Group Hatred in Nazi Germany: 80 Years Later

Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp

Source: Pixabay/Pexels

As we are approaching the 80-year mark since Germany invaded Poland in 1939, which was the start of World War II and the Holocaust, we are still asking why.

Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Germans willingly and knowingly participated in the torture and mass murders of innocent people, and a significant number of those who didn’t participate were passive bystanders who knew about the mass killings and the intentions of the Nazi regime.

How could it happen?

The Germans were not sadistic psychopath killers. The vast majority of active German participants and passive bystanders had quiet normal and stable personalities before Hitler came to power. Their family lives were remarkably similar to those of average middle-class American families today. They had jobs to support their families, sent their children to school, donated to local charities, and socialized with friends and family on weekends.

Neither participants nor passive bystanders showed signs of having psychopathic or sadistic dispositions prior to the Nazi era. Nor were they immune to feelings of empathy and moral indignation and disgust. A number of the ordinary middle-aged German men recruited to shoot children and women in Jewish villages willingly embarked on the mission but “only” shot a few before succumbing to moral disgust—an emotion unfamiliar to killer psychopaths and sadists.

Nor is there any evidence that people (for the most part) participated exclusively out of fear of retribution from the Nazi military leader or others in power. Political and social forces made people fearful of protesting the atrocities they knew were taking place. There were clear limits to the kinds of free speech and choices the dictatorship would tolerate. Those who explicitly condemned the regime or obstructed the elimination of the Jews were sent to death camps.

But although anti-Nazi speech and obstruction of “justice” was punishable by death, no one was coerced to actively contribute to the “final solution.” Even when explicitly given a chance to opt-out, most recruits went on to participate in killing and torture. Out of the 500 ordinary men in Germany who were recruited to do roundups of the 1,800 Jews in the village of Józefów, only fifteen decided not to participate after being told by Major Wilhelm Trapp that they were to shoot the woman, children, and the elderly but could step aside if they didn’t want to be part of the killing.

The Germans who voluntarily signed up to do roundups or work at Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, Dachau, and other concentration camps where the inmates were killed in gas chambers or used as human guinea pigs in sadistic medical experiments came from all social classes and trades. Recruits for camps and battalions included soldiers, police officers, lawyers, doctors, nurses, secretaries, train engineers, factory workers, and academics.

Hitler calls attention to class in a speech in January 1937:

Numerous people whose families belong to the peasantry and working classes are now filling prominent positions in this National Socialist State. Some of them actually hold the highest offices in the leadership of the nation, as Cabinet Ministers, Reichsstatthalter and Gauleiter. But National Socialism always bears in mind the interests of the people as a whole and not the interests of one class or another. The National Socialist Revolution has not aimed at turning a privileged class into a class which will have no rights in the future. Its aim has been to grant equal rights to those social strata that hitherto were denied such rights.

While military-trained people were in command of the camps, ordinary Germans executed the actual atrocities. People who had previously lived side by side with Jews, willingly carried out, assisted with, or facilitated sadistic human experimentation.

Medical doctors didn’t succumb to moral disgust after deliberately inflicting mustard gas burns; cutting prisoners’ legs and dosing the wounds with bacteria, dirt, glass, and splinters to cause infection; sterilizing them by exposing them to radiation and then cutting them open to inspect the effectiveness of the procedure; keeping them immersed in ice water to test how long the human body could survive in freezing temperatures; or infecting them with deadly diseases, such as malaria, tuberculosis, typhus, syphilis, and gonorrhea in order to test cures. One Holocaust survivor reports having been forced to stand still for two hours while thousands of mosquitoes infected him with malaria.

The vast majority of ordinary Germans who were in charge of the daily function of the camps, including nurses, research assistants, and camp guards, did not quit their jobs or ask for a transfer after witnessing brutal torture.

In the death camp at Auschwitz, Dr. Josef Mengele subjected young twins to experimentation, intended to examine the genetic origin of diseases and test medical and surgical procedures. The barbaric twin studies ranged from injecting them with chemicals to see whether it would change their eye color to literally sewing them together to create conjoined twins.

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Mengele, however, was not working alone. He was one among a team of 30 physicians under the command of SS captain Dr. Eduard Wirths, aided by hundreds of trained nurses and untrained assistants. Trained medical professionals among the prisoner population were also recruited under duress to do the dirty work.

Pure contempt for the Jews cannot explain the willing participation of ordinary Germans in these unspeakable atrocities. Contemned small-time crooks of the Aryan “race” were not rounded up and sent to concentration camps.

Nor can the existence of a dehumanizing stereotype be the sole factor motivating ordinary Germans. The vast majority of Hitler's executioners would not willingly have subjected their pet dogs to this kind of torture.

The Germans did what they did because they thought it was just and necessary.

They thought it was just because they were conditioned to hate the Jews. They were taught that the Jews had destroyed the economy and that Jewish international Bolsheviks in Moscow were secretly scheming to destroy non-Jewish Germans and enact a Communist coup.

They thought it was necessary because they believed the Jews were a great danger to the welfare of Germans.

The Germans had been mentally prepared for the ugly war long before it started.

The anti-Semitism of the time was not merely the result of Nazi propaganda. It dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The view of the ordinary German was that the Jews were duplicitous, malevolent, and powerful.

The concept of race that helped colonists rationalize slavery in Colonial America also played an important role in the German ideology. The common view of race was that traits essential to a race are unchangeable. This meant that the slyness that was alleged to be inherent to the Jewish “race” could not be dealt with by educating them in the German Christian values.

The preexisting anti-semitism made it easier for the Nazi propagandists to plant fear and false beliefs and later justify the war, which the Nazis officially blamed on Poland.

But it is a reasonable guess that most Germans wouldn’t have been ready to physically exterminate the Jews, had it not been for Hitler and his dark souls’ skillful manipulation tactics to turn people’s pre-existing anti-Jewish sentiments into hatred, initially via propaganda, books, essays, and speeches, alluding to a Jewish conspiracy to gain world leadership, and later also by staging hoaxes of foreign attacks on Germans and the Nazi regime’s benevolence.

In the second part of this post, we look closer at how the Nazi regime used propaganda and hoaxes to transform an entire population into Marionette puppets.