REFLECTIONS ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EVIL:

THE HOLOCAUST

DR. PETER DAN

Is evil a legitimate subject of study for

psychology?

• Moral dilemma: does trying to explain and understand the Holocaust implicitly reduce its horror? Does demythifying evil carry risks?

• Scientific inquiry requires impartiality – and, in this context, the mere pretense of it is a moral monstrosity

• George Steiner: “There is no human form of language adequate to the conceptualization and understanding of Auschwitz”

• Elie Wiesel: We may lack the adequate words to discuss the Holocaust

• Psychology can integrate a moral and a scientific standpoint,

allowing understanding without forgiveness

• Examples of evil abound throughout History. The Holocaust is the

most representative example of evil.

• The participation of the “common man ”stands at the core of any

attempt at an explanation.

• What is sought, is a commonality – a specific configuration of factors

that permit the emergence of evil.

• The cooperation of the common man made possible and gave the true

dimension to the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the various

Gulags, the killing fields, ethnic cleansing, Rwanda, Darfur.

Hypothesis

• Participation in Evil is made possible by the

interaction of several unrelated interpersonal,

intrapersonal, and social phenomena, whose

adaptive function is to foster socialization, avoid

anxiety and pain, and insure an optimal

processing of information.

Adaptive mechanisms involved in the emergence of evil

• The acceptance of symbolic reality

• Death denial and the quest for

symbolic immortality

• The universality of stereotyping

and obedience to authority

• Psychological mechanisms for

stress reduction

• Self Deception

• Facilitate socialization

• cope with awareness of own

mortality

• Facilitate the anticipation of others’

reactions. Increase group

cohesiveness

• Help cope with extreme situations

• Help cope with guilt and internal

consistency

Symbolic reality

• Origins: deception, need for explanations

• Widespread acceptance across cultures:Plato

• Symbolic Universes (Berger & Luckman)• gives meaning to the entire human experience, which is conceived as

taking place within it.”

• is sustained by universe maintenance mechanisms, which ensure their internal consistency and continuity, and act as a safeguard against dissonance. Mythology, theology, philosophy, culture and science are all universe maintenance mechanisms.

• Deviants – those whose beliefs threaten the symbolic universe – are either included, by making them fit (i.e. conversion, forced or not) or by “nihilation”: using the maintenance mechanisms to “liquidate conceptually everything outside the universe” (i.e. heresies, excommunication)

• When “nihilation” is used against individuals or group, they are seen as inferior and not belonging to society. In the Nazi symbolic universe, the Jews were seen as deviants and a threat

• “Liquidating physically what one has liquidated conceptually is a practical question of policy.”

Death denial and symbolic immortality• Becker (1976): culture has evolved from humankind’s attempts to master the

awareness of its own mortality and. The main function of culture is death denial

• Bronowski (1974) the identification of the individual with symbols of his culture helps

establish “a sense of permanence characteristically human, that life forms a continuity

which transcends and flows through the individual”

• Lifton (1983) the culture fosters a sense of “oneness” and continuity, creating a

context in which one can “both die and continue”.

• Becker: culture offers symbolic immortality, obtained by the accumulation of

“immortality symbols” which promise “symbolic immortality”

• Mankind readily dies to obtain “symbolic immortality”

• Power, wealth , prestige, notoriety, works of art, scientific discoveries are all

“immortality symbols”

• Those who cannot obtain them follow those who do or their causes, such as “1000

Years Reich”

• The Jews are seen as possessing symbolic immortality, and having obtained it at the

expense of the “host nation”

The evolution of antisemitism: Religious antisemitism

• Rooted in a fundamental ambivalence

• Christianity: Jews are the Chosen People but also Christ killers:

Matthew 27:25: “His blood be on us and our children” Paul, 1

Thessalonians 2:14-16 directly accuses the Jews of having killed

Jesus

• Islam: The Jews are a People of the Book, but also Jews the enemies

of Muhammad,

• Qur’an: The Jews are “cursed by Allah" (4:46), are liars (2:78) distort

the word of Allah (2:75) they are the servant of the Devil(4:60) they will

be turned into apes and swine (2:65, 7:166; 5:60), and will burn in the

fires of hell. They are the worst of created beings.” (98:6, also 4:55,

5:29 and 58:14-19).

