Why Do We Forget?
/The Holocaust: An Unfinished History by historian Dan Stone recently garnered attention for offering a new perspective on the Holocaust-the deliberate murder of at least 5.7 million Jewish people during World War II. The basic thesis of the book is that the genocide was much more localized and decentralized than most people might think. Yes, the Holocaust was unique in that it was the first genocide to involve modern industrial size, scope, and scale. Death camps, gas chambers, train cars…What person with a trace of humanity doesn’t have the indelible image of the concentration camp at Auschwitz seared into their memory? Images like these are memorable because they are true, shocking, and revealing of the dark side of human nature.
auschwitz as a symbol looms over any discussion of the holocaust.
From Schindler’s List, to Life is Beautiful, to Ellie Wiesel’s Night, life and death in the concentration camps of Europe has been imprinted into our memories of the Holocaust. But historian Dan Stone argues that while all of this is undeniably true and important, it’s only half the story. The full picture of the Holocaust also included much more localized killing in all kinds of places-Germany, Poland, France, Eastern Europe, even North Africa. Collaborators with the Nazi regime turned in suspected Jews. Local police battalions rounded up Jews and killed them of their own volition. Killings and mass graves sprawled across small towns and villages all over Eastern Europe. Deaths from ghettos, starvation, and disease. Slow physical and psychological torment across long periods of time, even for the survivors. For Dan Stone, to ignore these aspects of the Holocaust and focus only on the industrial nature of it would be a mistake.
But as Dan Stone himself would say, there’s only one problem with this thesis-for serious students of history, we already knew all of this.
In 1992, Christopher Browning published what I consider to be a revolutionary book-Ordinary Men. Meticulously researched, Browning follows Reserve Police Battalion 101-a group of about 500 ordinary men from mostly middle and lower classes (construction workers, teachers, policemen, dockworkers, etc.) cobbled together in 1942. The men were told they would be participating in “actions,” mostly in Poland. Eventually it was revealed to them what these actions would be-the deliberate extermination of Jewish people in the towns and villages they were ordered to go to. The logistics of how this worked were harrowing, yet surprisingly simple. Jews were simply rounded up at gunpoint and shot so that they fell one by one into mass graves. By the end of the war, Reserve Battalion 101 alone would be responsible for the shooting deaths of 38,000 Jews, while shipping 45,000 to concentration camps.
Why did they do it? Plenty of ink has been spilled and podcasts recorded over the years trying to answer this question. The most convincing answer remains the title of Christopher Browning’s book. The men of Reserve Battalion 101 were ordinary men. They could justify their killing by pointing to Nazi Propaganda depicted Jews as subhuman, and blaming them for the horrors of war that they themselves were experiencing. But only a small number of the men were actually members of the Nazi Party. While Nazi ideology certainly created the conditions necessary for genocide, once it came time to do the killing, according to Browning’s exhaustive study of documents, first hand accounts, trial testimony, and more, they did it for ordinary reasons.
In a twisted inversion of humanity, men felt pressure to conform to what their fellow soldiers were doing-in this case murdering people. They didn’t want their friends to feel alone as they did their horrific work. Some felt their career aspirations would be harmed if they didn’t follow through. Diffusion of responsibility allowed soldiers to divide up the gruesome logistics of killing in order to feel less of a psychological burden. If they were just digging the graves, or rounding people out of their homes, or shoving people into a cattle car, then it’s an easier step to believe I’m not responsible for what happens in the next link in the genocide chain. Little situational queues like referring to the components of genocide as “actions” or “resettlements” further normalized the proceedings. Authority and obedience certainly played a role-people tend to see something as acceptable if their leaders condone it. Some felt pressure to kill to avoid punishment, but remarkably some chose not to take part in the killings, and not a single person in Reserve Battalion 101 was punished for not participating-putting the lie to the common conception of brainwashed soldiers being forced to follow orders.
