As we've focused this week on Auschwitz and Nazism in general, I've come back to the idea that "people are really really messed up" over and over. Concepts like eugenics, indoctrination, and the need to absolve oneself from accountability show just how depraved humans can be. And in terms of the intentional/functional debate concerning Hitler, I think to a certain degree the Holocaust was an intentional thing.
While eugenics may have had an innocent start in trying to help eliminate disease and reduce discomfort, I doubt anyone would make an argument that it had good moral intentions when it was used as a justification for genocide. At some point it transformed from being a helpful and useful process with (sometimes) questionable practices into something sinister used to justify the death of millions of people. And even if Hitler didn't envision death camps and other similar things in 1933, if he had been presented with it I doubt he would have batted the idea away because of some moral obligation but because of impracticality politically.
And with no doubt indoctrination in schools and through propaganda helped this process proceed. How do you get an agenda passed? Get people to buy in to it. Rome wasn't built in a day, and Hitler couldn't come in a get everything he wanted done within the week. It takes a significant amount of time for people to buy in to things, but indoctrination, especially with kids at a young age, tends to be pretty effective.
Additionally, I think the building up of the bureaucracy around death camps served two primary purposes. 1) it absolves people of their natural feeling of "killing people is wrong" by allowing them to say "Hey I didn't pull the trigger" and then that builds into 2) it allows people to work in/around/with German authorities and to a certain extent buy into what the SS and other German officials preached about Jews. If you aren't killing them and seeing the horrible things you see then I would think you're more likely to start taking sips of the Koolaid.
Obviously this is all my opinion, and I don't have a lot of solid data to back it up with. But I think at some point this stuff has to stop being functionalist in nature and become something intentional. Yes, death camps may be the literal end of the ladder for eugenics programs, but at some point someone has to rationalize everything and sign off on putting in gas chambers and crematoriums. And if killing people in the name of something like scientific progress wasn't a big deal, they never should have had to move beyond death squads. I think the fact the people couldn't handle being responsible for killing people shows that death camps are not the practical end of eugenic theory, but something that was forced.
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David, I think you have some very valid points. I agree that at some point somebody had to realize that this wasn't just getting a few "bad" genes out of the pool. It was plain old murder, and in very large quantities. Using the schools to indoctrinate the younger generation was a well calculated move that is widely used today. We feed children commercials and adds all day long. If you convince people and espcially kids that it's ok to do whatever it is that you're doing, such as killing Jewish people, and it's not your "fault" then you can do anything.
ReplyDeleteI think that the use of eugenics early on was made to look as a good thing, but Hitler and the other leaders knew what the overall goal was. This was politics and not a whole lot has changed. Politicians make promises and say one thing but mean another all the time. The issue of busing during the Civil Rights era is a good example. There was no clear statement that it was intended for African Americans, but the leaders who inacted busing knew what they wanted. The need for the popular vote in politics will make any politician lie through their teeth in order to get what they want.
ReplyDeleteYou are correct that intent had to play a role at some point in the equation and functionalist explanations do not deny that there was intent to kill at some point but rather attempt to created more nuanced and satisfactory explanations for how such a monstrous thing could occur.
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