• Both based on the notion of collective guilt: John Chrisostom “Sicut

Iudeis”, Hadith: Mohammed poisoned by Jews (Vol.3, bk.47, no.786)

Allah cursed the Jews and the Christians (Vol.2,bk 23, no 414)

• At a personal level, antisemitism is a normative structure: alleviates

cognitive dissonance and guilt and facilitates aggression

• Outcomes: pogroms, forced expulsions, forced conversions,

ghettization, blood libel, dhimmi status, jizya

The evolution of antisemitism: Racial antisemitism

• Purity of Blood laws:

• Netanyahu: 633, 4th Toledan Council:prohibits the granting of public

office “ to Jews or those who are of the Jews”

• The“Fuero Juzgo”, codex of Spanish law, prohibits “Jews, whether

baptized or unbaptized to testify against Christians” (1241)

• Roth: 1449,Toledo “Sentencia Estatuto”, prohibits the Jews and

their descendants, convert or not, from holding any public office

“as this causes harm to “old Christians of pure lineage ( a los

Christianos viejos lindos)”

• Roth:Jewish identity and issues framed in racial terms, positing

“(two) inseparable relationships (one) between racial and moral

qualities of man and another that imputed to Jews as a race a

predisposition to evil”

• Outcomes: The negative characteristics attributed to the Jews are

seen as a biological fact; the concept of “The Jewish Problem”

The evolution of antisemitism: ideological antisemitism

• Originated in Germany and France, pseudoscientific frame work

provided by comparative linguistics, Social Darwinism and ethnology:

competition between Semitic and Aryan Civilizations.

• von Hellwald: “… the Jew is the cancer slowly eating into the flesh of

the other nations. Exploitation of the people is his only aim.

Selfishness and lack of personal courage are his chief characteristics”

(1872)

• Drumont:”The Semitic race can be recognized almost exclusively by

negative characteristics. It lacks a mythology, an epic, science,

philosophy…the Jew will never be the equal of a man of Christian race

(sic). He creeps at your knees or crushes you under his heel, he is

beneath or above, never by your side.”(1886)

• Core antisemitic beliefs: Bering (1992) ““Jews are not only partially

but totally bad by nature… their bad traits are incorrigible.” They

remain “essentially alien” to their host societies and “bring disaster

(on them) or on the whole world” Because their bad nature is a

generalized trait, Jews must be seen not as individuals but as a group.

The evolution of antisemitism: ideological antisemitism

• racial antisemitism incorporates the religious antisemitism, and ideological antisemitism incorporates racial antisemitism

• The Jews are a triple threat:

• a threat to the symbolic immortality and the symbolic universe

• a threat to the existence of the nation as a biological entity

• a threat to the existence of society and culture.

• Paranoid projection: casting the Jew as aggressor:

• Hitler:” Today…it is the inexorable Jew who struggles for domination over the nations. No nation can remove this hand from its throat except by the sword”

• Himmler: “we had a moral right vis-a-vis our people to annihilate this people which wanted to annihilate us.”

• Outcomes: eliminationist mindset (Goldhagen), complicity of

population, Final Solution

Modern Islamic antisemitism: the convergence between fascism and

Islam

• Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Quassam encouraged the use of violence against Jews and founded “The Black Hand” secret society whose goal was to target Jews for terror and murder.

• Sheikh Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem urged the killing of all Jews, not only Zionists

• Al-Husseini, March 1 1944 , ”Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion

• Al- Husseini got the support of Himmler and Eichmann urging the governments of Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania to cancel exit visas granted to Jews, resulting in the revocation of 80.000 visas by Romania and 400.000 visas by Hungary

• Hitler assured Al-Husseini that Germany’s uncompromising war against the Jews included active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine and that the objective was the destruction of the Jews residing in the Arab countries.

• Karl Jung:” We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is already on his way; he is like Muhammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic. They are all drunk with (their) wild god. That can be the historic future”

• Speer: Hitler talked wistfully about the more vigorous Islam which he considered more suitable for the Germans than the “flabby and meek” Christianity

Corresponding reactions at different levels of universe maintenance

mechanisms:

• mythology: worldwide Jewish conspiracy

• art: antisemitic art, representations of the Jew as demonic or monstrous

• theology: the Jew as Christ killer

• philosophy and science: attacks on the theory of relativity as “Jewish physics”

• biology: theories of racial superiority

• legislative: the elimination of Jews from civil society

• Nuremberg laws: The systematic exclusion of Jews from society:

• prohibition of intermarriage and non conjugal sex with Jews (Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor 9-15-1935),

• barring Jews from holding public office (11-11-1938)

• destruction of synagogues (11-11-1938),

• dissolving all Jewish businesses ( 11-23-1938)

• cutting Jewish homes’ heat and electricity (2-2-1938),

• forbidding Jewish children to attend German schools ( 11-13-1938)

• forbidding Jews to own radios (9-29-1939)

• forbidding Jews to own telephones (7-20-1940),

• forbidding Jews to own bicycles (5-15-1941),

• forbidding Jews from using public transportation (9-18-1941)

• forbidding Jews from using public phones (12-26-1941)

• mandatory wearing of the yellow star (9-1-1941)

• prohibition of friendly relations with Jews (11-24-1941).

