The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet

Author:Mattias Desmet
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

The Nazis were indeed often convinced of their good intentions; a willingness to acknowledge this is a sign of maturity and essential to learning from history. But of course, this should in no way be interpreted as an argument to excuse their crimes. A human in the grip of mass formation may, in a sense, not know what he is doing, but that does not mean that he should be forgiven just like that. In a state of mass formation or hypnosis, people do still have the ability to make ethical choices. It is well known that, while under hypnosis, people may be made to do things they would be painfully ashamed of otherwise (undressing themselves, performing ridiculous dance moves) and be led to perform physical feats that they are normally incapable of (laying stiff as a plank between two chairs, for example), but they cannot be persuaded to cross ethical boundaries that they respect in an “awake” state.

The anonymity offered by the masses—the individual disappears into the crowd and feels unseen—is essentially just an excuse and a cover for letting one’s own compulsions run wild. Whoever commits crimes in a crowd shows, above all, that under normal circumstances, he controls himself only for tactical, and not ethical, reasons. The explanation for the immorality of the masses does not mean that mass formation removes a normally present ethical awareness.6 It means that it temporarily suspends the concealment of its lack. In this way, the masses reveal the real ethical dimensions of man.

Eichmann was not the only Nazi who believed in his remarkable ideological “benignness.” The entire Nazi discourse on the extermination camps testified to this. They called death in the gas chambers the “death of grace” (i.e., the least painful solution for people they felt were better off dead than alive). The Führer had that same death in mind even for the entire German people if Germany were to lose the war: He promised on his word of honor that he had set aside a sufficient volume of gas in case of this scenario. Even at the Nuremberg Trials, the Nazi leaders continued to speak matter-of-factly of such death as a “medical act,” a precision therapeutic intervention to render society “healthy.”

Arendt notes that there was something even more remarkable than the appeal for cooperation that Eichmann addressed to the Jews: that he also obtained that cooperation. Arendt writes:

The Jewish Councils of Elders were informed by Eichmann or his men of how many Jews were needed to fill each train, and they made out the list of deportees. And the Jews registered, filled out innumerable forms, answered pages and pages of questionnaires regarding their property so that it could be seized the more easily. And then, right on time, they assembled at the collection points and boarded the trains. The few who tried to hide or to escape were rounded up by a special Jewish police force. As far as Eichmann could see, no one protested, no one refused to cooperate, that thanks to the “general cooperation” everything was right.

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