How would you define yourself? Are you a good person by nature? Are you a bad person? Or - are there really good people or bad people?
Is this a matter for the biological field, that is, are there people who are born to be good, extreme altruists, or alternatively radical evil?
In the perspective of history, the minority of the 'great' evil men, Stalin, Hitler, Nebuchadnezzar, and Haman, seem to prove that there are indeed certain people who are born with a cruel evil that is difficult to grasp, an evil that cannot be acquired by a human being unless it is accompanied by him from the moment of his birth.
If we look for the 'great' evil, we will undoubtedly find it in the category of Nazism, but even there we must inquire whether it was a broad German phenomenon, or perhaps a handful of officers who surrounded the charismatic leadership?
Indeed, many soldiers in the German army of World War II claimed that they were only following orders [see the Eichmann-Dymaniuk trial], while they themselves did not believe and would never have agreed with the cruel acts committed against Jews and other peoples.
Is this assumption correct?
Facts and field studies, as well as laboratory research, have proven that this is not the case.
We begin with the chilling experiment of Zimbardo and his students.
Zimbardo's experiment
Professor Zimbardo and his students placed an ad in the newspaper seeking healthy young men, ages 17-30, for a social study on prison life, for $15 a day.
For the experiment, the researchers set up a makeshift prison with barred prisoner cells and isolation cells (a dungeon).
The 21 subjects, who were healthy men in mind and body, were divided by coin toss to prisoners and guards, with none of them knowing when the study would begin or how they were required to fulfill their role.
The subjects all agreed to the conditions.
On the first day of the experiment, all the "prisoners" were "arrested" and taken in police cars to the "prison". Their bodies were searched and they were dressed in mismatched prisoner clothes, rubber boots were put on their feet and an iron chain was attached.
The guards, on the other hand, were dressed in khaki uniforms and armed with batons, whistles, and sunglasses.
The conditions set were that once in a while the prisoners would recite a verse, they would be allowed to go to the bathroom three times a day, and they would be identified by numbers attached to their uniforms and not by their names.
The prisoners were required to stay in prison for about two full weeks (the trial period) and the guards were expected to work eight-hour shifts, during which they could go home and continue their lives.
After preparations for the event were complete, the researchers began to monitor the "actors" - would they fulfill their "roles"? And how?
The results observed were so shocking that the researchers were forced to stop the experiment after only six days.
It turns out that the "guards" who were overwhelmed by a sense of power increasingly abused the "prisoners." They harassed them, searched their bodies, isolated them, worked them hard, and frequently woke them up in the middle of the night for checking and counting.
The abuse was especially severe when the "guard" was convinced that he was alone with the prisoner and that no one was watching him. The prisoners initially tried to rebel, but the retaliatory actions of the guards turned them into passive and spineless obedient.
A day and a half after the start of the experiment, the researchers were forced to release the first prisoner who was suffering from severe depression, and within a few days more and more prisoners were released until, on the sixth day, the remaining prisoners were in such shock and shock that the researchers were forced to stop the experiment, much to the disappointment of the "guards.".
Zimbardo himself wrote:
After only six days we had to close our mock prison because what we saw was terrifying. Again we could not, we or our subjects, distinguish where the person ends and the role he plays begins. Most of the subjects became "prisoners" or "guards," and could not clearly distinguish between themselves and the role they played. Almost every aspect of their behavior, thoughts, and emotions underwent dramatic changes... We were horrified because we saw boys ["guards"] behaving toward other boys as if they were despicable animals and enjoying being cruel to them. Other boys ["prisoners"] became submissive, servile, inhuman robots, thinking only of escape, of their own survival, and of their hatred of the "guards.".
It should be emphasized again that the subjects were volunteers, they agreed to the conditions, and the division between them was by flipping a coin. Zimardo came to the conclusion following his research [which is unethical, by the way] that anyone is likely to reach extreme situations and perform actions they would not believe they were capable of doing.
