54. Give Me Your Angry, Your Lost and Your Lonely

Today we explore the radicalization of young men. How do authoritarian movements especially capitalize on men and bend them to their will?
How does a kind, average boy grow up to be ordered to kill and say "I was just following orders"? Why do particularly conservative men buckle so quickly under perceived "more masculine" authority?
The reality is that there are a lot of reasons. And they are the same reasons that men are living in a system that makes them feel lonely, invisible, unable to access emotions, and kills them young.
Today we explore patriarchal systems, how the narrowing of masculinity rips humanity out of the hands of men. And how movements like the Nazis were able to weaponize disenfranchised, disappointed, and angry men and transform them into weapons of genocide.

Sources:

Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. HarperCollins, 1992.

Browning, Christopher R. Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp. W. W. Norton, 2010.

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

Welzer, Harald, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall. Myth of the German Comradeship: The Wehrmacht and the Politics of Memory. Cambridge University Press.

Welzer, Harald. Perpetrators: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Bloxham, Donald. Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory. Oxford University Press.

Koonz, Claudia. The Nazi Conscience. Harvard University Press, 2003.

Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics. St. Martin’s Press, 1987.

Neitzel, Sönke, and Harald Welzer. Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying. Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. (Based on secretly recorded conversations of German POWs)

Biddiscombe, Perry. The SS Hunter Battalions: The Hidden History of the Nazi Resistance Movement 1944–45. Tempus.

Biddiscombe, Perry. Werwolf!: The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944–1946. University of Toronto Press.

Lower, Wendy. Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.

Heinemann, Isabel. “Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut”: Das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas. Wallstein Verlag.

Bartov, Omer. Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich. Oxford University Press, 1991.

Bartov, Omer. The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare. Palgrave.

Fritz, Stephen G. Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II. University Press of Kentucky, 1995.

Manstein, Erich von. Lost Victories. Zenith Press.
(Primary source memoir; ideological but useful for studying mindset)

Himmler, Heinrich. Posen Speeches (1943). Primary documents; available in English translation via Holocaust Research Project / Nizkor / German Federal Archives.

Yad Vashem Archives. Testimonies of perpetrators and victims, Einsatzgruppen records, postwar interrogation files.

Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. Basic Books, 1986.

Staub, Ervin. The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence. Cambridge University Press.

Bandura, Albert. Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live With Themselves. Worth Publishers, 2015.
(Not Nazi-specific but foundational for understanding perpetrator psychology)

Kelman, Herbert. “Violence Without Moral Restraint.” Journal of Social Issues.

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin, 1963.

Rees, Laurence. The Nazis: A Warning from History. New Press, 1997.

Rees, Laurence. Auschwitz: A New History. PublicAffairs, 2005.

Haffner, Sebastian. Defying Hitler: A Memoir. Picador, 2003.

Snyder, Timothy. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. Crown, 2015.Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books, 2010.