Mechanized killing distances perpetrators from responsibility while also corrupting them

Evidence

This new mechanized system eased the feeling of responsibility as much as was humanly possible. When, for instance, the order came to kill every day several hundred Russian prisoners, the slaughter was performed by shooting through a hole without seeing the victim. (See Ernest Feder, “Essai sur la Psychologie de la Terreur,” in Syntheses, Brussels, 1946.) On the other hand, perversion was artificially produced in otherwise normal men. Rousset reports the following from a SS guard: “Usually I keep on hitting until I ejaculate. I have a wife and three children in Breslau. I used to be perfectly normal. That’s what they’ve made of me. Now when they give me a pass out of here, I don’t go home. I don’t dare look my wife in the face” (p. 273). — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2842

Categorization

• XREF: The hole-shooting detail is the classic mechanism for bureaucratic moral dissociation — directly relevant to how modern rational administration enables mass exclusion in later readings. — connects to: Extermination stage killing requires that killers see victims as less than fully human — Gregory H. Stanton, Ten Stages of Genocide, 8
• DEEPTHINKING: The dual movement — machinery that reduces moral responsibility AND perversion that corrupts normal men — is a dense, paradigm-level observation about how totalitarian systems manufacture evil rather than merely permit it.