Whether modern day social psychologists know it or not, Social Psychology as a modern discipline started in the direct aftermath of the decisions of Reserve Police Battalion 101. The stunning reality of the Holocaust is that it was done by ordinary people to ordinary people for ordinary reasons that would make sense to any middle school kid feeling peer-pressured in the school cafeteria. Shortly after the war, Stanley Milgram attempted to replicate the experience of ordinary people becoming killers. In the famous Milgram obedience study, he brought in normal people off the street, and told them to shock a “stranger” when that stranger answered a trivia question wrong. Of course none of the shocks were actually real and the strangers were confederates of the experiment, but the participants didn’t know that. It turns out that over 60 percent of normal people off the street would administer a lethal shock to a total stranger, just because someone in authority told them to do so. After these stunning results, social psychology took off. For years it has focused on questions like how does the situation influence our behavior? In what ways does the environment around us dictate the decisions and the choices we make? Are we just a product of our environment? These questions fascinated students, drove research at universities, and offered a unique insight into human nature-arguing that the biggest reason we do anything is the situation around us.
The Milgram obedience study was influenced by the events of the holocaust and kicked off the modern field of social psychology.
In modern times, Social Psychology is in crisis. Several of it’s key experiments have failed to replicate (Milgram’s does however), some are completely made up (see Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment), and some have begun to question if it’s even possible to learn anything interesting about humanity from controlled experiments. Arguments around the tenability of the field have gotten heated over the years, but whatever side you take, perhaps the field has strayed too far from its roots. Why not just look directly at the Holocaust as Christopher Browning did? Social scientists want a controlled and replicated lab experiment, but reading 10 pages of Ordinary Men provides as compelling a validation to the field of social psychology as any laboratory experiment ever could.
While psychologists debate variables, the average population forgets. Getting accurate data from self report polling is notoriously tough, but something does seem to be amiss in our collective cultural understanding of the Holocaust. One poll suggested that 1 in 10 Americans don’t believe the Holocaust happened, over 50 percent drastically underestimate the death toll, and a dwindling number have any grasp on accurate historical knowledge surrounding it. What accounts for this shocking data? Some element of this is simply nefarious misinformation by ideologically driven influencers. Another element is, ironically, a growing mistrust of authority, institutions, and higher education teaching people about the Holocaust. This leads to people mistrustful of authority telling people they should give the ultimate authoritarian government the benefit of the doubt. Certainly this type of bizarre thinking can be attributed to some of the shift in how the Holocaust is now viewed. But when dealing with collective memory, it’s also likely that we as a society are simply starting to forget. And while the Holocaust is well researched and has an abundance of evidence to draw on to make conclusions, there’s no reason not to apply the principles of collective forgetting to dozens or hundreds of other genocides historically.
So why are these ordinary men forgettable? In psychology, we know that memory is a tricky thing. Individually we know that the keys to remembering are relevance, agency, and depth. The more relevant something is to you, the more likely you are to remember it. The more you actively and continuously play a role in something, the more likely you are to remember it. And the further in depth you study something, the more likely you are to remember it. But much like human behavior, memory is situational. A sight, a smell, a particular moment, can take you back in time and cause you to remember something you once forgot. Or remember something that was never there. Or forget something that was. As historical stories like the Holocaust lose relevance, agency, and depth over time, people begin to misremember. They insert their own values and goals into their memories. Remembering what they want, forgetting what they don’t, and inserting fabrications when necessary. In this case, people want a grand evil, an enduring symbol that looms over all time, like an Auschwitz, that they can comfortably distance themselves from and say “I’m not that.” However, the chilling truth is that if ordinary men were the killers, then some part of us is too. If we were in their shoes, we probably would have done the same thing.
A mother attempting to shield her child from ordinary men.
Why do we forget so easily? Looking at pictures like the picture above, reading books like Dan Stone’s The Holocaust: An Unfinished History, giving yourself reminders of what humanity is capable of…this is no fun. So we don’t do those things. Relevance, agency, and depth are lost. And we forget. What’s more human than that? Remember that the vast majority of Reserve Battalion 101 assimilated back into society after the war, with no punishment meted out. They went from regular people serving as teachers and construction workers, to perpetrators of genocide, and then back to their jobs and their families. Ordinary men were the killers, and now ordinary men forget.
1. Bloom, Paul. Psych: The Story of the Human Mind. New York: Ecco, 2023.
2. Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 2017.
3. Stone, Dan. The Holocaust: An Unfinished History. New York: Mariner Books, 2023.
4. Book Review: ‘The Holocaust,’ by Dan Stone - The New York Times
5. https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/ordinary-people-do-terrible-things
6. https://www.dancarlin.com/product/ep-28-superhumanly-inhuman/
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