“What are the Origins of Extraordinary Evil?”

Friday, March 5th, 9:00-10:00AM

Dr. James WallerAuschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation

james.waller@auschwitzinstiute.org

General Principle• Political, social, or religious

groups wanting to commit mass murder do. Though there may be other obstacles, genocidal regimes are never hindered by a lack of willing executioners. They can always recruit individual human beings who will kill other human beings in large numbers and over an extended period of time. German soldiers of the Waffen-SS and the Reich

Labor Service look on as a member of an Einsatzgruppen prepares to shoot a Ukrainian Jew kneeling on the edge of a mass grave (Ukraine, 1941-1943).

Research Questions• How many people

does it take to carry out genocide and mass killing?

• Who are these people and how are they enlisted to perpetrate such extraordinary evil?

Men with an unidentified unit execute a group of Soviet civilians kneeling by the side of a mass grave (Kraigonev, USSR, 1941).

The Interahamwe (Kinyarwanda meaning Those Who Stand Together or Those Who Fight Together) was the most important of the militias formed by the Hutu ethnic majority of Rwanda.

What are the arguments for the extraordinary origins of extraordinary human evil?

Extraordinary Origins ofExtraordinary Human Evil

found in…

Extraordinary Nature of the CollectiveGustav LeBon

Reinhold NiebuhrM. Scott Peck

Nature of an Extraordinary Ideology

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

Nature of Extraordinary

Individuals

“Mad Nazi”Psychopathology

“Bad Nazi”Personality

1945-1950s: The “Mad Nazi” Thesis

• Nuremberg Trials (November 20, 1945-October 1, 1946)

• 22 Nazi Leaders• Douglas M. Kelley

(Psychiatrist) and Gustave Gilbert (Psychologist)

• IQ Testing• Rorschach Testing• Copenhagen War Crimes

Trials (1946)The defendants at the International Military Tribunal trial of war criminals at Nuremberg (1945-1946).

1945-1950s: The “Bad Nazi” Thesis

• Psychological Foundations of the Wehrmacht (1944) – Henry V. Dicks– “High F (Fanatical) Syndrome”

• The Authoritarian Personality (1950)– Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik,

Levinson, and Sanford– http://www.anesi.com/fscale.htm

What are the arguments for the ordinary origins of extraordinary human evil?

Ordinary Origins of Extraordinary Evil found in Ordinary Individuals

Divided Self Theories Unitary Self TheoriesWaller

Agentic StateStanley Milgram

DoublingRobert Jay Lifton

Obedience to Authority Experiments (1960-1963)

• “I must conclude that Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare to imagine…That is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.”– Obedience to Authority (1974), p.

175

Robert Jay Lifton (b. 1926)

• Doubling = “…the division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that a part-self acts as an entire self.”– The Nazi Doctors

(1986, p. 418).