We recently continued our ‘Dialogues in Holocaust Education’ series with a fascinating conversation with Laurence Rees, the renowned, award winning author and documentary maker.
The session focused on themes in Laurence’s recent book ‘The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings From History’ and also delved into issues relating to the mindset of perpetrators that he has grappled with over three decades. As a teacher, I gained three key insights into the mindset of perpetrators from the fascinating discussion with Laurence that will help shape my teaching about perpetrators.
Insight No. 1: The extraordinary meeting with an SS man:
When confronted with the horrific crimes committed by human beings against other human beings during the Holocaust students in my classroom always have one question: what kind of a person could commit such acts?
Laurence began the discussion, as he does in his book, by relating his first meeting with an SS officer. The perpetrator was incredibly well groomed, well educated, articulate, charming…and a very successful businessman in post-war years. In essence, the antithesis of what many students may perceive a perpetrator to be. Clearly, the man sat in front of Laurence was not easily categorised as the sadistic robot of common imagination. However, when the conversation with the SS officer turned to the war the interviewee ‘turned into someone who lived in an alternate reality’. Laurence revealed that many of the people who he came across in the making of ‘Nazis: A Warning From History’ were not sorry about what had happened but felt that there had been a ‘lack of understanding’. That is something that is a difficult idea to get across to students but it is a vital one, as Laurence explained.
Insight No. 2: The devastating importance of the First World War on the minds of would-be perpetrators
As a teacher I certainly do not place huge emphasis on the impact of the First World War on the outlook of the perpetrators. Laurence argued that we must, explaining that it is almost impossible to emphasise the individual trauma and national trauma of the loss of that war and the circumstances of defeat and the immediate aftermath. Through his research and interviews with perpetrators he has come to understand that those who became Nazis felt a tremendous sense of injustice in 1918 and the lies that they created around those circumstances of defeat are central to the development of the Nazi Party and their hatred of Jews. Oskar Gröning, a member of the SS who worked at Auschwitz, justified the fate of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis through the lens of defeat in the First World War. It was a defeat that Groenig and other Nazis for Auschwitz erroneously blamed on the Jews. Importantly, Laurence contends, students can’t understand the Holocaust without understanding the mentality of Nazis going back to the First World War. The Nazis had at their core not just racism but also a huge sense of injustice surrounding the circumstances of defeat and its aftermath in the First World War.
Insight No. 3: he erroneous and dangerous trope of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’
The third insight into the mindset of the perpetrators that the conversation with Laurence revealed was the false belief in the lie that Jews were behind Communism. The idea of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’, espoused by Hitler in Mein Kampf was a trope deployed to advance Nazi anti-Jewish racism. It was also a lie that Romanian, Lithuanian and other perpetrators swallowed. As Laurence explained, they saw their oppression and loss of land at the hands of the Soviet Communists as being motivated by Jews…and created an enemy to take merciless and brutal ‘revenge’ on when they had the opportunity in the early years of World War Two.
To learn more about Laurence Rees book ‘The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings From History’ please take a look at a recording of the online session here:
