Last night, I caught glimpses of a program that I presume was on the history channel. It broadcasted rare photographs of the Nazis who conducted, operated, and perpetrated the Holocaust. Many of the images were not of the soldiers committing atrocities, but rather, of them talking, laughing, hanging out with friends, and playing musical instruments. As one historian commented, the pictures were disturbing because they expose a truth no one wants to admit: these murderers weren’t soulless demons. They were humans. For large portions of their lives, they managed to ignore the blood on their hands, to smile, to be normal.
Coincidentally, that was the day I finished reading Erik Larson’s In the Garden of the Beasts. (It’s not really a coincidence. Turn on the TV. There’s probably a program about the Nazis and/or Hitler playing right now. These shows are ubiquitous.)
Larson delves into the story of American Ambassador William E. Dodd, an unassuming diplomat who took up his position in Germany just after Hitler became chancellor. He brings his family with him to Berlin, where they live near the Tiergarten, a park at the political heart of the city (Captain Rohm lives several blocks away, and Hitler’s chancellery is located in the vicinity.) His daughter, Martha, befriends and dates top-tier Nazi officials. But the idealistic Americans soon grow disillusioned by the severity of the party and by the mindless conformity of the German public. Here’s Larson:
Throughout that first year in Germany, Dodd had been struck again and again by the strange indifference to atrocity that had settled over the nation, the willingness of the populace and of the moderate elements in the government to accept each new oppressive decree, each new act of violence, without protest. It was as if he had entered the dark forest of a fairy tale where all the rules of right and wrong were upended. He wrote to his friend Roper, “I could not have imagined the outbreak against the Jews when everybody was suffering, one way or another, from declining commerce. Nor could on have imagined that such a terroristic performance as that of June 30 would have been permitted in modern times.” (p. 328)
Dodd is witnessing the German population’s slow ebb toward learned helplessness. Like the trained dogs in Seligman’s famous experiment, they accepted the supposed inevitability of cruelty and personal violation. Nothing to be done to stop it, they perhaps believed. The photographs of the ebullient Nazis at the death camps are the logical extension of this foundational acceptance. Don’t worry, be happy.
Thus, the civilians became as acclimated to terror as the soldiers. The fish-out-of-water Dodds were less accommodating to the dissipation of their privacy:
The lives of the Dodds underwent a subtle change. Where once they had felt free to say anything they wished within their own home, now they experienced a new and unfamiliar constraint. In this their lives reflected the broader miasma suffusing the city beyond their garden wall. A common story had begun to circulate: One man telephones another and in the course of their conversation happens to ask, “How is Uncle Adolf?” Soon afterward the secret police appear at his door and insist that he prove that he really does have an Uncle Adolf and that the question was not in fact a coded reference to Hitler. Germans grew reluctant to stay in communal ski lodges, fearing they might talk in their sleep. They postponed surgeries because of the lip-loosening effects of anesthetic.
The society of the Third Reich has a lot to teach us about how oppression can thrive. It ripens on a heady diet of intolerance, fear, and utter helplessness. Dodd lost his ambassadorship when the U.S government acquiesced to the Nazi demands that he be removed. He spent the last few years of his life warning the national and international community of Hitler’s plans for world domination. Few, if any, listened. They told themselves that everything was normal, and each small ethical transgression was permissible. That’s how these things always happen. That’s how men and women transform into beasts before our very eyes.
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