Conformity and Obedience
From Facing History and Ourselves:
Holocaust and Human Behavior, Chapter 5
Chapter 4 considered how Germany became a totalitarian state. This chapter looks at why the German people allowed it to happen. Chapters 1 and 2 offered insights into the importance we, as individuals, place on our membership in various groups. This chapter shows how the Nazis took advantage of that yearning to belong. It describes, in Fritz Stern’s words, how they used the “twin instruments of propaganda and terror” to coerce and cajole a people into giving up their freedom. A character in George Orwell’s 1984, a novel that details life in a state much like Nazi Germany, offers another view of the process.
Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer... There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no employment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always... there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantlygrowing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.
Others argue that the process of transforming a democratic society into a totalitarian one was not quite so simple. They note that “life is almost always more complicated than we think. Behind the gleaming ranks of those who seem totalitarian robots stand men and women, various and diverse, complex and complicated, some brave, some cowardly, some brainwashed, some violently idiosyncratic, and all of them very human.”1
Download Chapter 5 from Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior
Selected Readings from the Chapter
Notes
1 Harrison E. Salisburg, Forward to Mischling, Second Degree: My Childhood in Nazi Germany by Ilse
Koehn (Greenwillow, 1977), viii-ix.
