That's how it was for Wehrmacht atrocities in general too: even when there were orders there was no formal coercion to actually commit them, the soldiers just said "oh ok" and did them even when they weren't leaping to do them of their own initiative. Like there's so much propaganda trying to distance the Wehrmacht from the Nazis or paint them as victims (because the US immediately pivoted to restoring less notorious Nazi officials to power and trying to fold as much of the remaining Wehrmacht into NATO as possible) when the truth is they were willing, active participants in the Nazis' crimes as well as taking the initiative and committing their own crimes as well.
Not only that, but nobody batted an eye if the soldiers didn't just say "oh ok". The nazis were self-aware enough to know they were doing absolutely ghoulish things that were downright impossible to carry out for most people, there's a Himmler speech he held in front of SS members where he goes through this extensively, praising his underlings for their fortitude while facing thousands of dead bodies. That just wasn't expected of common grunts who wouldn't have been there without the draft.
Exactly. At most there was peer-pressure/guilt-tripping about it, and I know volumes have been written about that.
Although as an aside, I'm curious how well explored the sort of... oh I don't even know the right word, the contrast I guess between the Nazis acknowledging the horror of everything they were doing and the damage that dealt to the individuals actually carrying it out, and the way that they celebrated that, as well as how that ties into the broader warrior-death-cult thing of fascism. That is to say, the way Fascism as a whole idealizes and romanticizes a warrior's death, a sort of self-sacrifice in the name of violence itself. Does their recognition and celebration of the damage caused to the self by committing violence tie into that, or is their whole death cult too incoherent and self-serving to draw any clear parallels? I don't think I'm articulating this right, but I'm not entirely sure how to do so better: it's just this whole romanticization of "shouldering burdens (by committing atrocities)" or "making hard choices" at great cost to the self seems to be a broader facet of Fascist thinking as well, part of their aesthetics of warriors suffering, dying, and triumphing in redemptive violence that is almost as much an end in itself as a means to some other end.
From what i know about Himmler himself, who's basically the prototypical neurotic-esoteric SS :le-pol-face: , there was both a lionization of becoming desensitized to violence and a downplaying of how emotionally stunted that makes people. Like, he took a lot of inspiration from zen bhuddism of all things, of mental techniques the zen monks developed to blank your mind and weather everything the world throws at you, and tried to apply that specifically to become more capable of doing unspeakable things. That's actually where the phrase zen fascist (as in the Dead Kennedys California Über Alles) comes from. At the same time, he praised the people who carried out his orders for mass murder as "having retained their humanity". I don't know if he actually believed that load of horseshit himself, but there was definitely cope going on to maintain a self-image of "good guys who did what was necessary", as absurd as that sounds. The nazi death cult rested on the assumption of being the hero, not the villain. They seriously didn't get that they were the bad guys, just as today's fascists thing that we're the baddies.
That's how it was for Wehrmacht atrocities in general too: even when there were orders there was no formal coercion to actually commit them, the soldiers just said "oh ok" and did them even when they weren't leaping to do them of their own initiative. Like there's so much propaganda trying to distance the Wehrmacht from the Nazis or paint them as victims (because the US immediately pivoted to restoring less notorious Nazi officials to power and trying to fold as much of the remaining Wehrmacht into NATO as possible) when the truth is they were willing, active participants in the Nazis' crimes as well as taking the initiative and committing their own crimes as well.
Not only that, but nobody batted an eye if the soldiers didn't just say "oh ok". The nazis were self-aware enough to know they were doing absolutely ghoulish things that were downright impossible to carry out for most people, there's a Himmler speech he held in front of SS members where he goes through this extensively, praising his underlings for their fortitude while facing thousands of dead bodies. That just wasn't expected of common grunts who wouldn't have been there without the draft.
Exactly. At most there was peer-pressure/guilt-tripping about it, and I know volumes have been written about that.
Although as an aside, I'm curious how well explored the sort of... oh I don't even know the right word, the contrast I guess between the Nazis acknowledging the horror of everything they were doing and the damage that dealt to the individuals actually carrying it out, and the way that they celebrated that, as well as how that ties into the broader warrior-death-cult thing of fascism. That is to say, the way Fascism as a whole idealizes and romanticizes a warrior's death, a sort of self-sacrifice in the name of violence itself. Does their recognition and celebration of the damage caused to the self by committing violence tie into that, or is their whole death cult too incoherent and self-serving to draw any clear parallels? I don't think I'm articulating this right, but I'm not entirely sure how to do so better: it's just this whole romanticization of "shouldering burdens (by committing atrocities)" or "making hard choices" at great cost to the self seems to be a broader facet of Fascist thinking as well, part of their aesthetics of warriors suffering, dying, and triumphing in redemptive violence that is almost as much an end in itself as a means to some other end.
From what i know about Himmler himself, who's basically the prototypical neurotic-esoteric SS :le-pol-face: , there was both a lionization of becoming desensitized to violence and a downplaying of how emotionally stunted that makes people. Like, he took a lot of inspiration from zen bhuddism of all things, of mental techniques the zen monks developed to blank your mind and weather everything the world throws at you, and tried to apply that specifically to become more capable of doing unspeakable things. That's actually where the phrase zen fascist (as in the Dead Kennedys California Über Alles) comes from. At the same time, he praised the people who carried out his orders for mass murder as "having retained their humanity". I don't know if he actually believed that load of horseshit himself, but there was definitely cope going on to maintain a self-image of "good guys who did what was necessary", as absurd as that sounds. The nazi death cult rested on the assumption of being the hero, not the villain. They seriously didn't get that they were the bad guys, just as today's fascists thing that we're the baddies.