There's a new exhibit at the US Holocaust Museum, which they've put up on-line. It's a collection of 116 photographs from Auschwitz, showing SS officers in their spare time, on-duty, and so on. The first 12 are the ones I find the most interesting and simultaneously unsettling; it's just photos of people having fun. Lots of them look like really nice people; the sorts of faces you would expect to see amongst your friends. Except that the men are wearing the uniforms of SS officers, the women of SS auxiliaries, even while they're playing accordions and laughing in the rain.
(There was lots of rain there. I've heard that the amount of smoke produced tended to seed clouds.)
Several of the later photos are interesting, too. #57 shows the commandant (Richard Baer), the previous commandant (Rudolf Hoess), and Josef Mengele just hanging out; this picture has a lot less of the "oh, what nice guys" aspect and a lot more of the "wow. So this is what villains look like in their spare time" aspect.
The usual sentiments about "the banality of evil" apply. The NY Times has an article and op-ed piece about the exhibit, which have some interesting bits about the provenance and significance of the photos.
What really strikes me about these is that the people photographed were doing horrifying things on a day-to-day basis; and not impersonal ones, but the sort where you're hearing people screaming in agony and terror, dragging them off and shooting them, and so on. Nor were they situations like combat where adrenaline and continual danger can keep you from thinking too much about it. Yet they seem calm, relaxed, happy. How did they manage to section off their lives to this extent?
It's amazing how soothing people find the idea that they're making the world a better place and it's all for a good cause... And it probably helped that they had fully dehumanized their victims.
Borges has a really good short story on the theme, actually, you might like it. I think it's called Deutsches Requiem.
The dehumanization and idea of working for a good cause is not even necessary. Numerous psych studies, from the Stanford Prison experiment to numerous electrical shock experiments have shown that the large majority of people will do what they're told to do, even if it is something they know is morally wrong. The internal motivation to follow the crowd and follow orders seems much stronger than the will to do what is right.
One might argue that the subjects in the Stanford Prison experiment et al thought they were furthering science... It's unfortunate, but psych experiments do have an unavoidable skew. However, I seem to recall that even the Stanford experiments resulted in the "jailers" mentally dehumanizing the "prisoners". Popular method for resolving cognitive dissonance, that.
September 24 2007, 21:40:29 UTC 8 years ago
September 25 2007, 05:50:45 UTC 8 years ago
Borges has a really good short story on the theme, actually, you might like it. I think it's called Deutsches Requiem.
October 3 2007, 08:34:47 UTC 8 years ago
October 3 2007, 15:49:36 UTC 8 years ago