How affected were the perpetrators of Nazi atrocities by their actions?

How affected (mentally, emotionally etc) were the Germans who carried out and oversaw war crimes/atrocities during WW2?

Whether they were Einsatzgruppen, concentration camp guards, extermination camp functionaries or regular troops in Poland and the USSR, to what degree on average were they bothered by their actions?

Were the majority of German perpetrators in the Holocaust and other atrocities against Slavs, Poles, Roma etc simply not affected by the horrific and nightmarish deeds they committed/helped commit because of their ideological views which deemed their victims as subhuman so they wouldn't feel bad afterwards?

Or was it more of an even split between those who were bothered and those who could sleep soundly even after killing large amounts of people?
 
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How affected (mentally, emotionally etc) were the Germans who carried out and oversaw war crimes/atrocities during WW2?

Whether they were Einsatzgruppen, concentration camp guards, extermination camp functionaries or regular troops in Poland and the USSR, to what degree on average were they bothered by their actions?

Were the majority of German perpetrators in the Holocaust and other atrocities against Slavs, Poles, Roma etc simply not affected by the horrific and nightmarish deeds they committed/helped commit because of their ideological views which deemed their victims as subhuman so they wouldn't feel bad afterwards?

Or was it more of an even split between those who were bothered and those who could sleep soundly even after killing large amounts of people?
You're better off directing this question to a history forum. Might I recommend:
http://forum.axishistory.com/
This book covers that question a bit:
https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068/ref=pd_sim_b_73
From the variety of books I've read and lectures I've heard there was rampant alcoholism and suicide among people directly involved in the killing and Himmler fainted upon seeing a mass shooting, which led to the development of gas chambers and use of Sonderkommando to handle the body disposal and people management, as it took a lot of the psychological toll off the perpetrators of the mass murder. Unless someone was a sadist/psychopath the psychological toll of participating was immense. Look at the suicide rate among veterans, it is enormous relative to those not exposed to such violence, which was even less than what an agent of genocide/mass murder would see as part of the SS or concentration camp system.
 
How affected (mentally, emotionally etc) were the Germans who carried out and oversaw war crimes/atrocities during WW2?

Whether they were Einsatzgruppen, concentration camp guards, extermination camp functionaries or regular troops in Poland and the USSR, to what degree on average were they bothered by their actions?

Were the majority of German perpetrators in the Holocaust and other atrocities against Slavs, Poles, Roma etc simply not affected by the horrific and nightmarish deeds they committed/helped commit because of their ideological views which deemed their victims as subhuman so they wouldn't feel bad afterwards?

Or was it more of an even split between those who were bothered and those who could sleep soundly even after killing large amounts of people?

bothered is maybe the wrong word. It gnawed at them surely, but at the time they didn't realise that, they just did what they saw simply a duty, an order. Bothers and worries went to the back of the head.

One needs to be able to shut down their worries, their conscious, to be able to do those things. Sense of duty, confindence in your leaders, believe in your moral highground.

It might sound disrespectful, contradicting, or downright wrong. But what the campguards did is not that different from what some victims were forced to do with the bodies for example, disposing of them in the ovens. They were forced, but the shutting down of your emotions was quite similar. Thats basically what they did. They had to do it in order to be able to do what they had to do. Just to able to move, to keep breathing, the basic things.

A trauma is the inevitable result, guilt, disgust and shame take control eventually, except for the unique psychopaths like Mengele and Rudolf Hoss. But usually only after the sense of duty has faded. Depends on the person how it comes to life though. Complete denial was probably not uncommon.

And yes, this probably does belong in Chat.
 
How affected (mentally, emotionally etc) were the Germans who carried out and oversaw war crimes/atrocities during WW2?

Whether they were Einsatzgruppen, concentration camp guards, extermination camp functionaries or regular troops in Poland and the USSR, to what degree on average were they bothered by their actions?

Were the majority of German perpetrators in the Holocaust and other atrocities against Slavs, Poles, Roma etc simply not affected by the horrific and nightmarish deeds they committed/helped commit because of their ideological views which deemed their victims as subhuman so they wouldn't feel bad afterwards?

Or was it more of an even split between those who were bothered and those who could sleep soundly even after killing large amounts of people?

Here is a good book by Richard Rhodes if you are interested in the subject:

https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Deat...qid=1489105620&sr=8-4&keywords=richard+rhodes
 
How affected (mentally, emotionally etc) were the Germans who carried out and oversaw war crimes/atrocities during WW2?

Whether they were Einsatzgruppen, concentration camp guards, extermination camp functionaries or regular troops in Poland and the USSR, to what degree on average were they bothered by their actions?

Were the majority of German perpetrators in the Holocaust and other atrocities against Slavs, Poles, Roma etc simply not affected by the horrific and nightmarish deeds they committed/helped commit because of their ideological views which deemed their victims as subhuman so they wouldn't feel bad afterwards?

