Read Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying for Free Online Page B

behavior. Only a tiny minority proved capable of humane resistance. According to the standards of the time,humane behavior wasdeviant, andbrutality wasconformist. For thatreason, the entire collection of events known as the “Third Reich” and theviolence 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. The proportion of people who were
psychologically
inclined toward violence,discrimination, and excess totaled, as it does in all other social contexts as well, 5 to 10 percent.
    In psychological terms, the inhabitants of the Third Reich were asnormal 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, inGünther 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.
    * Translator’s note: The excerpts from surveillance protocols made inBritish POW camps come from the original British military translations during WorldWar II. Translations of excerpts fromAmerican POW camps are my own.

Fighting, Killing, and Dying
G UNNING P EOPLE D OWN
    “Throwing bombs has become a passion with me. One itches for it; it is a lovely feeling. It is as lovely as shooting someone down.”
    A Luftwaffe first lieutenant, July 17, 1940
82
    They say that war brutalizes, that soldiers are turned into beasts by the experience of violence, by being confronted with mutilated bodies and dead comrades or, in the case of a campaign of annihilation, with masses of murdered men,women, andchildren. Even the Wehrmacht and the SS were concerned that constant exposure to extreme violence, be it as witnesses or perpetrators, would damage soldiers’ “manly discipline” and lead them to engage in unconstrained, unregulated brutality—at the cost of the efficiency needed for both World War II and mass exterminations. 83 The idea of war brutalizing soldiers plays a central role in social-psychological research on violence. 84 Scholars assume that extremely violent experiences change the way people evaluate their worlds and make them more prone to violent acts of their own. Autobiographies and war fiction reinforce the impression that over time, soldiers become brutal as they themselves are exposed to increasing brutality.
    But the words of the Luftwaffe first lieutenant cited above suggest that this notion may be misleading. Thebrutalization hypothesis excludes the possibility that violent behavior can be something attractive for which one “itches,” and it presumes, with no real proof, that people need to be somehow pre-trained to commit acts of extreme violence. Perhaps all that is needed is a weapon or an airplane, some adrenaline, the feeling of having power in areas where one normally has none, and a social framework in which killing is permissible, even desirable.
    The hypothesis of successive adjustment to and acceptance of violence may have more to do with self-images that historical actorswould like to maintain and the preconceived ideas of researchers than with the realities of war. The surveillance protocols contain an abundance of material suggesting that soldiers were extremely prone toviolence right from the start of World War II. The quote introducing this chapter, for instance, was recorded early on in the war, at a point when the conflict had not become an all-or-nothing struggle for survival. Moreover, the first lieutenant in question had only experienced war from above, from the air. Thus, while many soldiers may recount a process of brutalization when they recall violent events, by their own admission the time in which they are socialized to accept extreme violence often spans no