Journey to comprehend evil actions

I was jolted because of all I thought I knew about the Holocaust, I do not recall hearing or reading about R&R camps. At its peak, Auschwitz was gassing about 6,000 people per day.

In 1961, I rushed to get home from church to watch the trial of Adolph Eichmann. I was a sixth-grader mesmerized by what I was hearing about millions of people being gassed for no reason.

This was the beginning of a new journey of discovery for me. I managed to get enough money to join the Book of The Month Club and ordered William Shirer’s ‘‘The Rise and Fall of Third Reich” and ‘‘Auschwitz” by Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, who survived because he worked with Mengele, who among other horrors performed painful experiments on children and other inmates without anesthesia.

In college, I discovered Hannah Arendt, an intellectual and political philosopher and a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. She covered Eichmann’s trial for The New Yorker magazine. In 1963, she published her reports in a book entitled ‘‘Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”

Banality is usually defined as something that is trite, obvious or predictable, a commonplace. Characterizing Eichmann’s behavior as commonplace and predictable caused a storm of protest because most of us would like to believe that such horrible violations of the moral code are not something that we or anyone we know would do – even as some white Americans turned to murder to keep African Americans from voting and screamed obscenities at 6-year-olds entering ‘‘white schools.”

Arendt argued that Eichmann was our next door neighbor, who goes to church, cares about his family, who had spent time in school but was poorly educated.

What passed for education was a mind filled with clichés and quotes given to him by Hitler and the Nazi party. He lacked the cognitive skills for introspection or insight that comes from critical thinking.

He was intellectually lazy. In the words of Arendt, ‘‘mindless, thoughtless,” but ambitious and willing to do anything to improve his lot in life, including arranging transportation for millions to the gas chambers.

After the war, much effort was put into understanding how so many Germans could have fallen for Hitler.

In 1959, Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, et al, published research they had done entitled ‘‘The Authoritarian Personality.” They created the F-scale (fascist scale) to measure what kind of personality structure was likely to be receptive to dictators:

* Conventionalism. A rigid adherence to conventional middle-class values.

* Authoritarian submission. Submissive attitudes to idealized moral authorities of the in group and antipathy to the weak.

* Authoritarian aggression. A tendency to seek out, reject and punish those who violate conventional values.

* Anti-intraception. Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded.

* Superstition and stereotypy. Belief in fate and astrology, a disposition to think in rigid categories and a hostility toward science.

* Power and toughness. Preoccupation with dominance and submission, and an identification with power and exaggerated assessments of strength.

* Destructiveness and cynicism. Generalized hostility, vilification of the human.

* Projectivity. A tendency to believe in conspiracies and that ‘‘wild and dangerous things go on in the world.”

* Sex. Exaggerated concern with sexual goings-on.

We need to remember that we are just as capable of altruism. Two of my favorites books are ‘‘Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust” by Eva Fogelman and ‘‘The Hidden Children: The Secret Survivors of the Holocaust,” Jane Marks.

People from all walks of life and varied socio-economic classes risk their lives to hide Jews. They are also us. Some evolution biologists believe that we are hard wired for altruism.

Van Caldwell, a lawyer, lives in Kettering. He can be e-mailed at wvcaldwell@comcast.net.