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Good people do bad things: demonising Them is not the answer
So here's a thing I periodically tell people:
Once upon a time, a boy was born in Austria, in a town called Altmuenster. His father was a night-watchman. The boy didn't like his father, but that wasn't his whole world, and in any case his father died when he was eight; the boy played the zither, and gave zither lessons, and as a teenager became an apprentice weaver. He was a master weaver by the age of 23, but he feared this wasn't the best career for him, for his health, for his future.
So, he joined the police force, because he was a very moral boy, who had written very good essays about morality in school. He liked the cleanliness and security the Austrian police uniform offered, he later said. His name, by the way, was Franz.
Seven years later, in 1938, the Anschluss happened, and Germany and Austria were united. Things got difficult for a lot of people - the new government was suspicious and authoritarian, and many people were arrested or otherwise removed from the police force. Franz got promoted rapidly. He was married by now, with young children, and he couldn't possibly let himself be arrested, made to disappear, leaving his wife and children destitute - or maybe even arrested with him. So as time went on, he did some things he didn't like very much, like sign documents disavowing any affiliation with the Catholic Church.
After all, it's not such a big thing, is it? And if he didn't... well. That would be suicide. Not just for himself - he might as well kill his own children himself, because it would be a cleaner death. Some very nasty men, called the Gestapo, would take his wife and children too, and they might get very badly hurt. So badly hurt his little children, who he loved more than anything, would die screaming if he said no to what they asked.
In 1940, a very important man called Heinrich Himmler gave an order to put Franz in charge of something called the T-4 Euthenasia Program.
Now, Aktion T4, as it was called, was killing people. Franz knew that. But you see, it still wasn't such a very big thing - the people were examined very carefully by doctors, and the only people killed were incurably, deathly ill, or insane, and suffering - they were mercy killings. It was practically a kindness, better for everyone. And still, if he said no, terrible things would happen to his children, so obviously it would be silly to refuse - after all, it was watched over by doctors, and these people were suffering terribly, and if he didn't do it, someone else would, and they might do it badly and things would get worse.
But as it turned out, things weren't quite happening the way they were supposed to happen. Some of the doctors turned out not to be examining people very closely at all. And they started including children. And some of the conditions that got people killed weren't really bad at all, like, for example, "being half-Jewish".
It had all crept up on him so suddenly, and this was what Mister Hitler, who was in charge now, had said should happen, and everyone was agreed that Mister Hitler was in charge, and everyone said how wonderful Mister Hitler was, so what if Franz was wrong, and these people really were sick? It wouldn't be fair to risk his children's lives if he was wrong anyway, would it?
As it turned out, he didn't have to worry about that any more, because Aktion T4 was winding down, and Franz was sent away to a new place. It was a supply camp for the Army, called Sobibor, and he had a very important job there. He was in charge, and he even had his wife and little children nearby, where he could see them, and where the Gestapo knew exactly where they were, which didn't have to be a problem - so long as Franz did everything he was told, his wife and children would be safe.
If he didn't...
Anyway, one day he found a gas chamber hidden in the woods. And his boss, Mister Globocnik, told him that if the Jews who were there to work for them didn't work hard enough, he should kill them off and Globocnik would send him new ones. Franz's wife heard some rumours about what was happening, and asked him questions. Franz told her: "You know this is a service matter and I can’t discuss it. All I can tell you, and you must believe me: whatever is wrong—I have nothing to do with it."
While he was in charge of Sobibor, about 100,000 Jews are thought to have died there.
Not long after that, he was sent to a new place again. This place was called Treblinka. Franz didn't have any doubts any more about what was happening, because it was all around him - he got used to it. He started thinking of the Jewish prisoners as cargo, alive or dead - there were so many of them, but they didn't stay, they just got processed through. It was like a factory, but all it produced was smoke from burning bodies.
He later admitted to the deaths of 900,000 people at Treblinka.
But he didn't admit to feeling guilty about it. He was doing his duty, these were his orders.
Of course, he was also drunk pretty much all the time, at Treblinka. He hadn't been a drinking man before, at all, but now he drank heavily and constantly. It's possible he didn't like himself very much for some reason.
After the war ended, he ran away. Some people from the Vatican helped him get away. Franz moved to Syria, then Brazil, and got a job at a Volkswagen factory under his own name.
An arrest warrant was issued for him in 1961. Franz Stangl was arrested in 1967, and convicted of the killings of 900,000 people. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but died less than a year later.