Hitler's army
We mentioned the Nazis and the horrors of the Holocaust. Since the end of World War II, there has been a great debate among historians as to whether the German soldiers who fought on the front - the Wehrmacht army - fought as "Hitler's army" and believed in his ideology, or, as the common and powerful argument goes, that the involvement of the Third Reich army in war crimes was secondary, and the main struggle was against Communism and its crimes. In other words: was the ordinary soldier a "Nazi" or a "legitimate soldier"?
Professor Bartov of Rutgers University, in his monumental book [translated from English], 'Hitler's Army', proves from a series of evidence that extends from an analysis of education in the years leading up to the war, to letters sent home by soldiers from the front, and especially from the last figure that reflects the clear position of the soldier from the battlefield, that the soldiers preferred to change the reality they knew intimately and to adapt it to the ideological tools of the regime.
Most of the soldiers who served in the Wehrmacht's combat units were children or teenagers when Hitler came to power in 1933. Hence, the vast majority of the army were children who grew up on the knees of Hitlerization, and their adulthood was shaped by the Nazi idea. Hence, it is understandable why Hitler was for them an admired and visionary figure, to the point of a juicy expression by one of the non-commissioned officers from October 1941, "For us, the words of the Führer are the words of the living God" [page 174] or from a letter written by Private von Kaul to his brothers: The Führer has grown to the dimensions of the great figure of the century, in whose hands is the fate of the world and humanity, eager for culture, may his pure sword subdue the satanic monster... This war is for a new life, a new ideology... I am happy that I can participate, even as a small corporal, in this war of light in darkness. [Ibid.].
From here to hatred of the Jew and the foreigner, the road was short. The soldiers dehumanized their victims and turned them into half-humans or animals, as is expressed in a number of letters quoted below.
In mid-July 1941, a Wehrmacht noncommissioned officer wrote home from the Eastern Front:
""The German people owe a great debt to the Fuhrer, for if these beasts of prey, our enemies here, were to come to Germany, there would be such murders as the world has never seen... When you read the "Sturmer" and see the pictures, this is only a faint illustration of what we see here and of the crimes committed by the Jews." [Page 113]
This stunning, inconceivable reversal is probably what led the average soldier to the following description:
""For God's sake you should have been in Würzburg during this Jewish business [Kristallnacht]. I don't know if things were as exciting as in Nuremberg, but we did a thorough cleaning here. I can assure you that the authorities didn't miss a single Jewish pig." [Page 122]
This letter was written by Karl Fuchs, in November 1938, neither a commander nor an SS officer, but a student and later a simple German soldier.
The Soviets were not spared the German soldier's fate either, Corporal Elohim Nakas wrote to his wife:
""You hardly see a face among them that seems reasonable and intelligent, they all look degenerate, and the wild, half-crazy look in their eyes makes them look like retards," he concludes, of course, because "it is incomprehensible how these villains, led by Jewish criminals, sought to leave their mark on Europe." [Page 167]
It should be emphasized again: these letters were not written by Eichmann, nor by Goebbels, but by 'ordinary' soldiers, or commanders from the lower ranks. There are dozens and hundreds more like them, [Hitler's Army, Chapter 4 The Distortion of Reality, and in the sources there].
It turns out that the common man can perform actions that would have seemed surreal to him until he actually performed them. And Maimonides already wrote:
Do not let this thing pass through your mind, as the foolish of the nations and most of the uneducated of the children of Israel say, that the Holy One, blessed be He, decrees upon man from the beginning of his creation to be righteous or wicked. This is not so, but every man deserves to be righteous like Moses our Lord or wicked like Joab...or merciful or cruel... [Rambam, Laws of Repentance, 5:2].
A life without Torah and commandments, without an external spiritual compass, based on a codex written by the One who created the world, can lead us to the worst place.
Also to Nazism.
Join the Haredim 10 Facebook page >>
Join the X page of Haredim 10 >>
Want more news, videos and stories? Join the Haredim 10 WhatsApp channel >>
