How Did Ordinary Citizens Become Murderers?

good evening my name is sarah ogilvy and i'm the museum's chief program officer whether you're joining tonight's program here at the museum or through our live stream thank you for making the time to be with us i encourage you to join the conversation on social media and you can invite your friends to tune in now on facebook or twitter using the hashtag ask y or ushm and later on our panelists will be taking questions through social media tonight's program marks the beginning of our fall 2017 season during all of our programs this fall we'll examine some of the most timeless and vexing questions that come out of the history of the holocaust as our founding chairman ellie wiesel said almost 25 years ago when we opened our doors to the public this museum is not an answer it is a question mark for the past quarter century we have examined the many complex questions that this history raises questions like why are some people attracted to extreme and hateful ideologies why are others willing to take extraordinary risks to help their neighbors or even people they don't know and why do societies fail these are challenging and consequential questions by pushing these questions forward the museum is building a pipeline of young people and leaders that understand the importance and the significance of the holocaust and who are willing to take an active role in confronting the divisions in their communities nation and at the in the world at large tonight we will focus on one of the most fundamental questions about human nature why do people become collaborators or perpetrators to guide us in this conversation i'd like to introduce tonight's moderator ralph blumenthal understands the art of asking tough questions and telling complicated stories he is the author of six books and for more than 45 years he was a new york times reporter he covered a wide array of subjects as a local correspondent a crime and investigative reporter and a foreign correspondent from germany vietnam and cambodia related to our topic tonight during his career at the times ralph was instrumental in exposing many former nazis living in the united states before i turn the floor over to him i'd also like to mention that recently ralph donated some of his family's materials to our collection and you can see these materials online and last year he described his family's connection to the holocaust in a piece that i think you'll want to read it's called in berlin unraveling a family mystery welcome [Applause] thank you sarah excuse me for not turning around uh let me take a moment to explain why tonight's program is particularly personal for me and sarah touched on it um west germany when i reported from there in the 1960s was crawling with ex-nazis in the government and industry including the chancellor kurt georg kiezinger i was in bonn when beyonce clause fell snuck into the bundestag and gave him a well-deserved slap across the face later back in new york i began investigating the cases of nazi war criminals who had gained refuge in america after the war some were brought in by our government as scientists and some were just allowed in as anti-communist that was the criteria it's a very shameful history for sure simon wiesenthal gave me a lot of tips and he gave me some good advice and i can still hear his voice he said ralph a jew may be stupid but it's not mandatory the times exposes helped pass the holtzman amendment barring persecutors from america in 1985 i went down to brazil to confirm that the bones found in a grave were indeed the remains of the long-hunted auschwitz doctor joseph mengele who lived there protected by fellow nazis until he dried in a swimming died in a swimming accident what i sadly didn't do in time was investigate my own family's holocaust history but a few years ago i opened a packet of letters showing that my uncle and aunt sillard and hella diamond had tried frantically to get a visa out of berlin starting in 1937. and there they are in the picture um sillard and hella overlooking uh cylinder my mother's birthplace of reicher poland syllab by the way was a metals dealer who spoke six languages and hella had been born in oswitsim later auschwitz by 1939 the noose had tightened and the letters end and there's a heartbreaking final letter informing them that help had been denied i later discovered that they fled to nitra in the puppet state of slovakia where they were rounded up in 1942 and put a board of transport to lublin my uncle silla disappeared uh perhaps murdered in in mydonic or killed by one of uh the police squads that christopher writes about and we'll talk about shortly my aunt ended up in a work camp of sobibor where miraculously she was able to escape make her way back to warsaw where she survived the brutal beating acquired aryan papers lived out the war remarried and moved to australia dying at 89 in 1997. now i had been there during the vietnam war and never thought to look her up which is a terrible oversight that i suffer with today i later located her stepson who's a step cousin of mine i never knew about uh and the documentation i managed to collect many years later i ended up donating to the holocaust museum here and two years ago i traveled to berlin to lay memorial stones called stolpersteiner at their last address in berlin and you see them there on the sidewalk they were alas not the only memorial stones at that building they were the 21st and 22nd stones mobilized by a wonderful german woman in the building non-jewish neighbors turned out to light candles lay white roses and play mozart on the violin so that's why i'm especially interested in what drove other ordinary germans to murder 75 years ago so thank you for that indulgence my story now let's get to the program christopher r browning taught for 25 years at pacific lutheran university in tacoma washington and then the university of north carolina chapel hill where he retired in may 2014. he is the author of eight books including the award-winning 1992 landmark study ordinary men police battalion 101 and the final solution in poland and here's the book and he and wendy lauer will be signing the books afterwards outside the auditorium he has served as a scholar at the holocaust museum and received many prestigious fellowships he has also served as an expert witness in war crimes trials in australia canada and great britain wendy lauer is the acting director of the jack joseph and morton mandel center for advanced holocaust studies here at the united states holocaust memorial museum she has been associated with the museum since 1994. she taught in germany and directed an oral history program collecting testimonials of perpetrators and bystanders in 2012 she was named the john k roth chair professor of history at claremont mckenna college in california where she's still active she's the author and co-editor of three books of holocaust scholarship including hitler's furies german women in the nazi killing fields 2013 which was a finalist for the national book award and national jewish book award and has been translated into 23 languages so chris and wendy thank you so much for being here for the audience here and on social media please share your reflections and questions on twitter and facebook using ask y and hashtag ushmmm and we will be interrupting the actual questioning period here for questions sent in that way so to start chris let's start with you why did individuals join the killing effort did they volunteer or were they conscripted yeah one of our problems in addressing that question is the fact that perpetrators came in so many forms they've traveled so many routes to becoming perpetrators they have so many different motives that we don't have a single answer i would say in rough categories we have the so-called true believers the ideological nazis where they go to the killing fields because they actually believe in what they're doing we have the experts that are crucial to any government the officer corps that enables hillary to conquer europe the industrialists who armed the army the various uh engineers who constructed things the doctors who ran the medical profession in germany after the war they all claimed to be apolitical albert bear is perhaps the archetype of this uh but of course once one digs deeper it turns out one can be an expert and an ideologue these are not mutually exclusive and that many of them were deeply committed to the nazi project or at least to hit her personally in any case we have the middle level functionaries people who sat at their desks they never saw a jew they never beated you they certainly never pulled a trigger uh but they drafted plans they drafted laws uh that led those were the the the desk that led to the segregation of jews the expropriation of jews the exploitation of jews but without ever physically in a sense contacting their victims and we have what i would call the grassroots killers the people who actually did the trigger pulling actually ran the death camps who do meet their victims face to face uh so people participated in so many different ways that we we don't have a a single answer to how people become all right it's a complicated and we're going to get we're going to break that down shortly wendy let me ask you for the women was the experience different for the women who went and i read from your book that many more women went east than i even knew uh extraordinary so women did participate in the holocaust yeah i think that um in comparing my work to to chris chris brownings who focuses on the male perpetrators who are primarily in uniform so mobilized as part of the war effort with regular police forces or we know