In 1970, Gitta Sereny interviewed him extensively. In 1974 her book, Into That Darkness, was published, and I wish more people would read it. She traces - with more depth and detail than I have, by far - the gradual process by which Stangl became a wholly amoral being, capable of doing things that he himself would have found unthinkable a decade earlier. Though she wants to be critical, she acknowledges that it is difficult to decide for someone else the point at which they should have sacrificed their own lives, and the lives of their families, for a principle. Knowing, too, that such a sacrifice won't prevent anything, not really, not on its own.
This was the evil of Hitler, and Himmler, and Goebbels - not that they were evil men, though they were, but that by their work they could make other men do evil too.
It's why it's dangerous to think that evil acts only can be done by Evil People. The Ku Klux Klan are evil people, the Nazis were evil people - but I'm not an evil person, my friends and neighbours aren't evil people, so the things we do certainly can't be part of something that's hurting people really a lot. That would make us evil people, which we're totally not, so what we're doing can't be that bad.
Except when it is. Except when the oh-so-sweet Ingalls family are stealing land, killing the people it should belong to, causing great harm. Except when the well-meaning missionaries are wiping out a culture, a language, destroying families. Except when a quarter of a million East Timorese people are dying because intervening against the Indonesian occupation is too hard. Except when we're letting it slide when the government is leaving people locked in tiny cages at Guantanemo Bay, when those people are getting tortured, because we want to feel safe no matter how much our illusion of safety comes at the price of other people's blood and pain. Except when the government is locking families in a "detention centre" that's really a prison, if prisons were allowed to be that terrible, for years and years and years, until they riot and sew their mouths shut and scream in their powerless anger, because we don't want to have to make them deal with all those refugees. Except, except, except.
We have met the enemy. They are Us.
We can choose where we stand. We can choose where we fight. But if we don't remember that the choice is always there, that good people do bad things, then we won't remember that sometimes, we can do harm by default.
Nobody who's going to read this has overseen the deaths of a million human beings. Has stood amid pits of human corpses and thought of them as trash that needs to be disposed of. Nobody has fallen as far as Franz Stangl fell.
But if you think you couldn't fall that far, you're kidding yourself. It could happen - the little compromises, the rationalisations, the tiny steps that are never worth the major sacrifice - that could be you, unless you remember to think.
And that good people do bad things.
Once upon a time, a boy was born in Austria, in a town called Altmuenster. His father was a night-watchman. The boy didn't like his father, but that wasn't his whole world, and in any case his father died when he was eight; the boy played the zither, and gave zither lessons, and as a teenager became an apprentice weaver. He was a master weaver by the age of 23, but he feared this wasn't the best career for him, for his health, for his future.
So, he joined the police force, because he was a very moral boy, who had written very good essays about morality in school. He liked the cleanliness and security the Austrian police uniform offered, he later said. His name, by the way, was Franz.
Seven years later, in 1938, the Anschluss happened, and Germany and Austria were united. Things got difficult for a lot of people - the new government was suspicious and authoritarian, and many people were arrested or otherwise removed from the police force. Franz got promoted rapidly. He was married by now, with young children, and he couldn't possibly let himself be arrested, made to disappear, leaving his wife and children destitute - or maybe even arrested with him. So as time went on, he did some things he didn't like very much, like sign documents disavowing any affiliation with the Catholic Church.
After all, it's not such a big thing, is it? And if he didn't... well. That would be suicide. Not just for himself - he might as well kill his own children himself, because it would be a cleaner death. Some very nasty men, called the Gestapo, would take his wife and children too, and they might get very badly hurt. So badly hurt his little children, who he loved more than anything, would die screaming if he said no to what they asked.
In 1940, a very important man called Heinrich Himmler gave an order to put Franz in charge of something called the T-4 Euthenasia Program.
Now, Aktion T4, as it was called, was killing people. Franz knew that. But you see, it still wasn't such a very big thing - the people were examined very carefully by doctors, and the only people killed were incurably, deathly ill, or insane, and suffering - they were mercy killings. It was practically a kindness, better for everyone. And still, if he said no, terrible things would happen to his children, so obviously it would be silly to refuse - after all, it was watched over by doctors, and these people were suffering terribly, and if he didn't do it, someone else would, and they might do it badly and things would get worse.
But as it turned out, things weren't quite happening the way they were supposed to happen. Some of the doctors turned out not to be examining people very closely at all. And they started including children. And some of the conditions that got people killed weren't really bad at all, like, for example, "being half-Jewish".
It had all crept up on him so suddenly, and this was what Mister Hitler, who was in charge now, had said should happen, and everyone was agreed that Mister Hitler was in charge, and everyone said how wonderful Mister Hitler was, so what if Franz was wrong, and these people really were sick? It wouldn't be fair to risk his children's lives if he was wrong anyway, would it?
