Look at the job titles from clicking around. You'll see nothing but things like "farmer", "bank clerk", "shop keeper", "businessman" after translating.
Food for thought, that you don't have to be the one pulling a trigger to be complicit in atrocities.
There's also a lot of people missing description though. Obviously, "professional sociopath" wasn't a job description they would have put in there, although it was probably quite characteristic for many of those "careers". I think they recycled a lot of criminals. The SS in general, while having started as a weird "aryan" elite group in the 30s, became a mercenary organization with divisions from all parts of the world later in the war. There were even muslim SS members.
From my reading on the subject, many Germans did. Some of them were intimidated into silence on the matter, while others acted in support of the genocide directly or indirectly.
Many Germans - whether or majority is up for debate - supported the Holocaust as they understood and/or admitted it to themselves at the time.
As an aside, your grammar is incorrect in your comment. I mean absolutely no offense by this and I'm hesitant to point it out, but if it were me I would want to be corrected. "had took" should be "had taken".
I don't doubt your intentions and it was nice of you to preface your correction with such reservation, but I gotta give a shout-out to descriptivism: if you can understand what's meant, maybe it's not incorrect!
For some background, I grew up in northern Arkansas. I have a very pronounced Southern accent if I allow myself to, and I've always made it a point to carefully enunciate and use "correct" (read: "Standard American English") grammar because my native accent is one that's generally associated with lower education or even lower intelligence.
I credit my vocabulary with my reading everything I could early in life. I'm in my early thirties and there are still times when I have to ask others how to pronounce a word because I've never heard it spoken. I would much rather take the embarrassment of asking over the implicit judgement that people make if I badly mispronounce a word.
Imagine you're living in Detroit in the 1970s. All around you, people are vilifying the Japanese car makers for ruining their livelihoods. Nobody would dare buy a Toyota or Honda, for fear of finding it burned out and being labelled a traitor. You might know that American manufacturing is inefficient, you might know that Japanese cars are of higher quality, you might know that your community is doomed, you might suspect that everyone around you knows it, but are you going to voice those concerns?
Multiply that by a hundred and you've got Nazi Germany. The country was humiliated and impoverished after the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles, the Weimar crisis and the Great Depression. Hitler promised food, jobs and pride, and he delivered on those promises. The Jews were just convenient scapegoat.
You might disagree with all sorts of things being done by the Nazis, but you can also see that Herr Schmidt next door has a job, that the children in the street have shoes, that people have a sense of hope and purposefulness. Kraft durch Freude gave you your first beach holiday, they put on plays at the town hall, they're teaching your daughter ballet. When the war is won, you'll get the brand new car you've been saving for, you'll have a beautiful new home in the suburbs, your son will be the first in your family to go to university.
Would you speak out, or would you turn a blind eye? Would you resist, or would you just go with the flow?
If you visit Dachau, you might be surprised to learn that the camp is right in middle of the town.
When I visited, there was a story about some locals taking a peek over the wall and were apprehended. They were put in the camp for a month or so (going by memory now). After they came out, they refused to talk about it and told everyone else to stay away.
This was before the extermination of the Jews began though - maybe around 1935.
There's a great movie that's worth a watch if you are interested in this history. It's a fictionalized ( and likely highly dramatized ) version of a real meeting[0] that took place between the SS leaders and German governmental types at the midway point of the War to discuss the "final solution" for the Jews.
But it does illustrate how regular men whether through self-interest, fear, bullying, or expediency will let themselves be talked into, or rationalize themselves into some truly horrific things by fanatical types.
Why watch movies about the past when you can observe these things in real life all around you?
The biggest question in my head is where do these power types find the large numbers of people to execute their ill plans? It seems like someone is always ready to jump into the role of camp guard at the first opportunity.
Well something about history and being doomed to repeat it...
But to your question, I don't think it's ever presented to the camp counselors that way initially. I'm sure there's a certain percentage that are maniacs and true believers that are itching to be the camp hall monitors, but I'd wager that's about 10% or less.
I'm sure it all starts with morally defensible, likely very reasonable ideas of personal security or welfare. "I'm keeping my family safe!". Before it slowly starts devolving, and you find yourself rationalizing or being an apologist for the higher ups decisions. And then before long, you're the one pulling the trigger, or kicking someone into the chamber.
I"m sure that's simplifying it by about 1000x, but I'm sure there's some truth there.
Fear of the outsider and self preservation are strong motivators...
> How we fight that is probably a better question.
