How The Holocaust Happened

What drives ordinary everyday people to become mass killers? What are the psychological mechanisms and cultural factors that lead to genocide? What were the causes of the Holocaust? Can we theorize a psychology of genocide? A theory of genocide?
The Holocaust was not perpetrated solely by a few sadistic psychopaths but by tens of thousands of everyday Germans, Poles, Frenchmen, Austrians, Slovakians, in fact, much of Europe took part.
If any of us could be motivated under the right conditions to become mass serial killers, how can we protect ourselves against the threat? How might we innoculate our societies and cutlures from decending into genocide?
There are a number of factors that lead to the Holocaust. Compartmentalization, euphemism, conformity, authority, rationalization, propaganda, anti-Semitism, victimhood, and association, in particular.
Gustav Le Bon, for example, argued that individuals are more likely to conform in a crowd because of anonymity and mimesis. Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments looked at conformity to authority. This combined with rationalisations like ‘its either us or them’ or ‘they won’t survive through the winter anyway.’
There was still a system of belief - an ideology - and almost a decade of propaganda disseminated by the Nazi Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (RMVP). Years of anti-Semitism in Germany and Europe led to conspiracy theories about Jewish world domination. While Britain, the USSR, and America were all consistently associated with ‘Jewish aggressors’.
When a person perceives themselves as a victim and a prisoner as an aggressor in a war of survival and we combine this with the pressure to conform and submit to authority the probability for murder increases. In Nazi Germany, everything was made to fit this formula.
Ervin Staub proposes a model of genocide that has three initial stages:
First, there’s the frustration of basic needs.
Second, An out-group is identified that’s the cause.
Next, The in-group is motivated by a ‘utopian vision’ that excludes a certain group.
And Herbert Kelman has also argued that the requirements are threefold: authorization, routinization, and dehumanization.
How does all of this fit together?
Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: patreon.com/user?u=3517018
Or send me a one-off tip of any amount and help me make more videos:
www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr...
Buy on Amazon through this link to support the channel:
amzn.to/2ykJe6L
Follow me on:
Facebook: thethenandnow
Instagram: / thethenandnow
Twitter: / lewlewwaller
Subscribe to the podcast:
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast...
open.spotify.com/show/1Khac2i...
Credits:
Milgram Experiment Diagram - Fred the Oyster, CC BY-SA 4.0, creativecommons.org/licenses/..., via Wikimedia Commons
Milgram video - Movie S1 from Slater M, Antley A, Davison A, Swapp D, Guger C, Barker C, Pistrang N, Sanchez-Vives M, Rustichini A. "A Virtual Reprise of the Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiments". PLOS ONE. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0000039. PMID 17183667. PMC: 1762398. (Creative Commons 3.0)
Sources:
Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men
Laurence Rees, The Holocaust
Donald G. Dutton, The Psychology of Genocide, Massacres, and Extreme Violence: Why “Normal” People Come to Commit Atrocities
Ervin Staub, The Origins and Prevention of Genocide, Mass Killing, and Other Collective Violence in the Journal of Peace Psychology
Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Years, www.schirn.de/glanzundelend/di...
Joseph Goebbels, The Jews are Guilty, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/...
Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During WWII & The Holocaust
Frank McDonough, The Hitler Years
Thomas Blass, Psychological Perspectives on the Perpetrators of the Holocaust: The Role of Situational Pressures, Personal Dispositions, and Their Interactions
Henri Zukier, The Twisted Road to Genocide
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Peter Cohen, The Architecture of Doom, • The Nazi Philosophy of...

[@ThenNow]

Script & sources at:

[@Illuminatethedark_]

"Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it."

[@nairobichik]

Nothing can ever justify genocide.

[@mattyb584]

Can't help but feel like history really is repeating itself..

[@psychedelicartistry]

Those 5 things he listed at the end are all very prevalent today.

[@manifestgtr]

This type of stuff is

[@patriciagranados4027]

What is really scary is all this can happen again and again and again

[@randomuser5609]

A good starting point to avoid stuff like this is to remember that people are individuals, not groups.

[@MegaCygnusX1]

"The perpetrators of genocide often see themselves as the victims,"

[@Gorlim_the_Unhappy]

I would say that the book "ordinary men" is the most haunting and chilling bit of history I've ever read. The fact that, if you or I could walk away from mass murder with no consequence, it would still happen. Some other ordinary man would carry out the orders. Choosing to be a moral person has no real effect on our history, and that is one of the hardest pills to swallow

[@krismoe31]

It is really important to go into depths on why people get convinced to kill, and not dismissing everything with simple explanations like "they were horrible people", "they just didnt like each other" (which was the explanation I was given for the genocides in the breakup of Yugoslavia in middle school when I asked about it), "authority made them do it" or other such crap. Great video!

[@intrusive-th0t]

Also:

[@capeda9942]

Very similar to what's going on in Gaza today. Very sad that humans are repeating these atrocities.

[@TheLacedaemonian300]

I'm 40 minutes into this and I had to take a pause. This video is nothing short of brilliant. It has become exceedingly scarce to hear a story told in a creative and innovative way, but here I've found one of those rarities. Before I go back to watching this I would like to thank you for making such an honorable tribute to those who were murdered in the Holocaust. You will never know what you mean to so many of us because there exist no words to describe the feeling, but it is an endless river of gratitude. Let us never repeat the errors of our past and may we all remember too, Never Forget!

[@melloone611]

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out-because I was not a socialist.

[@azzy101]

This is exactly what I was looking for, an explanation that would make sense as to how and why this even happened, very well done to the creator. This should have much more views.

[@tapashyarasaily1373]

that last shot of the headshower in the brausebad says it all. this documentry was so well created, the narrative and sequencing is absolutely perfect. thank you for it.

[@hightechnician]

Thanks. It's such a hot topic here in Germany to even dare try and analyse it. So I'm glad people from the outside are doing it. There are many parallels between the situations of Germans then and Russians now, the same twisted sense of victimization, that isn't even entirely unfounded, just wholey misdirected

[@amorosogombe9650]

Thank you for tackling this difficult subject so thoroughly, bravely and honestly. I'm from Kenya (luckily, in this part of the world). I've grown up seeing waves of refugees escaping genocide since I was a child, Eritrea, Tigray, Darfur, Rwanda, the DRC, I was even in the first cohort of African students to go to post-aparthied South Africa for university, a country that very narrowly avoided what might have become the first nuclear genocide, believe it or not. Many don't know how the CIA and South African special forces chased down the apartheid regime's nuclear weapons, finding them across barns and goodness knows where before Mandela was sworn into power. We've lived and continue to live in a seriously disturbed world. We must be grateful to scholars and intellectuals like you for tackling and attempting to understand & so help to heal, these catastrophic social pathologies.

[@user-sn4jp3cu4j]

Well done to the inventor, this is exactly what I was hoping for-an explanation that would make sense as to how and why this even occurred. This ought to receive a lot more views.