the verimot was heavily implicated in the holocaust and obviously the ss agencies were the prime executors of it um but when you understand the holocaust all the uh parts of the different roles people play that that it's a social phenomenon that genocide is a social practice an entire society has mobilized men women and children um and in especially in this case of what they understood to be a total war against judeo-bolshevism that that would then entail you know bringing women in their traditional roles kind of aligning them with what's necessary right so nurses secretaries teachers all of the kind of quote unquote female professions that were instrumentalized to wage this war and to carry out this genocide um and the war in the east was in addition to this finishing creek as the germans called it right the war of destruction it was a huge imperial campaign so it was destructive war that was the destructive side and for them the constructive side was building this utopia this laban swam and it was all predicated on the annihilation of the enemy um population and then they would build these german-only settlements and that's where women also came into the picture and however so let's i mean you had these secretaries who worked in the offices they were the assistants to the uh the administrators uh you had the nurses the red cross nurses um and then you had uh the concentration camp guards at probably the other end of the spectrum so they they broke down into different levels of complicity would you say right so those are the women in uniform who are trained to be guards in the camp system which are sites of massive violence and detention about 3500 so that's a fraction of the overall population of women who were involved in some capacity as secretary so a half a million women cycled through kind of went through the eastern territories in these various roles as well as the wives and mates of german officials and ss officers okay so let's set the picture a little bit what did these people see as they went east they they were obviously brought up on the propaganda of the nazi regime they were ideologues or idealists or brainwashed to some extent chris uh what happened as they actually came into the occupied territories and subdued um you know the native populations there well i would say the first wave that comes in either in poland or 39 or in russia 41 many of the letters that the men write back was the appearance of the eastern jew seems to confirm the stereotype that nazi propaganda had which the very assimilated german jew did not so you do get oh a kind of aha moment oh now i i understand and i think that is part of what triggers these uh rituals of humiliation that german troops carried out and and and so forth but those kinds of emotions burn themselves up very quickly the danger is when you systematize things and it becomes more than just the sport of humiliation and becomes state step systematic killing and that's where you get this extraordinary bringing together of all sorts of different people from middle-aged policemen of my unit to the vermont to the hard ss elites to people that wendy's looking at now border customs officials who's ever in uniform there is is fair game to be mobilized for these killing units uh one of the the key things actually the two key things why we look at a unit like reserve place battalion 101 is one of the most unlikely killers these are middle-aged germans averaging age 40 unskilled workers drafted conscripted at random and homeboard because they're not valuable to the war economy they're too old to have been in world war one they're they're in a sense uh are you too young to have been world one too old to have been through the nazi socialization process and they're shipped off and the second thing that is key is they have a commander that makes it clear they don't have to participate so you have the various unlikeliest people as potential perpetrators with a commander that says you don't have to do it and he's the killing still right and we're going to find out he's a very interesting commander wendy let me ask you this you have looked at the the diaries and the journals and talked to um relatives and examined testimonies uh what do you draw from this what was the reaction of the women as they went east and saw conditions there for themselves for the first time um in general they went through a period of adaptation initially shock because while they had been socialized in nazi germany and they was first generation to be so most of these women were born right after the first world war so they've been schooled in anti-semitism but they didn't quite grasp the horrors of what was what war was all about so they were very happy to put on their uniforms their nurses uniforms and were proud to be part patriotic idealist ambitious adventurous some of them wanted to you know get better pay the pay was better in the east so they had all different reasons for going east and then you can see in the memoir literature and as i interviewed them this period of of of realization of oh my gosh i'm actually in these sites of of extreme violence i mean right as they cross the border into poland when they're briefed these teachers there were 3 000 teachers in poland young women and they're told you know are secretaries and they're just told by this nazi official now ladies you know don't be alarmed if you hear a little gunfire it's just that a few jews are being shot oh or they're in the train and they're going a nurse who's going to ukraine and these ss men get into the train compartment and just start talking to them about how they had shot these this jewish woman and her disabled um um daughter um and they were they said we were horrified but we didn't know what to do we were just horrified so i think you know and then some went a step further that kind of you know they they decided to get involved you know there was a minority it's interesting i mean chris you said these these men were not recruited as professional killers in a way that's the most disturbing part of the whole story these really were ordinary germans they came from hamburg your unit which was notably anti-hitler basically and more liberal correct so didn't the nazi leadership take a big chance using these people as their murder squads i mean what made what gave them the confidence that these ordinary un unprofessional killers would turn into killers i think it was that every step of the way in fact they did find compliance uh and in some cases growing adaptation to it that they could by 42 count on even a randomly selected unit like like reserve police battalion 101. these people came they'd been raised you know for six years by now and uh or seven years in a nazi atmosphere where they had by now accepted the fact that jews were not german the jews were the other but they'd still been disturbed by say the burning of the synagogues and kristallnacht so how do you go from being upset about a riot to three years later blowing somebody's head off at point-blank range and that's the transition that we we really struggle to try to explain and i think it is the shift of geography in part you're in an occupied territory in the east under the cover of war where for the men going we think what did they think about their victims what they were thinking about is themselves do my comrades accept me do they see me as tough enough am i up to this uh am i doing what what a soldier or our uniformed policeman is expected to do in this kind of circumstance they are trying to live up to expectations and the government of course is helping to set those expectations uh so it's the the dynamic of of harnessing these people uh is is in la is to a fair degree i think that what the degree in which all armed forces work the the creation of small unit loyalties commitment uh and that you don't want to be the one who's letting people right i think you put your finger on it we we need to zero in on that moment um when they make the shift to coming from their their background even with the brainwashing they've had uh to actually uh committing these atrocious acts uh when you talked about the women going east and you know they they were they were secretaries they they came from uh ordinary households there were nurses um how did they make that jump to to harden themselves when they heard these stories on the train from from the veterans that we killed the the jews we did this we did that how did they make that that that switch well in the memoir literature they describe it as going into kind of a uh inner immigrant immigration and focusing on work trying to find various distractions and diversions um uh there are some cases of some women who had kind of breakdowns who who would describe going back to their dorm room and curling up in a ball and just because for them it was also the shock of war and they're young they're 18 to 25 year olds most of them um so that was that just being in a war zone was a shock but for those who like here's ilestruvi um who was a vermont an army secretary wanted you know had a sense of adventure and wanted to to uh fulfill her labor duty by by working in the as a vermont kind of auxiliary and she was in rovno ukraine at the time in in spring 1942 160 000 jews in valhanya were killed this was a massive wave of of ghetto liquidations in mass shootings she looked out her window one night across the street was a cinema it's where they were holding the jews before they were marched to the killing fields and she knew that they were being shot her there was a jewish girl working in her office who didn't appear the next day and she was really outraged about this but there was nothing she felt helpless and i