Personalizing enemy combatants directly caused soldiers to refuse to kill them.

Evidence

The extraordinary power of humanization to curb violence is poignantly documented in a remarkable event on a battlefield in Flanders in 1914, early in World War I (Weintraub, 2001). It is Christmas Eve. The Allied and German forces are poised in their trenches for the bloody assault. In the eerie silence, the Allied soldiers witnessed the surreal spectacle of German soldiers adorning their parapet with candle-lit Christmas trees and singing the Christmas carol “Silent Night.” The soldiers exchanged friendly banter across enemy lines, and sang Yuletide carols and folk songs as initial peace gestures. To further convey their peaceful intentions, the soldiers created placards: You no fight. We no fight, by the Germans, and Merry Christmas, by the Allied soldiers. A few Germans emerged from their trenches unarmed. The field officers from both sides negotiated an impromptu truce, during which they personalized their lives. … They refused to obey orders to start shooting. “We can’t—they are good fellows—we can’t” (Weintraub, 2001). As one of the soldiers explained to his military foe during the prior festive gathering, “We do not want to kill you and we don’t want you to kill us. So why shoot?” (Weintraub, 2001). To avoid killing each other, they shot high above the trenches. In a letter home, one of the soldiers described the untargeted shooting: “We spent that day and the next morning wasting ammunition in trying to shoot the stars from the sky” (Weintraub, 2001). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 659

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly illustrates the humanization mechanism that underpins moral disengagement claims — supports the vault argument about how dehumanizing framing enables harmful policy by showing the reverse (humanizing framing disables harm).
• XREF: The Christmas Truce as real event pairs with the vault’s claims about ordinary people’s cruelty being situational and reframing-driven, complementing Cooper and authoritarianism arguments.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 659