The Exception (35 page)

Their voices gradually fade away.

Anne-Lise persuades herself that the panting is probably not dogs but a defective pump somewhere in the ventilation system. She listens for people talking. Not a sound.

After stealing back out into the corridor, Anne-Lise follows it for a few more turns. Another metal staircase and, at the top of it, a small anteroom. She pulls at one of the door handles but this
one is alarmed and a siren goes off. The sound is like the piercing noise of a giant dog whistle.

Anne-Lise looks around her. She is in the reception area. The choir is staring at her from behind the glass wall.

This is the end.

How can she tell Henrik that she has been fired? Now he’ll have to put up with her languishing at home for years: another drunken, useless Jutta. And the children will suffer as their mother slowly falls apart.

Pernille opens the door leading into the rehearsal room. It doesn’t matter, now that the alarm has been set off.

‘Oh, good. There you are!’

Anne-Lise can’t answer. She tries to muster the courage to stand in front of them, exposed as a liar.

Someone calls out. ‘Hey, Camilla! Your old classmate has found her way back!’

Tess has joined Pernille. ‘We’ve been quite worried about you, Brigitte.’

Anne-Lise scans the room for Camilla. She can’t see her anywhere.

Another voice from the back of the group.

‘Camilla?’

Others join in.

‘Goodness, where did she go? We keep losing people today.’

‘Camilla? Camilla, where are you?’

‘Look, her bag is gone! It was here a moment ago.’

Anne-Lise quietly collects her coat and umbrella. She smiles vaguely at no one in particular.

She hears someone mention how Camilla reacted when she heard about ‘Brigitte’. Even after all these years, Camilla was so upset that she sneaked away without anyone noticing.

Anne-Lise excuses herself. ‘I’d better leave too.’

The women look sympathetically at her.

The Psychology of Evil I

Interest in the psychology of perpetrators is growing rapidly. Past research in this area is summarised in this and the next issue of
Genocide News.

By Iben Højgaard

In the Old Testament whole populations are described as being ‘wiped off the face of the Earth’ on twenty-seven separate occasions. The phenomenon of genocide is integral to not only Western, but also non-Western cultures, although the latter has surprised some observers.

For thousands of years genocides have been known to take place in just about every location on Earth, and during recent centuries, we know that the number of killings has been increasing steadily. In the course of the twentieth century, over 100 million people have died in genocides and wars. This is more than five times the number killed in this way during the nineteenth century, and more than ten times the corresponding number in the eighteenth century. At present there are no signs to suggest that the rate will level off without active intervention.

Genocide is always committed by the group holding power at the time. The first time psychologists were able to do research into the mechanisms driving those who plan and carry out mass murder came after the defeat of the Nazis at the end of the Second World War.

The Nuremberg military tribunal

After the defeat of the Nazi regime in Germany, an Allied military tribunal was set up in Nuremberg to examine the legal cases brought against twenty-two high-ranking Nazis accused of ‘crimes against humanity’.

During the war, Allied propaganda portrayed the top Nazis
as sadistic madmen and, later, documentary films from the German concentration camps demonstrated to the rest of Europe and the United States that those running the system had to be amongst the sickest, most inhumane people the world had ever seen.

A sizeable group of psychologists and psychiatrists, led by Douglas M. Kelley and Gustave Gilbert, was given access to the twenty-two prisoners for the purpose of examining their mental state. The brief was to find out what was wrong with the Nazi leadership. There was no question in the minds of the experts that the accused were deranged. The task was seen as diagnostic: what conditions afflicted the perpetrators and how mentally unstable were they?

The main diagnostic tools used were IQ and Rorschach tests. The media gave comparatively little publicity to the results of the intelligence testing because the Nazi prisoners turned out to be exceptionally intelligent, an observation that the world definitely did not want to hear. None of the accused had an average IQ – 100 – or less, and all fell within the range 106–143, with a mean of 128. This figure is substantially higher than the mean of American college graduates (118), and several high-ranking Nazis were borderline geniuses. In other words, if they were mentally ill, they were remarkably brilliant madmen.

The Rorschach test is a method used to determine personality traits, not intelligence. The psychologist shows the subject a standardised series of cards with symmetrical ink-blobpatterns and asks the subject what each ¡mage might be. The patterns are meant to stimulate the imagination, but are strictly meaningless, in the sense that no answer is correct. The psychologist takes note of what the examinee says, but also variables such as the time taken before an answer, any emotional reactions, spontaneous comments and other responses to the images. The session is intended to chart the subject’s personality, thought patterns and capacity for imaginative
expression. The method was developed in the 1920s and is still in use.

The hostility between Douglas M. Kelley and Gustave Gilbert grew in the course of the investigation, and finally reached the point where they refused to work together. Kelley, a psychiatrist, was experienced in the use of the Rorschach cards and, after having examined seven of the accused, he found no evidence of mental illness. Even though Gustave Gilbert, a psychologist, was unfamiliar with Rorschach tests, he went on to examine sixteen of the prisoners.

Gilbert wrote several books and articles about his experiences among the Nuremberg war criminals. He described the Nazi leadership as psychopaths and ‘murderous robots’, lacking in conscience and empathy. However, he presented very few analyses of his test results. Instead his books mostly quoted notes from his informal conversations with the accused. These talks were conducted during a period when several of the prisoners were trying to use the widespread conviction that they were psychotic to their own advantage. Among others, Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess later admitted that he had simulated mental illness, hoping for less severe punishment and a better opportunity to escape.

