Rudolf Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz. He and his family lived in a lovely villa on the grounds of this sprawling factory of death. One day Höss’s brother-in-law Fritz Hensel came to stay with them for several weeks. Decades later, the Israeli historian Tom Segev interviewed Hensel. This is what he wrote:
Fritz Hensel . . . asked Höss once what the term Untermensch meant. They sat in the commandant’s house, in the evening, over glasses of wine. Höss sighed. . . . “Look, you can see for yourself. They are not like you and me. They are different. They look different. They do not behave like human beings.”1
The Holocaust is a prime example of dehumanization. Dehumanization of Jews was a central component of the Nazi program. And to date it represents the most explicit and thoroughly documented example of the dehumanization of a whole people.
Much of what we can learn from the Holocaust can be applied to other cases of dehumanization too, because dehumanization always conforms to more or less the same pattern. Of course, there are individual variations: the dehumanization of Black people by Whites is not the same as the dehumanization of Tutsis by Hutus, which is not the same as the dehumanization of Armenians by Turks. Each of these episodes must be understood against the background of different historical and cultural contexts, in response to different political forces, and each has features that are unique to it. But these differences make their striking similarities all the more significant, suggesting that dehumanizing states of mind are grounded in some very general features of human psychology. That’s not to say that the dehumanizing impulse is innate, or that it was installed in our minds by evolution, or that these tendencies can never be overcome. But it is to say that we so easily slip into thinking of others as less than human in part because of how the human mind is configured.
The Holocaust had deep roots in Christian anti-Semitism. For centuries, Jews were the only religious minority that was permitted to exist in Europe and its colonies, albeit in a state of subjugation. When missionaries or conquerors encountered other sorts of non-Christians, they either converted them, often by force, or simply slaughtered them, but the suffering inflicted on Jews was a specific and sustained form of cruelty, marked by accusations of infanticide, pogroms, expulsions, and physical and cultural segregation. Its history is too long to retell here.
There’s no better example of the dehumanization of Jews in the pre-Nazi, Christian European past than the ubiquitous image of the Judensau (the “Jew-pig”). From the twelfth century onward, many churches and public buildings, mainly in Germany but also elsewhere in Europe, were adorned with images of Jews sucking milk from a sow’s teats, as though they were piglets, or inspecting a pig’s anus, or sometimes it was a composite beast with a Jew’s head on a pig’s body. Later on, in an era of more widespread literacy, the Jew-pig image circulated in pamphlets and broadsides, accompanied by text that described Jews as dirty swine that guzzle filth. Later still, in the early decades of the twentieth century, the expression “Jew-pig” survived as an anti-Semitic slur that was quickly appropriated and proliferated by Nazi ideologues. It was around the same time that the Nazis adopted and somewhat transformed a traditional German proverb that pointed unambiguously to the sub-humanity of Jewish people: “Yes the Jew has the form of the human. However, it lacks the human’s inner being.” The distinguished and influential German jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt turned this racist saying into a toxic political slogan: “Not every being with a human face is human.” Jews were considered as something like swine with human faces. They merely appeared to be human, but were nothing but filthy animals beneath the surface, and were compared to an infestation of rats in the notorious propaganda film The Eternal Jew.
The racialization of Jews laid the foundation for their dehumanization. To the Nazis, as well as to many other Europeans, Jews were a racial minority. The 1935 Nuremberg laws, which were passed to disenfranchise Jewish citizens of the German state, and which were inspired by the Jim Crow laws of the American South, were explicitly race laws. This was crucial, because Hitler and his followers were obsessed with the role of race in human affairs. They interpreted human history as the struggle for dominance between races, and believed that the highest moral good was to subordinate one’s narrow self-interest to the greater well-being of the race. The Nordic or Aryan race was seen as the highest form of life, while the Jewish race—a race of Untermenschen or “subhumans”—was its implacable enemy.
There is a lesson to be taken from this. Dehumanization is enmeshed with beliefs about race. Groups of people who’ve been dehumanized are almost always first treated as racially alien. This might seem strange, given my definition of dehumanization. How can it be that members of a race—a human race—are thought to be subhuman? Isn’t this a blatant contradiction?
Looking closely at Nazi propaganda dispels the appearance of contradiction. In 1942, the SS published a booklet entitled The Subhuman, which was all about Jews as less-than-human creatures. One of its main points was that although Jews look human, they aren’t really human. As the text puts it, “Although it has features similar to a human, the subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any animal. Not all of those who appear human are in fact so. Woe to him that forgets it!” These sentences convey the idea that there’s a difference between what Jews appear to be and what they really are. Although Jews look human, they’re really only ostensibly human. They consist of a subhuman core that’s concealed beneath a veneer of humanness. Jews and other dehumanized groups were not imagined as a human race of subhumans, but rather as a race of subhumans disguised as a human race.
Imagine a world where there are nonhuman creatures that are disguised as humans. This would be strange and disturbing. And it would be even stranger and more disturbing if you believed that these pseudo-humans were malevolent entities bent on destroying true humans and everything that they’ve achieved. But that’s exactly what committed Nazis believed about Jews, as is very clear from another passage from The Subhuman:
This subhuman hates all that is created by man. This subhuman has always hated man, and always secretly sought to bring about his downfall. . . . The subhuman thrives in chaos and darkness, he is frightened by the light. These subhuman creatures dwell in the cesspools, and swamps, preferring a hell on earth, to the light of the sun. . . . The subhuman hordes would stop at nothing in their bid to overthrow the world of light and knowledge, to bring an apocalypse to all human progress and achievement. Their only goal is to make a desert wasteland of any nation or race that shines with creativity, goodness, and beauty.
Just for a moment, ignore the historical context of this material. Forget that it’s Nazi propaganda and just concentrate on the themes, as though it were a description of the plot of a movie. The story goes something like this. There is a horde of subhuman entities that pass themselves off as human beings. Although these evil and repulsive entities aren’t human, they aren’t mere animals either. They’re something altogether different—something demonic or monstrous. Their mission is to take over the world and to destroy the human race.
There’s no mystery about what kind of movie this would be. It would be a horror movie. Perhaps one about a zombie apocalypse, or a plague of vampires, or hostile aliens from another world that morph themselves into human form. Imagine yourself in such a movie—or rather, imagine yourself in a world where this is a nightmarish reality. That’s the world that die-hard Nazis took themselves to be inhabiting. They were terrified of those whom they wished to exterminate. They conceived of the persecution of Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, as an act of self-defense rather than one of brutal aggression. They were so far detached from reality, so deeply absorbed in the fiction that Jews were not humans like them, but something subhuman, and deadly, that they would take any steps to exterminate them. This is the state of mind that fosters genocide.
The Holocaust teaches us that when we are in the grip of a dehumanizing mindset, we often see the dehumanized other as toxic and frightening, resulting in what perpetrators see as a life-and-death struggle against a deadly enemy. To combat dehumanization, it’s crucial to understand that dehumanizers are not just slinging animalistic metaphors at a vulnerable group. Dehumanizers aren’t just pretending. They sincerely believe that those whom they persecute are less than human. And that’s why dehumanization has such immense destructive power.