Of Mind and Murder: Toward a More

Comprehensive Psychology of the

Holocaust George R. Mastroianni
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Of Mind and Murder
 Of Mind and Murder
Toward a More Comprehensive
Psychology of the Holocaust

GEORGE R. MASTROIANNI

1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Names: Mastroianni, George R., author.
Title: Of mind and murder : toward a more comprehensive psychology
of the Holocaust / George R. Mastroianni.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018009285 | ISBN 9780190638238 (jacketed hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Psychological aspects.
Classification: LCC D804.3 .M3735 2018 | DDC 940.53/18019—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009285

The views expressed in this book are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy
or position of the United States Air Force Academy, the United States Air Force,
the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

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 For My Teachers:
Daniel N. Robinson
Robert P. Wease
 ABOUT THE COVER PHOTO

This plaque originally hung in the entryway of Lela Karayanni’s house

on Limnou Street in Athens, Greece. Lela Karayanni was a leader of the
Bouboulina anti-​ Nazi Resistance group. This group operated for three
years gathering and passing on intelligence to the Allies, helping vulner-
able people escape the Nazis, and organizing acts of resistance against the
Nazi occupiers. Lela Karayanni was arrested by the Nazis on August 11,
1944, and was subjected to days of torture, though she revealed nothing
to her captors. She was shot along with seventy-​one other members of the
Resistance on September 8, 1944, in the forest of Daphni. She reportedly led
her compatriots in the Zallogos, a Greek dance of defiance, as they were ex-
ecuted.* On September 13, 2011, Lela Karayanni was honored as Righteous
Among Nations by Yad Vashem for her heroism in saving the family of
Solomon Cohen. The plaque, by an unknown artist, probably dates to the
construction of the house on Limnou Street, sometime in the 1920s. The
plaque is now in the possession of Iason Carayannis, Lela’s grandson, who
generously made it available for this cover photograph.

NOTE

* http://​www.drgeorgepc.com/​LelaCarayannisTribute.html
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xi
Human Nature and the Peace xiii
Introduction xix

1. What Was the Holocaust? 1

2. The Holocaust: A Brief History of Psychological Explanation 35

3. Matters of Method: Issues and Problems in the Psychological Study of

the Holocaust 71

4. Clinical/​Abnormal Perspectives 105

5. Personality 137

6. Learning and Conditioning 165

7. Cognition and Memory 197

8. Age and Development 231

9. Social Psychology 263

10. In the Aftermath 303

11. Psychology, Context, and the Risk of Genocide: Japanese Evacuation

and Confinement 333

12. The Psychology of the Holocaust in Perspective 367

Index 401
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I appreciate the support of the United States Air Force Academy,

Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership in helping make this
book possible.
I am deeply indebted to Dagmar Herzog, Irina Goldenberg, Connor
Sebestyen, Greg Robinson, Karen McComb, and anonymous reviewers at
Oxford University Press for their review of all or parts of earlier versions
of this manuscript and their immensely helpful comments and criticisms.
Their collegiality and wisdom have improved the book greatly: defects re-
main solely my responsibility. Abby Gross, Courtney McCarroll and Katie
Pratt at Oxford University Press have been wonderfully patient and pro-
fessional with me, and their unparalleled competence and unfailing cour-
tesy are deeply appreciated.
I am also grateful to my wife Kathy, and my daughters Katie and Corey
for the patience and forbearance through what has been many years of
sometimes difficult work on this project.
 HUMAN NATURE AND THE PEACE

G O R D O N W. A L L P O RT ■

On April 5, 1945, there was released to the press a statement signed by 2,038
American psychologists. This statement had its origin during the summer
of 1944 in informal conversations among psychologists, about twenty-​
five of whom contributed to its formulation. Although at no time was the
statement officially sponsored by any psychological organization, the funds
for printing and mailing were supplied by the Society for the Psychological
Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), and the recipients of the statement were the
3,803 members and associates of the American Psychological Association
listed in its 1944 Yearbook. The covering letter soliciting endorsements
was signed by the following group of psychologists: G. W. Allport, R. S.
Crutchfield, H. B. English, Edna Heidbreder, E. R. Hilgard, O. Klineberg,
R. Likert, M. A. May, O. H. Mowrer, G. Murphy, C. C. Pratt, V. S. Taylor,
and E. C. Tolman.
While many mail solicitations bring only a 25 percent response and
while many psychologists were abroad in war service and hard to reach,
the result of this call brought more than a 50 percent response. Among
those replying more than 99 percent subscribed to the statement.
Included among the signers are 350 clinical psychologists, 230 industrial
psychologists, approximately 250 in other fields of applied psychology,
and approximately 300 in the armed services. The remainder were in
xiv Human Nature and the Peace

universities and colleges. Minor comments and suggestions were received

from ninety-​two individuals. There were only thirteen refusals to sign.
Besides being printed in newspapers, the statement was sent to 535 rep-
resentatives and senators in the United States Congress and to many or-
ganizations and individuals prominently concerned with peace-​planning
and international cooperation. The statement likewise is printed in the
recent Yearbook of the SPSSI, Human Nature and Enduring Peace, edited
by Gardner Murphy.
The full text of the statement follows:

HUMAN NATURE AND THE PEACE: A STATEMENT

BY PSYCHOLOGISTS

Humanity’s demand for lasting peace leads us as students of human nature

to assert ten pertinent and basic principles which should be considered in
planning the peace. Neglect of them may breed new wars, no matter how
well-​intentioned our political leaders may be.

1. War can be avoided: War is not born in men; it is built into men.

No race, nation, or social group is inevitably warlike. The frustrations

and conflicting interests which lie at the root of aggressive wars can be
reduced and re-​directed by social engineering. Men can realize their
ambitions within the framework of human cooperation and can direct
their aggressions against those natural obstacles that thwart them in the
attainment of their goals.

2. In planning for permanent peace, the coming generation should be

the primary focus of attention.

Children are plastic; they will readily accept symbols of unity and an
international way of thinking in which imperialism, prejudice, inse-
curity, and ignorance are minimized. In appealing to older people,
Human Nature and the Peace xv

chief stress should be laid upon economic, political, and educational

plans that are appropriate to a new generation, for older people, as a
rule, desire above all else, better conditions and opportunities for their
children.

3. Racial, national, and group hatreds can, to a considerable degree,

be controlled.

Through education and experience people can learn that their preju-
diced ideas about the English, the Russians, the Japanese, Catholics, Jews,
Negroes, are misleading or altogether false. They can learn that members
of one racial, national, or cultural group are basically similar to those of
other groups, and have similar problems, hopes, aspirations, and needs.
Prejudice is a matter of attitudes, and attitudes are to a considerable extent
a matter of training and information.

4. Condescension toward “inferior” groups destroys our chance for a

lasting peace.

The white man must be freed of his concept of the “white man’s burden.”
The English-​speaking peoples are only a tenth of the world’s population;
those of white skin only a third. The great dark-​skinned populations of
Asia and Africa, which are already moving toward a greater independence
in their own affairs, hold the ultimate key to a stable peace. The time has
come for a more equal participation of all branches of the human family
in a plan for collective security.

5. Liberated and enemy peoples must participate in planning their

own destiny.

Complete outside authority imposed on liberated and enemy peoples

without any participation by them will not be accepted and will lead only
to further disruptions of the peace. The common people of all countries
must not only feel that their political and economic future holds genuine
xvi Human Nature and the Peace

hope for themselves and for their children, but must also feel that they
themselves have the responsibility for its achievement.

6. The confusion of defeated people will [sic]call for clarity and

consistency in the application of rewards and punishments.

Reconstruction will not be possible so long as the German and Japanese

people are confused as to their status. A clear-​cut and easily understood
definition of war guilt is essential. Consistent severity toward those who
are judged guilty, and consistent official friendliness toward democratic
elements, is a necessary policy.

7. If properly administered, relief and rehabilitation can lead to self-​

reliance and cooperation; if improperly, to resentment and hatred.

Unless liberated people (and enemy people) are given an opportunity to

work in a self-​respecting manner for the food and relief they receive, they
are likely to harbor bitterness and resentment, since our bounty will be
regarded by them as unearned charity, dollar imperialism, or bribery. No
people can long tolerate such injuries to self-​respect.

8. The root-​desires of the common people of all lands are the safest
guide to framing a peace.

Disrespect for the common man is characteristic of fascism and of all

forms of tyranny. The man in the street does not claim to understand the
complexities of economics and politics, but he is clear as to the general
directions in which he wishes to progress. His will can be studied (by
adaptations of the public opinion poll). His expressed aspirations should
even now be a major guide to policy.
Human Nature and the Peace xvii

9. The trend of human relationships is toward ever wider units of

collective security.

From the caveman to the twentieth century, human beings have formed
larger and larger working and living groups. Families merged into clans,
clans into states, and states into nations. The United States are not 48
threats to each other’s safety; they work together. At the present moment
the majority of our people regard the time as ripe for regional and world
organization, and believe that the initiative should be taken by the United
States of America.

10. Commitments now may prevent postwar apathy and reaction.

Unless binding commitments are made and initial steps taken now,
people may have a tendency after the war to turn away from interna-
tional problems and to become preoccupied once again with narrower
interests. This regression to a new postwar provincialism would breed the
conditions for a new world war. Now is the time to prevent this backward
step, and to assert through binding action that increased unity among the
people of the world is the goal we intend to attain.
 INTRODUCTION

The passage of seventy-​five years has not diminished the power of the
Holocaust to challenge our understanding of ourselves and others.
Academic and scholarly works on the topic continue to appear in great
number, as do artistic, literary, and cinematic contributions to our
thinking about what remains, in many ways, the paradigmatic geno-
cide. Psychologists have been engaged in explaining and understanding
the Holocaust from the very beginning and continue to make important
contributions. And yet there remain large gaps in our psychological un-
derstanding of the Holocaust.
From the early 1960s until quite recently, psychological scholarship on
the Holocaust was dominated by Stanley Milgram’s situationist approach
to obedience. In the 1990s, though, two books were published that would
ignite controversy and discussion and would ultimately have the effect of
causing a reconsideration of the centrality of obedience in understanding
the psychology of the Holocaust. Christopher Browning’s Ordinary
Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland1 and
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans
and the Holocaust2 both contain the word “ordinary” in their titles. This
word has struck a chord with many interested in the Holocaust and has
given new life to some old questions: How could people do these things
to other people? Was the Holocaust the work of ordinary people, or were
the perpetrators sick, insane, or monstrously evil? These questions have
been such a persistent feature of psychological (and other) discussions of
xx Introduction

the Holocaust in part because of the implications they seem to have for
the rest of “us.” By placing the blame on a few disturbed or evil people we
run the risk of sweeping the Holocaust, and the propensity for mass vio-
lence more generally, under a kind of psychological rug, negating the need
for careful self-​reflection. To see the Holocaust as the work of ordinary
people, though, may appear to help us acknowledge our own potential for
such behavior, to more honestly engage the continuing potential for mass
violence, and to offer more realistic hopes for preventing such violence in
the future.