As it turned out, he didn't have to worry about that any more, because Aktion T4 was winding down, and Franz was sent away to a new place. It was a supply camp for the Army, called Sobibor, and he had a very important job there. He was in charge, and he even had his wife and little children nearby, where he could see them, and where the Gestapo knew exactly where they were, which didn't have to be a problem - so long as Franz did everything he was told, his wife and children would be safe.
If he didn't...
Anyway, one day he found a gas chamber hidden in the woods. And his boss, Mister Globocnik, told him that if the Jews who were there to work for them didn't work hard enough, he should kill them off and Globocnik would send him new ones. Franz's wife heard some rumours about what was happening, and asked him questions. Franz told her: "You know this is a service matter and I can’t discuss it. All I can tell you, and you must believe me: whatever is wrong—I have nothing to do with it."
While he was in charge of Sobibor, about 100,000 Jews are thought to have died there.
Not long after that, he was sent to a new place again. This place was called Treblinka. Franz didn't have any doubts any more about what was happening, because it was all around him - he got used to it. He started thinking of the Jewish prisoners as cargo, alive or dead - there were so many of them, but they didn't stay, they just got processed through. It was like a factory, but all it produced was smoke from burning bodies.
He later admitted to the deaths of 900,000 people at Treblinka.
But he didn't admit to feeling guilty about it. He was doing his duty, these were his orders.
Of course, he was also drunk pretty much all the time, at Treblinka. He hadn't been a drinking man before, at all, but now he drank heavily and constantly. It's possible he didn't like himself very much for some reason.
After the war ended, he ran away. Some people from the Vatican helped him get away. Franz moved to Syria, then Brazil, and got a job at a Volkswagen factory under his own name.
An arrest warrant was issued for him in 1961. Franz Stangl was arrested in 1967, and convicted of the killings of 900,000 people. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but died less than a year later.
In 1970, Gitta Sereny interviewed him extensively. In 1974 her book, Into That Darkness, was published, and I wish more people would read it. She traces - with more depth and detail than I have, by far - the gradual process by which Stangl became a wholly amoral being, capable of doing things that he himself would have found unthinkable a decade earlier. Though she wants to be critical, she acknowledges that it is difficult to decide for someone else the point at which they should have sacrificed their own lives, and the lives of their families, for a principle. Knowing, too, that such a sacrifice won't prevent anything, not really, not on its own.
This was the evil of Hitler, and Himmler, and Goebbels - not that they were evil men, though they were, but that by their work they could make other men do evil too.
It's why it's dangerous to think that evil acts only can be done by Evil People. The Ku Klux Klan are evil people, the Nazis were evil people - but I'm not an evil person, my friends and neighbours aren't evil people, so the things we do certainly can't be part of something that's hurting people really a lot. That would make us evil people, which we're totally not, so what we're doing can't be that bad.
Except when it is. Except when the oh-so-sweet Ingalls family are stealing land, killing the people it should belong to, causing great harm. Except when the well-meaning missionaries are wiping out a culture, a language, destroying families. Except when a quarter of a million East Timorese people are dying because intervening against the Indonesian occupation is too hard. Except when we're letting it slide when the government is leaving people locked in tiny cages at Guantanemo Bay, when those people are getting tortured, because we want to feel safe no matter how much our illusion of safety comes at the price of other people's blood and pain. Except when the government is locking families in a "detention centre" that's really a prison, if prisons were allowed to be that terrible, for years and years and years, until they riot and sew their mouths shut and scream in their powerless anger, because we don't want to have to make them deal with all those refugees. Except, except, except.
We have met the enemy. They are Us.
We can choose where we stand. We can choose where we fight. But if we don't remember that the choice is always there, that good people do bad things, then we won't remember that sometimes, we can do harm by default.
Nobody who's going to read this has overseen the deaths of a million human beings. Has stood amid pits of human corpses and thought of them as trash that needs to be disposed of. Nobody has fallen as far as Franz Stangl fell.
But if you think you couldn't fall that far, you're kidding yourself. It could happen - the little compromises, the rationalisations, the tiny steps that are never worth the major sacrifice - that could be you, unless you remember to think.
And that good people do bad things.
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Thank you for that.
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Sometimes I also wonder if it can make someone more sensitive to the idea that someone who does bad things is not necessarily a completely bad person. I know that growing up with people who did both very bad things to me, and very good things, was confusing, and may have made me more conscious of boundaries, but also prepared me for the fact that people are not generally all one thing or the other.
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