Masters of Death (5 page)
Brutalization, the first stage of violent socialization, Athens found to consist of three distinct but related significant experiences that might occur in any order and at differing times and places: (a) violent subjugation (an authority figure from one of the novice’s primary groups uses violence or the threat of violence to force the novice to submit to his authority by showing obedience and respect); (b) personal horrification (the novice witnesses people close to him undergoing violent subjugation); (c) violent coaching (to prompt violent conduct, people whom the novice perceives to be or to have been authentically violent instruct the novice in how to conduct himself when confronted with conflict, emphasizing that he has an inescapable personal responsibility to physically attack people who provoke him).
Many people today identify these three conjoined experiences with child abuse, but they have been the common lot of children throughout most of human history and continue to be the common lot of children in much of the world today: domination with violence or the threat of violence by parents, adult relatives and older siblings; witnessing the domination of mothers and siblings; coaching, especially of boys, that physical violence is an expected and appropriate way to settle disputes. Certainly brutalization was the common lot of most children in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is also the standard boot camp experience of military recruits: real or threatened violent subjugation by drill instructors, witnessing drill instructors similarly subjugating barracksmates, coaching in combat responsibilities. Military training imposes on recruits both violent coaching in Athens’s sense and specific instruction in weapons and tactics, and brutalization may continue beyond basic training. “Harsh military discipline had a long tradition in Germany,” the historian Omer Bartov reports in
Hitler’s Army.
“. . . The strict obedience demanded from the troops, and the draconian punishments meted to offenders, doubtlessly played a major role in maintaining unit cohesion under the most adverse combat conditions.” SS training as Himmler organized it was known for its brutality; training in the Totenkopf divisions that supplied guards for concentration camps was even more brutal. Even ordinary police training before the war in German-speaking Europe was brutalizing: Fritz Stangl, later to be commandant of the death camp at Treblinka, told writer Gitta Sereny of his police academy experience in Austria, “They called it the ‘Vienna School.’ . . . They were a sadistic lot. They drilled the feeling into us that everyone was against us: that all men were rotten.”
Brutalization “is an odious and traumatic experience,” Athens observes. It leaves the novice shaken, “dejected by the events that have transpired in his life,” deeply troubled and confused. “Why did all this happen to me?” he begins to ask himself. The onset of this emotional turbulence signals the beginning of the second stage of violent socialization, belligerency.
Like other social traumas people suffer in life that expose them to challenges their previous experience has not prepared them to master — serious illness, a natural disaster, physical disfigurement, the death of a loved one — the trauma of brutalization shatters the novice’s identity. Breaking down a recruit’s identity is the purpose of military basic training, of course, part of an institutional process that military organizations have evolved by trial and error over hundreds of years to turn a civilian into a soldier.
Moving into belligerency, the novice questions his previous values, which failed to encompass brutalization. Brooding over his brutalization experiences, he comes to focus on his personal performance and responsibility, finally identifying the specific question he has to answer: What can I do to stop other people from violently subjugating me and people I value? Expressed differently, his problem is to find a way to reorganize himself into someone who can successfully survive further encounters with the kind of traumatic experience that has shattered his former identity.
When people have undergone social trauma and fragmentation, they seek guidance from others who have successfully overcome comparable experiences. The belligerent subject has a fund of advice at hand on how to deal with violent subjugation—the stories and ridicule and threats and harangues of his violent coaches — and now, abruptly, he realizes that their advice makes sense. “It is
as if
the subject had earlier been partially deaf,” Athens writes, “and has only now heard what his coach has been telling him all along: resorting to violence is sometimes necessary in this world.”
Struck by his insight, which takes on the force of a personal revelation, and convinced of its correctness, the belligerent subject now “firmly resolves to resort to violence in his future relations with people.” This first violent resolution — resolving to seriously injure or even kill someone should the circumstances arise—is a landmark in the subject’s life, but it is still strongly qualified. “The subject is prepared to resort to potentially lethal violence,” Athens explains, “but only if he deems it absolutely necessary for the well-being of his body and mind and if he believes he has some chance of success.” That is, he resolves to use violence—but only defensively, to protect himself or the people he values against imminent danger or at least purposeful and cruel antagonism. Why these qualifications? Because personally attacking someone with serious violent intent involves risking serious injury, even death. No one confronts such risks lightly, not even seasoned police officers or combat soldiers.
In making this mitigated violent resolution, the subject moves from belligerency, stage two of violent socialization, to stage three: violent performances. Given the right circumstances, he undertakes to use serious violence against someone who has seriously provoked him. A subject can win or lose such a violent confrontation, or the fight can result in a draw. Defeat, especially repeated major defeats, may lead him to question the wisdom of his violent resolution, to decide he has little aptitude for violence and to resign himself to nonviolence. Then his resolution may wither away, or the still-fragile new identity he has been trying to construct may shatter as his old identity shattered, leaving him once again fragmented and derelict. Suicide and violence are inversely correlated in specific populations, for example, suggesting that suicide is an alternative outcome to resolving the conflicts that brutalization presents. A few Einsatzgruppen personnel made that choice, as did, of course, a much larger number of Jewish victims.
But success with defensive violence marks a turning point in the subject’s violence development. He has proven his resolve, which gives him great personal satisfaction. He has also answered the painful question he identified during the belligerency stage of how to protect himself and the people he values from violent subjugation. Stage three of violent socialization appears in fact to be relatively stable; many people who have been violently socialized to this point stop here and move no further, remaining prepared throughout their lives to use serious violence only when physically threatened or seriously antagonized — in Athens’s terminology, marginally violent. Modern Western societies are composed of mixed populations of pacifist and marginally violent people: people who are not prepared to use serious violence even if physically threatened or seriously antagonized and people who are. Neither population considers itself to be violent, since its violence, if any, is essentially defensive. Modern Western societies also, of course, include small populations of fully violent people, a deviant minority that law enforcement agencies work to restrain.
