[elcapitan]

Another thing which is quite important is to prevent the creation of systems that enable people to abstract away other people's humanity. One of the main reasons why the nazis established this complex system of bureaucracies, secrecy, many points from defamation, registration, exclusion, deportation, degradation to finally extinction and disposal is that the early versions (grab men, women and children from a village, dig a hole and let soldiers shoot them in the head) was, even for tough people, hard to deal with. Having a complex bureaucracy with many small steps towards extinction allows for big-level atrocities. So checking for small things is just as important as preventing the big crime.

[jacquesm]

That's an absolutely amazing realization that I had never seen put to words anywhere. The 'yes ladder' of genocide. Thank you.

[jacquesm]

Replying to my own comment after thinking some more about this: It also explains to a large extent the choice of gas for the murders. After all you can open a gas tap a long way away from where the people are that you are going to kill, in fact the person opening the valve may not even know what they are doing (unlikely in this case, but still you could easily arrange it that way).

Everybody else is just doing their job right? Herd a bunch of people into a room, remove a bunch of corpses from a room. Nothing to do with killing anybody, or so you could delude yourself.

This also ties in with why I'm so totally against drones, robots and other kinds of remote warfare (including aerial bombardment), they make it so much easier to pretend you're not killing real people.

[elcapitan]

To be complete there: They didn't use gas from a tap, they used Cyclon-B, a cyanice pesticide which comes in cans, which is solid and becomes a gas when it gets in contact with air. They put it in from the top through the ceiling.

I think beginning with that point all the killing and removal work had to be done by groups of prisoners.

As for drones: Yes, there was an interesting keynote talk at 33c3 by a former us army guy who has become a whistleblower. They hire specifically for gamers to become drone pilots, because they already have that abstraction from their games. They see the bad guys (arabic looking people) on their screen and have less issues to hit the trigger than a pilot who would be based in the area.

[danieltillett]

Complex bureaucracies allow people to avoid personal responsibility for the outcome - the smaller your percentage contribution to the final decision the easier it is to disown the result emotionally (look at general elections to see this effect in action).

The other major factor is that many small steps are required to turn average people into killers. The military know this hence all the training to get soldiers to kill - it doesn’t take many months to train someone to pull a trigger, but it does take many months to get them to point a gun a person and pull the trigger. There is a fantastic book on this topic On Killing [1].

1. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00J90F8W2/