the Nazis, the direct medical killing or
“euthanasia” project. The smaller genocide develops the technology
(poison gas) personnel (medical units) and institutional structures (killing
centers) for the larger genocidal act. But the prior event does something more
it provides a shared sense notably among the élite that it can be
done that one can move from relatively amorphous imagery of victimization
and triage to the act of total murder; and that it seems to work — a
problem is solved, there is a sense of achievement, a movement toward health.
Early perpetrators become a scientific and moral élite and form
a spiritual engine of biological necessity. The rest of the population is not
deemed ready for full knowledge; there is an ambivalence between se-
[…crecy] |
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* Hitler’s preceding
sentence reads (with his emphasis): “If the power to fight for
one’s own health [he had been speaking of “decay” brought
about by prostitution and syphilis] is no longer present, the fight to live
in this world of struggle ends.”67
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