think that many of the witnesses that's what they did they just tried to you know remove themselves from the scene as much as possible and find other diversions and then as chris mentioned which is really important they weren't really thinking so much about the jews uh you know in an empathetic way in the in the way that we might hope they were thinking about them they were very um concerned about their own safety about their colleagues about the how the war was going to go if they were going to be victorious about their next meal about about heating i mean they just weren't as before we go on to that uh question of camaraderie that chris raised i want to just remind those listening um that we are encouraging uh really soliciting questions on social media uh hashtag ask why hashtag ushm uh please send in your questions um so camaraderie is is a factor in what because we're interested in what turned these ordinary germans into killers um because we want to learn these lessons for for the future um um camaraderie obviously was a factor so how did that work when they got to the killing fields did they look to each other to to influence themselves what if people didn't didn't go along with it some some refused didn't that influence uh some of the men talk a little bit about that i think we see two things happening one is that people are changed by what they do and what they see so you get a process of brutalization a process of numbing as they go along for instance the men will describe the first massacre and they're very distraught very traumatized and then with these successive massacre the descriptions become much less graphic because it becomes routine so that they lose the ability to be shocked by what they are doing the other process is that in fact the unit does divide and that they're emerged within the unit roughly three groups a group of eager killers people that learn to enjoy killing other human beings volunteer about for it joke and laugh about it uh and these of course are the these terribly sadistic ones that are so embedded the memory of survivors who still come and you know can tell the tales there is a a middle group which doesn't want to be seen as weak or cowardly they will do as they're told they won't confront authority far more important to be not be seen as a coward than to shoot somebody if you have to but you don't seek opportunities and then there's a significant group that learns to evade uh that you learn where not to be or to get a reputation that you're squishy and so you won't be asked to be on a firing squad and with the commander basically having made this a a principle you don't force people to shoot a fairly significant group were evaders who didn't they took part in all the subsidiary activities they would guard the shooting sites they would march people to the trains and deportation but they wouldn't actually kill the trigger and that gave them a sense when you hear them talk about it later in their interrogations of a great distance from events uh they may have had the moral high ground but they didn't think that they were the killers right um uh wendy did the women break down in the same groups um not in that kind of uh those specific categories because again they're not in uniformed in a killing unit in in the way that your men are and who are going repeatedly to a site and falling into various roles of guarding of shooting and so forth but the role-playing is really significant so the ones who went that extra step and became violent and took that initiative to lash out most many of them against jewish children the most vulnerable they put themselves in that role they self-fashioned in a way into particular roles so the wife of an ss officer who was pretty um extreme she kind of positioned herself as like the missus on a plantation here's vera vollhouse she's the wife of of the order police battalion commander julius valhall from orpo101 she was very assertive very she she was the classic aryan five nine blue eyes athletic so she kind of believed herself to be that ideal of that nazi type of that racial stereotype um and there's there's her husband so interesting both of you have written about this couple and uh it's an extraordinary story by itself and i encourage you when you get their books to read about this couple they actually honeymooned at a killing field uh in poland and she was pregnant at the time and was actually participated in some of the worst atrocities and it'll bring up a question which we'll discuss later there she is um on what what was going through their minds and how this how this could have possibly happened but uh before we go on i want to break for a moment for a video um joasos alexinus was with the lithuanian security battalion who carried out mass shootings in belarus and it is chilling to hear how he explained events and it's very instructive to hear this from the killers themselves so why don't we cue that and then we'll go on with the discussion okay um chris you alluded to this that some of the men refused to participate and i read in both of your books that people who refused were not punished that's quite interesting talk a little bit about uh those episodes you describe in your book men who refused and the commander uh who seemed legitimately torn about his his orders to kill civilians yes and the first masks are not only the men distraught but the commander who's never done this before is and and when he's telling the men what their task is going to be uh the witness has described that he has tears streaming down his cheeks his voice is choking his major trap major trump he's fighting to control himself and he gives them a series of justifications and then explains that they're going to have to shoot everybody in the town and then makes the offer if you don't feel up to it you know you can step out and turn in your rifle and then he doesn't go to the killing fields he stays in town and the men see this that that he doesn't he's making them well he did give him the chance to stand out he also doesn't go and see what they actually have to do so in some ways they're they they he was a very popular commander the men identified with him uh and part of in a sense why people uh i think didn't step out is they weren't going to leave the old the old man in the lurch they weren't gonna you know fail him he had a terrible job he was assigned and they had to help when when the film we just saw he referred to this as work this is how some of the men coped with it this was a bad job i got a bad assignment but it's a job that has to be done is work and so they did try to normalize what they were doing by using this term work as we we've seen here so so the war criminals who were tried after the war and said i was only following orders i had to do this that's not true they didn't have to do this yes some and many units you didn't have somebody who explicitly made it clear but when people tested they found out one one didn't uh and was as uh very clear that in all the post-war trials in germany which there have been hundreds uh no german defense attorney has been able to find one documentable case when someone who refused to shoot unarmed civilians suffered any significant punishment it just didn't happen the problem was people testing the system you know cannot do i in fact they were they self-selected they were afraid to test now wendy women were not in the chain of command um so they didn't have orders to kill those who killed did it on their own volition is that right i mean they were not in the same category as as the police battalion members who who who were directed to participate correct it was not their assignment it wasn't in their job description as it were um so they went beyond and ironically after the war in terms of their um measuring their identity judging their culpability they were excessive in their behavior by going beyond and killing which should have landed them you know a conviction because they displayed kind of sadism or bloodlust but um they were not um by and large were mostly acquitted but one of the pieces that you mentioned in terms of what is turning ordinary people into killers that's interesting and that we've been doing in our work i know your first edition of your work really pushing us into the realm of psychology and social psychology as historians because of all this conditioning cognitive dissonance and all these concepts in terms of how the individuals and the social dynamics kind of wore them down their moral inhibitions and became part of this process of adaptation um which points to to all of us in terms of right i mean we're familiar with this concept of soldiers um uh motivated principally by the comrades and we have that today in our military that after a battle soldiers will say when they committed an act of great heroism so i was doing it for my my colleagues so this seems to be universal in military organizations throughout that that soldiers do it for each other is that correct i think that's pretty part of basic training of any uh any armed forces and so that is is exploited and harnessed to to genocidal killing um now um conviction rates were very low after the war uh it's astounding some of the wendy the women you write up in your book who were documented as committing some of the worst atrocities were not prosecuted uh what accounted for first of all neither men nor women were properly prosecuted after the war in numbers sufficient to their acts but women were particularly uh exonerated why is that i think it's a whole complex of factors um and i think that it has to do with these gender dynamics between men and women covering for each other legitimizing to each other why they're