Jennifer Teege, author of My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me, spoke in my town. I asked her about English language books which might help me understand the mentality of Germans during fascism, and she recommend this book.
Sönke Neitzel, a historian, and Harald Welzer, a social psychologist, analyzed declassified transcripts of surreptitiously recorded conversations of German prisoners of war in British & American prisons during World War II. These transcripts confirm both the shocking level of violence fascists unleashed and the suitability of the psychological and institutional structures of a modern capitalist, industrial society to support this violence. Reading it in the United States of America in 2019 increases the urgency of radical resistance to oligarch-inspired labor docility, militarism and global genocide through ecological destruction.
"Radical resistance" is not the McResistance practiced today in the United States by Centrist Democrats & the "Never-Trump" Republicans. "Radical resistance" isn't Günter Grass's Social Democrat in The Tin Drum, who pasted posters even when it rained.
... large parts of the existing [pre-Nazi] frame of reference continued to function, and "life carrying on as usual" could be interpreted as a triumph over the Nazis. How could people have hit upon the idea in early 1933 that they needed an entirely new interpretation of reality, that what was happening was not something one could evaluate using customary criteria? Even if someone had sensed that the times were different, where would he have gotten the instruments to decode this new reality? p. 28When fascism's practices are introduced into a modern industrial society, conditioned by the workplace into obedience, task-oriented, specialized thinking and productivity evaluations, little time is necessary before the vast majority of the members of that society actively or passively support fascism.
The "de-Jewification" of Germany and broad stretches of Europe was, in [Peter] Longerich's words, "the instrument for gradually penetrating the various realms of individual existence." This penetration allowed moral standards to be reformatted, bring about an obvious change in what people considered normal and deviant, good and bad, appropriate and outrageous. Nazi society was by no means amoral. ... [The many instances of mass murder] were the result of the astonishingly quick and deep establishment of a "National Socialist morality" that made the biological defined Volk and the community it entailed the sole criterion for moral behavior and promoted different values and norms that those obtained, for instance, in post-World War II Germany. pp 30-1
Human beings in general behave according to particular rationales, and it is fundamentally false to imagine that they clearly see universal contexts when acting. For that reason, social processes always produce unintended results, outcomes no one desired but everyone helped to bring about. p 124
[W]ar is accepted as long as it can be articulated in terms of peacetime, workplace values such as diligence, endurance, persistence, duty, obedience, and voluntary subordination: 'The only thing that changes on the frontline or as part of a special commando is the content of one's work, not one's attitude toward work itself or the way it is organized. In this sense, the soldier is a "worker of war." p. 335"Radical resistance" stops the practice of fascism before it reaches this critical threshold.
Aside from the collapse in political power for the working classes, the demise of the militant labor movement means people's idea of "refusal" & "resistance" has devolved into purchasing the latest "anti-establishment" clothes or music. Likewise, at a time when peace and environmental protection are needed more than ever, those movements have become corporatized into the non-profit industrial complex.
Neitzel & Welzer conclude by analyzing the Wikileaks "Collateral Murder" video from Iraq.
[E]ntirely unrelated to historical, cultural, and political circumstances, the definition of a specific situation and all the actors present in it establishes the frame of reference for everything that happens subsequently. Group thinking and the dynamic force of unfolding violence ensure that the ending is almost always deadly. p. 329While the theme of the collapse of our global ecosystem due to humans' economic activities is not explicitly mentioned in the book, the parallels in our psychological attitudes towards our own participation in this crime are worthy of attention. Very few of us are ideologically committed to destroying the biosphere. Most of us even have some portions of the biosphere, such as a beach or mountain or national park, with which we are "friends." Yet our routine habits of production and consumption and our obedience to the status quo polities which conceal and further the grand scale production and consumption of corporations are the accounting, maintenance and logistical services which located Jews, arrested them, dispossessed them, enslaved them and then killed them. We deny it's happening. We say others are doing it far worse. We think we are compelled to do this. We hope some technology (clean coal, species regeneration, artificial ecosystems) will sustain us.
Harald Welzer has authored another book which deals with the environmental crisis.
According to the Discovery Channel series on Theodore Kaczynski, the manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future claimed that the biggest problem with industrial society is that it reduces the ability of people to refuse to comply. I've never read the manifesto or felt anything but horror at the violence he committed, but there does seem to be no shortage of compliance as humanity is galloping perilously close to dangerous cliffs.
When I occasionally have happy thoughts about organized religion, I think that it may train people to refuse to participate in evil. Most days, however, I think of religion's ineffectual or inflammatory role during the United States's civil war and World War I. I hope a better understanding of religion would restrain a believer from participating in movements where evil means are justified by appeals to a larger good. And I know I've contradicted myself: I claim that radical politics are necessary, and I warn people to avoid the Pied Piper.
