Given The Opportunity To Do Evil, Many Will Do So

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Consider the modern nation whose state policy is to drive out, cleanse or exterminate an ethnic minority living within its borders. How does a state go about implementing this policy?

In the case of Nazi Germany, Adolph Eichmann and his staff created a bureaucracy that directed and coordinated a Nazi Socialist policy that began with expulsion—and ended with genocide—of the Jewish minority that lived in Austria, Germany and later the conquered territories. The decisions that made expulsion and genocide policy were created over time at the highest levels of the German government. But those bureaucrats who implemented policy were no mere “cogs in the machine” argues Hans Safrian in the book “Eichmann’s Men” (Cambridge/U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum). Given an opportunity to commit inhumane deeds—without fear of punishment and more than that, rewarded for the job they did—these bureaucrats were responsible for acts of murder and genocide.

Safrian was a research historian for the Historical Commission of the Republic of Austria and is currently a research fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Safrian’s Austrian roots are noteworthy because he makes clear that Eichmann and most of his staff were Austrian and that anti-Semitism was a central feature of Pan-German Austrian politics prior to the Anschluss. When the Germans entered Austria on March 12, 1938, all sorts of hell broke loose against Austrian Jewry for two months.

This free-form violence and looting against Austrian Jews had to be brought under control. To this end, Berlin dispatched Herbert Hagen and Adolph Eichmann to create some order and curb local excesses. Eichmann single-mindedly took dictatorial control of all of the re-established Jewish organizations in Austria, writes Safrian. Under Eichmann’s executive powers, Austrian Jews could now be jailed or sent to concentration camps. There would be no more spontaneous looting and expropriation of Jewish property. All this would be controlled and implemented by Eichmann’s Zentralstelle fur Judische Auswanderung (the Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration).

Safrian argues the Zentralstelle became the “Vienna Model” (Wiener Modell) or prototype for future Nazi agencies and methods for dealing with the Jewish and Roma minorities.

Who were Eichmann’s men, the bureaucrats so efficient in implementing genocide? Many were old Austrian Nazi Party comrades. Since the NSDAP was outlawed in Austria from 1933-1938, most of these men had lost their jobs or seen their careers blocked. Some had left to go to work in Germany. Now, with the Nazi promise of a new social order, it was pay back time for these formerly marginalized men.

How much actual power did these bureaucrats have? This is an important question because of the influence of Hannah Arendt and her “banality of evil” thesis. Arendt, after covering the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1963, published her famous book in which she characterized the archetypical Nazi functionary as mediocre, without imagination, not acting primarily out of anti-Semitic motives.

Wrong, says Safrian.

For example, letters written by Eichmann’s men reveal most of them were unmistakably satisfied with their work persecuting Jews. Within the parameters of their assignments, these men made decisions that decided the life or death of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Roma. And these bureaucrats relished that power.

Another Austrian historian, Gerhard Botz, bolsters Safrian’s interpretation. Botz argues, “The persecution and annihilation of Jews quite concretely satisfied immediate social and economic interests of large strata and classes”. In short, driving out or cleansing ethnic minorities usually brings a wide array of rewards direct and/or perceived rewards.

Since the Holocaust, there have been other instances of mass expulsion and genocide. In the few instances where perpetrators have been brought to justice (as in the case of Serbian mal-doers), there was little evidence of “dismay or pangs of conscience over having participated in the orchestrated murder of tens of thousands of people”.

Both Safrian and Botz make a strong case that most people, given the opportunity to commit inhumane acts, particularly without threat of punishment, will find it in their interests to do so.

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