Bettelheim’s camp study showed prisoners identifying with their SS captors

Evidence

Bettelheim was a psychologist. In the spring of 1938, immediately after the Germans had annexed Austria, he had been arrested and sent to Dachau and Buchenwald, then the largest concentration camps for political prisoners. In 1939 he was unexpectedly released, and emigrated to the United States. He wrote down his memoirs at once, and then began to analyse his experiences, after hesitating for several weeks, fearing that his indignation would rob the analysis of its objectivity. When the defeat of National Socialism began to approach, and misuse of his findings by the Gestapo was hardly to be expected any more, he finally decided to publish them as `The Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations’. The article’s explosive quality was the way it showed how the SS brought about a personality change in prisoners by torturing and humiliating them until they finally conformed to camp existence and identified with the SS itselfeven in the case of political prisoners. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1618

Categorization

• SHARE: Bettelheim’s paper-the-rejection saga and Eisenhower’s mandate make this a strong anecdote for anyone interested in the history of Holocaust psychology.
• XREF: connects to: SS torture made even political prisoners identify with their captors — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1618; Long-term prisoners shifted from preserving identity to adapting to camp life — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2840

Broader Connections

• SS torture made even political prisoners identify with their captors #corroborates (1.00) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1618
• Long-term prisoners shifted from preserving identity to adapting to camp life #expands (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2840