The holocaust sounds like something straight out of a horror-thriller movie, and it’s incredibly hard to believe that humans can do something so horribly cruel and unspeakable out of plain hate. Not one or two, but an estimated six million European Jews and at least five million Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, Romany, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other victims have been killed deliberately in Nazi Germany as a part of an organized, state-funded persecution.
I remember the first time I heard about this. I’ve wondered if my friend had been pulling a joke on me or if she was telling me the plot of a movie and I’d missed the title. But no. I’ve crosschecked with my parents and teachers and looked at a senior’s history textbook. Then, the gross circumstances and the unsettling numbers started sinking in.
The first question that hit me was, why? Why would someone do something so horribly brutal? How could people participate in something like that and then go home, have a good meal, and sleep as if nothing had happened? The murder of two-thirds of the European Jewish population and others surely involved several lengthy explanations other than a simple word called hate. It wasn’t just the Nazis, there were a million other bystanders and accomplices.
Social psychology is a branch of psychology devoted to understanding how others influence one’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, and this branch was pioneered by five Jewish men who lost their everything after the Holocaust, and were haunted by the very same question: How can something like this happen in the first place?
Kurt Lewin, Solomon Asch, Serge Moscovici, Henri Tajfel, and Stanley Milgram were the five men whose work formed the foundation of psychology. Their studies, research, and experiments on several social phenomena have given us ground-breaking revelations about everyday scenarios. Many other researchers have followed their lead and unearthed other crucial evidence.
While we can’t generalize one reason for the entirety of the population that stood by and killed, there are two broad categories of interpretations that most likely interacted with the individual’s psychology to bring about the catastrophe. The two categories are cultural explanations, like ideology and antisemitism, and the other category includes the social-psychological explanations like fear, pressures to conform, deference to authority, and opportunism.
Here are the broad, generalized social-psychological explanations behind the holocaust:
Deference to Authority:
Citizens in Nazi Germany, whether they be members of the police, military unit, or normal citizens, are expected to follow established chains of command. One is expected to carry out the superior’s orders, or their careers and jobs might be out on the line.
Stanley Milgram conducted one of the most famous experiments on obedience after observing the justifications of acts of genocide in the Nuremberg War Criminal Trials. Their defense was mostly based on “obedience”; they justified their acts by saying that they were just following the orders of superiors.
Milgram wanted to determine whether this explanation was just a common one after the Nazi killings, or whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures.
As a part of his experiment, each participant took on the role of the “teacher” who would deliver a shock to a “student” in the neighbouring room upon incorrect answers. The shocks were fake, and the “student” was an actor, but the participant wasn’t aware of these facts. Milgram had developed an intimidating shock generator, starting from 15 volts up to 450 volts. The final switches were simply labeled ‘XXX’
As the experiment progressed, the participant would plead to be released, complain about a heart condition, and even bang the wall to be released once they reached the 300–450-volt level. Beyond this point, the learner would go silent, and the experimenter would prompt the participant to treat this as an incorrect answer and administer a shock. Though many participants would become distraught, agitated, and angry at the experimenter, they would continue to follow the orders until the very end.
His study’s results showed that 65% of the participants in the study delivered the maximum shocks. Out of 40 participants, 26 delivered the maximum shocks, while 14 stopped before reaching the maximum levels. Milgram stated that some situational factors could explain the high levels of obedience. The physical presence of an authority figure dramatically increased obedience; the shocks were said to be painful, not dangerous; the fact that Yale [a trusted academic institution] sponsored this study; the selection of teachers and students seemed random, and the experimenter seemed to be a competent expert.
Later experiments conducted by Milgram demonstrated that the presence of rebellious peers dramatically decreased obedience levels. 36 out of 40 participants refused to go along with the experimenter when they noticed other people refused to go along with the experimenter’s orders.
This experiment concludes that people are likely to follow orders from authority figures, even to the extent of killing others. Obedience to authority is ingrained into us based on how we were raised, which seems to be high in that era’s German society.
Conformity:
Conformity can be defined as the act of matching beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours to match norms, politics, or being like-minded. It is the process where people change their beliefs, attitudes, perceptions, and actions to closely match those held by groups to which they want to belong. People conform to group pressures because of two desires: the desire to be accepted by others and to accurately perceive reality.
Solomon Asch’s famous experiment on conformity involved showing a set of lines and asking some questions regarding their length. Though the right answer was obvious, the other six people in the room [who are actors] gave the wrong answer. Asch found that two-thirds of his subjects seemed to be influenced by the wrong answer given by the rest of the people around them, was driven by the pressure, and gave the wrong answer though they knew that the answer was wrong. When they were interviewed after the experiment, most of them said that they didn’t believe what they gave was the right answer, but continued to give that answer because they didn’t want to be seen as strange, or become fragmented from the group because of their beliefs.
The tendency to conform can lead to a larger-scale catastrophe, and it was what happened during the Nazi killings. It demonstrates the probability of many of the perpetrators not wanting to be the odd one out and not conform, so it would seem easier to follow the authorities’ orders. This experiment demonstrated that people would often go along with others even though they believe others are wrong.
Fear:
Fear is also seen as an influential factor behind the holocaust. People did not disobey their superior’s orders, and bystanders didn’t speak out mostly because of the paralyzing fear that accompanied the very thought of defying orders. People tend to go into ‘self-protection’ mode by seeing everything go down, prioritizing themselves over others. They would fear the consequences– they might lose their jobs, their homes, and their lives too. What was happening to the Jews might happen to them if they dared cross the undrawn line. It was this fear that shut most people down. It is impossible not to see the cruelty and other humans being mistreated, but people start to withdraw from the victims to protect themselves. Some would repeat the justifications made by the Nazis for killing Jews to justify their actions as passive bystanders by devaluing victims and coming to see them as deserving of their fate.
Several other studies and their conclusions help us understand the Holocaust in a better manner. Kurt Lewin’s experiments with groups of children shed light on how leaders of the groups shape the children’s behaviours. Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated what would happen when a good person was put in an evil position. It was a study conducted to examine the psychological effects of powerlessness and authority in a prison environment. The psychological abuse by the participants turned so cruel, that the experiment was stopped mid-way.
Overall, the causes of the Holocaust can’t be pinned down on one reason. Several factors interacted with different people in different ways, causing the catastrophe to take place. The horrors of the Nazi Ideology are still partly a mystery to us, and they have led to the creation of a new field of science: the Science of Evil.
- Chandana Bonagiri
References:
1. BBC. (2020, February 11). Radio 4 in Four - How the Holocaust created a new field of science: the Science of Evil. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4B9rmwvZwQN45rckdzQKxp2/how-the-holocaust-created-a-new-field-of-science-the-science-of-evil
2. Holocaust. (n.d.). https://cpa.ca/documents/Holocaust.html
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