HOW COULD PEOPLE DO THESE THINGS?

How could people do these things? The answer that seemed to resonate
with the public in the years after the International Military Tribunal at
Nuremberg was that there were a few insane or evil men at the top but that
most of those who had perpetrated the Holocaust were merely following
orders, absent any real ideological commitment or anti-​Semitic prej-
udice. The public was seemingly content to follow the lead of Franklin
D. Roosevelt, who (proposing the establishment of a United Nations
Commission on War Crimes to deal with atrocities in Europe) said on
October 7, 1942:

The number of persons eventually found guilty will undoubtedly

be extremely small compared to the total enemy populations. It is
not the intention of this Government or of the Governments associ-
ated with us to resort to mass reprisals. It is our intention that just
and sure punishment shall be meted out to the ringleaders respon-
sible for the organized murder of thousands of innocent persons and
the commission of atrocities which have violated every tenet of the
Christian faith.3

This statement was made during the most intense period of killing: some
80% of those who would die in what we call the Holocaust were killed
Introduction xxi

between early 1942 and the summer of 1943. Roosevelt could not have
known then what has taken many years of research and study to estab-
lish: the full story of the Holocaust, still being written, is much more
than a story of a few ringleaders and a population of mostly good citi-
zens. Roosevelt’s view of the civilian populations of Europe may simply
have reflected his naïve understanding of what was happening. The focus
on “ringleaders” did, however, lay the groundwork for a speedy and lim-
ited judicial response at the end of the war that would help make pos-
sible a rapid reconstruction and rehabilitation of European countries as
America confronted the prospect of Soviet domination of Europe. It is
worth noting that Roosevelt’s view of the Japanese population was rather
less charitable than his view of European populations, as a few months
earlier he had signed an executive order that would be used to facilitate
the involuntary confinement of some 110,000 Japanese Americans solely
on the basis of their race, defined as Japanese “ancestry.” These 110,000
were not a small subset of the population of Japanese Americans, but the
entire population of Japanese Americans living in the exclusion zones es-
tablished by the military.
Milgram’s obedience studies had given the ringleader theory, for lack of
a better term, new life by the mid-​1970s. A major difficulty with the ring-
leader approach had always been defining the mechanisms by which so
many could be induced to behave so badly by so few. Until Milgram, there
was no general agreement on the mechanism by which the ringleaders
were able to get the ordinary masses to carry out their destructive and
murderous aims. Insanity, peculiar German child-​rearing leading to the
development of authoritarian personalities, particular aspects of German
history and culture, and a particularly German cultural obsession with
obedience were all explanations that had been tried and found wanting.

THE SITUATIONIST ACCOUNT

Milgram’s scientific demonstration of obedience in the laboratory, coupled

with Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of the Eichmann trial as illustrating
xxii Introduction

“the banality of evil,” seemed to offer a simple and persuasive solution: the
power of “the situation” could irresistibly transform good people into bad
people. Phillip Zimbardo, Milgram’s high-​school classmate, seemingly
confirmed this power a decade later in his Stanford Prison Experiment.
Both Milgram and Zimbardo explicitly connected their situationist
account of behavior to the Holocaust. This account came to dominate
psychological thinking about the Holocaust and also became immensely
popular with the lay public.
That this viewpoint resonated so powerfully with American psychologists
and the public is perhaps at least partly explicable in terms of the changes
then taking place in American culture. Consider some of the historic
events that occurred in the United States during the decade bookended
by Milgram’s obedience studies and Zimbardo’s prison study: the Cuban
Missile Crisis (1962), the assassination of John F. Kennedy (1963), the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, the Tonkin Gulf affair and the escalation of the Vietnam
War (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965), the assassination of Robert
F. Kennedy (1968), the assassination of Martin Luther King (1968), the
My Lai Massacre (1968), the Charles Manson murders (1968), worldwide
summertime protests and riots (1968), Woodstock (1969), the shootings at
Kent State (1970), the US invasion of Cambodia (1970), and the Watergate
break-​in (1972).
These developments had a monumental impact on American society,
and especially on the academy, as draft resistance and protests were
centered on many college campuses. The breakdown of trust in fun-
damental institutions and the polarization of American society led to
dictums like Timothy Leary’s “Question Authority”4 and Jack Weinberg’s
“Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30,”5 both of which would make some sense
as reactions to the Milgram experiments. An image of corporations,
institutions, and bureaucracies as malevolent entities manipulating the
innocent into doing their evil bidding coincided with growing unease
at the effects of modernity itself, as the world faced the possibility of
nuclear devastation. These images fit the tenor of the political times
and also dovetailed nicely with the social psychology of Milgram and
Zimbardo.
Introduction xxiii

The task of reshaping society after generations of institutional racism

and segregation lay ahead. The pernicious consequences of viewing human
nature in terms which too strongly emphasized “nature” over “nurture”
had been exposed in the most horrific way possible during the Holocaust.
The hope that lay ahead for America was, in many ways, seemingly to be
found in the adoption of the opposite approach from that taken by the
Nazis in their attempt to reshape German society. The Nazis focused on
the “nature” side, the biological and genetic determinants of human na-
ture, and attempted to “improve” German society by changing the genetic
composition of the population through “positive” measures, such as pro-
motion of reproduction among the genetically fit, and “negative” meas-
ures, including sterilization, euthanasia, and, eventually, extermination.
In America, the goal was to improve society by leaving the population
as it was and changing the environment: the assumption was that all could
and would benefit from improvements in housing, education, nutrition,
and health care and that, with the achievement of these improvements,
the legacies of inequality would gradually disappear. The Milgram and
Zimbardo studies, showcasing extreme examples of the role the environ-
ment can play in affecting human behavior, were thus in synchrony with
both the anti-​authoritarian impulses of the Vietnam era and the focus on
external, environmental, situational factors as the means by which civil
society could be reconstructed in a truly egalitarian direction.
While Milgram’s work would eventually come to be seen (though not in
these terms) as providing a sound basis for the ringleader theory, Milgram
himself did not spend much time talking about the ringleaders, prefer-
ring to focus on the influenced rather than the influencers. Gertrude
Stein, speaking about obedience in 1946, saw both sides of the equa-
tion: she suggested that World War II was the direct result of “bad men”
using uniquely obedient peoples (Germans and Japanese) to accomplish
evil ends. Phillip Zimbardo, like Gertrude Stein, also focuses on the role
of individual authority figures (bad men) in creating situations that then
engage basic human psychological mechanisms (obedience, conformity)
to make good people do bad things, but Zimbardo no longer limits
this assessment to only Germans and Japanese: he applies it to all of us.
xxiv Introduction

Zimbardo frequently uses the metaphor of the “bad barrel” as opposed

to “bad apples” as an explanatory framework. Blaming a few low-​level
individuals for bad behavior in corporate or military environments is,
on this account, a species of victim-​blaming, as the individuals are only
responding naturally and involuntarily to the conditions created by the
“system” and those in charge of it. Blaming a few bad apples, such as the
soldiers who abused Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib, is nothing more than
a dodge employed by the “system” (the “System” or “Systems Managers” in
Zimbardo’s terminology) to protect those who are really responsible, the
high officials whose actions and policies created the situation to which the
soldiers then responded.
The idea that most of the blame for the Holocaust lay mainly with the
“ringleaders” has been remarkably persistent in America and in Europe: in
1995, when an exhibition in Germany suggested that average German
soldiers during the Nazi years were far more directly and willingly in-
volved in atrocities in the East than they cared to admit, widespread
anger and demonstrations resulted. But since the 1990s, long-​standing
impressions and assumptions about the role played by ordinary German
soldiers (and other ordinary Germans) have had to undergo substantial
revision in the face of new scholarship. The situationist perspective has
increasingly been seen as constituting at best a limited explanation of
the behavior of some Holocaust perpetrators. This perspective has never
really addressed the origins of the behavior of those on whom the blame
actually gets placed (those in authority issuing the orders) or, indeed, of
many others.

A NEGLECTED HISTORY

Psychology, then, does not seem to have offered a complete answer to

the questions that most of us have about the Holocaust: How could
people do these things to other people? Was the Holocaust the work of
normal, average people, or were the perpetrators exceptional in some
way? The hegemony of the situationist interpretation of the Holocaust
Introduction xxv

as a set of events to be understood mainly through the lens of obedi-

ence, and the ease with which serious thinking about the interior lives
of ordinary Germans or Nazi killers could be discouraged by invoca-
tion of the “fundamental attribution error,” have perhaps deflected our
attention from a more complete history of psychological thinking about
the Holocaust.
As it happens, though, even before Milgram there was a substantial,
vibrant, and diverse body of psychological scholarship on the Holocaust
dating back to the years immediately following the war, when awareness
of the Holocaust as we now understand it was just emerging. There is
also a substantial body of scholarship on the rise of Hitler and the Nazis,
some of which antedated not just the Holocaust but the war itself, and
even Hitler’s rise to power. Much of this work directly addressed the basic
questions about human nature posed by the Holocaust, with which we
continue to grapple.
One purpose of this book is to resurrect and perhaps rehabilitate some
psychological approaches to understanding the Holocaust that have been
largely forgotten, or remembered only as something to be dismissed at
second hand as hopelessly outdated. Gustave Gilbert and Douglas Kelley,
for example, who were both present at Nuremberg and wrote about the
major war criminals, also thought deeply about the origins of Nazism
and the psychological mechanisms that had made the Holocaust pos-
sible. These men are often mentioned but rarely covered at any length
in discussions of the Holocaust in psychology: they seem to be mainly
treated as a kind of footnote to be acknowledged before moving on to
the really serious material. This is a shame, as both Gilbert’s and Kelley’s
experiences were very nearly unique as psychologists interested in under-
standing what had happened: they lived in occupied Germany immedi-
ately after the Nazi surrender, interacted with a wide variety of people,
and had access to the men deemed most important by the Allied judicial
authorities. They were the last psychologists to speak to the eleven who
died at Nuremberg (ten who were executed and Goering, who committed
suicide) and saw their role as one of great psychological and historical
significance: it was they who would have this unique experience and they
xxvi Introduction

who would have to compose and preserve some record of it for posterity.
Surely their efforts are worthy of at least a first-​hand reading.
Tracing the changes in psychological thinking about the Nazis and the
Holocaust in the decades since the events became known is also a way of
tracing changes in the discipline itself. Until and immediately after World
War II, psychological discussions of Hitler, the Nazis, and eventually the
Holocaust were dominated by psychodynamic formulations. Freudian
thought was something nearly all psychologists, including those who re-
ferred to themselves as social psychologists, took for granted as a basic
language in which to discuss human motivation and behavior. Gordon
Allport, writing in the mid-​1950s, included psychodynamic concepts in
his work but also weaved a considerable amount of learning and condi-
tioning quite consistent with behaviorist formulations into his account of
the development and display of prejudice. Changes in attitudes toward ho-
mosexuality and sexual liberation in the 1960s and 1970s pushed Freudian
thinking out of the psychological mainstream in the United States, just as
the project of transforming the culture and politics of America became
more and more dependent on the idea that people are a “product of their
environment”: mainly their current and future environment, not just the
first few months or years of childhood. Psychodynamic explanations of
the Nazis and the Holocaust gave way to those based on obedience and
social influence.