We need a politics with the urgency to address the global issues facing humanity. We need a way for people to support policies that don't depend on oppression, expropriation and violence. We need economies which don't externalize costs to workers and the environment. The conversations of the German POWs reveal how difficult it will be for humans to tread such a path.
November 2012 interview of Sönke Neitzel on Canadian Public TV's "The Agenda With Steve Paikin."
Appendix of Lengthy Quotations
When the System Goes Bad, Individual Virtue is Irrelevant
As the Holocaust and the Nazi war of annihilation show, the vast majority of civilians, as well as soldiers, SS men, and police officers, behaved in discriminatory, violent, and inhumane fashion if the situation at hand seemed to encourage and promote such behavior. Only a tiny minority proved capable of humane resistance. According to the standards of the time, humane behavior was deviant, and brutality was conformist. For that reason, the entire collection of events known as the "Third Reich" and the violence it produced can be seen as a gigantic experiment, showing what sane people who see themselves as good are capable of if they consider something to be appropriate, sensible, or correct. ... In psychological terms, the inhabitants of the Third Reich were as normal as people in all other societies at all other times. The spectrum of perpetrators was a cross section of normal society. No specific group of people proved immune to the temptation, in Günther Anders's phrase, of "inhumanity with impunity." The real-life experiment that was the Third Reich did not reduce the variables of personality to absolute zero. But it showed them to be of comparatively slight, indeed often negligible, importance. [pp. 24-5]
The Underlying Frame of Reference for German Soldiers Was the Workplace
Interpretive paradigms are especially central to how soldiers in World War II experienced others, their own mission, their "race," Hitler, and Jews. Paradigms equip frames of reference with prefabricated interpretations according to which experiences can be sorted. They also include interpretations from different social contexts that are imported into the experience of war. This is especially significant for the notion of "war as a job," which in turn is extremely important for soldiers' interpretation of what they do. ... The interpretive paradigm from industrial society for how soldiers experienced and dealt with war also informs philosopher Ernst Jünger's famous description of soldiers as "workers of war." In Jünger's words, war appears as a "rational work process equally far removed from feelings of horror and romanticism" and the use of weapons as "the extension of a customary activity at the workbench." p. 18
Fascism's Psychological Appeal is Powerful and, Once Established, Nearly Impossible to Dispel
The Third Reich was a period with a remarkable density of experiences, full of change and characterized by an eight-year phase of radical euphoria and a four-year period of rapidly increasing fear, violence, loss, and insecurity. The fact that this period etched itself so indelibly into German history is not just due to Nazi crimes against humanity and extreme mass violence. It also has to do with the sense of being involved in something new and momentous, of working on a common National Socialist project. In short, people felt a part of a "great age." p. 26
The Nazi project has to be seen as a highly integrative social process. ... Psychologically speaking, it is no great wonder that the practical enactment of theories of the master race was a matter of such consensus. Once the theory was cast in laws and regulations, even the lowest unskilled laborer could feel superior to a Jewish writer, actor, or businessman, especially since the ongoing social transformation entailed Jews' actual social and material decline. The resulting boost to the self-esteem of members of the Volk was reinforced by a reduced sense of social anxiety. It was a new and unfamiliar feeling to belong, inalienably and by law, to an exclusive racial elite, of which others, equally inalienably, could never become part. pp. 31-2
Interviews with people who experienced the Third Reich reveal even today how psychologically attractive and emotionally integrative the Nazi initiatives of exclusion and integration were. It is no accident that Germans of that generation tend to describe the Third Reich, up until Germany's military defeat at Stalingrad, as a "great time." Such people were categorically incapable of experiencing the exclusion, persecution, and dispossession of others for what they were. By definition, the others no longer belonged to the community, and thus their inhumane treatment did not conflict with the ethics and social values of the Volk community. pp. 32-3
The Practice of Liberal Forms Doesn't Mean There is Liberal Substance
To believe that a modern dictatorship like National Socialism integrates a populace by homogenizing them is to mistake the way it functions socially. The reverse is the case. Integration proceeds by maintaining difference, so that even those who are against the regime -- critics of the Nazis' Jewish policies or committed Social Democrats -- have a social arena in which they can exchange their thoughts and find intellectual brethren. p. 29
Militarism and Nationalism Preceded Formal Fascism & Were Essential to Fascism's Violent Wars
During the Weimar Republic, significant parts of German society propagated the idea of national defense and a state willing to take to battle as an alternative to the Treaty of Versailles and the perceived impotence of German democracy. Germany was to mentally prepare for wars to come by encouraging courage, enthusiasm, and willingness for sacrifice.The literary apostles of "soldierly nationalism," men like Ernst Jünger, Edwin Dwinger, or Ernst von Salomon, spread a metaphysical, abstract cult of war among hundreds of thousands of readers, and they were supported in their efforts by a host of right-wing, nationalistic organizations, including the Stahlhelm (Steel Helmet) association. By the end of the 1920s, war memorials that concentrated on representing grief for soldiers killed in battle had way to monuments creating a mystique of brave fighters on the front lines. Tributes to battles Germany had won during World War I and the wars of German unification became omnipresent. Voices of protest against this romanticizing of the military past and pacifist objectors to the army had increasing difficulty making themselves heard. p. 36
