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The Genocidal Mindset

© Ralph Zuljan

Perhaps the most important consequence of the Second World War was the acceptance of what may be termed genocidal practices as legitimate means of warfare. This did not happen overnight, and there is still a social conception of ethics and warfare that denies that it has happened at all, but by the time the war ended atomic bombs and ballistic missiles were a reality. Mass killings in the context of war were also a reality. In the end, the psychological distancing individuals achieved through the bureaucratic and technological developments produced during the war made genocidal behavior universally conceivable in the context of a modern industrialized state at war.

This was a radical reversal of the trend in modern warfare before World War II. For over two hundred years prior, from about the time that professional standing armies were developed, there had been a trend towards a formal distinction between combatants (military personnel) and noncombatants (civilians) which viewed the former as acceptable targets, and the latter as unacceptable targets of warfare. However, by the time of the Great War the physical distance achieved by some forms of combat suggested that an eventual shift in this attitude would take place. World War II confirmed this change and normalized the genocidal extremes made possible by the distancing effects of the bureaucratic form, when combined with technological innovations, for the purpose of killing.

Distancing allowed individuals to disassociate their actions from the consequences those actions imposed upon others. Artillery crews fired at coordinates on a map, not the people located there. A submariner launched torpedoes at ships -- filled with people he would never see. A bombardier concentrated on an accurate release of the bomb load, not the deadly results of doing so for the population of the center being targeted. At the most extreme, a death camp doctor making a "selection" concentrated on the fitness of the individual before him, not the implication of sending someone to the "showers" -- and certain death. But for many individuals, even for those in the military organizations engaged in combat, they never even saw the face of the enemy they were supposedly fighting.

Freeman Dyson, a planner with Bomber Command in England during the war, confessed in his autobiographical account that "After the war ended, I read reports of the trials of men who had been high up in the Eichmann organization. They had sat in their offices, writing memoranda and calculating how to murder people efficiently, just like me. The main difference was that they were sent to jail or hanged as war criminals, while I went free. I felt a certain sympathy for these men. Probably many of them loathed the SS as much as I loathed Bomber Command, but they, too, had not had the courage to speak out. Probably many of them, like me, lived through the whole six years of the war without ever seeing a dead human being" (Weapons and Hope, 120).