How could the Holocoust happen?
When I was about 4 years old , I lived with my grand-parents. During that time I became ill . It was some kind of digestive problem and the cure was a liquid, cod liver oil or something. My grand mother mixed the oil with sugar to make it taste good enough to get me to drink it . The medicine must have tasted really, really bad because she used a lot of sugar. In those days that was how you got a child to take their medicine, mix it with sugar. That principle can be applied to many things and is how governments get people to do and believe things that other wise would be unthinkable.
The process with society is a slow one and you must sugar coat everything with a benefit that overrides the natural resistance to what ever you are trying to get people to do. In high school I was interested in WWII Germany. I wanted to know how the people in an entire country become so evil? By any standard , murdering innocent citizens for political purposes is evil. Yet in Germany, it was not considered immoral or wrong. During the Nuremberg trials, a Sargent of the army was asked how he plead to the charges of crimes against humanity, murder, etc, he answered “not guilty”. The evidence was overwhelming, and the defendants weren’t denying having done what was done.
When I read his answer I was surprised, not only because of his plea of not guilty, but that he believed it. He had in fact freely admitted to having done everything he was accused of. He worked to arrest, capture, enslave ,starve and murder many people. The facts of the atrocities he was accused of were not even in dispute. Yet his testimony was that he was not guilty of braking any law, he had committed no crime. And he was right ! Technically his plea was legally correct. He had broken no law, committed no crime. In fact, he claimed just the opposite was true. He was a law abiding citizen enforcing the law, following orders, obeying lawful commands. This Sargent was following lawful orders when he captured (arrested) Jews, turned them over to slave labor camps, sent them to gulags, concentration camps, and personally shot to death many innocent civilians. He even testified of his compassion in caring out his assigned duties. He told the story of a young Jewish mother with an infant child that he was ordered to kill. To be as compassionate as possible, he had the mother hold the baby to her chest, so that he could shoot the mother thru the child, killing both with a single shot, minimizing the suffering of the mother.
How could anyone believe that these acts were not evil, violate some morale standard. The question became, how does an average person devolve to this level of conscience, or lack of. Either normal people were somehow brainwashed to become something that should have been unthinkable or this was a nation of mostly sadists and sociopaths. There had to be something or some method that would turn normal people into a culture of evil. To understand this I needed to understand what is government, what purpose does it serve . Does the government reflect the citizens or do the citizens reflect their government? Does the government exist to serve us or do we exist to serve the government? That is the question our founding fathers labored over when writing our constitution and bill of rights. An example of this is the question of law. Do laws exist to serve the citizen or does the citizen exist to serve the law? The founding fathers created our government to be unique in all history.
Our government and its laws were created to serve its citizens. That is why they defined and limited what it could do. The concept of the law serving the person or the person serving the law can be demonstrated in a simple example. In 1968 General Motors Co, the Oldsmobile division produced the first American automobile with front wheel drive, the Tornado. The Japanese had been manufacturing front wheel drive cars for several years with great success. An incident in the winter of 1969 demonstrates the role of law in practice. Does the law serve the citizen or does the citizen serve the law? A man who owned a new Tornado was traveling from Reno to Sacramento over Donner pass during a winter snow storm. The chains required sign was out and everyone was putting their chains on before being allowed to continue. He pulled into the chain installation area beside the highway and began to install the chains on his car. A California Highway Patrolman seeing him installing the chains on the front tires, approached him and told him he would have to put them on the rear tires instead. The gentleman explained to the officer that this was a front wheel drive car and that the chains would not do any good on the rear tires, and might even make the car dangerous to drive. The officer explained that the law required the chains to be on the rear wheels and if he did not put them on the rear tires he would not be allowed to continue on. A discussion ensued to no avail and the gentleman was not allowed to continue on because he refused to put the chains on the “wrong tires”.
Was the law serving man or did the man serving law. To answer the question, we must ask, what is the purpose of this law, chains on the tires? Obviously it is to make the cars safe to drive in winter snow conditions. Did the officer obey and enforce the law? Yes. Would the purpose of the law be fulfilled? No. The Officer could not or would not adjust to the situation of what the intent of the law was and was doing his duty and inforcing the letter of the law. In this case, who served who. Did the law serve the citizen or was the citizen forced to server the law? This is not an indictment of the officer, who was doing his duty. He was not evil, rude, mean or anything else. He was a police officer who risked his life every day to protect those people on his road. He was enforcing the law as it was written trying to protect those driving over the mountain that day.
I'm writing this because this is how we could become like Germany, with out realizing it. This is how the German people came to accept the mass murder of the Jewish people. How ordinary citizens, those in civil service, the military, police, news reporters came to believe not only that it was acceptable, but even participated in what was happening. It's how the Sargent could with a clear conscience claim innocence? Why didn't the average German citizen ever questioned what was happening to its Jewish citizens? Only a few protested, and some of them paid with their lives. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer) The process was gradual as the Law became supreme, the citizen existed to serve the law. The law represented order, and the German society was an orderly one. The unquestioning obedience of the law laid the foundation for the "final solution".
What is frighteninge is how it came about. In 1933 a young farmer had a son who suffered severe birth defects, was in constant pain and nothing could be done to help. His doctors who told him, there was no hope, nothing could be done. An unbearable and tragic situation. This man went with his doctor to the German government to seek relief for his dear son. This word of his son's suffering reached all the way to Hitler. To bring relief for the suffering of this boy, a legal solution was passed into law and his son was the first to be legally put to sleep. This tragedy was the legal basis of the holocaust. From this legal precedent the law was adjusted to cover more and more people, classes of suffering and finally races of people. It became the basis of the “final solution”. What the law did was to redefined what a “person” was under the law.
I wonder if this is also the solution the supreme court found in Row vs Wade. Did they redefined the fetus as a “non-person” there by having no legal protection under the law or was something else redefined? Today there are new laws coming out of our congress, laws written to define who is protected by our laws and who is not. Under the new definition of terr0ism, citizens can become non-persons and just disappear, no trial, no recourse, nothing. To me it appears that the law is moving to a point so that it no longer serves us, but we serve it. I can only hope and pray that the people who are ordered to enforce these laws will not be like the sargent. They will be told that what they are asked to do is for the good of our country. The good of our country would be the sugar to help them swallow the bitter taste of the law. This process is slow, and maybe we will be able to see it and avoid becoming like Germany.