I feel condescending for saying it, and in general I believe that we should preferably not try to control how other victims respond to their oppression. That being said, in spite of films like Downfall and The Zone of Interest refuting the notion, sometimes I still see someone inviting us to see the fascists and neofascists as inhuman, and I disagree with that invitation. Bear with me, because the conclusion that I derive from all this is not necessarily what you may have in mind.
The temptation to see militant anticommunists as monsters is easy to understand, for obvious reasons, but the uncomfortable truth is that we’ll never fully comprehend and recognize our enemies if we focus solely on their horribility. No honest and reasonable being would deny that all of the Axis powers committed horrific atrocities, but in between those—when they weren’t committing them—Axis officials frequently came across as well adjusted, almost normal people, too.
Like the abusive antagonist in The Stepfather, or like abusive husbands in general, many Axis employés performed a balancing act where they knew when to abuse and when to charm. No wonder, then, that the psychiatrist Douglas M. Kelley had trouble looking for signs of criminal insanity in one Axis official:
Kelley found Goering’s results surprising, given the wartime propaganda that the [Axis] leaders had to be madmen. Goering’s responses to the Rorschach images demonstrated “normal basic personality,” Kelley wrote, although they also revealed “marked egocentricity and powerful emotional drives.” They showed nothing seriously wrong with Goering’s mind.
Nevertheless, Kelley considered the test results a good first step toward gaining insight into Goering’s thinking. He used intelligence testing to assign Goering an IQ of 138, third highest among the incarcerated [Reich employés]. (This score delighted the vain Goering.)
Kelley further noted that the prisoner was “cynical and filled with a mystic fatalism,” which explained why he would not take responsibility for such wartime conduct as his murder of political opponents and complicity in genocide.
In his initial neurological and psychiatric report on Goering (a record hidden among Kelley’s personal papers for the past 65 years), the psychiatrist observed Goering’s emotional volatility and narcissistic fixation on what the prisoner perceived as the beauty and strength of his body. Kelley, concerned about the health of Goering’s heart, took advantage of this latter obsession to convince Goering to trim down. “When I pointed out that he would make a better appearance in court should he lose some weight, he agreed and ate abstemiously,” Kelley wrote.
More forbiddingly, Kelley learned that Goering displayed a terrible flip side to the charm and eloquence he showed on first impression. This man who, as Reich Forestry and Hunting Master, had repeatedly condemned cruelty to animals and drafted humane laws to preserve wildlife, also ordered the 1940 bombing of the defenseless city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands that flattened the city center and left 85,000 people homeless.
After Goering matter-of-factly recounted the murder of a close associate that he had once set into motion, Kelley asked how he could bring himself to demand his old friend be killed. “Goering stopped talking and stared at me, puzzled, as if I were not quite bright,” Kelley recalled. “Then he shrugged his great shoulders, turned up his palms and said slowly, in simple, one-syllable words: ‘But he was in my way…’”
And Kelley’s conclusions from all this? For the international war crimes tribunal, he pronounced the [Fascist] legally sane, free of psychosis and fit for trial. As part of his private study of Goering’s personality, Kelley declared, “He was undoubtedly the most ruthless human being that I have ever experienced.”
True, IQ tests and Rorschach tests need to be taken with a grain of salt (most medical professionals did not know better), but in any event you can see that Goering did not come across as a rabid pitbull as he might have on a battlefield. Hypothetically, he might have tried to consciously manipulate the psychiatrist, but under these circumstances he would have had very little to gain from that. Whatever the case, even the most sadistic antisocialists can seem harmless in ordinary situations, for the simple reason that they have nothing to gain by constantly expressing their abuse everywhere. As John Stockwell recounted in 1987:
And this is what the CIA was teaching them to do. And one of the women who was in this program for 2 years — tortured in Brazil for 2 years — she testified internationally when she eventually got out. She said, ‘The most horrible thing about it was in fact, that the people doing the torture were not raving psychopaths.’ She couldn’t break mental contact with them the way you could if they were psychopaths. They were very ordinary people…
Likewise, Adolf Schicklgruber could, oftentimes, come across as harmless, especially as a child. He had bouts of anger, but he also wept when his mother died, he laughed and joked on occasion, he charmed his lover in home videos, he was close friends with a legally ‘Jewish’ girl, and he was so distressed in the April of 1945 that he killed his favourite dog, Blondi, before suiciding with his wife.
Likewise, Axis troops were people who had hopes, dreams, desires, loved ones at home, moments of innocent playfulness, appreciation for animals (some of the time), and—with few exceptions—most of them sincerely believed that they were doing the ‘right’ thing, just like their leadership believed. Many saw their actions as ‘right’ because these actions let petty bourgeois goyim survive longer, to name only one of their goals.
Who were the Nazis and what did they really want? They didn’t want to destroy civilization or freedom, they wanted to build what they viewed was a better society. That’s important to understand because the Nazis were not motivated by evil or the desire to destroy; they were motivated by their desire to create. The same is true for the Americans who supported the fascists, such as Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst, and Andrew Mellon.
This is important to understand because you cannot judge a person’s actions by his or her intentions. Someone can have good intentions and still do things that are harmful to many people. A person’s belief that they are right can blind them to the consequences of the actions.
I believe that Hitler believed that what he was doing was right, and that he was going to make the world a better place. It’s all a matter of perception. Anyone who genuinely believes that white people are superior to others and that a highly structured society is the height of human civilization would probably to agree with Hitler’s ideas, as many Americans and British did prior to Hitler’s launch of full-scale war.
(Emphasis added in all cases.)
Yet for as much as the Axis demonized its enemies, it could not prevent countless soldiers from suffering guilt after they massacred innocents, which was why so many soldiers liked to get drunk after they did it, and was one of the reasons why the Third Reich preferred poisoning crowds of people when it was convenient to do so; it felt less personal than killing them up close. Even IOF soldiers, despite being conditioned to see all Palestinians as ‘animals’ or ‘terrorists’, are frequently suffering psychological distress because of their rôles in the Nakba.
Now, I need to explain to you my main purpose for writing this topic. This is typically when we would roll our eyes, because when antisocialists remind us of the Axis’s humanity, they usually do it with the intention of compelling us to take pity on Axis war criminals, or worse, with the intention of portraying the Axis as a force for good.
The reality is that you need to remember that even the Axis’s worst war criminals were still human, not to take pity on them, but because it is necessary to identify them. If you go around somewhere looking for ‘monsters’, you’ll find nothing. Such dehumanization may be useful in a boot camp that wants to train killing machines, but not here. Accurately summarizing our adversaries is not as easy as that. To keep it simple: ‘evil’—for the lack of a better word—is a complex phenomenon.
I once said that I feel the same way about the Fascists as I do about angry bears. It may seem like I am defeating my own argument by mentioning that, but if you pause to think about it, it may not be entirely inappropriate either. When you are lost in the woods in the middle of the night, you don’t really have time to dwell on the likelihood that the bear that you are about to shoot has a family to feed and is only threatening you because she herself feels threatened.
On the other hand, the angry bear does not care about your worries either. She is fighting for her survival, but so are you. There is no hatred involved; you simply have an obstacle on your hands. This is, I would argue, a better way of seeing our enemies: not as inhuman, but as people whose survival goals only conflict with ours.
Mama bear explaining why she mauled me: “but he was in my way…”