engaged in these atrocities and in my case where you have husbands and wives former secretaries and bosses they're just they're covering their loyalty packs that are that they strike during the during the war that continue into the post-war period and they share defense strategies so there's no real difference between a man you know on the stand saying oh i can't quite remember i was on furlough that weekend the women are saying the same thing but the added piece for the women who are indicted is that especially outside the camp system it's hard to get really good hard evidence it's mostly eyewitness testimony survivors and that wasn't considered strong enough johanna aldfater case in point indicted 1978 for the um uh being a murder of 7 000 jews in in vladimir vulinsk and was acquitted acquitted twice actually um so that was pretty outrageous case in in west germany is it because people can't believe that women would be capable of things like that yeah um i mean even this even the survivors would say such in her case such sadism i've never seen before from a woman were as dumbfounded during the war and then the prosecutors picked up on that are the interrogators and said this is this is this is um mystifying why were women behaving like this and they want to suppress that they want to go back to a normal society it shows something to to us to society that that we shy away from that we we shun we were appalled by it and i think you have this quote in your book i picked it up in one of your books nothing makes people stick together better than committing a crime together does that explain why husbands and wives sometimes egged each other on and were were really literally partners in crime yes they were partners in crime and both in the workplace as well and into the post-war period many of them were also went through divorces after the war um which was interesting um in terms of the denunciation history but yeah so they were partners in crime but they also personal relationships marital otherwise i mean work relationships is very much a part of the dynamic of how this history unfolded and you know when when um chris when you said that um soldiers in the unit could could refuse and did refuse there's a very interesting part where somebody said if i had more time to think about it i might have refused they weren't given much time to make that decision trap as i recall said basically if you don't want to be part of this terrible operation or in effect you can step out but it came so suddenly that they didn't have time to consider it is that true if they had more time they might have stepped out what we do know is that over the course of the of the following summer and fall increasingly numbers of people did go to their non-commissioned officer and said i can't do this anymore but to do that they had to say i can't do any more because i am too weak what you couldn't do is reproach the regime and criticize the policy you had to affirm what the killers were doing as positive manly tough and say i am too weak to take part i i have to be excused so you in in the very act of extra extricating yourself from the killing you had to affirm the killers as as coded positive and what you were doing as coded negative so there was a big hurdle to making that claim but you said that more and more refused as the war went on but on the other hand more and more came became used to the killings and as you say in your book um it became less and less of a problem to do the killings yeah i think both the evaders group of evaders grew and the group of ear killers grew in the middle shrinks over a course of time as as they moved towards one one side of the spectrum of the um i was also interested to read two things in your book one is that in if i have this right in march 1942 75 to 80 percent of all the eventual victims of the holocaust were still alive by the following february 1943 the figures would be reversed only 20 percent would be alive and 75 to 80 percent would be dead meaning that the bulk of the murders occurred in that 11-month period and a lot of the murders 40 percent if i remember this correctly were by bullet not by gassing so uh what we have to remember is that these events that you particularly talk about with your police battalion was responsible for a lot of the holocaust in a very compressed period of time in murders and mass shootings in the field this was not gassings and and trains to auschwitz yeah i think we do have to realize that the trajectory of world war ii and the direction of the holocaust are not identical and that you do have this extraordinarily intense period of killing uh from early 42 to early 43. as a as a policy in a sense the holocaust has been accomplished by stalingrad songbird falls in the end of february of 1943. in that since hitler has already won his war against the jews when the military turning point comes there's two years of mopping up and particularly the great tragedy of hungarian jews but most of the deed has been done by the time of stalingrad and interestingly that as you say as hitler was losing his war the war he was winning the war against the jews and the fact that he was losing the war made no difference uh obviously to the fact that he was stepping up his war against it because his his battle was really against the jews um i want to ask you this uh clearly what comes through both of your books is that the the dehumanization of the jews was a major if not the major factor in the holocaust that these killings all depended on the fact that the victims were not seen as human right and the the callousness and the cruelty really depended on the fact that their lives were were considered completely worthless and and and malign is that the same as saying anti-semitism was dehumanization the same as anti because some of the perpetrators were not necessarily uh avid or or malignant anti-semites yeah certainly the term anti-semitism covers a whole range of of degrees of aversion and hatred so it's an awkward term to explain in fact a range of behavior but we know of course many uh of the german killers killed other groups they were equal opportunity killers uh the euthanasia killers then staffed operation reinhardt uh the military in serbia first shot high school students uh as to fill retire retaliation quotas and then only turn to killing jews uh we know that the partisan sweeps wiped out what 25 of belarus i think is is killed in the course of this war because of these deadly partisan sweeps and destroying village after village so these this is a case where the nazi regime was capable of killing millions of people even if they had never killed a single jew but clearly in their own ideology the jew had a very special place in this and clearly they had lived in a society where the jew was not considered german had been to use helen fein's telling term jews had been expelled from the community of human obligation these were not us not people we had an obligation to and in war us them that means their fair game and this ability to to basically expel jews as fellow europeans from this community of human obligation whereby their lives don't count they are expendable i think you don't even have to hate them though certainly as many did but the key thing is you just don't care about okay so we made some progress here if we're looking for a way to kill vast numbers of people commit genocide the first thing to do is dehumanize them in any society right um and that's something worth learning and understanding right that that that is a key component could i guess it's a rhetorical question and i'll rephrase it these killings could not have taken place if the victims were seen as human correct um we certainly have the one example where hitler had to tread much more carefully was of course the the mentally and physically handicapped relatives of germans and he did that in secret and then when it became public he had to decentralize it was continued but there he knew there were limits there he knew that these people still had german relatives german eyes they they were tied to germany in a way that most of the other victims even if they had been german german jews of course lived in germany for centuries but you could ex you could create a mindset whereby they were not part of the community and that is the key thing expelling them from the community setting that boundary right you know i was interested wendy that you you said some of the nurses started off in the euthanasia program killing and they were not just jews they were the so-called defective human beings disabled um deformed children etc um so it was that the the way they progressed from uh their entry into the killing process the so-called mercy killing pauline kneisler one of the nurses in the so-called t4 program at the start of the war that hitler signed off on um was killing 70 patients a day mostly through injection but also gassings in germany itself starting with the this case of this jewish sorry this german child um but the the the interesting part about um the dehumanization aspect i think it it happens kind of at a later stage when suddenly the inferior idea of a jew or of a racially defective person materializes before their eyes they are put in a position in the ghettos when they're deprived um and they're emaciated or they're being either being forced into ravines naked like they're they're um or they're for they're cutting their beards you know they're they're trying to take away their cultural identity for instance so they're all these ways of stripping them of their um identity of their humanity but um i think that that comes in some ways later and closer to the killing i think before that you obviously