The reverse and difficult-to-grasp side of faith in the Führer is what does not occur in the POWs' conversations: political reflection about what went wrong. In fact, the depoliticization of German soldiers would seem to be one of National Socialism's most lasting achievements. Soldiers tended to see what was happening as not their affair, but the business of their omnipotent Führer and his circle of helpers, whom the soldiers saw alternately as philistine, corrupt, incompetent, or criminal. They did not, in the main, have a political opinion on the National Socialist state, the dictatorship, or the persecution of Jews. The criticism they put forth was aimed at the personal traits of Nazi bigwigs and occasionally at individual policies. But it was very rare for the POWs to engage in political debates about decisions or perspectives. Clear differences in position or opinion seldom emerge. This is one of the central results of totalitarian rule. It creates a mental lack of alternatives and makes people fully dependent on the charismatic leader, to whom they stay true even when their mutual downfall is inevitable. As the protocols reveal, especially with respect to higher-ranking officers, politics is replaced by faith. And since faith in the Führer was simultaneously a faith of Germans in themselves, every threat to positive images of Hitler was also a threat to the project in which people had invested so much energy and emotion. The fear was that this project would turn out to be utterly worthless. pp. 226-7 [italics in original]
Belief in Technological Solutions Is a Tempting Alternative to Abandoning Fascism
The belief in a miracle weapon was rampant in all three main branches of the military, which says a lot about the illusions maintained by navy and Luftwaffe officers. Despite possessing technical expertise and despite having directly witnessed Britain's extraordinary military and economic capacities, they never asked themselves how the decisive blow they imagined and hoped for could ever be achieved practically. It seems to have been unthinkable for such men that the war could be lost. For that reason, they believed in a utopian technology that would make everything turn out all right. On this topic, as with the POWs' belief in the Führer, the wishes and emotions that soldiers had invested in the National Socialist project and the war were so powerful that they could not be overridden by any countervailing experiences. on the contrary, belief in a miracle weapon grew stronger the more illusory the prospect of German victory and a rosy future became. p. 187 [italics in original]
The soldiers' obsession with technology had dominated their everyday experience of war, and it remained one of their primary topics of conversation as POWs. Yet as incessantly as the men discussed questions of horsepower, cubic capacity, and radio frequencies, all the more rarely did they ask questions about the overall context. Specialists tend to apply their instrumental reasoning to the precise situation and task they have been given. The topic of military technology once again manifested the deep connection between modern industrial labor and the labor of war. World War II was a war of technicians and engineers, pilots, radio operators, and mechanics. The laborers in this war used what they saw as grand and fascinating tools. Technology was an arena men could both talk about and agree on for hours on end. p 192
"War Crimes" Is Misleading. Crime is Inherent in War.
The misconception thus arises that, by and large, war adheres to international law, and violations of that law are the deeds of rogue individuals. Autotelic violence, so the logic goes, is not a systemic aspect of war, but a regrettable deviation. But the surveillance protocols show that once the floodgates of violence are opened, anything can provide an impetus and justification for soldiers to start shooting. p. 89 [italics in original]
It is high time to stop over estimating the effects of ideology. Ideology may provide reasons for war, but it does not explain why soldiers kill or connect war crimes. The actions of the workers and artisans of war are banal, indeed just as banal as the behavior of people existing under heteronomous circumstances -- in companies government offices schools or universities -- always are. Nevertheless, this very banality unleashed the most extreme violence in the history of humanity, leaving behind 50 million casualties and a continent devastated in many respects for decades to follow. pp 319-20
The other side's casualties are almost always regarded as fighters, partisans, terrorists, or insurgents. ... It is the violent act following the definition that confirms the definition's accuracy. In this way, violence serves as proof that one has correctly assessed a situation. The "Collateral Murder" video clearly illustrates how violence transforms a murky situation, in which men suffer from a lack of orientation and don't know what to do, into something crystal clear. When all the targets are dead, order has been restored. Once the procedure has been set in motion, any further details will be seen in light of the original definition. p. 326
A lot of what appears horrible, lawless, and barbaric about war crimes is actually part of the usual frame of reference in wartime. For that reason, stories about cruelty don't attract any more attention in the World War II German surveillance protocols than they do in reports and commentaries of U.S. soldiers who served in Vietnam. .. Such violence is instrumental in nature. It's hardly any surprise, then, that it occurs in war. p. 333
