Licensed Mass Murder;: A Socio-Psychological Study of some SS Killers

by Henry V. Dicks

Study based on first-hand observations from interviews with former members of the SS. The Columbus Centre Series.

Genres: Psychology

283 pages, Hardcover

First published January 28, 1973

Reviews

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first I was just reading this for what it was: an English study on the SS from a Freudian lens published in 1973 - with the bulk of the research and interviews done in the late 1960s. Then during Dicks' interview with "Captain A," he mentioned that he wanted to keep the interviewed SS men's names a secret. Challenge accepted, Mr. Dicks (I'm sure Dicks never anticipated the search and information retrieval capabilities of the 21st century Internet). I have more of a Claude Lanzmann philosophy regarding former SS men in that I do not think their identities should be protected. I figured out 5 of the 8 that were interviewed:

S2: Gustav Sorge ("The Iron Gustav") was born in on April 24, 1911. With the title of SS-Hauptscharführer, he was a guard first at Esterwegen then at Sachsenhausen. He was tried for his war crimes at Sachsenhausen by the Soviet Union in 1947, sentenced to life imprisonment. However, the USSR repatriated him to West Berlin in 1956 and was put on trial in Bonn. He spent the rest of his life in a Rheinbach prison and died there in 1978.

Captain A: Franz Johann Hofmann was born in 1906, joined the NSDAP in 1932 (#1369617) and his SS number was 40651. He initially worked at Dachau and was promoted to SS-Oberscharführer in 1937. In 1942 he began at Auschwitz and in 1943 he assumed command of the Gypsy camp. Finally in 1944 he was posted in administration at Natzweiler. After Germany's surrender he lived under a fake name in Rothenburg. He was arrested on April 16, 1956 for his crimes at Dachau and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Then in 1965 he made another appearance in court for the Auschwitz Trial. Hofmann spent his life in a Straubing prison until his death in 1973.

BS - remains unknown

Doctor MO - remains unknown

BT - Hermann Blache worked in the Tarnow ghetto and later at KZ Płaszów before the infamous Commandant Amon Göth took over. He held the role of SS-Oberscharführer. He was convicted in 1964 for 22 counts of murder and complicity in the massacre of an additional 4,000 Jews (a 28-year sentence).

GM - Gottlieb Muzikant was born in 1903 at Mürau, Moravia. His first assignment in the Totenkopfverbände was at Ravensbrück. His next job was at Mauthausen (Austria), where he was transferred to the subcamp Melk. By the time of Germany's surrender he had the role of SS-Unterscharfürhrer and was captured in 1945 by the Americans. He escaped and proceeded to live under his real name in Fulda, West Germany. Eventually, he was arrested in April 30, 1959, his local case being LG Fulda No. 601223 and Case No. 502 of Nazi Crimes in Detainment Centers. His trial began November 31, 1960 and by December 23, 1960 he was sentenced to 21 terms of life imprisonment at hard labor plus 15 additional years imprisonment.

KW - remains unknown

Lawyer: Dr. Alfred Filbert was born in 1905 in Darmstadt. He studied law in the 1920s and was a member of the "Alemannia casting" fraternity. In 1932 he became part of the NSDAP and SS. He initially worked with the SD and Reich Security Main Office (RHSA) but was put in command of Einsatzgruppe B; Einsatzkommando No. 9 with Arthur Nebe in 1941. He gave up command to Oswald Schäfer on October 20, 1941 and was recalled to Berlin. Due to a foreign exchange deal, he was suspended for two years from the RSHA. After Germany's surrender he tried living in Schleswig-Holstein with other RSHA members under the name Dr. Selbert. In February 1959 he was arrested and charged in Berlin with 11,000 counts of murder on June 22, 1962. He was released on June 5, 1975 from the Berlin Tegel Prison and played himself in the 1984 films "Gun Wound – Execution for Four Voices" and "Our Nazi." He died in 1990 at the age of 85.

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Take an outstanding British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst whose wartime duties included supervision of Rudoph Hess and have him interview former members of the SS concentration camp and Gestapo units convicted of mass murders in order to understand what it was in their personalities and family backgrounds that led them to commit atrocities. Dicks was part of a team of historians, social and political scientists, psychiatrists and ethologists who studied the "German case". In chapter one Dicks write:

...my role became that of examining the evidence for an against the "popular", lay view that the Nazi movement, especially as expressed in their mass extermination of helpless, unarmed citizens of their own and other countries, was a "collective madness" led by insane individuals and carried out by fiends as inhuman as Nazi propaganda pictured its own enemies [...] I have tried to apply relevant parts of[..] socio-psychiatric theory to face-to-face study of the personalities and life stories of a small sample of men men who actually, manually or executively, perpetrated these organized, official persecutions, tortures and murders.