have the indoctrination and the schooling which has a certain logic to it and it's existential and it's that's where it's ratcheted up to okay i may not want to kill but i'm going to better them than us right so with the war against the judeo bolsheviks they felt threatened that was a security that was necessity and so it's that fear of the power of that other but then that other is is reduced to such a state like the muslim on it you know in birkenau um is it not it's easier to kill them when they're in that state that seems to affirm their inferiority so it was like a self-fulfilling prophecy you reduce the jews to abject state and then you point to them and say look at these jews they're not really human beings but your nurses also killed german soldiers who were wounded at stalingrad i was struck to read that well that was something that had been discussed in the testimony and increasingly there's more documentation on that i kind of speculated in my book about that i wanted to kind of point the attention to that um yes there was a special unit because of the connections between the euthanasia program the killing of the mentally physically disabled and gassing technology to the establishment of the gassing centers um but the notion that german soldiers coming out of the war in the moscow campaign who were frostbitten and had become so become disabled so they were in a way like the patients back in germany who were slaughtered to be killed and so the germans were very pragmatic right they talked about useless eaters and if you're not you know um an able-bodied um person for the reich then you know then you're trash right then you're not valuable so um this team was sent out to perform the same things they were doing back at hadamard and grafeneck doing that kind of those cleansing operations with the german soldiers but i mean if it was such a big favor to the reich that they were going to get rid of these poor useless soldiers they certainly weren't advertising it and saying that this is a mercy operation so they were ashamed of it clearly of course yeah they sent letters home to the loved ones saying that your son died honorably on the front so just when you thought you heard all the possible depravity of of the nazi system here's another one they're killing their own soldiers because they didn't want wounded soldiers walking around um extraordinary now since so much has come out since your book other police battalions have come under scholarly scrutiny what information has come out since that confirms or alters your conclusions in your book chris well certainly the fact that the police battalions were a major source of manpower for killing has been confirmed and that many many battalions were involved which we didn't know about earlier this has been one of the elements that's taken place since i think in terms of our understanding of social psychology is a important way of getting at the idea that these are not individually psychologically imbalanced people these are people working in a group and understanding group dynamic how people interact under whether it's in normal times or in extraordinary times we do need to understand social psychology rather than abnormal psychology and uh much of the argument when i wrote my book was was cast as well is it ideological or is it situational and i was cast as a situational explanation versus the ideological and i think that some of the best works since has said this is a false dichotomy first of all the men who go out there read their situation through an ideological lens there is no neutral situation it's in the mind of the person doing it so how a german understands what it means to be an occupying uniformed person in poland is part of the situation but it's through the ideological lenses that he wears of german superiority and entitlement to empire and the acceptance of the jew is other and outside the community of human obligation so that in fact i think what we're getting to now is that that it is a mixture of of a broad set of cultural attitudes not just anti-semitism but including other ideas about racial superiority and inferiority german entitlement as well as the situational factors of camaraderie of being seen as tough and these just come together this is a synergy it's interesting so what you're saying is that it's a much more complicated picture and excuse me if i go back to this but you had a famous debate with daniel goldhagen years ago in this venue over um and the the uh responsible role of anti-semitism in the holocaust and goldhagen of course in his book hitler's willing executioners posited that it was endemic um what was the word anti-exterminationist anti-semitism that was embedded in the soul of the german people since time immemorial and that explained it all so what you're saying is it's more complicated well i'm saying it one is an interaction of these and also the the attitudes are not embedded for centuries but in fact are very sharply created in the crisis of germany in the 20th century by the fact that they reversed themselves and have become a a philosomic if anything society correct yeah or or take the notion of of of community which in germany is the term folks mineshaft in 1914 when the kaiser gives his speech the beginning of world war one uh the german folkesca mineshaft you know knows no classes no parties no confessions it's inclusive what the nazis did is had all the emotive power of that and turned it into an exclusive notion of it is all the people who aren't jewish aren't gypsy aren't marxist aren't handicapped and it becomes an in an exclusive notion uh so they capture the emotive power of this word of community uh but harness it to a racist and exclusivist uh ideology uh and so that's that's part of the mindset it's not just jews but it's a an utterly racist and exclusive view of the community in all facets anyway it's almost time or perhaps it is time now to go to the q a am i getting an instruction to go to the q a now we can do that we have two mics set up on either aisle you can line up behind the mic please ask a question don't make a speech and we are also open to questions from social media and when those come in we'll um uh accept those and while we're waiting for people to to line up with questions and you can start to line up i'll take you soon uh one more question for wendy um the um most shocking part of your book are the women who really committed horrible atrocities in the concentration camps uh who were out and out sadis horrible horrible stories and women who were mothers themselves who murdered jewish children and you say it's not complicated they were able to separate their roles as mothers and on the other hand they were just killing undeserved undesirable whatever people um that that strikes me as a kind of a shocking uh finding if if i got that right uh yeah in part that they you know there's so much about the folks combined shaft and privileging the unity of the people as the strength of germany above individual life um not only against the individual lives of their enemies but even of of their own of germans i mean think of magda gobles in the bunker and her husband joseph goebbels killing their six children because their regime failed there was for them no future so to take the life of your own child and obviously the killers i focused on of a jewish child who was in their eyes worth even less that's how extreme this got this ideology there's one scene in your book which is absolutely chilling about a a woman who a nazi a woman who was running down jews with her baby carriage her children's baby carriage anyway we have a person questioner here hi i have a a two-part question if you don't mind first one is uh um uh concerns uh ordinary people and a book that you published 14 years earlier about the german foreign office and the holocaust did you ever take a look or compare the attitudes of you know how you dissected the attitudes of of of the police battalion and ordinary people versus the people at the higher realms of the agencies and departments who planned who are involved in planning the holocaust did you ever take a um did you ever take a look at that the other thing is since your book came out ordinary people in 1992 has there been any um thing written or any evidence about um uh about some of the people in the police battalions or other battalions who when they decided they didn't want to participate in these killings their careers did suffer or does that theory still hold consistently uh throughout uh okay let me ask you the first question uh i haven't actually worked on the very top leadership because i felt that was less of a problem there you have what we would call behavior or attitude behavior consistency they had ideas about jews and they acted on them uh we know what motivated hitler so in in that sense i found that i wanted to know how the people who implemented this were motivated and again if we go to the foreign office book i was looking at the jewish desk of the german foreign office uh there were four major figures there two of them in fact asked to get out and eventually got transfers one was a very hardcore eager ideological nazi the most interesting one wasn't who came in from the outside he'd been in the cultural division department he gets the job as the head of the jewish desk what he does is become a self-made anti-semite he immediately writes to all the publishers in germany and send me your anti-semitic books and he does a crash course to become a jewish expert and and turns himself into an anti-semite because that's his his new job and his new role and if he's going to be the head of this he wants to be the best anti-semite in germany uh so