The Complexity of Cruelty

Acts of inhumanity and forbidding calamities are in our faces daily, in the newspapers we read and the social media we consume. A woman, glancing at her cell phone on a subway platform, is pushed onto the rails and flattened to death for no apparent reason. The assailant calmly walked away. A good Samaritan is stabbed to death for trying to intervene in a heated dispute between lovers.

It is these kinds of human tragedies that, as a forensic psychologist, I confront on a regular basis. I’m asked to make sense of the motivation that prompted such unspeakable and depraved carnage. For instance, I evaluated Robert, a 17-year-old adolescent who killed his elderly neighbor. Having helped her in the past with her groceries, he knew where she kept her money. One evening, he entered the house at night, figuring it was an easy way to get some cash. When she unexpectedly awakened and looked him squarely in the face, he figured his only option was to bludgeon her to death.

Robert had known his neighbor for years and had previously helped her carry packages into her house. Yet he reacted savagely to this older woman whom he knew well. Or consider the 30-year-old man I evaluated who reacted violently when “some Indian girl” complained after he cut in front of the movie theater line. He sprayed mace on the victim’s face. When arrested, he had a handgun tucked in his jacket pocket.

How to understand the roots of such aberrant conduct? It might make sense to study individuals who deliberately perpetrate acts of malignant violence on a grand scale. Surprisingly, the study of mass violence muddies the water even further, and the complexity of human behavior metastasizes further.

World War II was the most deadly conflict in human history, ending the lives of over 60 million people, mostly civilians, between 1939 and 1945. During that period, Nazi leaders conspired to exterminate entire groups of people, especially the Jews but also Slavs, Gypsies, or others who were not pure “Aryan” Germans. The killings were perpetrated in a premeditated fashion and with such infamy that the concentration camp Auschwitz is now associated with evil incarnate.

These massacres were perpetrated by members of the Einsatzgruppen, an “elite” force of rabid Nazi ideologues who believed in the superiority of “Aryan” blood.” Their leaders were highly educated men.

Most startling, historians have documented mass killings that were also carried out by the non-Nazi military (Wehrmacht) reservists and conscripts drawn from the general German population. They were not political ideologues or even Nazi party members. Before the military draft, they were family men with ordinary jobs.

After the war, the vanquished Nazi leaders were held accountable during the historical Nuremberg trials of 1945-1949, with 22 top Third Reich officials tried between 1945-1946. Many of the leaders were interviewed by psychiatric experts and administered psychological tests of intelligence and personality. Included was the Rorschach inkblot test, which is used to assess an individual's personality, level of emotional maturity, and the capacity to perceive reality accurately.

The Nazi leaders examined included Hermann Göring, second-in-command behind Hitler, who sanctioned many of the policies that led to the death of millions. Also examined were Hans Frank, the governor-general of Poland who was responsible for the premeditated murder of millions of Jews and Poles, and Wilhelm Keitel, the chief of the Wehrmacht who also dutifully issued orders that resulted in the slaughter of multitudes.

The psychological testing results of these Nazis were disturbing and illuminating. Almost all of the Nuremberg defendants were intellectually bright, with high IQs in the very superior range, up to an IQ of 142 (99th percentile.) Surprisingly, there was no psychological “smoking gun” in the results of the Rorschach. Nazi leaders seemed to be within the normal range of psychological functioning, albeit with their individual personality quirks.

Some appeared quite emotionally immature, while others manifested poor self-control and limited psychological mindedness. Some leaned heavily towards an authoritarian personality style. Still, on the whole, the psychological findings of this group of men who orchestrated murder on a grand scale looked not unlike that of the multitudes.

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The Rorschach test was later administered to rank-and-file Nazis and collaborators who participated in the Nazi atrocities, with similar results: They appeared to be psychologically indistinguishable from the faceless crowd.

In essence, there was no clear definition of the “Nazi personality,” no psychological profile of individuals prone to coldblooded evil-doing, or of those willing to exterminate masses of human beings on an industrial scale.

After some reflection, I realized that these findings resonated with my forensic experience. Having evaluated thousands of inmates whose crimes have ranged from petty theft to mass murder, it has become clear that the source of such extreme violence and inhuman cruelty is complex, with psychological, temperamental, and, importantly, social components.

For instance, in Germany, like many European countries during the 19th to 20th century, extreme anti-Semitism was widespread. After World War I, a defeated and traumatized Germany was humiliated and socially precarious. The country was rife with militia groups of veterans who were chastened by the loss of the war and enraged at their political leaders for surrendering. Unrest skyrocketed with the onset of the Great Depression and the ensuing financial hardships.

At one point, inflation was 1,000%. It was fertile ground for Adolf Hitler as he scapegoated Jews for allegedly “stabbing Germany in the back” and the government for being weak. He proposed policies that were heavy-handed but designed to stabilize the country and restore honor and purity to a superior “Aryan” folk without Jewish influence. The rest is history.

Millions of everyday Germans were willing to follow Hitler down a path of wanton hate. This historically tragic fact exposes a humble truth: Most of us, under certain social-political conditions, could become motivated to rationalize and accept the commission of abject cruelty as a necessary course of action.

But not everybody.