Unfortunately Dicks' results are meagre and simply provide corroboration of Hannah Arendt's key intuition into the "banality of evil" and Stanley Milgram's notorious experimental results on just how far most ordinary people obey orders by people perceived to be in authority. Dicks quotes both these sources.

Dicks briefly describes "the high F syndrome" a concept:

...based on a set of validated ratings of personality traits significantly correlated with Nazi fervour and fanaticism.

Perhaps the most interesting -and chilling- aspect of the most frequent factors attached to what he terms "personality pointers" are:

(f) Paranoid scapegoating
(b) Need for affiliation and gang comradeship
(h) Urge to act out brutality, sadism, love of brawls
(a) Submissive character, hero-worshipper
(e) Smarting under national humiliation and weakness
(c) "Manliness", love of being a soldier.

These factors show the highly subjective nature of the questionnaire -when coupled with the small number of subjects under study (61) and the fact that there is no control group leads the attempt to provide a "statistical analysis" to fall apart. Dicks approach should definitely be considered under the heading of "soft" methodologies. According to the chapter headings, the eight SS prisoners actually interviewed are grouped into:

- The fanatic?
- Two norm setters
- Two medical humanitarians [humanitarians should be in quotation marks]
- Free enterprise: Two privateers
- The lawyer turned hangman

I must admit, I did not have the stomach to finish all the case studies, they are predictably chilling because of the interviewees' matter of factness, the defensiveness and evasiveness they display, their aggrieved air and/or their wheedling, cajoling and special pleading.

More interesting, albeit ultimately disappointing, are the two final chapters How could it happen and, to a lesser degree Postscript. From the first of the two chapters:

Two commonly encountered thought-stereotypes about the Nazis will, surely already have been weakened or eliminated by my interview reports. The first is that these SS killers were "insane" or uncontrollable people, in any generally understood clinical sense. This makes the assessment of their "temporary" systematic, murderous activity all the more baffling and psychologically important. The second widely believed idea -that Hitler's terror and extermination activities were exclusively and narrowly focused on Jews and thus a murderous exaggeration of anti-Semitism alone -is also found to be untenable. [...]

My task has been to throw some light on how that ideology and disastrously destructive implementation came to grip individuals such as my interviewed men and make them its available and willing tools. This will involve on the one hand some discussion of the special claims a state or a political authority has on its subjects' loyalties and obedience. On the other hand it will necessitate an examination of the latent capacities of "ordinary" men to harbour and, under given conditions to activate, murderousness, and, when the given conditions have ceased to operate -to return to inconspicuous, "ordinarily" law-abiding reasonable existence.

An important key to totalitarianism is mass indoctrination:

Frau von Baesyer-Katte has skillfully depicted the process of regression towards the acceptance of Nazi group norms [...] after the Party came to power. At mass level there were the constant uniformed triumphal marches, day-long singing of the Party's "Horst-Wessel" song, in short the build-up of a "We" feeling, from which no patriotic "decent" person could stand aside. One had to cheer, too. It now became easier to succumb to the subtly introduced blackmail of Party pressure through the appearance in offices, industrial plants, etc., of uniformed or at least openly Nazi "believers". In the climate of Germany of those days such people easily became paranoidally regarded and feared as planted secret informers.. Thus conformity -always a strong social motive- by colluding with these early elements of terror, in the shape of "authentic" representatives of the new and required group ethos, replaced individual rational criticism and moral judgements. People had to vie with one another in public to mouth the right sentiments. It became a spiral in which each suspected the other of being "authentic" and thus challenging loyalty. At first a person wih an averagely humane conscience would condemn himself for this lack of moral courage and self-betrayal. This became too intolerable -so the second stage was a denial: surely there had to be some truth in what Nazi beliefs he had to assent to in his group [...]

As for the role of the leader:

[Freud] thought that a group primarily coheres because it meets the need of its members for the equal, shared love of a leader[...] Freud, with characteristic pithiness, says that the illusion that the members of a group are "equally and justly loved by their leader" is "simply an idealistic remodelling of the state of affairs in the primal horde, where all of the sons were equally persecuted by the primal father, and feared him equally." The fascination and devotion evoked in the affiliate towards the leader is thus closely related to the individual's ambivalent and thwarted primary love needs in the phased development of his parent-ties. The ties of identification can simultaneously make the affiliate feel powerful through the shared omnipotence of the "father-leader" and of common, one-pointed herd-like direction; and at the same time also feel a powerless, dependent tool or cog, in awe of the group's power to threaten and persecute him if he fails.