again you had a whole spectrum of how people in this in this bureau reacted but the scary thing is it didn't matter what their individual background does when you look at the telegrams they wrote and the policies that came out you can't tell who wrote what they're all doing the same job which is harnessing the foreign office to maximize the number of jews that will be turned over to germany to be deported to the death camps and their personal attitudes differ but it doesn't alter in any way the uniform role this this agency plays in in the holocaust um okay let's move along if we may over here first person the photograph of the nurses was really powerful and part of the power for me is that in nursing and other professions there's ethical codes and i'm wondering as much as what went wrong what went right were there ordinary people who just said no to participating in all of this and what worked and how can we learn from what worked good question yes that was a photo of a swearing-in ceremony of the nurses and the nursing um profession you know the some 300 000 of them were circulating the eastern territories as the huge numbers are necessary for the war effort um had really been taken over in large part by by the ss the head of the german red cross was an ss officer the nurses had to swear their loyalty to hitler like the vermont soldiers had to and they had been indoctrinated with a lot of the racial ideology um so they were conditioned to obviously um prioritize the the the care for the german soldier so that he could be sent back out into into combat and so forth but they really um had a different understanding of caring um and even to the extent that the euthanasia program was called you know mercy killing so um i mean the one of the cases two of the cases in my book of the nurses who were really appalled by the wartime conditions and what they saw of the holocaust they just stuck to their work in the infirmary they didn't you know they didn't rise up in any way they were part of a kind of cadre of nurses it's a similar kind of group dynamic you just don't see individuals at least we don't have enough documentation on that and they don't talk about it after the war as anything kind of heroic they're very patriotic this this this kind of cohort um most of these young women had never been outside their villages uh so this was a really they they met after the war um like the vets they would meet and have these social evenings and speak nostalgically about the war so they saw themselves as part of a general military campaign this was a professional opportunity for them many of them continued to be nurses after the war um but not a kind of moment of moral you know confrontation with something deeply moral like the holocaust uh we're going to go over here you know in hitler's war against the jews was there any distinction between german jews and the other jews only in timing of implementation that as they start with killing soviet jews and the initial deportations from germany are in fact sent to transit ghettos they're sent to loge auriga or minsk and they are sent sort of held there in the same way that you might say criminals launder dirty money and they have to pass it around for a little while and essentially had these holding ghettos and until they'd been out of germany for 9 or 12 months then they could be sent to be shot and so you have the killing of the german jew sent to lodge in the fall of 41 sent to hemlock in may of 1942. uh the german jews sent to minsk are sent in the fall of 41 it is july of 42 that they're killed there and initially when the first massacres of german jews occurred uh in fact that word got back to germany very quickly and that's when they decided they needed to hold off and sort of put these in kind of holding pens for a while and delay until you know out of sight out of mind and then you could then then you could kill them after a quote decent interval when nobody cared anymore or had forgotten about them so there was a sensitivity to to the fact that germans would might be more concerned about the fate of german jews than others so it did affect the timing but the ultimate goal was always that the jews had to be killed once they had committed themselves to the final solution let me also remind our audience that we're soliciting questions on social media hashtag ask why or hashtag ushmmm thank you and we have a question from social media actually we have a couple um we have two that are related i think one is from the reverend dr matthew coomber who wants to know if either of you have any ideas on what separated those who resisted from those who went along with the holocaust and becky frank asks a similar question how can we learn from the past of these ordinary people who became perpetrators and make sure that we or people we know don't follow the same path at some point good question that's an easy one well i have to say on the resistance one um i've really found so little documentation on on resistance when in fact one would think logically especially to post-war testimonies when individuals are trying to avoid prosecution that they would if they had a resistance story to tell or story of saving a victim by george it would be there right i mean but it's very rare that it's that it materializes um there's some court records from the wartime period where we see so-called acts of of sabotage against the regime and they're dealt with the punitive measures are really extreme i have a woman in western ukraine who was um sheltering jews in the forests and um she was a wife of a nazi a forester and and right at the end she was brought to trial um in ukraine in the german court system and and executed um so these are stories that are i think very difficult to uncover um i'm working on a book project right now and it turns out the person i most unlikely thought to be a resister who was taking atrocity photographs at a mass shooting that was a turning point for him being at that site was a turning point for him and he ended up becoming a resistor and sheltering jews and i only uncovered this story because i had the opportunity to meet with his family and interview them so they're they're difficult uh um cases to to turn up um i think it also speaks to the enormity of this of the system of the holocaust the pressure uh that was placed on not only germans but all europeans who were engulfed in this that you know these are these are um uh the minority resisted um these these policies these killing policies yeah to that question of you know why did some people decide not to participate and others went along and even transformed themselves into either eager killers i would say that is this the single most difficult question that i can't answer on the basis of the evidence that i've looked at these are interrogations from the post-war period from the 1960s the interrogators of course are looking for evidence against criminals and breaking down their denial they are not trying to satisfy historians curiosity as to why some people said no so they don't follow those up and you don't get a what an historian's interview would have been of course was to take those people and to try to elicit from them much more about what it was and enable them to to evade they did make a few odd comments that nonetheless are in the record but they're not uniform some would say well they had jewish friends before the war they knew jews uh or that they had a landscaping business that worked mainly in the jewish neighborhood so they knew jews and they knew all the stories about jews weren't true basically they just rejected the anti-semitic dehumanization of jews from personal experience because that was had been part of their pre-war world a few decided their their ideology i was a communist i was a socialist i was an anti-nazi uh others uh you know i think it's what is it that gave some of them a moral autonomy to not have to conform to not be afraid about the the negative opinions their comrades that's just a very what in their upbringing enable them arm them to take that stance that's one of the most difficult questions i and i wish i could answer it uh but i can't this is why we honor people like raul wallenberg and vale valerian frye and others because they are such mysteries um do we have another question or uh let's take one over here and then we'll go back to social media that's okay my name is martin weiss i'm also a holocaust survivor mr browning i read your book the ordinary man a long time ago and that opened my eyes about some things i didn't know i expected that uh they were all willing killers and i was glad to hear that some of them were not but anyway i what i really wanted to ask you is this we talk about the germans what they were doing we know about the izan's group okay now the anzac group what nobody ever mentions there's a lot of ukrainians they have a lot of lithuanians and so on from different countries and nobody ever mentions them they got off scot-free and this is something that annoys the heck out of me the hungarians which i was by the way shipped as a hungarian uh even though i was not from hungary they committed their own atrocities on the russian front and and companies padalks got different places like that and they threw people into the nester river nobody ever mentions that only the germans and i could go on and on about different things like this and this is something that i wish somehow another somebody would do something about that because the how come they got off scot-free you look at the history books nobody ever mentioned slovakia is a good one the slovakia were the first people that were actually shipped out to ukraine to be killed and the slovak