The Pattern of Evil: Myth, Social Perception and the Holocaust

Copyright © 2006 by Lawrence LeShan, Ph.D..

Library of Congress Number:       2005908837

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

APPENDIXES

APPENDIX I

APPENDIX II

APPENDIX III

ENDNOTES

APPENDIX IV

FOR ADA NICOLESCU M.D.

who knows a great deal about these matters.

PREFACE

How This Book Came to be Written

Standing astride the negative side of life’s ledger like a colossus is the 1# human problem—the problem of horror. Nothing eludes our scholarships and science like the roots of human horror… How can one person look another in the eye and carve that person to pieces? How can one kill for a religion? . . . How can one person deliberately inflict heinous physical pain on another in torture, often for strictly ideological reasons?

(Frank Parley—Presidential address to the

American Psychological Association, 1994.)

I was reading Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors (68) as part of an attempt to understand more about the healing professions as they are today and the risks and potentialities which they have.

As I looked at the pictures of the long rows of barracks at Auschwitz crowded with emaciated, still-breathing corpses, I realized that a strange contradiction seemed to exist. The gas chambers themselves, immediately next to the ovens for burning bodies, the trolleys to take the bodies from one to the other formed an extremely efficient unit. Just what I would have expected from the vaunted German attributes of order and efficiency. The system for delivering the condemned to the unit, however, was ridiculous in its inefficiency. With trains arriving at an extermination camp, what was the need for hundreds and hundreds of filthy, lice-ridden barracks, lined up neatly in precise rows, the large SS staff needed to control so many prisoners, the inadequate food rations (why not feed them adequate food or none at all?), the double rows of electrified barbed-wire? Why not simply have the trains arrive on schedule as there was room available in the gas chambers and take the prisoners directly from one to the other?

The more I became aware of this problem, the stranger the whole thing looked. Reading about the horrors was like taking a bath in an acid swamp every day. Fordham Library at Lincoln Center in New York City has the Rosenblatt Holocaust Collection, several thousand books on the subject. It includes the complete transcripts of the Nuremberg Trials and the other trials of the camp staff and SS personnel. I began to spend day after day there. Gradually I became more and more involved until I had abandoned the other projects on which I had been working and was spending all of my time on this.

I have always been intrigued by and chosen complex and difficult research projects. Here, however, something more was at stake. Here I began to see a hint of clues that would lead to a deeper understanding of what we humans are and can be. I was upset, disturbed and fascinated by what I was reading.

It was even more upsetting when I realized that the cruelty at Auschwitz and other camps was not an extra byproduct of the brutalization of guards or the actions of sadistic perverts (although some of these certainly were present). The cruelty was coolly and carefully planned and organized. It was a deliberate and conscious attempt to provide the greatest possible amount of suffering and degradation. Inefficient in killing they might have been; however, they were extremely efficient in producing suffering. As this became more clear, I felt myself more and more torn apart psychologically. What sort of thing is the human race? What species do I belong to?

The philosophy Emmanuel Kant said that all philosophy is an attempt to answer four questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What dare I hope? What is a human being? I found myself struggling with these questions, deeply hurt and wounded, as I read the accounts of the camps. No wolf ever treated another wolf as we humans can treat each other.

I have been a professional research psychologist since 1943. Reading book after book of the experiences of survivors and the diaries and testimonies of SS guards, I felt as if for the first time I was dealing with the true potentialities of what it means to be human—the extremes of heroism, dignity, suffering, depravity, cruelty, strength and weakness. Day after day I was shaken to the core. From this material I could not distance myself. The horrors left me trembling, subject to nightmares, preoccupied.

As I progressed in my knowledge of the camp system the problem deepened. The first extermination camps—Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec—were extremely efficient. With a very small camp staff, prisoners were taken from the trains directly to the gas chambers and ovens. The Germans experimented with the best way to do this, the best methods of murder, the best ways of disposing of bodies, etc., until they had raised it to an expert level. They knew how to do this. Then they opened camps run with maximum inefficiency.

Why did they do this? It took me a long time to begin to see an explanation which seemed to fit the facts. This book is a description of the problem and its solution. It suggests, I believe, a new way of looking at the development of the system of wholesale murder and torture the Nazis developed.

More importantly it leads to a new insight about how a civilized society can move to a point where organized, large scale murder by the state seems a logical and reasonable procedure and, furthermore, why it was done so inefficiently. This developmental process provides clear signals to the world as it progresses. Further, it is not inexorable. There are actions which can be taken at each of these signal points to abort the process.

A book on this subject must be written with great humility and with fear and trembling. This is a great and terrible event we are trying to understand. One does not lightly attempt to analyze Moses on Sinai or Jesus on the Cross.