WHAT IS THE CURRENT STATE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL

EXPLANATION OF THE HOLOCAUST?

A second purpose of this book is to assess the current state of psycho-

logical understanding of the Holocaust. This is an especially difficult task
because we are, in my opinion, “between explanations” of the Holocaust.
Introductory texts in psychology are mostly stuck in the 1960s when it
comes to the psychology of the Holocaust, and so, presumably, are many
millions of people whose acquaintance with the discipline does not extend
much beyond this level. There are, though, a fair number of psychologists
Introduction xxvii

who read widely and think deeply about the Holocaust and who are
struggling to assemble and articulate a coherent postsituationist explana-
tion of what happened.
A difficulty encountered in this enterprise is understanding the rela-
tionship we must have with other disciplines if we are to articulate such
a coherent understanding. Historians do not “own” the Holocaust, in the
sense that only they can speak authoritatively about it, but historians do
produce and provide most of what we psychologists might call the “data”
of the Holocaust. Anyone who has ever submitted a paper to a psychology
journal is painfully aware that we psychologists are notoriously per-
snickety about the natural history of our data. How was it produced? How
representative is it? How were those who provided it selected? How was
it recorded? Was there any opportunity for the experimenter to influence
the data?
But we often seem willing to accept more or less uncritically the
products of historians, though we may know little about their craft and
the natural history of their “data.” Some psychologists’ response to the
Browning-​ Goldhagen debate illustrates the dangers of this tendency.
Here we have two historians who reviewed much of the same historical
material and came to quite different conclusions about what it meant.
Untroubled by any sense of obligation to engage the material on its own
terms, many psychologists simply rejected Goldhagen (who after all had
rejected social psychological explanations as irrelevant) and accepted and
embraced Browning (who after all had accepted and embraced the [lim-
ited] relevance of Milgram and Zimbardo in explaining the Holocaust)
and moved on.
If psychologists are ever to articulate a coherent understanding of
the motivations and behavior of those who lived through the Holocaust
(in whatever role), then they must grasp the nettle and engage the data
on its own terms. This is not to say that we should or can tell historians
their business, but we must try as best we can to understand the nature
of the data they provide us. Crucially, we must first care about the data
historians produce. The first chapter of this book is not about psychology
at all: it is about the Holocaust. That is purposeful. A starting point for any
xxviii Introduction

understanding of the psychology of the Holocaust is an understanding of

the Holocaust. It is our responsibility to understand the historical data we
use to construct what we hope will be a coherent and compelling account
of the psychology of the Holocaust.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

A third purpose of this book is to suggest some avenues for future psy-
chological scholarship on the Holocaust. The dominance of the obedience
explanation of the Holocaust has inhibited the development of alterna-
tive approaches. The Milgram and Zimbardo studies are among the very
few psychological studies of which most non-​psychologists are aware. The
immense popularity of these studies in the public square has certainly
done a great deal to promote the legitimacy and validity of social psy-
chology as a discipline, but the public square is no place for nuance: part
of the public appeal of this explanation is exactly its simplicity, and any
attempt to introduce the complicated but essential background that might
help people frame the significance of the results in a less dramatic but
perhaps more accurate way are often met with impatience at the endless
quibbling and equivocating of ivory-​tower academics.
While the perceived significance of the Milgram and Zimbardo studies
in explaining the Holocaust has not been significantly eroded in the pop-
ular and journalistic mind, there has been a shift within the halls of ac-
ademe in the last fifteen years or so. Browning’s support for Milgram
and Zimbardo in Ordinary Men notwithstanding, other historians have
stepped forward to directly challenge the situationist interpretation, per-
haps most notably Omer Bartov6 and Götz Aly.7 Psychologists attentive
and open to new developments in historical scholarship on the Holocaust,
such as the evolving awareness of the complicity of the Wehrmacht in
crimes in the East, have come to appreciate that there must be more to the
story of the Holocaust than obedience and social influence. A wide range
of thinking about the psychology of the Holocaust is to be found, for ex-
ample, in Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust,8
Introduction xxix

Leonard Newman and Ralph Erber’s 2002 volume of essays on the so-
cial psychology of the Holocaust. The Holocaust is approached from the
perspectives of cognition, personality, and evolution/​biology (to mention
a few) in this very useful volume which is, in its own way, a kind of histor-
ical marker on its own account. The book contains a refreshingly diverse
set of perspectives and seems to honor the important contributions of the
situationist perspective to understanding the Holocaust while simultane-
ously signaling that the floor is now open for additional discussion on the
matter. Newman and Erber acknowledge that their book offers nothing
like a coherent grand theory of the psychology of the Holocaust, but it
does accomplish something far more important at the moment: it opens
the door for all social psychologists to look at the Holocaust in new and
exciting ways, psychologically speaking.
Future psychological scholarship on the Holocaust can and should be
more than social-​psychological in orientation, though. Just as historians
do not own the Holocaust, neither do social psychologists own the psy-
chology of the Holocaust. I will suggest several avenues of potential fu-
ture psychological inquiry into the psychology of the Holocaust: readers
may find them interesting, potentially fruitful, or, perhaps, not so much.
However that may be, it seems to me to be time for psychologists to reflect
on our disciplinary contribution to understanding the Holocaust. What,
first of all, have we contributed? Can we do more, as a discipline, than we
have done so far? How?

Holocaust or Genocide?

In recent decades, psychologists have begun to devote more and more

attention to genocide in general, rather than the Holocaust as a single
event. Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” in his 1944 book, Axis
Rule in Occupied Europe.9 The existence of this word helped make pos-
sible the recognition and population of a category of events (genocides)
which includes not only the Holocaust but many more examples as well.
Ervin Staub’s 1992 book The Roots of Evil10 marked an important shift in
xxx Introduction

psychological thinking about human behavior of the sort that occurred

in the Holocaust: Staub’s subtitle was Origins of Genocide and other Group
Violence. By addressing a category of similar events, rather than one
single event, Staub brought genocide more squarely within psychology’s
methodological reach.11 As long as the Holocaust was seen as a unitary
or disjunctive event, there was only a limited potential for applying the
methods of social science to its understanding. Viewing the Holocaust as
but one of many examples of genocide, though, opens the door to the kind
of scientific study and theorizing in which several psychologists (perhaps
most notably Ervin Staub, James Waller, and Roy Baumeister) have now
engaged.
Because this book addresses the entire history of psychological
thinking about the Holocaust, it necessarily straddles these two psycho-
logical conceptions of the Holocaust: as a unitary event in the early years
and as one instance of a more general phenomenon, genocide, more re-
cently. The explanatory focus in this book is squarely on the Holocaust,
however. The Holocaust was the historical event that has framed and
shaped most psychological thinking about humans’ capacity to commit
what we might now call genocidal violence. Theories of genocide devel-
oped by psychologists in the last few decades aim to identify variables,
factors, and conditions that may predispose societies toward mass vio-
lence. Theories of the psychology of genocide naturally pay more attention
to common features among instances of genocide and less attention to
(seemingly) minor contextual and cultural differences among them: rich
contextual detail is not (and need not be) part of a theoretical enterprise
intended to identify the few most important predictors or determinants
of genocide. My aim is limited to achieving a better understanding of the
Holocaust from a psychological viewpoint, and the rich contextual detail
of the specific history of humans in the Holocaust is vital to achieving that
understanding.
Understanding individual genocides and studying genocide as a human
phenomenon are not the same task, but they are activities that can inform
one another. It was detailed study of the Holocaust that provided heu-
ristic clues for the first theories of genocide, and the Holocaust continues
Introduction xxxi

to help shape these theories. Testing psychological theories of genocide

can raise new questions as individual examples of genocide may offer new
clues about the origins of mass violence: these new questions can then
feed back into improving our understanding of individual genocides, such
as the Holocaust.

NOTES

1. C. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in
Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992, 1998).
2. D. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.
New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
3. Jewish Virtual Library, FDR Statement on War Crimes, http://​www.
jewishvirtuallibrary.org/​jsource/​Holocaust/​fdr_​warcrimes.html, retrieved
December 20, 2015.
4. https://​en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Question_​authority
5. https://​en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Jack_​Weinberg
6. Omer Bartov, Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 2003).
7. Götz Aly, Why the Germans? Why the Jews? (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2011).
8. Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber, Understanding Genocide: The Social
Psychology of the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
9. USHMM, Coining a Word and Championing a Cause: The Story of Raphael
Lemkin, https://​www.ushmm.org/​wlc/​en/​article.php?ModuleId=10007050#,
retrieved November 28, 2017.
10. Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
11. Though Gordon Allport had already discussed prejudice as central to under-
standing perpetrator behavior in the Holocaust as well as in other examples, such
as racism against African Americans and Asians.
 1

What Was the Holocaust?