The Final Solution

• Goebbels: “In the case of the Jews there are

not merely a few criminals, but all Jews rose

from criminal roots, and in their very nature

are criminal. The Jews are no people like

other people but a pseudo-people welded

together by hereditary criminality…The

annihilation of Jews is no loss to humanity

but just as useful as capital punishment or

protective custody against other criminals.”

Roots: Turn of the century French and German antisemitic

cartoons

Antisemitic art and cartoons: Nazi Germany

Stereotyping• Ubiquitous

• Favor attribution bias

• Stem from the need to predict the behavior of others

• Self fulfilling prophecy

• Distort the incoming information, maximizing the differences

between groups and minimizing the differences within group

• Impervious to cognitive dissonance

• Negative stereotypes are “sanctions for evil” : they dehumanize

potential victims, weakening the moral restraints against

violence.

• Dehumanization of both victim and victimizer leads to

disinhibition of aggression (Bandura, Zimbardo, Milgram,

Lifton)

Conformity and obedience to authority

• Ash: Individuals tend to conform through deception and self

deception in the 60% to 75% range

• Milgram: in order to conform and obey authority, a significant

number of “normal” people are ready to hurt their peers

• Agentic state, the opposite of autonomy: “a self regulating

entity is internally modified so as to allow its functioning within

a system of hierarchical control. From a subjective standpoint,

a person is in a state of agency when he defines himself in a

social situation in a manner that renders him open to regulation

by a person of higher status. In this condition the individual no

longer views himself as responsible for his actions, but defines

himself as an instrument for carrying out the wishes of others”

• Free will is maintained, moral responsibility is not avoided

Psychological mechanisms for coping with extreme

situations

• Lifton:

• Psychic numbing: observed both in victims and victimizers.

• A decrease in emotional reactivity due to the inability to process

symbolically what is taking place. “Death in Life”

• Slovic: exposure to mass atrocities leads to “a collapse of

compassion”: the number of lives at risk and the value of a life worth

saving are inversely correlated; the higher the number at risk, the

lower the value of life(2007)

• Himmler:“Most of you know what it means when 100 corpses lie there,

or when 500 corpses lie there, or when 1000 corpses lie there. To have

gone through this and – apart from a few exceptions caused by human

weakness – to have remained decent, that has made us great. That is a

page of glory in our history which has never been written…”

Psychological mechanisms for coping with extreme

situations

• Lifton: Doubling

• ”the division of the self in two functioning wholes so that a part self

acts as an entire self”

• Allows guilt free functioning

• Prior Self and Auschwitz self : ”. “There is dialectic between the two

selves in terms of autonomy and connection. The individual Nazi

doctor needed his Auschwitz self to function psychologically in an

environment so antithetical to his previous ethical standards. At the

same time, he needed his prior self in order to continue to see himself

as humane physician, husband, father. The Auschwitz self had to be

both autonomous and connected to the prior self that gave rise to it.”

• This is not dissociation, there is full continuity of awareness, just the

acceptance of different norms. Free will is maintained

Psychological mechanisms for coping with extreme

situations

• Lifton :controlling image

• Highly symbolic, emotionally loaded metaphors that distill the

essence of a culture and help to both motivate and rationalize

behavior

• “Killing in the name of healing” :equates the very existence of the

Jews with the symptom of a disease that threatens the well being of

the national organism.

• Facilitates the emergence of an eliminationist mindset

• Facilitates transfering the requirements of conscience to the

“Auschwitz self”

• For example, Auschwitz prisoners who worked could be expected to

survive approximately 12 weeks, and those who had survived for more

than the expected period of time were executed, because it meant that

either they avoided work or stole food. Within the Auschwitz self this

action could be rationalized as an issue of fairness loyalty, discipline

and getting rid of parasites.

Self deception

• In order to have become a co-participant in the Holocaust one had

to make conscious decisions; – no one became “unconsciously” a

member of the SS.

• The “choice for evil” was achieved by self deception: one has only

to feel convinced that there is “no choice” and the moral dilemma

disappears.

• Paul Ricoeur: “intimate core of personality”: there are successive

layers of truth, half truth and falsehoods, but at the level of the

intimate core self deception is impossible. not a moral arbiter, but

an incorruptible witness.

• The multiple layers of truth and lies permit the forging of coherent

versions of reality and of the past and of life stories consistent

with them, with different levels of self deception corresponding to

different levels of justification.

• Orwell: doublethink – a vast system of mental cheating that

flourishes in totalitarian society.