We are dealing here with an event which must be approached with our tools of intellectual understanding so that we may find ways of preventing its ever happening again. However, it must not be approached only with these tools. They sanitize and sterilize the events too much for the bare recital that remains to be acceptable or useful.

We have inherited, from the 17th Century, the belief that everything can be analyzed into its component parts and causes and thereby understood. Only very slowly are we casting off the universality of this myth and realizing that there are realms of events in which it is not true. The term understanding has, as the philosopher Jacob Needleman once pointed out, two meanings. The first is our usual approach of analysis into parts. The second is to stand under, to be a part of the same universe in which the event happened—to comprehend the colour and feel and being of the whole. (75) This is the response we give to a great symphony or painting or poem. It is the response needed if we are to relate to those things which make us distinctly human and which have refused us understanding by analysis—religious awe, love, dignity, courage, the love of beauty and the need to create it. To comprehend these things we can not go to the psychological textbooks, we must go to the other approach of art, religion, empathy, love. The intellectual approach is absolutely necessary for control and prevention; it is not enough by itself and in the case of events like the Holocaust or the Passion for comprehension. And even with this approach of both meanings of understanding we must fail to know the true enormity of the event. Elie Wiesel put it:

Ask any survivor. He will confirm to you that it was easier for him to imagine himself free in Auschwitz than it would be for you to imagine yourself a prisoner there. Whoever has not lived through the event can never know it. And whoever has lived through it can never reveal it. (101, pp. 197 ff.)

Each of us must ask ourselves what right we have to only intellectually analyze the Holocaust in the light of a naked nine- or ten-year-old girl who, knowing that their murderers will shortly kill them and with the sound of screaming of the last group of children being killed still in the air, tenderly undresses her younger brother and stills his tears and terror by explaining to him that there is nothing to fear and that one need not be afraid of death. (101, p. 190.)

Nor can I rest my approach to the Holocaust only on the intellectual tools so long a part of myself and my profession in the presence of a particular exhausted and dehydrated Jewish woman with her two-year-old child in her arms. She was in a long line of women who had just comes out of a crowded cattle car after three days with no food or water or sanitary facilities of any kind. Stumbling out of the train, they had been separated from the men and marched off the ramp to a place where the path forked right and left. At the fork there was a desk behind which sat a uniformed SS officer flanked by guards. Off to the left were the chimneys of the ovens, off to the right at some distance rows of barracks.

At the desk, as each woman in turn approached it, the officer would indicate that they should go the right or the left. The woman with the child saw that all women wearing the yellow star, as she was, went to the left and most of the others to the right. Just before she came to the desk she turned to the non-Jewish woman behind her and said loudly, Here, take your brat. I’m tired of carrying her for you, and shoved her child roughly into the woman’s arms. At the officer’s gesture she walked off the left without a backward glance. (79)

Nor is it permissible to think of the gas chambers as a quiet and merciful death of statistics. In his trial the commandant of Auschwitz was asked how he knew how long to keep the doors locked. He answered, We always knew when the people were dead when the screaming stopped. (47, p. 252)

A typical run of the chamber might include a sixteen-year-old girl (your daughter or granddaughter?), a forty-year-old woman, a twenty-five and a sixty-year-old man. Which of your family or closest friends do you picture screaming there? Until we do see them there we are avoiding the truth of what happened.

The intellectual understanding of human behavior has been the central focus of my professional life. However, for me now, as I look at these two incidents (and these are typical of many I know of and millions more of which I do not know) I realize that they can not and must not be explained only in technical psychological terms and with our technical psychological constructs. In the deepest human sense, all children are our children. It was our children who suffered and died in the camps. How can we be only objective?

I have not escaped unscathed from this exploration. No one who really makes it can emerge unchanged. But I believe that what I have brought back may be worthwhile: a new conceptual tool that may help in preventing a return of the concentration camp world.

* * *

This book opens with a general discussion of the concept of different world views and the validity of the concept. An overview of its history and present use is given. Next is a discussion of the mythical world view and its laws (basic limiting principles). Following this is a presentation of how it relates and contrasts to the common sense picture of the world, the sensory construction of reality. Several chapters (the heart of the book) then discuss how the mythical world view was expressed in Nazi writing, speeches and action and, in particular, in the motivation for and the establishment, organization and maintenance of the camps.

One purpose of history is to teach us so that perversions of humanity like Hitlerism can be avoided in the future. There are signs in a culture that it is moving toward a point where building a concentration camp system will be believed to be a rational action. In the last section of the book these are described so that in the future we will be able to see that they are signal flags that we are on the road to building hell on Earth. Preventative courses of action, when these signal flags appear in a culture, are described.

After this book was written I showed the manuscript to Ann Cassirer Appelbaum, the daughter of the philosopher Ernst Cassirer. After reading it she gave me a reprint of a 1944 article by her father that