What comes first to mind when you hear the word Holocaust? For many
of us, images from the popular films that have done so much to increase
awareness of the Holocaust may be salient: the ground-​breaking minise-
ries Holocaust if you are old enough and Schindler’s List, Sophie’s Choice,
or (annoyingly to many historians) The Boy in the Striped Pajamas if you
are younger. Most of us, I suspect, think of Auschwitz when we think of
the Holocaust. Auschwitz has been portrayed again and again in films
and best-​selling books. There are iconic images of Josef Mengele making
selections on the ramp, of the gas chambers, and the crematoria belching
smoke. Timothy Snyder’s book Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and
Warning contains a chapter titled “The Auschwitz Paradox.” The paradox
is that “while Auschwitz has been remembered, most of the Holocaust has
been largely forgotten.1” Snyder points out that Auschwitz is remembered
for a variety of reasons, some accidental and some political and instru-
mental to particular preferred ways of remembering the Holocaust, but,
for our purposes, it is enough to recognize that there was much more to
the Holocaust than Auschwitz. For example, of the three main killing
methods used to exterminate Jews during the Final Solution (shooting,
engine exhaust gases, and Zyklon B), Auschwitz used the third, Zyklon
B, and this method was third both in order of appearance and in impor-
tance.2 This method of killing was mainly applied to large numbers of
people late in the Holocaust, when most of the Jews killed in the Final
Solution had already been killed by other means.
2 O f M ind and M urder

The Holocaust was not a unitary event that occurred in a particular place
on a single day, like the signing of a treaty or the winning of a battle: it was
a series of events that unfolded over many years, across vast geograph-
ical distances. There is strong consensus on many of the core facts of the
Holocaust: the Nazis exterminated Jews on racial grounds, killing some
six million; there were also many non-​Jews killed; and shooting, engine
exhaust gases, and poison gas were the main methods used to commit
these murders. However, there is still much on which there is less agree-
ment; for example, was there a specific order to exterminate the Jews of
Europe, as there was to authorize the euthanasia program? That not eve-
rything is known about the Holocaust does not diminish the fact that a
great deal is known, the result of painstaking and heartbreaking research
for many decades.
The scope and scale of the Holocaust are known. If we begin with the
stipulation that the Holocaust was the systematic attempt by the Nazis
to murder every “Jew,” as defined by the Nazis, to whom they could gain
access, the widely accepted figure of six million deaths is a good estimate.
We can break down these deaths many ways, but some useful ways in terms
of understanding the Holocaust are by national origin of the victims, year
of death, place of death, and method of murder.
Christopher Browning points out that in mid-​March 1942, 75% to
80% of the Jews who would die in the Holocaust were still alive; slightly
less than a year later, in mid-​February 1943, 80% of those who would die
were already dead.3 Table 1.1 is from Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the
European Jews. Hilberg’s estimates are lower than those of some other
historians, but the temporal pattern of killing is clear: most of the killing
occurred in a very short time.
Table 1.2, adapted from a US Holocaust Memorial Museum publica-
tion, summarizes deaths by cause and location.
The Nazis attempted to exterminate every Jew upon whom they could
lay their hands: Table 1.3, also from Hilberg, summarizes Jewish deaths
by country. These are absolute numbers, but it is worth noting that Jewish
deaths by country varied enormously as a percentage of the Jewish national
 Table 1.1. Holocaust Deaths by Year

Years Deaths
1933–​1940 Under 100,000
1941 1,100,000
1942 2,600,000
1943 600,000
1944 600,000
1945 Over 100,000
5,100,000

Table 1.2. Holocaust Deaths by Cause and Location

Location Deaths Cause

Auschwitz 1,000,000 Zyklon B
Belzec 434,508 Exhaust gases
Chelmno 160,000 Exhaust gases
Sobibor 167,000 Exhaust gases
Treblinka 2 925,000 Exhaust gases
Shootings in the 200,000 Shooting
Generalgouvernement
Shootings in the Warthegau 20,000 Shooting
Deaths in other concentration 150,000 Various means
camps
Shooting operations in Russia 1,300,000 Shooting and gas vans
Shooting operations in Russia 55,000 Shooting
of deported Jews
Serbia 15,088 Shooting and gas vans
Croatia 24,000 Shooting/​torture
Deaths in ghettos 800,000
other 500,000
Total 5,750,596
4 O f M ind and M urder

Table 1.3. Jewish Deaths by Country

Country Deaths
Poland Up to 3,000,000
USSR Over 700,000
Romania 270,000
Czechoslovakia 260,000
Hungary Over 180,000
Germany 130,000
Lithuania Up to 130,000
Netherlands Over 100,000
France 75,000
Latvia 70,000
Yugoslavia 60,000
Greece 60,000
Austria Over 50,000
Belgium 24,000
Italy (including Rhodes) 9,000
Estonia Over 1,000
Norway Under 1,000
Luxembourg Under 1,000
Danzig Under 1.000

population. In some countries, only a small percentage of Jews perished;

in other countries, most did.
Psychological explanations have seemingly focused on only one as-
pect of the Holocaust at a time. Stanley Milgram had killing centers like
Auschwitz in mind when he constructed his obedience experiments and
then asserted that his findings were relevant to them. Since the Browning-​
Goldhagen controversies, many psychologists have adopted Christopher
Browning’s interpretation of Reserve Police Battalion 101’s activities in
the mobile killing operations as a paradigmatic event to be explained. If
the explanations on offer for these events were completely adequate, how
complete an explanation of the Holocaust would we have? That depends,
What Was the Holocaust? 5

of course, on what other events, facts, and phenomena make up “the

Holocaust,” and there are many.
This is a book written by a psychologist, not an historian, and what
follows is not intended to summarize the vast historical literature on the
Holocaust. It is offered not as a means of acquiring the historical perspec-
tive needed to think seriously about the psychology of the Holocaust,
if you have not already, but as an invitation to embark on that task. An
immense amount of scholarship has been devoted to the Holocaust, and
any attempt to “explain” the Holocaust from a psychological viewpoint, or
any viewpoint for that matter, should begin with the existing literature on
what to many is the defining event of the twentieth century, and much of
that literature has been produced by historians.
Stanley Milgram, whose work on obedience is widely presented as the
most influential psychological thinking on the Holocaust,4 eschewed the
notion that a detailed understanding of the events of the Holocaust was
required to offer a psychological explanation for those events. Milgram
simply assumed that obedience was the psychological mechanism that
underlay the Holocaust and argued that the validity of this conclusion
did not depend on “what happened exactly in Germany.” The popu-
larity of Milgram’s ahistorical approach to the Holocaust, and the nom-
othetic ambitions of most psychological explanations since, have perhaps
worked to diminish the interest of psychologists in the historical details
of the Holocaust, but that is beginning to change. Ervin Staub5 and James
Waller,6 for example, included significant historical detail in their books
exploring the psychology of genocide.

THE BACKGROUND OF ANTI-​S EMITISM

Anti-​Semitism is the starting place for many histories of the Holocaust.

Raul Hilberg devotes the first chapter of The Destruction of the European
Jews7 to a brief history of anti-​Semitism in Europe. Gerald Reitlinger, in
The Final Solution,8 one of the earliest histories of the Holocaust, identifies
the bifurcated hatred of Hitler against “World Jewry,” representing global
6 O f M ind and M urder

financial interests, and “subhuman Jewry,” the proletarian Jews of the

East, as sources of the murderous programs enacted by the Nazis.9 Lucy
S. Dawidowicz opens A Holocaust Reader with the following:

The Final Solution would not have been possible without the per-
vasive presence and the uninterrupted tradition of anti-​Semitism in
Germany. The exposure of the German people for generations to con-
ventional anti-​Semitism in its manifold forms—​political, nationalist,
racial, cultural, doctrinal, economic—​eventually rendered them insen-
sitive to Hitler’s radical and deadly brand of anti-​Semitism.10

David Bankier’s11 fascinating study of the attitudes of Germans toward

the Nazi regime, which reveals the sometimes surprising limits of the pen-
etration of Nazi ideology, nevertheless shows widespread and enduring
German public commitment to anti-​Semitism. Despite their tight grip on
all public and many private modes of expression, Nazi leaders failed to
build the universal and unquestioning support for all the policies they
desired. The fragility of popular support for the regime became more
apparent as the war turned against the Germans. But consider Bankier’s
assessment of German public commitment to anti-​Semitism:

Yet, if the success of Nazi doctrine to penetrate the German popu-

lation has been exaggerated, why then was Nazi antisemitism so
effective with the public? Are we to suppose that the propaganda
met with indifference when it sought to change thinking on political,
religious and other issues but succeeded with the Jewish question?
Nazi antisemitism was successful not because the German pop-
ulation changed course and suddenly became devotees of racial
theory: it was effective because large sectors of German society were
predisposed to be antisemitic. It reinforced deep-​seated anti-​Jewish
feelings, harnessing them to the ideals embodied in Nazi doctrine.
There is no doubt that on the whole the public did not assign
antisemitism the same importance as the Nazis did. Nevertheless,
eradicating the Jews had broad backing and reflected popular
What Was the Holocaust? 7

aspirations and social norms; dissenting attitudes stemmed mainly

from personal annoyance.12

Anti-​Semitism was certainly not confined to Germany at the time.

Anti-​Semitism was common in Europe, and certainly present in the
United States. Many historians see anti-​Semitism as playing some role in
achieving an understanding of the Holocaust, though there are signifi-
cant differences among historians on the importance of this factor: some
assign it nearly central importance in the unfolding of the Holocaust,
while others see it as only a minor contributor. Psychologists approaching
the Holocaust from a social-​ psychological viewpoint, and especially
those in the situationist tradition have tended to downplay the impor-
tance of anti-​Semitism as a source of motivation for perpetrators in the
Holocaust. Insofar as the differences between Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
and Christopher Browning involve differing interpretations of the role
of anti-​Semitism in the Holocaust, many social psychologists side firmly
with Browning.13 There seems to be a strong consensus among historians
that acknowledging the role of anti-​Semitism (though not necessarily as it
is understood by Goldhagen) is essential in any attempt to make sense of
the Holocaust, however.
Anti-​Semitism was persistent and pervasive in German society, a kind
of intellectual furniture so familiar as to be unremarkable. Anti-​Semitism
may have existed below the level of consciousness for many people.
Modern studies of implicit bias suggest that many Americans are not con-
sciously aware of racial bias against African Americans but nevertheless
display measurable behavioral differences in response to images of people
of different races in different situations. Such findings are often taken as
evidence that racism need not be conscious or overt to affect our behavior
and that prejudice and discrimination against African Americans are still
pervasive in American society. Anti-​Semitism may have functioned in a
similar way in Germany. Regardless of whether conscious anti-​Semitism
was the primary motivator of the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 (or
of any others) when they murdered Jews, anti-​Semitism played a central
organizing role in the rhetoric and propaganda of the Nazi regime and was
8 O f M ind and M urder

an ever-​present backdrop to daily life in Germany. That it must have had

subtle and not-​so-​subtle effects on a population predisposed by history
and culture to think in such terms, exposed to it day in and day out, must
be factored into any psychological attempt to understand the Holocaust.
Germans in the 1930s had very different experiences, assumptions, and
conditions to confront than do Americans in the 2010s, or Germans in
the 2010s. These differences are relevant to psychological understanding.