Self deception

• Arendt: self deception was “almost a moral prerequisite for survival” providing an effective – and culturally shared – shielding from reality: “Eichmann needed only to recall the past in order to feel assured that he was not lying and he was not deceiving himself for he and the world he lived in had once been in harmony and that a society of 80 million people has shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self deception”

Participation in evil

• All humans groups belong to a symbolic universe

• Belonging to a culture provides death denial

• In order to share symbolic immortality, humans

accept others’ definition of reality

• By implication, they tend to become subservient to

authority

• They accept and share the stereotypes that facilitate

the use of violence

• Psychic numbing and doubling insulate them

against the consequences

• By using self-deception, they can create consistent

life stories that free them of guilt

• Free choice is present at every step and individual

responsibility is never eschewed.

Initial Conclusion

• The awareness of the potentiality of the Holocaust

must become part of our symbolic universe and the

moral repugnance of genocide must become a

universe maintenance mechanism

• That is why is important to understand what

happened and never forget

• Failing to do so opens the possibility of it occurring

again

• George Steiner: there were “wolves in the streets of

cities in the center of Europe at the close of the

Thirty Year’s war. If man is a rabid creature, he is

also a tenacious one. There are living Jews, and

Hiroshima is a booming city”.

20+ Years Later: Resurgence and acceptance

of antisemitism

• “If we searched the entire world for a person

more cowardly, despicable and week in

psyche, we would not find anyone like the

Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli.If they

(the Jews) all gather in Israel it will save us

the trouble of going after them worldwide.”

Hassan Nasrallah , secretary general of the

Hezbollah, 2006

20+ Years Later: Resurgence and acceptance of

antisemitism

• The Jews are the accursed people, who incurred the wrath of Allah. They are the offspring of snakes and vipers, the slayers of our Prophet Muhammad, whose death was a consequence of his being poisoned by a Jewish woman... We should know that the Jews are the slayers of the prophets…the Jews are behind all the ruin and destruction in the world…The Jews were behind World War I and World War II. When the American commander said that Japan had agreed to the terms of surrender, Rothschild the American – or rather, Roosevelt the American –was told by the Jewish loan sharks to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Jews were behind the English Revolution. The Jews were behind the French Revolution. The Jews were behind the U.S. Civil War in 1869-1866 [sic]. The Jews were behind the French coup of 1815. The Jews were behind the war between France and Prussia. The Jews were behind the rise of Communism. Karl Marx was a Jew. The Jews instigated war by means of sex. The Jewish Mathilde inspired Johnson to carry out the 1967 war.” Egyptian cleric Sheik Said Al-'Afani , Al Rahma TV, January 17, 2009,

20+ Years Later: Resurgence and acceptance of

antisemitism

• "We must believe that our fighting with the Jews is

eternal, and it will not end until the final battle...You

must believe that we will fight, defeat, and annihilate

them, until not a single Jew remains on the face of

the Earth.” Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein

Yacoub, Al-Rahma TV on January 17, 2009

ANTISEMITIC CARTOONS IN NAZI AND

CONTEMPORARY ARABIC PRESS

Cartoons in the Arabic press equating Israelis with Nazis

Cartoons in the Western press with antisemitic themes

• Italy: Caption: They don’t want to kill me again

Spain. Caption: No problem. At least Hitler taught me how to

invade a country and kill everything living thing

Greece.Caption: Holocaust II

China and Brazil

Russia

Norway: Comparing Olmert to Aron Goeth

USA:Oliphant, New York Times

Belgium, Moslem publication

Conclusion 2009

- The anti-Jewish prejudice demonstrated by these quotes has

precisely the hallucinatory, delusional quality Goldhagen

identified in the antisemitism of Nazi Germany

- The Pew Global Attitudes Project Report from September 2008,

indicates that the “unfavorable view of Jews is increasing in

Europe

- Western reaction to acts of religious intransigence is

conciliatory and muted

- Violence against the Jews is constantly downplayed or

excused.

- At the same time “The systematic building up of a false picture

of Israel as aggressor, and deliberate killer of babies and

children, is helping to slowly chip away at Israel’s legitimacy”

Gross, 2001

Conclusion 2009The Pew Global Attitudes Project Report:

Percentage of population holding an unfavorable opinion of the Jews:

Country

• Spain

• Poland

• Russia

• Germany

• France

• Britain

• US

2004 2008

21% 46%

27% 36%

25% 34%

20% 25%

11% 20%

9% 9%

8% 7%

Conclusion 2009

• Nathan Sharansky: “Israel has become the world’s Jew.”

• Genocidal mentality is present in certain Islamic nations today.

• It is accompanied by a widespread tolerance of antisemitism and a de-legitimizing of Israel.

• The image of the Jew as the focus of evil in the world is gaining acceptance

• The idea that an “Israeli Problem” exists that requires a “Solution” is making headway

• This dynamic is eerily reminiscent of the one that existed in Nazi Germany. The structure that permitted the emergence of evil at a national scale is reproduced at a global scale.

Conclusion 2009

We ignore these

warning signs at our

own risk !