Nazi guards could sincerely punish victims for conditions the guards themselves created

Evidence

In his description of the brutal Helmbrechts work camp set up by the Nazis in 1944, he recounted how the female prisoners were deprived of access to latrines and instead forced to use buckets in their barracks. Even worse, not enough buckets were provided for the Jewish prisoners, so, predictably, the buckets frequently overflowed, leading to a terrible stench in the barracks. The guards’ response was nightmarish yet predictable: “As if the permanent stench was not itself a sufficient form of punishment, the camp’s guards beat the Jewish women daily, including the seriously ill, ostensibly for the soiling of their barracks. Yet they would not pro­ vide the Jews with the additional buckets that would have altered the condi­ tions producing these ‘punishments’” (Goldhagen, 1996, p. 341). In other words, the Germans “‘punished’ the Jews for things which the Germans themselves guaranteed that the Jews could not avoid doing” (p. 342). Goldhagen’s use of the word ostensibly and his mocking quotations around the word punishment suggest that he believed the guards were fully aware of the grotesque absurdity of their behavior. There is, however, no reason to assume that. Given how far the guards had already traveled along the continuum of destructiveness, they were certainly not motivated to make situational attributions for the prisoners’ appearance and behavior. As counterintuitive and even horrifying as it might seem, they could well have felt that it was only natural that they should re­ spond in such a punitive way to the filthy and animal-like behavior with which they felt they were confronted. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide, 363

Categorization

• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
• XREF: connects to: People judge others based on behavior they themselves have constrained — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 358; Nazi degradation of prisoners functioned to protect perpetrators from psychological distress — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2097; Nazi degradation of victims functioned to spare the perpetrators’ own psychological distress. (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Perpetrators can overlook their own role in degrading victims even when they caused it #expands (0.95) — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide, 362
• Nazi degradation of prisoners functioned to protect perpetrators from psychological distress #corroborates (0.92) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2097
• Nazi degradation of victims functioned to spare the perpetrators’ own psychological distress. #corroborates (0.92)
• Guards reframed their own coerced abuses as evidence victims were animals #exemplifies (0.85)
• Nazi administrators could endorse Jewish extermination while opposing methods they found uncultured #complicates (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2594