Institutional violence training is designed to socialize officials to the point of defensive violent performances — that is, to make them marginally violent—but to block further violence development. Police and soldiers are violently socialized to this third stage to prepare them to control and protect the rest of us. Many remain marginally violent throughout their careers. But stage three can be a slippery slope, since it already encompasses the majority of the violent experiences necessary to become fully, malefically violent. All that is missing is social reinforcement of a violent identity and a widening resolution to use violence.
Those final components of violent socialization constitute stage four, virulency. However personally satisfied a violent performer may be with his defensive victories, they will not change his fundamental view of himself—his self-conception, his identity—unless other people acknowledge them and demonstrate their full significance to him by their actions. When people learn of a successful violent performance by someone whom they previously judged not to be violent, they act differently toward him: they begin treating him as if he were dangerous. “They act toward him much more cautiously,” Athens writes, “taking particular pains not to offend or provoke him in any way. . . . For the first time, the subject keenly senses genuine trepidation when he approaches people.” These heady experiences of violent notoriety, especially when combined with his painful memories of feeling powerless and inadequate during brutalization and belligerency, encourage the subject to believe that violence works, that he has discovered a way not only to reliably protect himself from the violent oppression of others but also to dominate other people just as he was once dominated. At which point, Athens found, “the subject makes a new violence resolution which far surpasses the one [he] made before. . . . He now firmly resolves to attack people physically with the serious intention of gravely harming or even killing them for the slightest or no provocation whatsoever. . . . In making this later violent resolution, the subject has completely switched his stance from a more or less defensive posture to a decidedly offensive one.”
With this final resolution to use violence
offensively,
the subject’s violent socialization is complete. Someone who is prepared to use serious physical violence against victims who provoke him minimally or not at all is clearly a dangerous person; such acts are felonious in modern societies regardless of their perpetrator’s official status.
Athens’s evidence that violent socialization was the common denominator among the violent criminals he studied strongly supports his contention that it is the cause of violent criminality. The clear parallels between violent socialization, which Athens discovered in the common past of violent criminals, and military combat training, which has evolved by trial and error across the centuries, demonstrate prima facie that a truncated form of violent socialization has been adapted by military institutions to convert recruits into capable violent professionals.
Militaries limit violence in much the same way entire societies limit violence: by instituting and maintaining both formal and informal social controls. Military law, for example, distinguishes legal and acceptable killing of enemy combatants from illegal and unacceptable killing of enemy prisoners, mutilating enemy dead, torturing prisoners or raping, battering or killing noncombatants. Unacceptable violence is punishable under military law much as unacceptable violence is punishable under civilian law.
Social trepidation and violent notoriety in military organizations are organized, constrained and parceled out in mandated rituals of rank deference—speaking when spoken to, standing at attention, saluting, calling officers “sir,” giving or receiving obligatory orders — which not only recall the hierarchical chain of command but also formalize the different degrees of military (by implication, violent) experience. Badges and medals, which civilians sometimes find mysterious or even quaint, are potent and awe-inspiring emblems of honorable violent performance. Formal and informal evocations of military honor and pride delimit the boundaries of acceptable violent behavior. Social stigmatizing and shunning can have lethal consequences under combat conditions and are therefore powerful social controls when directed against soldiers who use violence malefically. Distancing — mechanically (killing at a distance with artillery or bombs) or organizationally (multiple executioners shooting at the same time)— also effectively limits socialization beyond defensive violence.
Constraining soldiers to defensive violence is important to militaries for reasons more immediately practical than simply conforming to treaty obligations limiting military violence: soldiers whose experiences and choices have carried them through virulency to criminal maleficence are subversive of military discipline and dangerous not only to the enemy but also to their own ranks, particularly to the superiors who order them into harm’s way. Bartov describes the development of just such complications in the Wehrmacht after Barbarossa:
Within the ranks of the army, breaches of combat discipline were punished with unprecedented harshness and contempt for life; conversely, soldiers were ordered to commit “official” and “organized” acts of murder and destruction against enemy civilians, POWs and property; and, as a consequence of the legalization of criminality, the troops soon resorted to “wild” requisitions and indiscriminate shootings explicitly forbidden by their commanders. In stark contradiction to the harsh combat discipline, however, the troops were rarely punished for unauthorized crimes against the enemy, both because of their commanders’ underlying sympathy with such actions, and because they constituted a convenient safety valve for venting the men’s anger and frustration caused by the rigid discipline demanded from the men and by the increasingly heavy cost and hopelessness of the war. Thus a vicious circle was created whereby the perversion of discipline bred increasing barbarism, which in turn further brutalized discipline.
Athens’s violent-socialization model supplies an evidence-based instrument through which to view the Third Reich, and specifically the Einsatzgruppen, that may help to illuminate their history and thus the history of the Holocaust.
When Field Marshal and Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, a giant with a
basso profundo
voice, invited Adolf Hitler to assume the chancellorship of Germany on 30 January 1933, the new Führer installed a government of criminals and radicalized former soldiers, including convicted assassins such as Nazi Party official Martin Bormann and future Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. Nearly thirty percent of Nazi Party members had a strong militaristic background, many of them as irregulars fighting in the streets as members of the Freikorps, which were responsible for nearly four hundred political assassinations in the postwar years of turmoil.