Finally, in the postscript, the author reminds us, that many upheavals of historical underdogs that aim at establishing "the rule of righteousness" and collapse into tyranny share the common features of extreme left wing and extreme right-wing systems:

(a) In-group exclusiveness and hostility to almost all out-groups sharply delimited from the former;
(b) Demands for complete submissiveness to the in-group as the only true source of beneficent change;
(c) The tendency to categorize persons with respect to selected characteristics and to make "all or none" judgements on strength of these [...e.g. ]"Capitalist hyaena", "Red scum", "imperialist spy", "terrorist circles", etc.
(d) The vision of the world as a scene of unceasing conflict (e.g. "class war", "survival of the fittest" as Darwinian sociology, "constant watchfulness", etc.);
(e) Disdain for sentiments of tenderness, for family bonds, for toleration of "enemies" as weaknesses in the in-group's struggle that demands total commitment and hardness ("a good Bolshevik", a "real soldier");
(f) Belief in the existence of ubiquitous hostile, conspiratorial influences and their masked control, even over quite remote spheres of life. Hence the complementary belief in the necessity to uncover and penetrate these and to achieve complete control, since one's in-group is the object of these conspiratorial designs and can only survive by manipulating and checkmating them, if necessary by violence, logically justifiable.
(g) The ideal of a conflictless, wholly harmonious society to be achieved only in the final triumph of one's in-group which holds the key to it.

Since Dicks studies "the German case" he leaves unanswered a crucial question: once such a thought-system digs its claws into any given society, how can it be dislodged?

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/...

blurb - Drawing on never-before-released papers, historian Daniel Pick uncovers the extraordinary story of British psychiatrist Henry Dicks, who was sent to examine Rudolf Hess in a British military safe house, at the height of the Second World War.

In May 1941, Nazi Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess suddenly appeared in a field in Scotland, having flown solo from Germany on what appeared to be a peace mission.

Much of this story is well known, but now Daniel Pick, Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, reveals documents which provide a fresh insight into this extraordinary episode - and cast new light on the role of psychology in the battle against Nazism.

Soon after Hess' capture and incarceration, Dr Henry Dicks, a British psychiatrist, was sent by the British authorities to meet him. His mission was to see what his specialised training could glean about this senior Nazi's thinking - without revealing he was a psychiatrist.

Dicks first encountered Hess in 1941, at the eerie military safe house in Surrey where the erstwhile Deputy Fuhrer was being held. And in this programme, Professor Pick reveals the contents of the notebook in which Dicks kept a record of his encounters.

He sets their contents in the context of the Second World War with the help of Professor Richard Overy.

He listens to a rare recording from the US National Archives of Hess being interrogated at Nuremberg.

And after the war, the lessons of encounters such as Dicks' meetings with Hess were still being pressed into service to combat extremism.

As Dr Jessica Reinisch tells him, even as Hess was consigned to prison in Berlin, psychological insights into Nazi thinking were helping to shape the drive to de-Nazify post-war Germany.

Producer: Phil Tinline.

[Amy]

Ok, here's the thing; this book is compelling in its own way. I know that I wonder about what could have possibly motivated every day Germans to become Nazis in the completely odious sense of that word. And what better (and also more horrifying) way to find out than to talk to said Nazis and uncover what made them tick?

Unfortunately, this book was written in 1971. Psychology has changed since then. I simply can't accept today that Nazi X was motivated to commit genocide because he had an Oedipus complex, or because he was living out his secret necrophiliac fantasies. Those explanations are too trite, too easy, and too restrictive. They in no way take into account the complexity of the human psyche, especially the ways in which that psyche copes in times of war and in times of totalitarianism. I'm not a psychologist, so maybe I'm talking out of my hat, but we're looking at the violent, brutal genocide of millions of people, and you're giving me Oedipus?! Really?

I also wasn't impressed with the way Dicks paraphrased the interviews. He could have, and I think should have let the Nazis speak for themselves, but instead, he told me what they said, he inserted his own voice into their monologues, and frankly, he muddied the waters so much I couldn't determine where their voices ended and his began.

It would be interesting to know what made Nazis do what they did. I just didn't find persuasive answers to that question in this book.