What drives ordinary everyday people to become mass killers? What are the psychological mechanisms and cultural factors that lead to genocide? What were the causes of the Holocaust? Can we theorize a psychology of genocide? A theory of genocide?
The Holocaust was not perpetrated solely by a few sadistic psychopaths but by tens of thousands of everyday Germans, Poles, Frenchmen, Austrians, Slovakians, in fact, much of Europe took part.
If any of us could be motivated under the right conditions to become mass serial killers, how can we protect ourselves against the threat? How might we innoculate our societies and cutlures from decending into genocide?
There are a number of factors that lead to the Holocaust. Compartmentalization, euphemism, conformity, authority, rationalization, propaganda, anti-Semitism, victimhood, and association, in particular.
Gustav Le Bon, for example, argued that individuals are more likely to conform in a crowd because of anonymity and mimesis. Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments looked at conformity to authority. This combined with rationalisations like ‘its either us or them’ or ‘they won’t survive through the winter anyway.’
There was still a system of belief - an ideology - and almost a decade of propaganda disseminated by the Nazi Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (RMVP). Years of anti-Semitism in Germany and Europe led to conspiracy theories about Jewish world domination. While Britain, the USSR, and America were all consistently associated with ‘Jewish aggressors’.
When a person perceives themselves as a victim and a prisoner as an aggressor in a war of survival and we combine this with the pressure to conform and submit to authority the probability for murder increases. In Nazi Germany, everything was made to fit this formula.
Ervin Staub proposes a model of genocide that has three initial stages:
First, there’s the frustration of basic needs.
Second, An out-group is identified that’s the cause.
Next, The in-group is motivated by a ‘utopian vision’ that excludes a certain group.
And Herbert Kelman has also argued that the requirements are threefold: authorization, routinization, and dehumanization.
How does all of this fit together?
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Credits:
Milgram Experiment Diagram - Fred the Oyster, CC BY-SA 4.0, creativecommons.org/licenses/..., via Wikimedia Commons
Milgram video - Movie S1 from Slater M, Antley A, Davison A, Swapp D, Guger C, Barker C, Pistrang N, Sanchez-Vives M, Rustichini A. "A Virtual Reprise of the Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiments". PLOS ONE. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0000039. PMID 17183667. PMC: 1762398. (Creative Commons 3.0)
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