Governments that Wish to Commit Mass Murder will Seldom Fail as “Ordinary” Men Assist Them

The Ovens at Buchenwald’s Crematorium

We live in troubling times and I believe that we are at a point in world history where the not so distant specter of a horrifying past is is rising before our eyes and all too many people cannot see it. The fact is that Donald Trump is leading us into the abyss of human catastrophe and mass murder. Not all of that will be the result of men or women pulling triggers and dispatching their victims, much will be the result of the intentional neglect of pubic health and vaccinations which will result in the recurrence of old diseases, influenza, COVID variants and whatever new pandemic is coming.

Monday was Holocaust Remembrance Day. On that day eighty years ago the Soviet Red Army liberated the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, the centerpiece of the Nazi Death Camp machine. To be sure, in his panic to save his neck Heinrich Himmler had started in the Fall of 1944 began to switch from his tactic of extermination to using the Jews as bargaining chips, but by then most of the Jews under Nazi control were dead. Those that remained, emaciated were dying by the thousands of starvation, and unchecked diseases as they were marched in ghastly conditions to camps deeper inside Nazi controlled areas.

About this time during his first administration, two things happened in the United States that caused me to shake my head and wonder if we are becoming a place that will turn its eyes and walk away from atrocities like genocide, ethnic and religious cleansing.

In 2018, President Trump issued a proclamation to observe Holocaust Remembrance Day, a statement that did not mention the Jews. How one remembers the Holocaust without mentioning the Jews is beyond me, but some of the President’s advisers, including the now fired and disgraced Steve Bannon, are closely connected to the self-proclaimed Alt-Right, a movement of white supremacists and neo-Nazis looking for respectability.

The second thing Trump did was to issue an Executive Order halting the immigration of refugees from certain Muslim majority countries, and to place a cap the number of refugees entering, our country. Shortly after his inauguration a week and a half ago he halted the immigration of Afghans who had helped us against the Taliban who had already been vetted and approved to enter the country, some married to American citizens including members of the military. These actions were all couched in the language of national security, but the real reasons are prejudice and racial hatred.

On the 28 June 2025, Trump’s Defense Department ordered an end to Holocaust Remembrance Days and many or days or months recognizing Americans who have all to often been the victims of the United States government’s state sanctioned prejudice and persecution, while today it ordered DOD to set up a camp for up to 10,000 detained immigrants at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base which is outside the jurisdiction of civilian U.S. Courts.

Lest we forget, this is not the first time that the United States stopped refugees from entering the country on national security grounds. In the 1930s and 1940s we used the same reasoning to keep German Jewish refugees out of the country, despite the fact that we knew what was happening to them. The government claimed that the Jews might be Nazi spies or saboteurs.

We cannot forget that during his first administration, President Trump, members of his administration, members of Congress, and his supporters in the Right Wing media constantly used the rhetoric of racism and race hatred. In addition to Muslims, who Trump repeatedly called terrorists, he defamed and dehumanized whole classes of other immigrants. Including those from Africa, Central America, and the Caribbean whose countries he referred to as “Shithole countries.” Likewise, after Charlottesville, Trump stated that neo-Nazis and White Supremacists are “very good people” and he frequently disparaged Jews in public and private. Then and now we are told that his words and actions are because Trump is “patriotic”. Hannah Arendt wrote:

“The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.”

The present day reminds us that this is a day that we should never forget. The horrors perpetrated by the Nazi regime, all in the name of “race purity” and the extermination of the Jews and others deemed by the Nazis to be “sub-human” or untermenschen is something that is hard for most to imagine, but that language is used by Trump and his supporters today. During his campaign the President referred to non-European immigrants as “poisoning American blood”, vermin, or less than human. The allegation that dark skinned immigrants poison American blood was one used by the Nazis in their Race and Citizenship laws issued in 1935. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nuremberg-laws?utm_source=mkto&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=E20200914MKTEMA&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWldZeFpqaGhOakl6WmpsaSIsInQiOiIwdFg3QlpzT05WRW9UaFhtZFNxTEdWQ21PTTZGejZSVElZNWNKMEVaNUNiWmRLclR3Z0FBTWZGbzBqcCtcL0JyU1N3eWQ1R29scVNjNFwvZEJlMFdBXC9VZGxoU1d3ZFJmN2hYV0NmOEZUYUxHVHJnNzhUZ1loRGU0VURRRzFKa0lJYlpOeWh4eGVVd3pIU3hXRVdUQ0RpWGc9PSJ9

