Abstract
There are two questions that haunt the second and third generations after the shoah1 : Where was God? And, where was humanity? Put differently: How could a good God have permitted the shoah to happen, especially to people chosen by God? And, how could so many people have been turned into passive and active participants in the shoah? I have given a forthright, if not popular, answer to the first question and have also proposed an answer to the second. It is with one aspect of the question about humanity that I will deal here.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The exception is E. Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 1989).
S. Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York, Harper and Row: 1974); also available as a film.
Film, ‘In the Eye of the Storm’ and later in a film, ‘A Class Divided’; the latter appeared as a book by W. Peters, A Class Divided Then and Now (New Heaven: Yale University Press: 1987).
H.C. Kelman and V.L. Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press: 1989).
H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press: 1963).
This is confirmed by the analysis of the Rorschach data for the Nuremberg accused. No psycho-pathology was found (G. Borofsky and D. Brand, ‘Personality Organization and Psychological Functioning of the Nuremberg War Criminals: The Rorschach Data’, in J. Dimsdale, Survivors, Victims, and Perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust [New York: Hemisphere Publishing Co.: 1980], 359–03).
E. Klee et al., ‘The Good Old Days’, transi. D. Burnstone (New York: Free Press, 1988, 1991).
C. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992). See also idem., ‘Ordinary Germans or Ordinary Men’, Address and Response at the Inauguration of the Dorot Chair of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies, ed. D. Blumenthal (Atlanta, GA: Emory University, 1994) pp.7–14.
M. Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans1933–1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955, 1966).
I. Müller, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich, transi. D.L. Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991) — reviewed by me in Modern Judaism 13 (1993): 95–106.
J. M. Darley and C.D. Batson, ‘From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27:1 (1973): 100–8.
E. Staub, ‘Helping a Distressed Person’, L. Berkowitz, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 1 (New York: Academic Press, 1974): 293–341.
L. Eron and L. Huesmann, ‘The Role of Television in the Development of Prosocial and Antisocial Behavior’, D. Olweus et al., Development of Antisocial and Prosocial Behavior (New York: Academic Press, 1986), pp.285–314.
L. Baron, ‘The Dutchness of Dutch Rescuers: The National Dimension of Altruism’, P. Oliner et al., Embracing the Other: Philosophical, Psychological, and Historical Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 1992), pp.306–27 — reviewed by me in Pastoral Psychology 46:2 (1997): 131–34.
E. Fogelman, Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust (New York: Anchor Books, 1994) — reviewed by me in Journal of Psychology and Theology 23 (1995): 62–63.
The Milgram experiments probably could not be conducted today because of stricter rules on experimentation with human subjects but, if one were to redo these experiments, one would need to redesign this part to test more fully the role of peer support in defying authority. More importantly, the Stanford Prison experiment (P.G. Zimbardo, et al. ‘The Psychology of Imprisonment: Privation, Power and Pathology’, Doing Unto Others, ed. Z. Rubin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974); available in slide presentation and, later, in a film, Quiet Rage; see New York Times Magazine, 8 April 1973) would have to be completely redesigned to test for resistance to add.
S. and P. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (New York: Free Press, 1988).
See also C.D. Batson, The Altruism Question: Toward a Social-Psychological Answer (Hillsdale, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates: 1991), p.160, that low-empathy persons need feedback on their helping activities.
A. Miller, For Your Own Good, transi. H. and H. Hannum (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983).
T. W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, abridged edition (New York: W. W. Norton and Co.: 1950, 1982).
E. Staub, ‘A Conception of the Determinants and Development of Altruism and Aggression: Motives, the Self, and the Environment’, in C. Zahn-Waxler, et al., Altruism and Aggression: Biological and Social Origins (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 1986), 150–52 (emphasis original), citing many sources.
Cf. also J.A. Piliavin and H. W. Charng, ‘Altruism: A Review of Recent Theory and Research’, American Review of Sociology, 16 (1990): 41.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2001 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Blumenthal, D. (2001). Perpetrator/Rescuer. In: Roth, J.K., Maxwell, E., Levy, M., Whitworth, W. (eds) Remembering for the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-66019-3_76
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-66019-3_76
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-80486-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-66019-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)