FROM 1933 TO 1939

The Nazi accession to power in January 1933, marked the beginning of a

process of progressive persecutory measures against the Jewish minority.
Many of these measures were issued as decrees by Hitler. The Reichstag
Fire, which destroyed the seat of the German legislature on February 27,
1933, was followed by the Reichstag Fire Decree on February 28, 1933.
This action was taken by Reich President Paul von Hindenburg as pres-
ident of the Reich, under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. The
decree effectively declared martial law in Germany. On March 23, 1933,
the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which authorized the govern-
ment to issue legislation without consulting with the legislature. These
two developments had the effect of converting the German government
into a dictatorship.
Hitler lost no time in using his new powers to begin the systematic
persecution of Jews.14 On April 7, 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the
Professional Civil Service was issued. This law removed all non-​Aryans
from the German Civil Service. An implementing decree issued on April
7, 1933, defined “non-​Aryan” for the purposes of the law as having one
non-​Aryan grandparent. The process of removing Jews from educational
institutions in the Third Reich was begun on April 25, 1933, with the Law
Against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Institutions of Higher
Learning. On September 15, 1935, the Reich Citizenship Law took away
the citizenship of Jews and established an arcane taxonomy of Mischlinge
(people of mixed heritage) with graded rights. On the same day, the Law
What Was the Holocaust? 9

for the Protection of German Blood and the Protection of German Honor
forbad marriage and/​or sexual relations between Jews and Germans.
March 28, 1938, saw the issuance of the Law Regarding the Legal Status
of the Jewish Religious Committees, which withdrew legal status from tra-
ditional Jewish communal organizations. One month after the Anschluss
with Austria on March 12, 1938, the Decree Regarding the Reporting of
Jewish Property was issued on April 26. This decree required Jews to re-
port the value of all property, foreign and domestic, to the government
by June 30, 1938. The Second Decree for the Implementation of the Law
Regarding Changes of Family Names and Given Names was promulgated
on August 17, 1938. This law prohibited Jews from taking Aryan names and
required all Jewish men to add the name “Israel” and all Jewish women to
add the name “Sarah” to their official documents. After Kristallnacht,15 on
November 9/​10, 1938, the process of government confiscation of all Jewish
wealth, property, and businesses was accelerated. On November 12, 1938,
Hermann Goering imposed a one-​billion-​mark fine on Jews as punish-
ment for the destruction that had been visited on them.

PURIFYING THE RACE

The Nazis also began to take steps to purify the German “race” soon after
taking power. On July 14, 1933, the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily
Diseased Offspring took effect. Richard Evans explains that

This prescribed compulsory sterilization for anyone who suffered

from congenital feeble-​mindedness, schizophrenia, manic-​depressive
psychosis, hereditary epilepsy, Huntingdon’s [sic] chorea, hered-
itary deafness, blindness, or severe physical deformity, or severe
alcoholism. These conditions were subject to further definition by
the large bureaucracy set up by the Reich Interior Ministry to ad-
minister the Law, while decisions on individual cases were taken
by 181 specially established Hereditary Health Courts and appeal
courts consisting of a lawyer and two doctors, acting on referrals
10 O f M ind and M urder

from public health officers and the directors of institutions such as

state nursing homes, clinics, old-​age homes, special schools and the
like, as well as social workers in the welfare system.16

Approximately 360,000 Germans were sterilized during the Nazi era,

most between 1933 and 1939.17 Seventy-​five percent were sterilized on the
basis of “congenital feeblemindedness”; two-​thirds were institutional-
ized mental patients.18 Many people were sterilized not because of mental
illness but because of social deviance.19 Fewer than 1% of those sterilized
suffered from purely physical deformities.20 This program was not a spe-
cifically anti-​Jewish effort: most of those affected were “Aryan” Germans.
On the other side of the coin, the Nazis also took steps to increase the
birthrate of desirable citizens. The Nazis sought to suppress feminism in
Germany, as female emancipation was thought to contribute to the de-
clining birthrates in Germany in the early twentieth century.21 Nazi organ-
izations were formed to support women and motherhood, and a variety
of policies designed to encourage larger families among racially desirable
citizens were implemented.
Many other countries considered or adopted eugenic policies of the sort
implemented by the Nazis in the first half of the twentieth century: the Nazi
program was conspicuous because of its scope and scale. Many American
states also adopted such policies, and forcible sterilizations were carried
out in the United States.22 The fact that such policies could be enacted
and implemented on such a scale without widespread protest or resistance
illustrates the pervasive acceptance of a naïve biological determinism not
just in German society but in many countries.

EUTHANASIA

Sterilization was undertaken to ensure the future health of the race.

Preventing undesirable people from being born would (the Nazis believed)
contribute to a better future for the German Volk and Reich. But there
were many such people in Germany who had already been born, who (in
What Was the Holocaust? 11

the eyes of the Nazis) were contributing nothing to German success and,
in fact, were impeding the progress of the German nation by consuming
resources that otherwise might benefit healthy Aryans. Evans reports that
“According to Hans-​Heinrich Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery,
Hitler had considered putting a provision for the killing of mental patients
into the Law of 14 July 1933, but shelved it because it would be too contro-
versial.”23 There are suggestions that behind-​the-​scenes steps were taken in
1936 and 1937 to pave the way for an eventual euthanasia program for the
mentally ill; the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and the subse-
quent beginning of the Second World War provided the immediate justi-
fication needed to begin to implement such a program.24
The first victims of the euthanasia program in Germany were chil-
dren.25 After August 18, 1939, the birth of all “malformed” children had
to be reported to the government. Compliance was encouraged by a cash
payment to doctors and midwives for reporting such births.26 Parents were
enticed to surrender their children to the government with the promise
of good care for their child or intimidated into surrendering them. After
September 1941, children could simply be removed from the parents by
the government. The children were starved to death or killed with an over-
dose of sedatives or toxic chemicals. By the end of the war approximately
5,000 children had been killed in this way.27
The killing of adults was undertaken under the same legal authority
provided for the killing of children by Hitler, a secret order issued in
October 1939 but backdated to September 1, 1939, to coincide with the in-
vasion of Poland and the beginning of the war. The euthanasia program is
sometimes referred to as the “T-​4” program, a designation based on the
street address (Tiergartenstrasse 4) of the organization built by the Reich
Chancellery to carry out the killings. Some 80,000 Germans were killed
under this program during the war. The law did not target Jews specifi-
cally, and the vast majority of its victims were “Aryan,” but Jewish patients
were a special target of opportunity eliminated under the program. The T-​
4 organization conducted research in the technology of killing that would
prove instrumental in the development of the large-​scale killing apparatus
employed later in the war. Specifically, the construction of gas chambers
12 O f M ind and M urder

and the use of carbon monoxide for large-​scale killing were pioneered by
the euthanasia program, and many of the key figures in what would be-
come the Final Solution gained valuable experience in the T-​4 program.
While the euthanasia program was ostensibly secret, killing on this
scale could not be implemented without the cooperation of large numbers
of professional people: doctors, nurses, and others. There were also many
nonprofessionals whose participation was required: drivers, technicians,
and many others. Several euthanasia centers were established, primarily
at existing mental hospitals, and patients were transported to them for
killing from all over Germany. The regime attempted to accomplish its
murderous goals through deception at every level. Patients were deceived
up to the moments of their deaths that they were merely being taken to a
shower room, rather than a gas chamber, and families were elaborately and
systematically deceived by the authorities as to what had really happened
to their relatives. These measures notwithstanding, the nature of the pro-
gram soon became widely known.
It is surprising to some to learn that the Nazis were, to a degree, sensitive
to and influenced by public opinion. The years between the passage of the
Nuremberg Laws in 1935 and Kristallnacht in 1938 had been characterized
by less publicly violent persecution of Jews in Germany than the years
before or after, at least in part because the international scrutiny associ-
ated with the 1936 Olympics invited a certain degree of restraint on the
part of the regime. The euthanasia program eventually provoked signifi-
cant resistance and reaction. Catholic Bishop Clemens August von Galen
of Muenster spoke out against the program in sermons in August 1941,
though he had been working behind the scenes since the previous summer
to protest the killing program.28 Galen’s protests stimulated widespread
publicity and condemnation of the program and were a direct cause of
Hitler’s August 24, 1941, order to halt the program, at least with respect
to adults.29 No such protests occurred later on behalf of Jews, Gypsies,
homosexuals, or other groups persecuted by the Nazis.
Bishop Galen’s protests were a courageous act of conscience, but many
Germans were content to look the other way and avoid making the difficult
choice to speak out against the program. Götz Aly sees the lack of response
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
guilty of some crime which the law would punish. But poor Caroline,
like myself, was at the mercy of the merciless Covey, nor did she
escape the dire effects of her refusal: he gave her several sharp
blows.
At length (two hours had elapsed) the contest was given over.
Letting go of me, puffing and blowing at a great rate, Covey said:
“Now, you scoundrel, go to your work; I would not have whipped you
half so hard if you had not resisted.” The fact was, he had not
whipped me at all. He had not in all the scuffle, drawn a single drop
of blood from me. I had drawn blood from him, and should even
without this satisfaction have been victorious, because my aim had
not been to injure him, but to prevent his injuring me.
During the whole six months I lived with Covey after this
transaction, he never again laid the weight of his finger on me in
anger. He would occasionally say he did not want to have to get hold
of me again—a declaration which I had no difficulty in believing; and
I had a secret feeling which answered, “you had better not wish to
get hold of me again, for you will be likely to come off worse in a
second fight than you did in the first.”
Well, my dear reader, this battle with Mr. Covey, undignified as it
was, and as I fear my narration of it is, was the turning-point in my
“life as a slave.” It rekindled in my breast the smouldering embers of
liberty; it brought up my Baltimore dreams, and revived a sense of
my own manhood. I was a changed being after that fight. I was
nothing before; I was a man now. It recalled to life my crushed self-
respect, and my self-confidence, and inspired me with a renewed
determination to be a free man. A man without force is without the
essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it
cannot honor a helpless man, though it can pity him, and even this it
cannot do long if signs of power do not arise.
He only can understand the effect of this combat on my spirit,
who has himself incurred something, hazarded something, in
repelling the unjust and cruel aggressions of a tyrant. Covey was a
tyrant, and a cowardly one withal. After resisting him, I felt as I never
felt before. It was a resurrection from the dark and pestiferous tomb
of slavery, to the heaven of comparative freedom. I was no longer a
servile coward, trembling under the frown of a brother worm of the
dust, but my long-cowed spirit was roused to an attitude of
independence. I had reached the point at which I was not afraid to
die. This spirit made me a freeman in fact, though I still remained a
slave in form. When a slave cannot be flogged, he is more than half
free. He has a domain as broad as his own manly heart to defend,
and he is really “a power on earth.” From this time until my escape
from slavery, I was never fairly whipped. Several attempts were
made, but they were always unsuccessful. Bruises I did get, but the
instance I have described was the end of the brutification to which
slavery had subjected me.
The reader may like to know why, after I had so grievously
offended Mr. Covey, he did not have me taken in hand by the
authorities; indeed, why the law of Maryland, which assigned
hanging to the slave who resisted his master, was not put in force
against me; at any rate why I was not taken up, as was usual in such
cases, and publicly whipped, as an example to other slaves, and as
a means of deterring me from committing the same offense again. I
confess that the easy manner in which I got off was always a
surprise to me, and even now I cannot fully explain the cause,
though the probability is that Covey was ashamed to have it known
that he had been mastered by a boy of sixteen. He enjoyed the
unbounded and very valuable reputation of being a first-rate
overseer and negro-breaker, and by means of this reputation he was
able to procure his hands at very trifling compensation and with very
great ease. His interest and his pride would mutually suggest the
wisdom of passing the matter by in silence. The story that he had
undertaken to whip a lad and had been resisted, would of itself be
damaging to him in the estimation of slaveholders.
It is perhaps not altogether creditable to my natural temper that
after this conflict with Mr. Covey I did, at times, purposely aim to
provoke him to an attack, by refusing to keep with the other hands in
the field, but I could never bully him to another battle. I was
determined on doing him serious damage if he ever again attempted
to lay violent hands on me.
“Hereditary bondmen know ye not
Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow!”
 CHAPTER XVIII.
NEW RELATIONS AND DUTIES.