A couple of years ago I read Bettina Stangneth’s book, Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer. While I am very well informed and educated on the lives, writings, actions, and statements of many of the Nazi war criminals, this new book on Eichmann is the most troubling that I have ever read. In particular it is the accounts of his writings and interviews with other pro-Nazi, or former Nazis in Argentina, particularly the Sassen Interviews, which span hundreds of hours of tape and thousands of pages of transcripts.

I am a Christian, a gentile, and a historian, as well as a nearly thirty-seven year military who served alongside our advisors and the Iraqis who fought alongside of us. I have lived in Germany, read, speak and write German and have many friends in that country, including members of the German military, retired and active duty. My study and association with Holocaust survivors goes back to my college days at California State University Northridge when as an undergraduate history major I spent much of my time studying Germany from the first unification and the Kaiser Reich, the First World War, Versailles, Weimar and the Hitler Regime. My professor, Dr. Helmut Heussler, whose family left Germany in the late 1920s, served in the U.S. Army in World War II and was an interrogator at Nuremberg. I took a number of classes from Dr. Heussler, including Hitler’s Germany and the Holocaust. In the latter I had the chance to meet Holocaust survivor Mel Mermelstein, who was later played by Leonard Nimoy in the TV movie Never Forget.

Since my college days I have continued to read and study, and to get a second Masters Degree in History in which much of my work dealt with the Nazi regime. I have visited the sites of former concentration camps including Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Flossenburg, and Buchenwald. I have been to the sites of the Nazi Party rallies in Nuremberg, the courtroom where the Nuremberg Trails were conducted and to the T4 Euthanasia complex at Hadmar. One day, God willing, I will get to Auschwitz and some of the other sites.

The Nazis began their persecution of the Jews shortly after Hitler took power in 1933. Later in the year the Enabling Act gave Hitler and his henchmen the legal means to begin their persecution of the Jews and others. These were followed by the Nuremberg Laws on Race and Citizenship and other laws that targeted the Jews. Persecution increased throughout the 1930s, and sadly most countries refused to accommodate increased Jewish immigration. Then came Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, when on 9-10 November 1938, a series of orchestrated attacks on Jewish businesses, Synagogues, institutions and individuals. On that night close to 200 synagogues, 7000 Jewish businesses and 29 major department stores were destroyed or damaged. Over 30,000 Jews, mostly men, were arrested and sent to concentration camps, 91 people were killed outright, and several thousand died in the aftermath.

When the Nazis invaded Poland, its Jews were rounded up and placed into ghettos where many died of starvation and abuse even before the ghettos were liquidated and the people who lived in them were deported to the extermination camps. In 1941 as the German military seemed to be assured of victory in the Soviet Union the Nazis decided to exterminate the Jews of Europe. In the Soviet Union four Einsatzgruppen followed each of the German Army Groups and systematically began to massacre the Jews of every city and village which German soldiers captured. Over a million and a half Soviet Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen, Ordungspolizei battalions, Army Security Divisions and locally recruited units.

The Wannsee House

At the Wannsee Conference of January 20th 1942 the specifics of the “Final Solution” were mapped out by Himmler’s number two man, SS General Reinhard Heydrich. What followed is beyond the comprehension of most people, but the perpetrators were for the most part men and women who were terrifyingly normal.

The truly terrifying thing about the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust to me is that most of the men at Wannsee and men that commanded the Concentration camps and Einsatzgruppen were very ordinary men who simply believed that they were doing their jobs. The majority of the leaders of the Einsatzgrüppe held doctorates. They were not street thugs. Very few could be described as psychopathic killers by nature. They were lawyers, doctors, career police officials, businessmen, and bureaucrats who carried out an extermination campaign that killed, based on their own meticulous records, between 5.5 and 6 million Jews. They killed many others deemed to be subhuman including the handicapped, the mentally ill, homosexuals, and other non-Jewish minorities like the Gypsies, not to mention the those they Nazis considered political enemies. But it was the Jews that bore the most tragic fate.

