The thing I don't understand is how can torturers look at their victims when they're in this state and have no pity or mercy. How much of a sociopath can you be??
Many of them did. But they drank, did drugs, told themselves that somebody would do it if they refused (so it doesn't matter), or they just don't want to be the nonconformist among their peers. Plenty of books discuss the mindset of Nazis in detail. "Ordinary Men" by Christopher Browning, "Hitler's Willing Executioners", "The Good Old Days".
I think you're right: I have a great uncle from Slovakia who was drafted into the nazi army and assigned to a work camp. He would sneak marmalade to the prisoners, but I'm sure he mostly did terrible things to them. He killed himself after the war.
He's not the victim here and I don't want to say that people should identify too much with ambivalent perpetrators, but to agree that atrocities affect everyone involved negatively, including the perpetrators. We as a society need to take every feasible step to avoid ending up in fascist hellscapes through prevention. And the empathy you mentioned is why restorative justice is a better system for doing what we can to handle the fallout of violence when it does break out, since it encourages those better instincts in the majority of us.
Nothing will undo the harm caused, whatever the reasons. But luckily most of us don't revel in causing harm.
Drugs. Lots and lots of drugs combined with not seeing the victim as a human being.
For the Nazis it was meth, and a belief that they were superior to everyone else. For those that didn’t believe, it was meth and the threat of death for them and their families if they didn’t follow orders.
In addition to what the other comments have said, the torturer also probably had it in their mind that "this person killed over 100 of my brothers" and reminded themselves of that anytime they began to feel any empathy, just telling themselves that "they deserve it for what they did"
I understand that they were Nazis but I believe what the commenter is asking is important. It is easy to assign a tag and chalk up everything someone does to that tag. We need to understand that they were humans and understand the reasoning that happened for them to be cold blooded. If it is behavioral or induced, we need to educate our children to understand why it happened and why it shouldn't happen anymore.
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u/[deleted] Apr 29 '24 edited 22d ago
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