SS selection actively weeded out ideologically zealous killers in favor of routine

Evidence

In the famous phrase of Hannah Arendt, the most difficult problem that the initiators of the Endlösung encountered (and solved with astounding success, as it were) was ‘how to overcome… the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering’. We know that people enlisted into the organizations most directly involved in the business of mass murder were neither abnormally sadistic nor abnormally fanatical. We can assume that they shared in the well-nigh instinctual human aversion to the affliction of physical suffering, and even more universal inhibition against taking life. We know even that when, for instance, members of the Einsatzgruppen and other units similarly close to the scene of actual killings were enlisted, special care was taken to weed out – bar or discharge – all particularly keen, emotionally charged, ideologically over-zealous individuals. We know that individual initiatives were discouraged, and much effort was made to keep the whole task in a businesslike and strictly impersonal framework. Personal gains, and personal motives in general, were censured and penalized. Killings induced by desire or pleasure, unlike those following orders and perpetrated in an organized fashion, could lead (at least in principle) to trial and conviction, like ordinary murder or manslaughter. On more than one occasion Himmler expressed deep, and in all likelihood genuine, concern with maintaining the mental sanity and upholding the moral standards of his many subordinates engaged daily in inhuman activity; he also expressed pride that, in his belief, both sanity and morality emerged unscathed from the test. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 90

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds Kelman’s authorization-routinization-dehumanization framework in para 93, and is a core mechanism for how bureaucratic modernity enables atrocity.