Dehumanization has been used by oppressive regimes for all time and it is a technique that is still used today, not just by regimes but also large scale cooperations. It is an easy way to get people rallied around a common enemy so one you can distract them from other operations and two they are more likely to follow you. This dehumanization of the jews was particularly easy because of the extreme antisemitism the party used for propaganda and the history of jewish oppression. Lowering them to the status of insects was hardly any trouble at all. These ordinary men didnt mind killing insects. This technique was used in other terrible genocides. In Rwanda the Tutsis were called Tutsi cockroaches. This simple phrase caught on and it made these people easy to kill. Overall there was the beginnings of war and people needed stability and they could find it by being part of the holocaust. There were obviously some who saw this as wrong but some truly didnt see the harm and others were just doing their job.
***Interesting fact
I was watching this documentary this weekend called The Cooperation (on netflix instant watch) It talked about all the terrible things large scale cooperations do. There was one section about how IBM funded the Nazi party by giving them punch card machines to use in the concentration/death camps. IBM claims they had no control of sales over seas but their documents showed that the sale was made from headquarters in NY. I thought that was interesting.
PS sorry for the late post
While reading Ordinary Men, the them of dehumanization kept popping into my head. I think it plays a major role in the psyche of the guards. I for one am not in any way justifying their actions or making light of their decisions but it is a higher scaled example of the type of dehumanization that occurs in the minds of individuals when propaganda/ "brainwashing" is instilled in a group of people. To further the prominence of dehumanization we can take a more scientific approach and look at Zimbardo's experiment for example. These seemingly "normal", intelligent, non barbaric, well raised young college students were given an idea that the "prisoners" in the experiment had done something wrong and deserved to be treated less than equal. They were given power, and suddenly things that they had never imagined they would do were happening. These Nazi guards shared a similar effect as the participants of the Zimbardo experiment. Sadly enough, the Holocaust was not an experiment, and a lot more was loss then pride and embarrassment.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that you bring up The Reader in association with the guards. I've read parts of Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem", in which the issue of blame and responsibility in the Holocaust is discussed heavily. Arendt discusses how Adolf Eichmann viewed his own responsibily in the Holocaust. Eichmann explains that he not only obey the explicit orders he was given, but that he was obeying the law. Could he truly be held responsible for the atrocities of the Holocaust? I would say that it is every person's own responsibility to obey their moral compass and decide for themselves if what they are being told to do is "right". With the soldiers in "Ordinary Men", having been told that did not have to participate in the atrocities, the question of responsibility becomes much more clear. Because they were told that they could leave, following the orders of superior officers essentially became optional- not that they could disobey, but they could leave.
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