Change of masters—Benefits derived by change—Fame of the fight with

Covey—Reckless unconcern—Author’s abhorrence of slavery—Ability to
read a cause of prejudice—The holidays—How spent—Sharp hit at
slavery—Effects of holidays—Difference between Covey and Freeland—
An irreligious master preferred to a religious one—Hard life at Covey’s
useful to the author—Improved condition does not bring contentment—
Congenial society at Freeland’s—Author’s Sabbath-school—Secresy
necessary—Affectionate relations of tutor and pupils—Confidence and
friendship among slaves—Slavery the inviter of vengeance.

MY term of service with Edward Covey expired on Christmas day,

1834. I gladly enough left him, although he was by this time as
gentle as a lamb. My home for the year 1835 was already secured,
my next master selected. There was always more or less excitement
about the changing of hands, but I had become somewhat reckless
and cared little into whose hands I fell, determined to fight my way.
The report got abroad that I was hard to whip, that I was guilty of
kicking back, that though generally a good-natured negro, I
sometimes “got the devil in me.” These sayings were rife in Talbot
County, and they distinguished me among my servile brethren.
Slaves would sometimes fight with each other, and even die at each
other’s hands, but there were very few who were not held in awe by
a white man. Trained from the cradle up to think and feel that their
masters were superior, and invested with a sort of sacredness, there
were few who could rise above the control which that sentiment
exercised. I had freed myself from it, and the thing was known. One
bad sheep will spoil a whole flock. I was a bad sheep. I hated
slavery, slaveholders, and all pertaining to them; and I did not fail to
inspire others with the same feeling wherever and whenever
opportunity was presented. This made me a marked lad among the
slaves, and a suspected one among slaveholders. A knowledge of
my ability to read and write got pretty widely spread, which was very
much against me.
The days between Christmas day and New Year’s were allowed
the slaves as holidays. During these days all regular work was
suspended, and there was nothing to do but to keep fires and look
after the stock. We regarded this time as our own by the grace of our
masters, and we therefore used it or abused it as we pleased. Those
who had families at a distance were expected to visit them and
spend with them the entire week. The younger slaves or the
unmarried ones were expected to see to the cattle, and to attend to
incidental duties at home. The holidays were variously spent. The
sober, thinking, industrious ones would employ themselves in
manufacturing corn brooms, mats, horse collars, and baskets, and
some of these were very well made. Another class spent their time in
hunting opossums, coons, rabbits, and other game. But the majority
spent the holidays in sports, ball-playing, wrestling, boxing, running
foot-races, dancing, and drinking whiskey; and this latter mode was
generally most agreeable to their masters. A slave who would work
during the holidays was thought by his master undeserving of
holidays. There was in this simple act of continued work an
accusation against slaves, and a slave could not help thinking that if
he made three dollars during the holidays he might make three
hundred during the year. Not to be drunk during the holidays was
disgraceful.
The fiddling, dancing, and “jubilee beating” was carried on in all
directions. This latter performance was strictly southern. It supplied
the place of violin, or of other musical instruments, and was played
so easily that almost every farm had its “Juba” beater. The performer
improvised as he beat the instrument, marking the words as he sang
so as to have them fall pat with the movement of his hands. Among
a mass of nonsense and wild frolic, once in a while a sharp hit was
given to the meanness of slaveholders. Take the following for
example:
 We raise de wheat,
Dey gib us de corn;
We bake de bread,
Dey gib us de crust;
We sif de meal,
Dey gib us de huss;

We peel de meat,
Dey gib us de skin;
And dat’s de way
Dey take us in;
We skim de pot,
Dey give us de liquor,
And say dat’s good enough for nigger.

Walk over! walk over!

