The Final Solution: Psychological Perspectives on Inhumanity

“I also want to speak very frankly about an extremely important subject. Among ourselves, we will discuss it openly; in public, however, we must never mention it…I mean the evacuation of Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. This is something that is easy to talk about. ‘The Jewish people will be exterminated’ says every member of the party, ‘this is clear, this is in our program: the elimination, the extermination of the Jews: we will do this.’ And then they come to you—80 million good Germans—and each one has his ‘decent’ Jew. Naturally, all the rest are pigs, but this particular Jew is first-rate. Not one of those who talk this way has seen the bodies, not one has been on the spot. Most of you know what it is to see a pile of 100 or 500 or 1,000 bodies. To have stuck it out and, at the same time, barring exceptions caused by human weakness to have remained decent: this is what has made us tough…This is a glorious page in our history which never has and never will be written.”—Speech by SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler to a meeting of SS generals in Posen on October 4, 1943. What can psychology offer us by way of a perspective for understanding the Holocaust in particular and genocide in general? We will explore the following themes in some depth: What is the nature of the evolution of an outlook that required, in the name of moral goodness, the destruction of a culture and the violent murder of six million people? How did victims view their fate in a world that saw their extinction as a cleansing of humankind? What thoughts and values guided the few who overtly and covertly opposed the policy of genocide at great risk to their own lives? Has evolution created a “universal neural circuitry” that disposes human beings to perceive an opposition between “us and them”? If so, can education dissolve such oppositions? Under what kinds of social conditions does hatred yield pleasure? This course will not provide entirely satisfying answers.