When you read the writings of these men, listen to them when they were interviewed, or watch footage of them during or after the war, you find that they had absolutely no empathy for their victims. When confronted about the evil that they engineered they invariably blamed their victims, just as many like people, especially Trump’s loyalists do today.

The men who coordinated the massive effort to exterminate the Jews of Europe following the Wannsee Conference were dispassionate about how they did their jobs. This was a common attitude among the civil service, military and police officials that oversaw the Holocaust. They simply did their jobs and followed the law, and for most of them, their victims meant nothing.

Adolf Eichmann

Adolf Eichmann summed up the attitude of many when he said regarding his work to deport hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in in just a few weeks during the fall of 1944, “Whether they were bank directors or mental cases, the people who were loaded on those trains meant nothing to me.”

Speaking to Willem Sassen in 1957 Eichmann reveled in that accomplishment, “It was an achievement that was never matched before or since.” Eichmann also enjoyed leading his victims on, pretending that he might listen, and they might change his mind. Eichmann was proud of what he did. He told his staff, “I will leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction.”

Hannah Arendt wrote of Eichmann:

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”

This was what made the Holocaust committed against the Jews of Europe by Nazi Germany a phenomenon different than other genocides. It was cold, clinical often dispassionate. Yes, there were men and women motivated by the pornographic blood lust of Nazi publications like Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer but they were not in the senior leadership as the SS considered themselves too intelligent and scientific to stoop that low.

The racial ideology of the Nazis which deemed the Jews and other non-Aryans to be sub-human. It is the kind of racist ideology believed and spread by Trump and his collaborators. That ideology undergirded the German treatment of the Jews, and the German conduct of the war, especially in the East. The execution of the plan required the bureaucratic, administrative, technical and legal skills of ordinary men. These were men sought promotion, advancement, and economic security for their families. Individually many would have never killed anyone. However, they ran the rail networks, the factories, the banking and finance industries and supported the war effort. Most of them never thought about the evil that they abetted. If they did, find a way, it almost always social, scientific, religious, patriotic, legal or just because it was efficient.

That is what makes their evil so terrifying. It was the product of “normal” people in an advanced Western nation. Make no bones about it, their actions were evil. They aided and abetted the genocide of the Jews, the disabled, other “sub-human” races, particularly Slavs, as well as those that they deemed less than suitable. Sadly, human beings, even Americans have that same capacity to commit genocide.

The most horrifying aspect of the Holocaust was that the greatest atrocities were committed by ordinary men. Many were well educated, decent family men. These men simply executed orders and often went home at night, unbothered about their crimes. Arendt wrote: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” She was right, there was an otherworldly ordinariness to the evil perpetrated by the Nazis. That being said, there are those among us today that consciously decide to participate in evil.

Charlottesville “Unite the Right Rally”

It is important that we do not forget the Holocaust. It is also important to recognize that the instruments of that horror were on the whole “ordinary” men who as they saw it were simply doing their job. It is something that everyone needs to remember. Bettina Stangneth wrote “Systematic mass murder is not just the sum of isolated instances of sadism but the result of a political thinking that is perverted from the ground up.”

So many of the Nazi perpetrators saw nothing wrong in what they were doing, in fact at his trial in Jerusalem Eichmann said, “To sum it all up, I must say that I regret nothing.”

The men and women who committed these crimes believed that their victims were less than human and like so many people even today, they had no empathy. Gustave Gilbert, an American Army Psychologist at the major War Criminal Trials at Nuremberg said it so well: “Evil is the absence of empathy.”

Today we have to be very careful. Christopher Browning wrote in his book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Holocaust in Poland:

“I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce “ordinary men” to become their “willing executioners.”

In such a world it is all too important that we never forget, especially now when we could be watching it begin all over again as Trump begins his campaign against every individual and group he has either opposed him or that he believes is less than human. As Yehuda Bauer said:

“The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn’t. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders.“

And he wrote: “thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander.”

Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel wrote:

“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

Can we do that today?