Your butter and de fat;
Poor nigger you cant get over dat.
Walk over—

This is not a bad summary of the palpable injustice and fraud of

slavery, giving, as it does, to the lazy and idle the comforts which
God designed should be given solely to the honest laborer. But to
the holidays. Judging from my own observation and experience, I
believe those holidays were among the most effective means in the
hands of slaveholders of keeping down the spirit of insurrection
among the slaves.
To enslave men successfully and safely it is necessary to keep
their minds occupied with thoughts and aspirations short of the
liberty of which they are deprived. A certain degree of attainable
good must be kept before them. These holidays served the purpose
of keeping the minds of the slaves occupied with prospective
pleasure within the limits of slavery. The young man could go
wooing, the married man to see his wife, the father and mother to
see their children, the industrious and money-loving could make a
few dollars, the great wrestler could win laurels, the young people
meet and enjoy each other’s society, the drunken man could get
plenty of whiskey, and the religious man could hold prayer-meetings,
preach, pray, and exhort. Before the holidays there were pleasures
in prospect; after the holidays they were pleasures of memory, and
they served to keep out thoughts and wishes of a more dangerous
character. These holidays were also sort of conductors or safety-
valves, to carry off the explosive elements inseparable from the
human mind when reduced to the condition of slavery. But for these
the rigors of bondage would have become too severe for endurance,
and the slave would have been forced up to dangerous desperation.
Thus they became a part and parcel of the gross wrongs and
inhumanity of slavery. Ostensibly they were institutions of
benevolence designed to mitigate the rigors of slave life, but
practically they were a fraud instituted by human selfishness, the
better to secure the ends of injustice and oppression. The slave’s
happiness was not the end sought, but the master’s safety. It was
not from a generous unconcern for the slave’s labor, but from a
prudent regard for the slave system. I am strengthened in this
opinion from the fact that most slaveholders liked to have their
slaves spend the holidays in such manner as to be of no real benefit
to them. Everything like rational enjoyment was frowned upon, and
only those wild and low sports peculiar to semi-civilized people were
encouraged. The license allowed appeared to have no other object
than to disgust the slaves with their temporary freedom, and to make
them as glad to return to their work as they were to leave it. I have
known slaveholders resort to cunning tricks, with a view of getting
their slaves deplorably drunk. The usual plan was to make bets on a
slave that he could drink more whisky than any other, and so induce
a rivalry among them for the mastery in this degradation. The scenes
brought about in this way were often scandalous and loathsome in
the extreme. Whole multitudes might be found stretched out in brutal
drunkenness, at once helpless and disgusting. Thus, when the slave
asked for hours of “virtuous liberty,” his cunning master took
advantage of his ignorance and cheered him with a dose of vicious
and revolting dissipation artfully labeled with the name of “liberty.”
 We were induced to drink, I among the rest, and when the
holidays were over we all staggered up from our filth and wallowing,
took a long breath, and went away to our various fields of work,
feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go from that which our
masters had artfully deceived us into the belief was freedom, back
again to the arms of slavery. It was not what we had taken it to be,
nor what it would have been, had it not been abused by us. It was
about as well to be a slave to master, as to be a slave to whisky and
rum. When the slave was drunk the slaveholder had no fear that he
would plan an insurrection, no fear that he would escape to the
North. It was the sober, thoughtful slave who was dangerous, and
needed the vigilance of his master to keep him a slave. But to
proceed with my narrative.
On the first of January, 1835, I proceeded from St. Michaels to
Mr. William Freeland’s—my new home. Mr. Freeland lived only three
miles from St. Michaels, on an old, worn-out farm, which required
much labor to render it anything like a self-supporting establishment.
I found Mr. Freeland a different man from Covey. Though not
rich, he was what might have been called a well-bred Southern
gentleman. Though a slaveholder and sharing in common with them
many of the vices of his class, he seemed alive to the sentiment of
honor, and had also some sense of justice, and some feelings of
humanity. He was fretful, impulsive, and passionate, but free from
the mean and selfish characteristics which distinguished the creature
from which I had happily escaped. Mr. Freeland was open, frank,
imperative, and practiced no concealments, and disdained to play
the spy; in all these qualities the opposite of Covey.
My poor weather-beaten bark now reached smoother water and
gentler breezes. My stormy life at Covey’s had been of service to
me. The things that would have seemed very hard had I gone direct
to Mr. Freeland’s from the home of Master Thomas were now “trifles
light as air.” I was still a field-hand, and had come to prefer the
severe labor of the field to the enervating duties of a house-servant. I
had become large and strong, and had begun to take pride in the
fact that I could do as much hard work as some of the older men.
There was much rivalry among slaves at times as to which could do
the most work, and masters generally sought to promote such rivalry.
But some of us were too wise to race with each other very long.
Such racing, we had the sagacity to see, was not likely to pay. We
had our times for measuring each other’s strength, but we knew too
much to keep up the competition so long as to produce an
extraordinary day’s work. We knew that if by extraordinary exertion a
large quantity of work was done in one day, becoming known to the
master, it might lead him to require the same amount every day. This
thought was enough to bring us to a dead halt when ever so much
excited for the race.
At Mr. Freeland’s my condition was every way improved. I was
no longer the scapegoat that I was when at Covey’s, where every
wrong thing done was saddled upon me, and where other slaves
were whipped over my shoulders. Bill Smith was protected by a
positive prohibition, made by his rich master (and the command of
the rich slaveholder was law to the poor one). Hughes was favored
by his relationship to Covey, and the hands hired temporarily
escaped flogging. I was the general pack-horse; but Mr. Freeland
held every man individually responsible for his own conduct. Mr.
Freeland, like Mr. Covey, gave his hands enough to eat, but, unlike
Mr. Covey, he gave them time to take their meals. He worked us
hard during the day, but gave us the night for rest. We were seldom
in the field after dark in the evening, or before sunrise in the morning.
Our implements of husbandry were of the most improved pattern,
and much superior to those used at Covey’s.
Notwithstanding all the improvement in my relations,
notwithstanding the many advantages I had gained by my new home
and my new master, I was still restless and discontented. I was
about as hard to please by a master as a master is by a slave. The
freedom from bodily torture and unceasing labor had given my mind
an increased sensibility, and imparted to it greater activity. I was not
yet exactly in right relations. “Howbeit, that was not first which is
spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward that which is
spiritual.” When entombed at Covey’s, shrouded in darkness and
physical wretchedness, temporal well-being was the grand
desideratum; but, temporal wants supplied, the spirit puts in its
claims. Beat and cuff your slave, keep him hungry and spiritless, and
he will follow the chain of his master like a dog; but feed and clothe
him well, work him moderately, surround him with physical comfort,
and dreams of freedom intrude. Give him a bad master, and he
aspires to a good master; give him a good master and he wishes to
become his own master. Such is human nature. You may hurl a man
so low beneath the level of his kind, that he loses all just ideas of his
natural position, but elevate him a little, and the clear conception of
rights rises to life and power, and leads him onward. Thus elevated a
little at Freeland’s, the dreams called into being by that good man,
Father Lawson, when in Baltimore, began to visit me again; shoots
from the tree of liberty began to put forth buds, and dim hopes of the
future began to dawn.
I found myself in congenial society. There were Henry Harris,
John Harris, Handy Caldwell, and Sandy Jenkins (this last, of the
root-preventive memory.)
Henry and John Harris were brothers, and belonged to Mr.
Freeland. They were both remarkably bright and intelligent, though
neither of them could read. Now for mischief! I had not been long
here before I was up to my old tricks. I began to address my
companions on the subject of education, and the advantages of
intelligence over ignorance, and, as far as I dared, I tried to show the
agency of ignorance in keeping men in slavery. Webster’s spelling-
book and the Columbian Orator were looked into again. As summer
came on, and the long Sabbath days stretched themselves over our
idleness, I became uneasy, and wanted a Sabbath-school, where to
exercise my gifts, and to impart the little knowledge I possessed to
my brother-slaves. A house was hardly necessary in the summer
time; I could hold my school under the shade of an old oak tree as
well as anywhere else. The thing was to get the scholars, and to
have them thoroughly imbued with the desire to learn. Two such
boys were quickly found in Henry and John, and from them the
contagion spread. I was not long in bringing around me twenty or
thirty young men, who enrolled themselves gladly in my Sabbath-
school, and were willing to meet me regularly under the trees or
elsewhere, for the purpose of learning to read. It was surprising with
what ease they provided themselves with spelling-books. These
were mostly the cast-off books of their young masters or mistresses.
I taught at first on our own farm. All were impressed with the
necessity of keeping the matter as private as possible, for the fate of
the St. Michaels attempt was still fresh in the minds of all. Our pious
masters at St. Michaels must not know that a few of their dusky
brothers were learning to read the Word of God, lest they should
come down upon us with the lash and chain. We might have met to
drink whisky, to wrestle, fight, and to do other unseemly things, with
no fear of interruption from the saints or the sinners of St. Michaels.
But to meet for the purpose of improving the mind and heart, by
learning to read the sacred scriptures, was a nuisance to be instantly
stopped. The slaveholders there, like slaveholders elsewhere,
preferred to see the slaves engaged in degrading sports, rather than
acting like moral and accountable beings. Had any one asked a
religious white man in St. Michaels at that time the names of three
men in that town whose lives were most after the pattern of our Lord
and Master Jesus Christ, the reply would have been: Garrison West,
class-leader, Wright Fairbanks, and Thomas Auld, both also class-
leaders; and yet these men ferociously rushed in upon my Sabbath-
school, armed with mob-like missiles, and forbade our meeting again
on pain of having our backs subjected to the bloody lash. This same
Garrison West was my class-leader, and I had thought him a
Christian until he took part in breaking up my school. He led me no
more after that.
The plea for this outrage was then, as it is always, the tyrant’s
plea of necessity. If the slaves learned to read they would learn
something more and something worse. The peace of slavery would
be disturbed; slave rule would be endangered. I do not dispute the
soundness of the reasoning. If slavery were right, Sabbath-schools
for teaching slaves to read were wrong, and ought to have been put
down. These christian class-leaders were, to this extent, consistent.
They had settled the question that slavery was right, and by that
standard they determined that Sabbath-schools were wrong. To be
sure they were Protestant, and held to the great protestant right of
every man to “search the Scriptures” for himself; but then, to all
general rules there are exceptions. How convenient! What crimes
may not be committed under such ruling! But my dear class-leading
Methodist brethren did not condescend to give me a reason for
breaking up the school at St. Michaels; they had determined its
destruction, and that was enough. However, I am digressing.
After getting the school nicely started a second time, holding it in
the woods behind the barn, and in the shade of trees, I succeeded in
inducing a free colored man who lived several miles from our house
to permit me to hold my school in a room at his house. He incurred
much peril in doing so, for the assemblage was an unlawful one. I
had at one time more than forty scholars, all of the right sort, and
many of them succeeded in learning to read. I have had various
employments during my life, but I look back to none with more
satisfaction. An attachment, deep and permanent, sprung up
between me and my persecuted pupils, which made my parting from
them intensely painful.
Besides my Sunday-school, I devoted three evenings a week to
my other fellow slaves during the winter. Those dear souls who came
to my Sabbath-school came not because it was popular or reputable
to do so, for they came with a liability of having forty stripes laid on
their naked backs. In this Christian country men and women were
obliged to hide in barns and woods and trees from professing
Christians, in order to learn to read the Holy Bible. Their minds had
been cramped and starved by their cruel masters; the light of
education had been completely excluded, and their hard earnings
had been taken to educate their master’s children. I felt a delight in
circumventing the tyrants, and in blessing victims of their curses.
The year at Mr. Freeland’s passed off very smoothly, to outward
seeming. Not a blow was given me during the whole year. To the
credit of Mr. Freeland, irreligious though he was, it must be stated
that he was the best master I ever had until I became my own
master and assumed for myself, as I had a right to do, the
responsibility of my own existence and the exercise of my own
powers.
For much of the happiness, or absence of misery, with which I
passed this year, I am indebted to the genial temper and ardent
friendship of my brother slaves. They were every one of them manly,
generous, and brave; yes, I say they were brave, and I will add fine
looking. It is seldom the lot of any to have truer and better friends
than were the slaves on this farm. It was not uncommon to charge
slaves with great treachery toward each other, but I must say I never
loved, esteemed, or confided in men more than I did in these. They
were as true as steel, and no band of brothers could be more loving.
There were no mean advantages taken of each other, no tattling, no
giving each other bad names to Mr. Freeland, and no elevating one
at the expense of the other. We never undertook anything of any
importance which was likely to affect each other, without mutual
consultation. We were generally a unit, and moved together.
Thoughts and sentiments were exchanged between us which might
well have been considered incendiary had they been known by our
masters. The slaveholder, were he kind or cruel, was a slaveholder
still, the every-hour-violator of the just and inalienable rights of man,
and he was therefore every hour silently but surely whetting the knife
of vengeance for his own throat. He never lisped a syllable in
commendation of the fathers of this republic without inviting the
sword, and asserting the right of rebellion for his own slaves.
 CHAPTER XIX.
THE RUNAWAY PLOT.

New Year’s thoughts and meditations—Again hired by Freeland—Kindness

no compensation for slavery—Incipient steps toward escape—
Considerations leading thereto—Hostility to slavery—Solemn vow taken—
Plan divulged to slaves—Columbian Orator again—Scheme gains favor—
Danger of discovery—Skill of slaveholders—Suspicion and coercion—
Hymns with double meaning—Consultation—Password—Hope and fear—
Ignorance of Geography—Imaginary difficulties—Patrick Henry—Sandy a
dreamer—Route to the north mapped out—Objections—Frauds—Passes
—Anxieties—Fear of failure—Strange presentiment—Coincidence—
Betrayal—Arrests—Resistance—Mrs. Freeland—Prison—Brutal jests—
Passes eaten—Denial—Sandy—Dragged behind horses—Slave-traders
—Alone in prison—Sent to Baltimore.