Gilbert’s unfamiliarity with the analysis of Rorschach test results was the reason why his notes were later handed over to ten experienced Rorschach specialists, who were asked to re-evaluate the Nazi leaders. Not one of the ten experts ever delivered their interpretation. Presumably, they feared being blamed for the outcome. Feelings would have run high in Europe and the USA if their results had shown that the Nazis were not mentally ill. The general public would simply have concluded that the Rorschach method, on which the investigators’ claims to expertise were based, must be flawed. Almost thirty years passed before Gilbert’s records were re-examined.

In 1975 the records were published in book form, which
meant that, for the first time, they were subject to scrutiny by interested psychologists. The wide-ranging discussions that followed showed how divided opinions still were. Many found clear evidence of psychopathic, depressive and violent personalities, while others contested this, pointing to the results of blind tests. In these, Rorschach analysts were unable to distinguish between Nazi responses and those made by non-Nazi and presumably normal subjects.

However, in later years, the Rorschach method was refined still further and given a more systematic, scientific basis. In 1985 the group of researchers who made the best use of the improved methodology (Eric A. Zillmer, Molly Harrower, Barry A. Retzler and Robert P. Archer) published their conclusion that mental illness was not rife among the Nazi leadership.

Generally, the Nazis were found to have had normal, functional and individually distinctive personalities – with just two exceptions. Traits shared by them were a marked tendency to overvalue their own abilities and a willingness to adjust their behaviour to whoever was construed as the group leader. In other words, these men were unable or unwilling to follow the directions of their ‘internal compass’.

Despite the shared traits, the researchers emphasised that the differences between the top Nazi individuals were much greater than the similarities. There is, they concluded, no uniform ‘Nazi personality type’.

The administration of the Third Reich

For the first fifteen years following the end of World War II, attempts to understand what motivated perpetrators of the Holocaust concentrated on psychological aberrations. The leaders attracted all the attention and the Nuremberg court documentation was the primary source of information.

Another line of investigation attempted to define the so called ‘authoritarian personality’. People with this personality type were thought to do exactly as they were told, even when
the orders contradicted common sense or decency. Many believed this personality type to be particularly prevalent in Germanic culture.

The early 1960s brought a shift in emphasis. Three circumstances were crucial:

1. The publication in 1961 of Raul Hilberg’s
The Destruction of the European jews
, a pioneering book in which Hilberg analysed, fo the first time and in great detail, the bureaucratic structure that underpinned the Nazi regime. He showed that Nazi rule was not directed by a united hierarchy that ruled from the top down, as had been generally believed. Instead, the Reich depended on the rivalry for power between several distinct organisations, each one striving to outdo the others. This system expanded into a colossal killing machine, which employed people from every sector of German society.

Hilberg also realised the necessity of setting up an extensive administrative structure to manage the extermination of millions. Administration meant, as always, rules, documentation and set procedures. Staff selected either for certain mental disorders or for a specifically Germanic personality type (or types) could not possibly have followed complex operational directives on such a scale.

Hilberg’s book interested many and stimulated further studies of the bureaucracy of the Third Reich and of the middle-ranking managers who were in charge of running the system according to the guidelines laid down by the leadership.

2. Hannah Arendt, the famous American philosopher and intellectual, wrote a book entitled
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
, which came out in 1963. Its core material consisted of her report from the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Israeli intelligence agents had captured him in Argentina and delivered him to stand trial in Jerusalem. The court case took several months. Eichmann had been the head of the Gestapo’s Section for Jewish Affairs and in that position he had borne the ultimate responsibility for organising the Jewish
transports across war-torn Europe to the network of concentration camps.

Arendt argued that the most terrifying thing about Eichmann was precisely that he was not a crazed demon, driven by his obsession to exterminate Jews; instead he was a dull bureaucrat devoid of any noteworthy personal traits. He was, in her view, bereft of any will of his own and followed orders without engagement, or any consideration of the consequences. The face of evil was not one of frenzied hatred, but of a mediocrity who, above all, cared about advancing his career within the organisation.

Hannah Arendt’s book portrayed evil in a new light. Her image of it has had immense influence on our attitudes to Nazi Germany and, more generally, to the phenomenon of evil, as well as to large, rule-ridden organisations. Her influence persists, even though most contemporary historians agree that she was wrong in her judgement. She had uncritically accepted Eichmann’s own story of his contribution to the Holocaust, distorted by him in order to support his defence.

It appears that Eichmann did in fact defy orders from above, if these interfered with the efficiency of his section’s management of Jewish transports. His energetic performance of his work went far beyond the call of duty. Indeed, his passion for his task was such that he was prepared to weaken the German war effort at times, if this allowed more Jewish transports to be completed.

3. Nineteen sixty-three also saw the publication of experimental results from the laboratories of the social psychologist Stanley Milgram. His data demonstrate the extent to which ordinary people will obey a perceived authority, even if those in charge have no means either of rewarding or punishing those who serve their purposes.

Originally, Milgram had intended to compare American and German subservience to authority, in order to illustrate a
presumed trait in the German national character. He never started the German part of his experiment, because the first set of results from the USA were more sensational than anyone had imagined.

The world’s most famous experiment in social psychology

Milgram’s experimental paradigm has become internationally recognised through dissemination in school and university textbooks, newspapers, magazines, films and television programmes. Recently, it was even referred to in a TV commercial.

Two experimental subjects are told that they are participating in an experiment designed to test the effects of punishment on learning. They draw lots about who is going to be respectively ‘teacher’ and ‘pupil’. The lottery is fixed beforehand. The true subject is unaware that his companion is an experimental assistant, who is predestined to be the pupil. Consequently, the true subject will always be the teacher.

The pupil is strapped into a chair wired up to deliver electrical shocks. The subject/teacher is then led away to another room, where his only contact with the pupil is via a microphone and the text on a display screen showing the pupil’s responses. If the pupil answers incorrectly, the teacher is instructed to deliver a punishment shock by pressing a button.