For me, the answer to that question is to advocate for reducing the power and scope of government at all levels, by maintaining the weapons and skills necessary to effectively resist, and by ensuring others have the right to do the same.
Another thing which is quite important is to prevent the creation of systems that enable people to abstract away other people's humanity. One of the main reasons why the nazis established this complex system of bureaucracies, secrecy, many points from defamation, registration, exclusion, deportation, degradation to finally extinction and disposal is that the early versions (grab men, women and children from a village, dig a hole and let soldiers shoot them in the head) was, even for tough people, hard to deal with. Having a complex bureaucracy with many small steps towards extinction allows for big-level atrocities. So checking for small things is just as important as preventing the big crime.
Replying to my own comment after thinking some more about this: It also explains to a large extent the choice of gas for the murders. After all you can open a gas tap a long way away from where the people are that you are going to kill, in fact the person opening the valve may not even know what they are doing (unlikely in this case, but still you could easily arrange it that way).
Everybody else is just doing their job right? Herd a bunch of people into a room, remove a bunch of corpses from a room. Nothing to do with killing anybody, or so you could delude yourself.
This also ties in with why I'm so totally against drones, robots and other kinds of remote warfare (including aerial bombardment), they make it so much easier to pretend you're not killing real people.
To be complete there: They didn't use gas from a tap, they used Cyclon-B, a cyanice pesticide which comes in cans, which is solid and becomes a gas when it gets in contact with air. They put it in from the top through the ceiling.
I think beginning with that point all the killing and removal work had to be done by groups of prisoners.
As for drones: Yes, there was an interesting keynote talk at 33c3 by a former us army guy who has become a whistleblower. They hire specifically for gamers to become drone pilots, because they already have that abstraction from their games. They see the bad guys (arabic looking people) on their screen and have less issues to hit the trigger than a pilot who would be based in the area.
Complex bureaucracies allow people to avoid personal responsibility for the outcome - the smaller your percentage contribution to the final decision the easier it is to disown the result emotionally (look at general elections to see this effect in action).
The other major factor is that many small steps are required to turn average people into killers. The military know this hence all the training to get soldiers to kill - it doesn’t take many months to train someone to pull a trigger, but it does take many months to get them to point a gun a person and pull the trigger. There is a fantastic book on this topic On Killing [1].
While I disagree, let's start with whatever you believe should be reduced or eliminated. Let's work together to make that happen, and once that's done, we can look for the next area of agreement.
> That's for the most part an illusion that may give you some comfort but that will likely not be of much practical use if and when tshtf.
For an individual? Yeah, pretty much. That's what the third part of my statement was about.
Others having the right to do the same implies a government of sorts. The alternative is anarchy and I don't think you'd like it, and another problem is that groups would coalesce anyway and would take over a group of anarchists with relative easy because of their better organization.
We are where we are for a whole pile of very good reasons.
People could think anything they want, but if they let those "we are taking things too far" opinions be known to others, they'd be removed from any position of government power at the very least.
The motivation behind publishing this database is interesting. It's a response to the western media using the term "Polish Death Camps", which enrages polish public. Personally I didn't think it was a big issue until I saw Obama use that term.
Not sure why this was flagged as it's a historical page, and in that sense no different from, say, the Atlas Obscura pages that make it to the HN front page from time to time.
Wow. After a quick glance at the database, it seems like many of the guys working at the KZ had little to no education.
Many of the ones where there are photos look like they have some kind of mental handicap. I wonder whether some of the people who worked there were also taken advantage of.
Keep in mind that that's true for almost the entire population in the 30s and 40s. Large quantities of the population had no better education than primary school plus job training. In the 1950s, only 5% of Germans had Abitur (which is 13 years of school and required for studying), in the 70s it was still only 10%. Most likely even less in the other countries (Hungary, Romania) where many of the garrison workers came from.
I don't get this. The link is titled The “Auschwitz concentration camp personnel” database, but it just appears to be a page that basically gives an opinion towards the holocaust that, to me, is somewhat obvious.
After clicking through a few links you can find it, it's tough because the content is repeated in several languages rather than via the commonly used "language switcher" UI we're all used to.
Under the "SS KL Auschwitz Garrison" link in the navbar, at the bottom of the page, there is a link to another site which seems to have a list of members of the SS garrison.
Great documentary about Treblinka, the death camp in which one-third of the killings occurred. It's not talked about very often, so it's refreshing to get an in-depth look:
Food for thought, that you don't have to be the one pulling a trigger to be complicit in atrocities.