I AM now at the beginning of the year 1836, when the mind naturally
occupies itself with the mysteries of life in all its phases—the ideal,
the real, and the actual. Sober people look both ways at the
beginning of a new year, surveying the errors of the past, and
providing against the possible errors of the future. I, too, was thus
exercised. I had little pleasure in retrospect, and the future prospect
was not brilliant. “Notwithstanding,” thought I, “the many resolutions
and prayers I have made in behalf of freedom, I am, this first day of
the year 1836, still a slave, still wandering in the depths of a
miserable bondage. My faculties and powers of body and soul are
not my own, but are the property of a fellow-mortal in no sense
superior to me, except that he has the physical power to compel me
to be owned and controlled by him. By the combined physical force
of the community I am his slave—a slave for life.” With thoughts like
these I was chafed and perplexed, and they rendered me gloomy
and disconsolate. The anguish of my mind cannot be written.
 At the close of the year, Mr. Freeland renewed the purchase of
my services of Mr. Auld for the coming year. His promptness in doing
so would have been flattering to my vanity had I been ambitious to
win the reputation of being a valuable slave. Even as it was, I felt a
slight degree of complacency at the circumstance. It showed him to
be as well pleased with me as a slave as I with him as a master. But
the kindness of the slave-master only gilded the chain, it detracted
nothing from its weight or strength. The thought that men are made
for other and better uses than slavery throve best under the gentle
treatment of a kind master. Its grim visage could assume no smiles
able to fascinate the partially enlightened slave into a forgetfulness
of his bondage, or of the desirableness of liberty.
I was not through the first month of my second year with the kind
and gentlemanly Mr. Freeland before I was earnestly considering
and devising plans for gaining that freedom which, when I was but a
mere child, I had ascertained to be the natural and inborn right of
every member of the human family. The desire for this freedom had
been benumbed while I was under the brutalizing dominion of Covey,
and it had been postponed and rendered inoperative by my truly
pleasant Sunday-school engagements with my friends during the
year at Mr. Freeland’s. It had, however, never entirely subsided. I
hated slavery always, and my desire for freedom needed only a
favorable breeze to fan it to a blaze at any moment. The thought of
being only a creature of the present and the past troubled me, and I
longed to have a future—a future with hope in it. To be shut up
entirely to the past and present is to the soul whose life and
happiness is unceasing progress—what the prison is to the body—a
blight and mildew, a hell of horrors. The dawning of this, another
year, awakened me from my temporary slumber, and roused into life
my latent but long-cherished aspirations for freedom. I became not
only ashamed to be contented in slavery, but ashamed to seem to be
contented, and in my present favorable condition under the mild rule
of Mr. Freeland, I am not sure that some kind reader will not
condemn me for being over-ambitious, and greatly wanting in
humility, when I say the truth, that I now drove from me all thoughts
of making the best of my lot, and welcomed only such thoughts as
led me away from the house of bondage. The intensity of my desire
to be free, quickened by my present favorable circumstances,
brought me to the determination to act as well as to think and speak.
Accordingly, at the beginning of this year 1836, I took upon me a
solemn vow, that the year which had just now dawned upon me
should not close without witnessing an earnest attempt, on my part,
to gain my liberty. This vow only bound me to make good my own
individual escape, but my friendship for my brother-slaves was so
affectionate and confiding that I felt it my duty, as well as my
pleasure, to give them an opportunity to share in my determination.
Toward Henry and John Harris I felt a friendship as strong as one
man can feel for another, for I could have died with and for them. To
them, therefore, with suitable caution, I began to disclose my
sentiments and plans, sounding them the while on the subject of
running away, provided a good chance should offer. I need not say
that I did my very best to imbue the minds of my dear friends with my
own views and feelings. Thoroughly awakened now, and with a
definite vow upon me, all my little reading which had any bearing on
the subject of human rights was rendered available in my
communications with my friends. That gem of a book, the Columbian
Orator, with its eloquent orations and spicy dialogues denouncing
oppression and slavery—telling what had been dared, done, and
suffered by men, to obtain the inestimable boon of liberty, was still
fresh in my memory, and whirled into the ranks of my speech with
the aptitude of well-trained soldiers going through the drill. I here
began my public speaking. I canvassed with Henry and John the
subject of slavery, and dashed against it the condemning brand of
God’s eternal justice. My fellow-servants were neither indifferent,
dull, nor inapt. Our feelings were more alike than our opinions. All,
however, were ready to act when a feasible plan should be
proposed. “Show us how the thing is to be done,” said they, “and all
else is clear.”
We were all, except Sandy, quite clear from slaveholding
priestcraft. It was in vain that we had been taught from the pulpit at
St. Michaels the duty of obedience to our masters; to recognize God
as the author of our enslavement; to regard running away an
offense, alike against God and man; to deem our enslavement a
merciful and beneficial arrangement; to esteem our condition in this
country a paradise to that from which we had been snatched in
Africa; to consider our hard hands and dark color as God’s
displeasure, and as pointing us out as the proper subjects of slavery;
that the relation of master and slave was one of reciprocal benefits;
that our work was not more serviceable to our masters than our
master’s thinking was to us. I say it was in vain that the pulpit of St.
Michaels had constantly inculcated these plausible doctrines. Nature
laughed them to scorn. For my part, I had become altogether too big
for my chains. Father Lawson’s solemn words of what I ought to be,
and what I might be in the providence of God, had not fallen dead on
my soul. I was fast verging toward manhood, and the prophesies of
my childhood were still unfulfilled. The thought that year after year
had passed away, and my best resolutions to run away had failed
and faded, that I was still a slave, with chances for gaining my
freedom diminished and still diminishing—was not a matter to be
slept over easily. But here came a trouble. Such thoughts and
purposes as I now cherished could not agitate the mind long without
making themselves manifest to scrutinizing and unfriendly observers.
I had reason to fear that my sable face might prove altogether too
transparent for the safe concealment of my hazardous enterprise.
Plans of great moment have leaked through stone walls, and
revealed their projectors. But here was no stone wall to hide my
purpose. I would have given my poor tell-tale face for the immovable
countenance of an Indian, for it was far from proof against the daily
searching glances of those whom I met.
It was the interest and business of slaveholders to study human
nature, and the slave nature in particular, with a view to practical
results; and many of them attained astonishing proficiency in this
direction. They had to deal not with earth, wood, and stone, but with
men; and by every regard they had for their safety and prosperity
they had need to know the material on which they were to work. So
much intellect as the slaveholder had round him required watching.
Their safety depended on their vigilance. Conscious of the injustice
and wrong they were every hour perpetrating, and knowing what
they themselves would do if they were victims of such wrongs, they
were constantly looking out for the first signs of the dread retribution.
They watched, therefore, with skilled and practiced eyes, and
learned to read, with great accuracy, the state of mind and heart of
the slave through his sable face. Unusual sobriety, apparent
abstraction, sullenness, and indifference,—indeed, any mood out of
the common way,—afforded ground for suspicion and inquiry.
Relying on their superior position and wisdom, they “would often
hector the slave into a confession by affecting to know the truth of
their accusations. “You have got the devil in you, and we’ll whip him
out of you,” they would say. I have often been put thus to the torture
on bare suspicion. This system had its disadvantages as well as its
opposite—the slave being sometimes whipped into the confession of
offenses which he never committed. It will be seen that the good old
rule, “A man is to be held innocent until proved to be guilty,” did not
hold good on the slave plantation. Suspicion and torture were the
approved methods of getting at the truth there. It was necessary,
therefore, for me to keep a watch over my deportment, lest the
enemy should get the better of me. But with all our caution and
studied reserve, I am not sure that Mr. Freeland did not suspect that
all was not right with us. It did seem that he watched us more
narrowly after the plan of escape had been conceived and discussed
amongst us. Men seldom see themselves as others see them; and
while to ourselves everything connected with our contemplated
escape appeared concealed, Mr. Freeland may, with the peculiar
prescience of a slaveholder, have mastered the huge thought which
was disturbing our peace. As I now look back, I am the more inclined
to think he suspected us, because, prudent as we were, I can see
that we did many silly things very well calculated to awaken
suspicion. We were at times remarkably buoyant, singing hymns,
and making joyous exclamations, almost as triumphant in their tone
as if we had reached a land of freedom and safety. A keen observer
might have detected in our repeated singing of

“O Canaan, sweet Canaan,

I am bound for the land of Canaan,”

something more than a hope of reaching heaven. We meant to reach

the North, and the North was our Canaan.
 “I thought I heard them say
There were lions in the way;
I don’t expect to stay
Much longer here.
Run to Jesus, shun the danger—
I don’t expect to stay
Much longer here,”

was a favorite air, and had a double meaning. In the lips of some it
meant the expectation of a speedy summons to a world of spirits; but
in the lips of our company, it simply meant a speedy pilgrimage to a
free State, and deliverance from all the evils and dangers of slavery.
I had succeeded in winning to my scheme a company of five
young men, the very flower of the neighborhood, each one of whom
would have commanded one thousand dollars in the home market.
At New Orleans they would have brought fifteen hundred dollars
apiece, and perhaps more. Their names were as follows: Henry
Harris, John Harris, Sandy Jenkins, Charles Roberts, and Henry
Bailey. I was the youngest but one of the party. I had, however, the
advantage of them all in experience, and in a knowledge of letters.
This gave me a great influence over them. Perhaps not one of them,
left to himself, would have dreamed of escape as a possible thing.
They all wanted to be free, but the serious thought of running away
had not entered into their minds until I won them to the undertaking.
They all were tolerably well off—for slaves—and had dim hopes of
being set free some day by their masters. If any one is to blame for
disturbing the quiet of the slaves and slave-masters of the
neighborhood of St. Michaels, I am the man. I claim to be the
instigator of the high crime (as the slaveholders regarded it), and I
kept life in it till life could be kept in it no longer.
Pending the time of our contemplated departure out of our
Egypt, we met often by night, and on every Sunday. At these
meetings we talked the matter over, told our hopes and fears, and
the difficulties discovered or imagined; and, like men of sense, we
counted the cost of the enterprise to which we were committing
ourselves. These meetings must have resembled, on a small scale,
the meetings of the revolutionary conspirators in their primary
condition. We were plotting against our (so-called) lawful rulers, with
this difference—we sought our own good, and not the harm of our
enemies. We did not seek to overthrow them, but to escape from
them. As for Mr. Freeland, we all liked him, and would gladly have
remained with him as free men. Liberty was our aim, and we had
now come to think that we had a right to it against every obstacle,
even against the lives of our enslavers.
We had several words, expressive of things important to us,
which we understood, but which, even if distinctly heard by an
outsider, would have conveyed no certain meaning. I hated this
secresy, but where slavery was powerful, and liberty weak, the latter
was driven to concealment or destruction.
The prospect was not always bright. At times we were almost
tempted to abandon the enterprise, and to try to get back to that
comparative peace of mind which even a man under the gallows
might feel when all hope of escape had vanished. We were
confident, bold, and determined, at times, and again doubting, timid,
and wavering, whistling, like the boy in the grave-yard, to keep away
the spirits.
To look at the map and observe the proximity of Eastern shore,
Maryland, to Delaware and Pennsylvania, it may seem to the reader
quite absurd to regard the proposed escape as a formidable
undertaking. But to understand, some one has said, a man must
stand under. The real distance was great enough, but the imagined
distance was, to our ignorance, much greater. Slaveholders sought
to impress their slaves with a belief in the boundlessness of slave
territory, and of their own limitless power. Our notions of the
geography of the country were very vague and indistinct. The
distance, however, was not the chief trouble, for the nearer the lines
of a slave state to the borders of a free state the greater was the
trouble. Hired kidnappers infested the borders. Then, too, we knew
that merely reaching a free state did not free us, that wherever
caught we could be returned to slavery. We knew of no spot this side
the ocean where we could be safe. We had heard of Canada, then