government at the time were the one that actually almost asked hitler to take the women and children as well they only wanted a man for work and this i only found it out in the past a couple of years and you know something i uh live not far from slovakia actually just across the border but the point is that uh all these things have been buried forever and nobody ever talks about it all right listen in the interest of time let me just shorten that you posed a very good question uh have the other ethnic groups other than the germans been short changed in in history's verdict of culpability we certainly know a whole lot less about them and they have been much less researched but to emphasize the question you're absolutely right in terms of the crucial role these people played if one looks at the german police in the soviet union behind the lines in 1942 the second great wave of killing during this very intense period for every german policeman they controlled 10 to 12 ukrainian police in the ukraine and most of the trigger pullers were not german uh that the manpower now wasn't even from you know middle-aged german policemen they weren't they were ukrainians in lithuanian units himmler approves the creation of these units in the summer of 41 by december there's 30 000 men in these units by december 30 42 40 yeah december 42 300 000 uh auxiliary policemen in the occupied territories that form a crucial manpower source part of the reason we couldn't investigate this of course is for years this was in the iron under the iron curtain and we simply couldn't go and there weren't trials about these people and so it's and also it's much less bureaucratic regime so we don't have the paperwork so it's one of those areas where we vitally need to research it but we are handicapped and trying to do it we do have um significant collections now at the museum the former kgb kind of archives and these investigations and it turns out that the lithuanian ukrainian these kind of what we call collaborators those who are killing with the germans um or even without the germans more of them were pursued after the war and rounded up and subjected to kind of kangaroo courts or drawn out proceedings and executed and had 25 years slave labor kind of in the inner russia but not as not within what the idea of what we think of as a holocaust trial so they were branded traders to the homeland and picked up for just their mere association with the nazi system and subjected some pretty draconian measures so more non-germans were prosecuted and punished than germans then i just said one thing i'll get off hungary itself and budapest i was still home because we're taking on 44 they were throwing women and children into the danube river then after that and 44 closed to the end of the war they were doing an armas scale okay all the jews that were left in budapest many of them were thrown into to the danube river and uh hungarians never admitted but finally finally they were forced to pop put up a uh memorial and guess what they didn't want any statue or anything something big so they're allowed to have shoes under the underbank of the danube so the architect made up shoes pairs of shoes to show that it happened before that they would never admit it thank you that's all lost in the history thank you very much jude did you have another social media question you wanted to get in yeah just um coming back um this is a question from becky frank who wants to know about the images in the hacker album and how they might supplement or complement this uh concept of ordinary men that's the outfit yeah this is one of the images here so okay hooker was deputy commandant of um of auschwitz birkenau and was these are images from the summer of 1944 and it's really a stan this is his personal photo album and this is another trend in the source material and in the um history of the holocaust that this was very much you know they're documenting they know they're making history they're documenting it they're very self-aware taking a lot of photographs including of the atrocities despite the ban that himmler issued and this photo album shows how men and women who were stationed at the camp the women were ss auxiliaries and these ss elite officers are carousing and and enjoying some recreational activities and it's coinciding with this peak period of killing of the hungarian jews in the summer of 1944. and the album itself is is also interesting to compare with the um auschwitz album that we know of that shows the hungarian jews arriving at the ramp and being selected um so it's an important artifact from this standpoint as well but certainly it is a very blatant display mangala is in this this album for instance of how men and women interacting kind of create a sense of normalcy and have recreational activities that we think of as kind of spirited um camaraderie activities were you know coincided with um the the the very criminal actions that they were doing they somehow could could live in these two worlds side by side yeah certainly one thing that himmler was concerned about was the demoralization of the killers and the psychological burden on them and in december 41 he sends out this remarkable memo and he says after the killings you shouldn't have this misuse of alcohol because of course what usually happened is they got dead drunk instead you should have cultural evenings and you should have music and performances and this actually happened here's a if you can go back to that photo uh well the the text of from the himmler order it's a sacred duty of every high leader and commander personally to take care that none of the men who carry at the task or brutalized or damaged in spirit or character and and and reserve police pretend 101 they did have these musical evenings and we have this remarkable set of photos in which you have the the battalion doctors with the accordion and the violinist and the guitarist and here they're putting on a show the other show photos show all the men below who are listening to it uh but this normalizing the same juxtaposition of the hungarian trains arriving at the ramp and these men on their r and r at the at the the the yeah you can see also in 101 where you have we know they're doing during the day and enjoying a music concert at night this goes to the whole question of ordinary people again and it is part of the most chilling aspects of the holocaust that these were not uh just single-minded killers all the time they were also human beings doing what human beings do question i was intrigued by that among the first posters that was displayed was de austin brought dish and i was struck by the fact that that is the more familiar rather than the more formal you and i'm wondering because i think that's it's a poster directed at women do you have the sense that it's a deliberate play on women's whatever that they use that more familiar dish rather than zis yeah it's interesting um to ponder i hadn't really thought about that it's informal and it could be you know you have um it says german women so frau married and german girls medal the east needs you and um that you you are needed as a resettlement advisor in the vatican the territories of poland about there were about 3 000 of these wealth so-called welfare workers young german women um yeah the d could be a call um a more informal call and and trying to the audience of the younger women this is being issued by the nazi party that's an interesting uh observation i always i always uh think about the use of the reflexive in the post-war statements of some of our perpetrators who say i myself don't feel guilty the regime is guilty that's an interesting grammatical um point yes we have a question here yes so um i'm pulling together a couple threads that you've you've mentioned but um you've been talking about making jews the other and people getting used to things and so normalizing them so my question relates it's two part but it relates to how did they do it the first time out of the box like when the jews from munich and frankfurt and berlin were deported in november of 1941 and were killed within a week at the ninth fort massacre and were often veterans of world war one and generations of german citizens how did that work because it doesn't it's not consistent with what you're saying about they weren't used to it because it was new and they weren't other because they were germans and this was the ninth ford massacre and how was that kept secret till the 1990s uh first it wasn't kept secret that's no actually it was because until the 1990s families were told the people died at rega and it was only in the 1990s that it became information became available that it was at the ninth fort no we have the five transport there were the documents of the five transports being killed at coveno they we know that from earlier you can find that in hellberg and much earlier uh but to the other question why the real issue here is how could they put them on trains to send them away from germany but i think we have to remember you start in 33 and you kick them out of kick jews out of government jobs out of the civil service jewish students out of the school rooms so you're not going to your jewish doctor you're not going to your jewish lawyer anymore in 1935 you pass the nurnberg laws so that you can't socialize with your jewish friends because somebody's going to say oh they're engaged in hanky-panky and you could both end up you know being accused of having sexual relations which is now criminalized by 38 you closed down all jewish businesses you're not shopping in a jewish store jews have moved out of small towns they've gone into so-called jewish houses in the big cities living by