How Could This Happen by Dan McMillan

Author:Dan McMillan [McMillan, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

THE ABSENT MORAL COMPASS

No one wants to be thought a coward.

—A member of a German shooting squad, explaining why he had helped murder thousands of Jewish civilians1

The causes of the Holocaust discussed in the preceding chapters help explain why Hitler ordered the murders and why his immediate subordinates, and countless Nazi true believers, did his bidding. They also explain why many tens of thousands of educated men in the civil service, professions, business world, and military also participated in the murders, if not directly in the killing. However, many murderers were neither members of the Nazi Party nor even, in many cases, especially anti-Semitic. Why did they kill? To answer this question one must look to patterns of behavior that are common to the human condition, and not specific to Germany or even Europe. And after all, the Holocaust has not been the only genocide. The sad fact is, any dictator who wants to murder civilians can easily find men to do the job.

To explain why thousands of ordinary Germans—not to mention ordinary Turks, Cambodians, Rwandans, and a few Americans—have committed mass murder, psychologists and historians have studied a cluster of three closely related human behaviors: automatic obedience to authority; conformity to the behavior of a group; and adaptation to a role and situation. The experiments of social psychologists demonstrate the power of these mechanisms to swiftly and drastically alter people’s ideas of what is right and wrong. Put another way, most human beings lack a moral compass and quickly rewrite their moral code to fit their circumstances.

Two examples illustrate these behavioral patterns. The first is Reserve Police Battalion 101, a group of 500 uniformed Germans who helped shoot 38,000 Jews in German-occupied Poland in 1942 and 1943, and who brutally rounded up another 45,000 victims and forced them onto trains headed for the gas chambers of Treblinka. The second is Charlie Company, a group of 105 American soldiers who shot roughly 500 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai, South Vietnam, on March 16, 1968. The American people also reacted to the My Lai massacre in ways that reveal widespread habits of obedience in American society, at least at that time.2

Turning first to Reserve Police Battalion 101, we know a great deal about their motivations and attitudes, thanks to Christopher Browning’s remarkable study, as well as to Daniel Goldhagen’s work. Both scholars studied these men using judicial interrogations of some 210 members of the battalion.3

The men of the reserve police battalion were thoroughly “ordinary.” Raised to adulthood under the old German Empire (1871–1918) or the democratic Weimar Republic (1919–1933), they had experienced none of the Nazi indoctrination that molded so much of German youth after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Except for some of their officers, they were not Nazi fanatics like those who volunteered for the SS. Instead, they were drafted into the Order Police because they were too old for combat duty. Nearly two-thirds of the rank-and-file members came from the working class of Hamburg, a city in which the Nazi Party had made few inroads before Hitler seized power.

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