Answers on Causes of the Atrocities Found in Nazi and Terrorist Psychological Analyses

Ukrainian political scientists say Russia does not consider Ukraine a state that has the right to exist independently of Russia. Following the Bucha massacre, it now seems like they do not consider Ukrainians human beings deserving of understanding, sympathy, or the right to live.

Bucha experienced horrible, inhumane behavior, and in the context of these events, it is often debated whether what was going on there could be called genocide. Prof. Danutė Gailienė, a researcher of collective trauma and psychologist, discussed the roots of this immense cruelty and the factors leading to such human behavior on Vilnius University podcast Mokslas be Pamokslų.

Cruelty can come from “turning off” empathy

“One thing is certain, the atrocities in Ukraine are something Europe has not seen since World War II and hoped to never see again because all international agreements have banned the use of heavy weapons against civilians. Therefore, there are no words to describe the Bucha events,” the psychologist says.

According to her, war and the rules of war are simpler than everyday life, because an ordinary soldier in war is not personally responsible for his actions, he only obeys the instructions of the commander. Russian soldiers have the generals’ blessing to engage in these immoral activities and thus know they will not be held responsible for it. What’s more, the soldiers’ marauding is seen as compensation for their frustration rising from their inability to win this war.

However, when asked how a person can commit such cold-blooded crimes, even with permission, the researcher notes that all they have to do is “turn off” a person’s empathy mechanism. “Pathological ideologies help to do that. In Russia, people have been indoctrinated by criminal doctrine for decades. There are few people who are able to resist this immense influence,” the researcher said.

If ideology keeps repeating that we are humiliated, we must restore our greatness, that others are to blame for our failures, people ultimately start believing it. Of course, there are Russians who think differently, there are military deserters. However, the vast majority obey the ideological propaganda, cave into the pressure from the authorities, and, being free of personal liability, stopped resisting, got accustomed to the atrocities, or even contributed to them.

“This moral destruction of people is a terrible thing that does not go without consequences. “They will not stop the violence when the war ends. They will get drunk constantly, they will spread aggression, their own lives will probably be sad and tragic,” the trauma psychologist said.

Psychiatric examinations disappoint

The psychologist recalled the Nuremberg trials where 24 criminals from former Nazi Germany were convicted as war criminals, a team of psychiatrists and psychologists worked with them for years. They could meet them, talk to them, and conduct analysis.

“All the professionals and the public were very hopeful that once the analysis is complete, it would be possible to answer the question of what the Nazi personality is. And when the specialists began to summarize the results of their observations and research, they themselves were greatly disappointed to be unable to describe a typical Nazi. Perhaps some of them were more neurotic, some had specific characteristics, but most of them were ordinary people, the only thing that stood out was their low level of empathy,” Prof. D. Gailienė said.

Since these discoveries were made, there has been increasing pressure on psychologists who are expected to explain the brutal behavior of some people and the causes thereof. However, experts have long known that a person is so complex and diverse that it is impossible to explain his behavior by diagnoses, categories, or labels.

“When right-wing extremist Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in cold blood, was tried, a psychiatric examination was arranged to examine whether he was sane, whether he has the legal capacity, and whether he understood what he was doing. The first examination found paranoid schizophrenia and a panel of experts leaned towards saying he did not have the legal capacity. But due to disagreement among the specialists themselves, a second expert examination was commissioned, which found that he does, after all, have the legal capacity, and arrived at a number of other diagnoses: autism, sociopathy, narcissism, etc.,” the professor said.

According to her, this showed once again that there is no single answer and that those diagnostic labels are just names and constructs that have been agreed to be used as a name for this type of behavior. However, that does not explain the nature of cruel behavior, so in cases like these, it is more reasonable to consider indoctrination, pathological ideologies, and moral dissociation (duality).

Nazi psychological examinations reveal the duality

According to the professor, to discuss the causes of violent crimes, one has to keep going back to Nazi psychological examinations and an assessment of the historical past in Germany. A famous American psychoanalyst Robert Jay Lifton, who studied the psychological dimensions of war and genocide, tried to understand where inhumane cruelty comes from. “He conducted a study about Nazi doctors who performed the most horrific experiments on prisoners in the camps. He talked to them, researched them, and discovered the duality of personality that manifests itself like this: one side of you doesn’t really know what the other is doing. They seemed to be divided into two parts: in the camps, they, as doctors, conducted cruel experiments and behaved primitively and vulgarly, but when they returned home, for vacation, for example, they again became quite refined, educated German doctors,” the trauma psychologist said.

It is difficult for a person to overcome duality, and according to the psychologist, historical traumas and events show analogous things can be said about societies as about a person. “There are already a number of historians, anthropologists, and psychologists trying to pinpoint what exactly happened in Russia and turned it into such a cruel nation, and one of the reasons is the pathological narrative. Even studies on terrorists show that the cruelty is based on ideology, lack of empathy, and the fact they do not bear personal liability. Once these mechanisms are “turned off,” they start seeing other people as objects, as if they could do whatever they want with them.”

Sigmund Freud stated that the cultural layer of man is so thin that dark forces can easily breakthrough, and we do see it in history.