The picture above of smiling girls on a picnic is taken at a recreation home called Solahütte. The girls are having blueberries enjoying a day far from work. Solahütte is just a little South of Auschwitz, and the man handing out blueberries is Karl Höcker, adjutant of the concentration camps' commander. The girls are SS helpers. At the same time, 1944, hundreds of thousands of people are exterminated in the gas chambers of Auschwitz no more than 30 km away.
If you had met one of those girls on the street a sunny summer day, would you have imagined that they could work at a concentration camp? Would they have been able to imagine it themselves 10 years earlier? 5 years earlier? 5 months earlier?
There was a recent article in der Spiegel about how common people were introduced to the SS for work in the camp.
Karl Höcker himself had been bank teller before joining the SS. The camp commander, Richard Baer, had been confectioner - probably giving free candy to happy children.
Nine out of ten new SS men who came to work in the camp refused the order "kick that man in the stomach", the first time they heard it. The fresh SS men seem to have had common human moral standards: "Kick him!" "No, I will not do it." That means that nine out of ten SS men refused to obey order in one of the strictest armies in history. They refused the first time.
Then started an intense psychological attack with insults and group pressure to make the newcomers do what they were told. Most of them gave in of course.
Most humans follow the moral standards of the group around them. If your only acquaintances think it is fine to steal towels at hotel rooms, you may very well think so too in the end. If they think it is fine to cheat with their tax declaration, you may do so too. If they think it is fine to steal cars, to burgle apartments, to sell drugs to minors - you may think so too in the end. Imagine if you did not know anyone who did not do it. Imagine that all your friends did so. Everyone who ever showed they cared about you. Everyone you cared for. If your choice was between losing the only friend you had or to help him steal a car, what would you do?
The older SS men made sure than the younger ones were treated as friends, people who cared, people one could confide in. An inside jargon kept them together against "the others".
In the concentration camps, the older SS men used arguments as well. The prisoners were considered "criminals". Some of them had committed no other crime than to be born by a Jewish mother, but they were "criminals" in the eyes of SS, and they had to be treated as such. The violence against the prisoners was supposed to be necessary considering the "danger" the prisoners posed.
The psychological defence of the newcomers was slowly broken down - just like it is in some armies and other organisations today. And once the young SS man had accepted using violence, realising the status it brought him in the eyes of the older ones, he could be used to foster other newcomers in a vicious circle of increased violence.
The article in Der Spiegel may be biased. It may be read as a twisted excuse for what earlier generations have done. But it all seems very plausible. Humans are not inherently evil, but the clay we are built of can be shaped to make us criminal and evil given certain circumstances. The same lump of iron can be made into a gun or a ploughshare - be it in Rwanda, Nanjing (南京) or Srebrenica.
This does not free us from responsibility of course. On the contrary. Considering that some of the worst crimes in the world have been committed by people who probably just imitated what people around them were doing, we should consider "I just did what everyone else did" the worst of all defences.
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