The Devil Made Them Do It?

Yesterday a former student from my “evil and suffering” class sent me an online news article in which it was reported that Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican’s chief exorcist  has claimed that Hitler, Stalin and all the Nazis were possessed by the Devil. The “caster out of demons” said on Vatican radio, “I am convinced that the Nazis were all possessed. All you have to do is think about what Hitler and Stalin did. Almost certainly they were possessed by the Devil. You can tell by their behavior and their actions, from the horrors they committed and the atrocities that were committed on their orders. That's why we need to defend society from demons."

According to Vatican documents recently released wartime pontiff Pope Pius XII attempted a "long distance" exorcism of Hitler which failed to have any effect. This of course begs the question, if Pius XII was so cognizant and so convinced of Hitler’s evil, then why was he consistently so silent in denouncing the Third Reich? Father Amorth said: "It's very rare that praying and attempting to carry out an exorcism from distance works. Of course you can pray for someone from a distance but in this case it would not have any effect. One of the key requirements for an exorcism is to be present in front of the possessed person and that person also has to be consenting and willing. Therefore trying to carry out an exorcism on someone who is not present, or consenting and willing would prove very difficult.” And as president of the International Association of Exorcists he should know.

My student sent the article to me because when studying Post-Holocaust theology he remembered my saying in class that it is a grave and dangerous error to judge Hitler and his generals as insane, as monsters, as demonic or pathological. To place the Nazis in categories that distance them from ourselves by making them so utterly different is to risk falling into comfortable complacency; it is to deny their humanity and as such to deny that simply by virtue of being human, we too are capable of “atrocities.” To ascribe to them characteristics and traits that fall so far outside the norm of human behavior that we cannot identify ourselves with them is to risk the naïve and erroneous conclusion that Nazi Germanywas an historical anomaly that can never be repeated.

One of the ethical consequences of claiming that the Nazis were demonically possessed is that such a claim exonerates them from moral responsibility. If they were “possessed by the Devil” then they cannot be held accountable for the acts they committed under satanic influence and power. The issues of moral choice and free will become irrelevant, for if their acts were directed and caused by an evil Being, then how could they not have done what they did? The Nuremberg Trials and the Eichmann trial become injustices committed against those pitiable, defenseless men whose moral agency was taken from them by a power beyond their control. And the world becomes guilty of convicting and executing the poor, helpless victims of Satan.   

To deny them sanity or moral self-possession is to deny the eye witness accounts of those who attended the Conference of the Undersecretaries of State, sometimes called the Wansee Conference. Held in 1942, in a house in the suburbs of Berlin, the aim of the conference was to discuss the effective coordination of the Final Solution; the total elimination of the Jews from Europe. Sitting around a table for no more than an hour and a half the men in attendance logically and deliberately discussed the “complicated legal question” of the treatment of “half- and -quarter Jews”—should they be killed or merely sterilized? They calmly discussed various strategies for the killing and offered opinions on the cost efficiency and man power required for each of the methods. Hannah Arendt, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, (a book that New York Times Book Review editor Barry Gewen has called “one of the great books of the last half century”) reported that Adolf Eichmann, testifying to the events of the conference said that the Final Solution was met with “extraordinary enthusiasm.” When the meeting ended the men retired to a salon, smoked, had drinks and lunch and according to Eichmann, they “did not talk shop, but enjoyed some rest after long hours of work.” And no doubt, they then went to their homes, played Wagner on their pianos and kissed their children goodnight.

During the trial Eichmann himself acknowledged that he held no particular animosity or hatred toward Jews. In fact, he counted a few Jews among his friends. He admitted that at the conference he had continuous “doubts about such a bloody solution through violence,” but since the inner circle of Hitler’s generals were in such unanimous accord and agreement, and in fact were vying and fighting with each other for the “honor” of taking the lead in the execution of the task, Eichmann allowed himself to be exonerated and exempt from moral responsibility in surrender to the heightened knowledge and wisdom of his seniors. He said, “At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt.” After all, who was he to judge? Who was he “to have his own thoughts in the matter?” Adolf Eichmann was not a victim of satanic possession. He was not beyond moral agency. Adolf Eichmann simply and too easily relinquished his moral responsibility to a bureaucracy that he did not question. He surrendered his own moral sensibilities and rationalities to unchallenged obedience. He was not a demon. He was just a man; a man who considered obedience to a higher authority to be his highest duty.

Hannah Arendt wrote, “…it would have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster…the trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.” 

To surrender one’s own thoughts and ethical independence to a higher authority, whether civic, political or religious is not demonic or satanic. It is quite ordinary. It happens everyday. The problem perhaps lies with how easily it is done. One can become so accustom to relinquishing one’s capacity for doubt and questioning that submitting to seemingly benign authorities becomes commonplace.  And so, when faced with a malevolent superior we hardly know anymore how to resist, how to fight, how to disobey. Oh no, what is terrifying about the Nazis is not that they were inhuman, but rather that they were so commonly and ordinarily, human.