Or was it more of an even split between those who were bothered and those who could sleep soundly even after killing large amounts of people?
Well, this does probably belong in chat. However, I can give a strong answer on this. For the most part, the S.S. was explicitly trained to be as ruthless as possible to the untermensch. Heinrich Himmler emphasized that the S.S. must only give consideration to the German race. So they were trained to automatically think their victims as inferior. However, this did become too much in certain cases. While the Einsatzgruppen originally began shooting Jews in occupied Russia, many soldiers gave complained that they couldn't stand watching Jews be shot with machine guns. Even Himmler reportedly fell ill when witnessing a mass shooting in Minsk. The worst case of this was Babi Yar. The S.S. men there had to liquidate the Jewish population there, but it was presence of bystanders and even Wehrmacht soldiers (likely von Reichenau's men) enjoying themselves watching the massacre that really got to those trained executioners. Afterwards, mass executions were to be minimized and other methods had to be sought. This is probably the extent of guilt felt by the common men carrying the Final Solution.
 
There was a study done by the SS which revealed that there was an extremely high rate of alcoholism and suizides among the shooting commandos. This was one of the reasons why they switched to the mobile gas vans which turned out to be ineffective.
 

Archibald

Banned
Folks,
Way too angelism for my taste.
Alcoholism and suicide ? really ?

oh please.

Most of them didn't gave a fuck about people they mass killed. In Nuremberg their usual defence was "I only obeyed orders from above"
A lot of medium-ranking nazis spent the rest of their lives quietly running a business. Their kids usually found (randomly) that "daddy was a monster", had hidden it, didn't wanted to talk about it, and if forced, easily justified its actions as "necessary evil" one way or another (bolcheviks !)
A lot of former nazis didn't lost sleep or went alcoholic or suicidal. Not at all. They found all kind of (wrong) reasons or pretexts to escape guilt or remorse, and died old.
 
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Folks,
Way too angelism for my taste.
Alcoholism and suicide ? really ?

oh please.

Most of them didn't gave a fuck about people they mass killed. In Nuremberg their usual defence was "I only obeyed orders from above"
A lot of medium-ranking nazis spent the rest of their lives quietly running a business. Their kids usually found (randomly) that "daddy was a monster", had hidden it, didn't wanted to talk about it, and if forced, easily justified its actions as "necessary evil" one way or another (bolcheviks !)
A lot of former nazis didn't lost sleep or went alcoholic or suicidal. Not at all. They found all kind of (wrong) reasons or pretexts to escape guilt or remorse, and died old.

Most Nazi's didn't have anything to do with implementing the final solution or mass killings (this isn't to lessen their moral culpability for enabling it)

The available evidence suggests that even among these men who considered their victims less than human the physical act of killing exerted significant psychological pressure on them and prompted the Germans to seek ways to further dehumanize the victims and distance them from the act of murder.
 
I think it was in Browning's "Ordinary Men", or maybe Helmut Langbein's "Hitler's Death Squads: The Logic of Mass Murder." Where they do an in depth analysis about the suicide rates in the Einsatzgruppen. It's well documented and has been analyzed by historians and psychologists, so you can't really call it "angelism ".

Now those rates apparently normalized as the war went on because of the rotation of units responsible for the mass killings, units that were more willing and less averse of executing civilians were identified and units which had problems were left out.
 
Folks,
Way too angelism for my taste.
Alcoholism and suicide ? really ?

oh please.

Most of them didn't gave a fuck about people they mass killed. In Nuremberg their usual defence was "I only obeyed orders from above"
A lot of medium-ranking nazis spent the rest of their lives quietly running a business. Their kids usually found (randomly) that "daddy was a monster", had hidden it, didn't wanted to talk about it, and if forced, easily justified its actions as "necessary evil" one way or another (bolcheviks !)
A lot of former nazis didn't lost sleep or went alcoholic or suicidal. Not at all. They found all kind of (wrong) reasons or pretexts to escape guilt or remorse, and died old.
There is certainly evidence that the various SS and Einsatzgruppen members, Trawniki-men, etc. were troubled by what they did - the additional rations of spirits issued before a massacre and the accounts of them becoming too drunk to shoot forcing others to take over clearly suggest this, as do the elevated suicide rates already alluded to. This doesn't in any way make them any less guilty of their crimes - rather the reverse in fact: they knew it was wrong and did it anyway. This fits in perfectly with the postwar cover-ups - they knew it was wrong and pretended it wasn't them to salve their consciences.
 
How affected (mentally, emotionally etc) were the Germans who carried out and oversaw war crimes/atrocities during WW2?

Whether they were Einsatzgruppen, concentration camp guards, extermination camp functionaries or regular troops in Poland and the USSR, to what degree on average were they bothered by their actions?

Were the majority of German perpetrators in the Holocaust and other atrocities against Slavs, Poles, Roma etc simply not affected by the horrific and nightmarish deeds they committed/helped commit because of their ideological views which deemed their victims as subhuman so they wouldn't feel bad afterwards?

Or was it more of an even split between those who were bothered and those who could sleep soundly even after killing large amounts of people?


The Surreal Reich by Joseph Howard Tyson is an excellent resource to read. He specifically mentions that Himmler often had to turn down transfer requests from Eintzgruppen commanders who wanted a field assignment to get out of the task unless they (the petitioners) were verging on complete mental breakdown. He also states that many in the rank and file did breakdown over the course of their "careers". Even Himmler himself, while witnessing executions in the Soviet Union during 1941 grew so sick he screamed and vomited during the proceedings.
 
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