A common example of how fallen moral values of a society can lead to horrendous consequences is the holocaust. Many people have tried to analyze how, in a society that was once regarded as the pillar of Western civilisation; in a culture of law, order, and reason, industrial scale murder of millions of people could have taken place? How could large numbers of people willingly tolerate the mass extermination of their fellow citizens? Within a couple years of Hitler coming to power, he was hailed as a great national statesman. So what if Jews were being discriminated against? The economy was doing well, right?
Hannah Arendt published a book entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in which she pointed out the general pattern of how ordinary people become brutal killers. One of the aims of employing the word banality was to show that great evil did not require abnormal, monstrous people. They could be achieved by ordinary people carrying out routine activities. These activities were not murderous in themselves. They consisted of office work such as organising transport, deciding how many Jews should be deported and to where.
Adolf Eichmann had the task of regulating “Jewish affairs and evacuations” in the Nazi regime. He knew perfectly well the train destinations and understood that the Jews were to be killed, and how they were to be killed. But he had a curious idea of duty: if he did not see Jews being killed, his activities were not responsible for the crimes. He was ready to do anything to advance in the Nazi bureaucratic grades. He had carried out orders to the best of his ability and experienced no regret.
Efficient production of evil depends on each person specialising in a part of the process. This diffusion of responsibility makes it easy for people to use their remarkable powers of rationalisation to wash their hands off any responsibility for the resulting monstrosity. At no step was there a protest. Over time, criminal activities had become routine and criminal orders were implemented without revulsion. Arendt recognised that Eichmann was the perfect example of the modern man devoted to carrying out efficiently what he had been tasked to do without being burdened by feelings.
It is rare to find Nazi documents in which such bald words as "extermination," "liquidation," or "killing" occur. The prescribed code names for killing were "final solution," "evacuation" and "special treatment"; deportation was called "resettlement" and "labor in the East". The function of such clichés and stock phrases is to protect people against reality. In ordinary language, they would be called lies. Eichmann easily accepted and internalized these "objective" Nazi rules which deprived them of their emotional content.
Eichmann believed his inhuman acts were marks of virtue. He would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do. Arendt had little sympathy for the excuse repeatedly used by Nazis criminals: “I was a cog in the machine”; “I obeyed the orders”; “anybody would have acted the same way”… etc. She insisted that “obedience and support are the same."
None of the various "language rules," carefully constructed to mask the truth, had a more decisive effect on the mentality of the killers than the first war decree of Hitler, in which the word for "murder" was replaced by the phrase "to grant a mercy death." If the creeping normalization of hate speech is not opposed at the very beginning because they still seem “below the threshold” of concern to many, it may escalate into unimaginable violence given the "right" kind of leader.
The Nazis were elected but the democratic institutions were unable to keep them in check. The reason was that the values of the people manning these institutions slowly got aligned with Nazi views. There were physicians, engineers, military leaders, etc. who were in support of the Nazis. Many prominent scientists and engineers built the Nazi war machine and helped Hitler to come close to world domination. German physicists and engineers built solid and liquid-fuel rockets, worked on developing an atomic bomb, invented nerve gases such as sarin, produced a cruise missile (the V-1), and much more.
Doctors tested new drugs on the prisoners, presenting the results to a scientific conference. By 1939, around two thirds of all German doctors had some connection or other with the Nazi Party. Nazi racial hygienists were among the top professionals in their fields. Academics in every field gave support to the Nazi regime. Many university faculty used party membership as a method of advancing their careers. In short, the most educated, privileged and respected people were Nazi sympathisers. There has been no evil in history that has failed to find support among many of the great and the good.
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