These were my arguments, and I asked him to do something for the child. He listened to me attentively, then asked me exactly what I proposed doing. I saw by his expression that I had put him face to face with a practically impossible problem. It was obvious that the child could not remain in the crematorium. One solution would have been to put her in front of the crematorium gate. A Kommando of women always worked here. She could have slipped in among them and accompanied them back to the camp barracks after they had finished work. She would never relate what had happened to her. The presence of one new face among so many thousands would never have been detected, for no one on the camp knew all the other inmates.
If she had been three or four years older that might have worked. A girl of twenty would have been able to understand clearly the miraculous circumstances of her survival, and have enough foresight not to tell anyone about them. She would wait for better times, like so many other thousands were waiting, to recount what she had lived through. But Mussfeld thought that a young girl of sixteen would in all naiveté tell the first person she met where she had just come from, what she had seen and what she had lived through. The news would spread like wildfire, and we would all be forced to pay for it with our lives.
‘There’s no way of getting round it,’ he said, ‘the child will have to die.’
Half an hour later the young girl was led, or rather carried, into the furnace room hallway, and there Mussfeld sent another in his place to do the job. A bullet in the back of the neck.
Distancing Yourself from the Act of Violence
The paradoxical way in which many organisational killers strongly distance themselves from others who kill directly – with their own hands. In fact, the desk killers in such cases will often evaluate themselves favourably in contradistinction to those who kill with their own hands. In essence such organisational killers are over-focussing on the final act of violence as a way of seeking to diminish their own – equally great – responsibility for the causation of violence.
The apparent squeamishness of organisational killers in the face of physical violence, and the desire to avoid direct experience of such violence, or its immediate after-effects, at first seems surprising, but is actually relatively common, especially at higher levels of power in organisations, where there is often little necessity to take part in, or even witness, acts of violence. For example, Albert Speer describes Hitler as having such an antipathy towards witnessing violence directly that it was extremely difficult to persuade him even to visit injured soldiers, or the front line: ‘As a rule he avoided not only physical, but indeed visual contact, with violence. During the later stages of the war this meant that, however important it was for morale, it was virtually impossible to get him to visit either the front or the bombed cities.’11
When Adolf Eichmann was on trial in Jerusalem in 1961 he never disputed his part in co-ordinating the logistics of the Holocuast, but he became furious when accused of murdering with his own hands: ‘With the killing of Jews I had nothing to do.12 I never killed a Jew, or a non-Jew, for that matter – I never killed any human being.’ The wilful myopia here is striking – the desk killer protests ‘I never killed’ because they almost never see the victims killed as a result of their orders. In fact, if confronted with accounts of direct killing, they can often react with anger. For instance, Hannah Arendt observed precisely this aspect in Eichmann’s behaviour as he listened to testimony:
During the trial, he showed unmistakable signs of sincere outrage when witnesses told of cruelties and atrocities committed by SS men … and it was not the accusation of having sent millions of people to their death that ever caused him real agitation but only the accusation (dismissed by the court) of one witness that he had once beaten a Jewish boy to death.
Exactly the same trait can be seen in Stangl, when confronted with an accusation by a Treblinka survivor that he had been one of several SS officers shooting in the direction of an arriving transport:
Stangl, insisiting that he had never shot into a crowd of people, appeared to be more indignant about this accusation than about anything else, and to find irrelevant the fact that, whether he shot into the group or not, these very same people died anyway, less than two hours later, through actions ultimately under his control.13
Here we have three men, working at different levels within the German state, all of whom were responsible for killing on a vast, industrial scale. Three men who believed they had kept their own hands clean, that they, personally, had never killed or been violent. Psychologically, this would seem to indicate a kind of ‘fetishisation’ of the importance of the act of violence itself, which has the subsequent effect then of diminishing (in their own eyes) their responsibility for acts that they caused to happen – in their case the conceptualisation and implementation of genocide.
While this may be seen as evidence of extreme self-delusion on the part of these three individuals, I think we can still see aspects of such over-focussing on the act of violence itself – and under-focussing on the causation of violence – in our legal systems and wider culture today. It was there in the post-war judgement of desk killers* but perhaps this trait also continues in much journalism and activism today where disproportionate attention is given to detailing the violent end results of a government’s or a corporation’s actions (the destroyed village, the injured civilians, the dead bodies, etc.), and insufficient energy is focussed on the causation of such actions – the propaganda, the financing, the political/military/corporate co-operation – which led to the violence in the first place.
Transferring Personal Responsibility to the Authority’s Responsibility
How, if you’re part of a large organisation, it is always possible to diminish your own sense of responsibility and pass on the greatest share of responsibility to others, especially those at higher levels of authority.
This is perhaps the most familiar of all the categories, and links most directly with issues surrounding corporate psychology and behaviour today. I believe that the development, since the late 1990s, of the so-called CSR movement (Corporate Social Responsibility) has actually had the disturbing effect of weakening moral and ethical frameworks within companies. Creating specific departments within companies which are supposed to deal with ethical, environmental and human rights issues has allowed the majority of employees working in the corporations to defer their own sense of responsibilityfn6 onto these departments, thus reducing their individual sense of moral agency, often with disastrous consequences.
This process of deferral of responsibilty is composed of two interlinked aspects. Firstly, the sense (which increases as the size of the organisation increases) that you are only ‘a cog in a vast machine’ – even relatively senior figures will attempt to use this excuse when confronted with malpractice or crimes. Secondly, that you are ‘only carrying out orders from a higher authority’ within the organisation. Both of these excuses were widely used even by senior figures such as concentration-camp commandants and their deputies after the war. We can see it vividly in a deposition Dieter Wisliceny (a deputy of Eichmann’s) gave to Lieutenant Colonel Smith Brookhart on 15 November 1945 in Nuremberg. Despite his own responsibility for having already deported tens of thousands of Jews from Slovakia, he recounts the following conversation with Eichmann in Berlin in early August 1942: