Nazis were not evil people they were only obeying orders Discuss
During the briefer than advertised Third Reich, the way in which the Nazis set about eliminating ‘inferior races’ was unique in scale and institutionalisation, with over six million European Jews slaughtered in industrial fashion along with other minority groups such as the old, the infirm and the Gypsies. ... Were the Nazis in the death camps wicked people? Or were they just obeying orders? ... People must, he states “aquire conscience through socialisation, which controls them from within.”(Strathern, 2000) Hobbes also stated that people need to be controlled externally, by society and the state, to prevent them from harming others to satisfy their own interests. ... However, what if the State is not benign, and utilizes totalitarian means of control and coercion upon its citizens? “Destructiveness of this magnitude and duration does not happen by accident or inadvertence, nor is it done by solitary individuals violating the common practices of their organisation or society” argues Sanford (Sanford & Comstock, 1971). The majority of the destructiveness is actually carried out by those who “feel they have received some kind of permission for what they do - as we call it, a sanction for evil. ... (Staub 1998) Going one step further, Erich Fromm seeks to transcend the utilitarian individualist philosophies of Freud and Hobbes, mixing them with the equally deterministic Marxist concepts of society driven class enlightenment and arrives at freedom, not biology or class as the motivational root beneath people’s actions.(Fromm, 1995) Wickedness, is not a scientific concept with an agreed definition, but the idea of it is a broadly shared human heritage; the essence of wickedness being that it constitutes the destruction of human beings. This includes not only the killing but the creation of conditions that materially of psychologically destroy or diminish people’s dignity, happiness and capacity to fulfill basic human needs. Wickedness is inherent in the action, not intention. ... While obedience is the most important force, it is not the true motive for mass killing or genocide. ... Using the three ways in which we try to escape from freedom as described by Fromm as framework for evaluating the ‘wickedness’ of the various groups of Nazis in the deathcamps, we can understand more about the motivation of the killers, and thence determine to what degree, if at all, wickedness should be ascribed to the individuals concerned.