themselves most germans had no contact with the jew from 1935 to 1941. so if you put them on a train in 1941 they've been isolated and and segregated and isolated for six years uh and then you send to the east and the and the first killings did get back to germany very quickly the five transports to kovano in the shooting of the first transport to riga those rumors spread very quickly and that's when they decide to send jews to these transit ghettos hold them for a while that's why they create terraisian stock where the older jews will go for even longer because they are sensitive to to to what the repercussions of this will be in german society uh why the einstein's group you know in in lithuania could shoot the german jews well they've been shooting jews now for for months by the time this happened so they are really brutalized they've been killing if we know from the from the yeager uh report where every day he records you know how many jewish men and women and children he's killed uh by november you know he's in he's well over the hundred thousand mark so uh that i maybe i'm wrong in that figure but any case has been killing tens of thousands of jews by then so these men are shooting anybody all right we our time is very short now so we're going to try to get as many questions as we can get in i'm fascinated by what you said about how it's social psychology rather than abnormal psychology that should be looked at to understand like the behavior of ordinary men in groups like in police battalion 101. i wonder if you've given any thought to um you know how should we train men in groups like in the police or in the military to prevent the kind of peer pressure or sticking up your comrade that contributed to what happened uh well the museum in fact has programs for police officers and west point cadets for exactly that reason that we want to use what we're learning to help train people who will be in in enforcement positions and that hopefully if one learns from the past we're not repeat gonna repeat it but uh so there's has been a very explicit attempt to work with those training groups uh through the museum okay over here social psychology human nature the sociological explanations or reasons that we've been hearing about here rather rather interesting and at the same time i find them strangely troubling in germany i'm going to ask a question to that will deal with germany and jews there with regard to the united states and jews here for many years the jewish community in germany which was proportional to what we have here in the united states about the same order magnitude were well accepted permeated german society from a to z were highly talented in many professions well accepted in the entertainment field in the financial field the medical fields etc etc same is true here why why do you think if you do that would happen to the jews in in a place where jews were so well accepted in germany is not possible in the future to happen to jews here in the united states one i would not say something is not possible because we don't know what is possible in the future we've seen too many things that we would have thought impossible that one somebody can't make that statement but i do think it's important to make two distinctions here one is that in germany between 1914 and 1933 this is a society that was literally pulverized by a total war a defeat a revolution in hyper inflation and a great depression that all impacted this is a space of less than 20 years uh that most societies have never been subjected in one generation to that kind of succession of overwhelming crises and it breaks down society and what we used to think you know things that would hold society together and they simply snapped i mean this is this is a highly vulnerable society secondly of course germany had not had a democracy to 1919 you don't have a long democratic tradition and it was a democratic regime implanted in part through defeat that many germans never even accepted hopefully in a country like the united states which certainly in 33 with roosevelt show that that democracy does have some powers of resistance if it is a broadly accepted political culture and custom and tradition and the the rules of the democratic game are accepted by the vast bulk of the population has a resiliency that it didn't have in germany so that is our reasons to hope that it is highly unlikely such a thing could happen in the united states and why it didn't happen in the u.s and it did happen in germany in 33 but as i say i don't go into the business of saying something can't happen in the future because i can't give guarantees thank you chris you mentioned roosevelt and and we have time for one more question so we're going to take it over here sorry go ahead sorry i'm kind of short but um hi um i was motivated to come to this event because it kind of reminded me of current events in charlottesville um and kind of related back to what you just said about we think the impossible like or things that we don't think are possible will happen but they do um and that was kind of that event was kind of directed towards um mainly blacks and jews and i kind of uh you know seeing a woman die there i went to the school so it was kind of emotional um and seeing someone um die because of that and kind of seeing what you said about the unity of the group over individual life um do you think um this is still kind of a social psychology over abnormal psychology um seeing things kind of happen like this more repeatedly than we thought should be happening or should be happening in general um so first part of the question would be uh do we think that it's still kind of social psychology over abnormal psychology or are the people here kind of in the group of abnormal psychology and the second part of the question which is more i guess have we learned anything um from the past and and seeing these types of things happen wow that's a long last question but let's try it all right thank you thank you for your question uh thank you very much i know it's difficult it's a very been very um these these recent events are incredibly troubling the museum has made a couple of statements about this some of our staff scholars have written op-eds and so forth so i want to encourage you to read these and see the museum's response to this and i think that the continuity of hateful ideologies be it anti-semitism various forms of racism um you know even even misogyny even you know that we have a history of that as well at work in many many cultures um it's pretty extreme um those ideologies they exist they they don't go away entirely and at some points in history be it crises that emerge that make those societies more vulnerable and leaders who seem to you know legitimize them of movements who come in or institutions that that allow them to to um give them a platform you know so they're all kinds of mechanisms that allow them to kind of bubble up um and gain some sort of traction and it is very troubling and that's why we just have to constantly be on guard yeah i would say again getting back to say the question there what we can say about the future i would have thought earlier that in fact you would not see in the united states people aping the nazi ritual of torchlight parades with the swastikas and confederate flags side by side marching through a university town chanting jews will not replace us if somebody had told me that was going to happen you know two years ago within two years i would have said you're crazy so yes we've broken a taboo we have lowered the bar and things are now happening that previously had not been allowed to happen and and didn't happen in in this way uh on the more positive side of course this did immediately invoke a very very broad reaction that this was just so repulsive it was just unbelievable uh and and i think the almost universal condemnation of what happened uh is is heartening uh we wish it was unanimous but nothing is unanimous in a democracy and i might also add as a final word that the germans were very concerned that this uh news would come out of what they were doing and had there been more publicity of it it might have curtailed it and that's why enemies of the people like the media are needed to bring these to bring these events to light in time so it's time to wrap up uh thank you christopher browning and wendy lauer and you'll be available upstairs outside signing books a couple of last thoughts just to sum up i think it's safe to say that nothing we have heard here tonight suggests that the holocaust grew out of any unique german disposition to murder rather a set of complex environmental social political psychological factors that could and did to various extents crop up elsewhere as we sadly know in rwanda and cambodia bosnia armenia and perhaps now in myanmar with the rohingya secondly explaining is not excusing and finally let us retain our humility in the face of a terrible mystery in the end we must confess we understand almost nothing but we must never stop asking the question how and why and now here's sarah to close our program thank you you

Channel: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Views: 883,289

Rating: 4.5608764 out of 5

Keywords: #USHMM, #ASKWHY, Never Stop Asking Why, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, USHMM, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, New York Times, NY Times, The Times, Mandel Center, Hitler's Furies, Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men, UNC, Nazis, Hitler, Ralph Blumenthal, Persecution, Holocaust, NSAW, Museum, Public Program

Id: 92UfAJr7790

Length: 89min 22sec (5362 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 18 2017