There was also a LOT of "just doing things" so to speak.. I didn't get that from Kershaw, but in pretty much all I read about the Nazis it's mentioned somewhere, and it does match the anecdotes of survivors I read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Willikens

> Ian Kershaw has argued that a speech made by Willikens in 1934, in particular his use of the phrase "working towards the Fuehrer", was important in laying the framework for the Holocaust. Kershaw argued that the speech recognised the aloofness of Hitler's charismatic leadership and thus encouraged officials to second-guess Hitler's wishes and act accordingly. Kershaw suggests that Adolf Eichmann's rise from minor functionary to a leading role in the SS was built on this principle of working towards the Fuehrer".

It wasn't that different with Mao or Stalin I guess. They set a quota (or just said something that could be interpreted as a quota even), and people accused each other to survive the round and/or get rid of people they didn't like.

> maybe mean people will hand you the gun, but anyone will pull the trigger, if they're told to do so.

There's still a spectrum. There's still the White Rose, for example. As youths, the Scholl siblings were quite enthusiastic about the Nazis, to the dismay of their parents. But that's because they didn't know better at that point, and they did pay attention to further information coming in.

Yes, people can be deceived and forced. And it's suicidal to say "it can't happen here", or "it can't happen to me". The wars of aggression by the US since so many past decades, and how many people are still actually offended when asked to repent of what they're guilty of whether they live to realize it or not, speaks for itself. Germany fucking insisting on trading arms for a guy captured by Erdogan who doesn't want to be traded for arms, speaks for itself. People excusing Chinese totalitarianism without fear of staining their remembrance or shifting their place in the history to something undesirable, that speaks for itself.

But still, individuals still matter, there is still a spectrum that at least influences the probabilities of how people will react, and when. I wouldn't just throw that away as irrelevant, because that's something you can influence on a personal level, and where a little discernment goes a long way.

> There can be no doubt that many people live without a firm inner identity. Years ago studies of sensory deprivation demonstrated that people isolated from their social and cultural context became psychotic (Lilli, 1956; Grunebaum, 1960; Heron, 1953). It was not recognized, however, that the outcome depended on the degree of a person's inner coherence. Admiral Byrd's autobiographical report of his months- long isolation in the polar region shows that an inner vitality makes one independent of external sensory stimulation (R. E. Byrd, 1938). The physician Evelyne Bone (1957) spent seven years in solitary confinement in a Hungarian prison. Her rich inner world of experience and thought kept her psyche intact. This possibility does not exist for someone whose inner life has turned into something foreign. That is surely the reason why so many subjects in the deprivation studies had psychotic breakdowns.

> Those who have been able to develop an inner coherence and derive a feeling of identity from it do not, even under extreme conditions of frustration and deprivation, lose their self -confidence and their belief in themselves. The kind of identity, typical in our culture (Siirala's 'commonness of the majority') that is based on identifying with fear inspiring authorities is, on the other hand, constantly at risk of dissolution. Such people can consolidate a self only by creating imaginary enemies or by conforming to the prevailing social structures around them. The latter case applies to Hitler's enthusiastic admirers who immediately adapted to the new democratic principles introduced by the victors after the collapse of the Third Reich. There are numerous examples in this century of people who, in spite of having endured the horrifying conditions in extermination camps, preserved their identity. American soldiers who refused to participate in atrocities and the torture of prisoners during the Vietnam War illustrate the same phenomenon (Herman, 1994; Eng, 1988; Werner, 1989)

-- Arno Gruen, "The Need to Punish - The Political Consequences of Identifying with the Aggressor"

I have not looked at those last footnotes yet, but I read "Defying Hitler: A Memoir" by Sebastian Haffner, and I distinctly recall how he described that many Germans after WW1 "didn't know how to live" (he describes it more in-depth, it's essentially alienation I'd say, he also describes the obsession with sports and numbers and statistics that swept German in the 1920s), and how those seemed more prone to fall for the Nazis. I might look for it and translate a bit just because it'd be on topic for once. I remember how unsettling it was to read that bit, because it reminded me so much of our lost and confused present.

If you know who you are, it's by definition really hard to sell you snake oil for solving the problem of not knowing who you are. You can still be threatened or blackmailed or whatever, but the psyche to order and the staff to accomplish that still always hinges on someone's development having been stunted in some way. In short, I'd claim that while you can find sane people in the ranks of Nazis, for some reason and duration or other, you cannot find a Nazi movement without any insane people in it, and that they provide the initial spark, the backbone and the driving force.

And while Hannah Arendt, whom I adore and respect like no other, wrote this:

> The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.

she also wrote

> When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.

and I would ask, how normal is that really? Maybe it's the norm, maybe it's not super rare, maybe it doesn't raise an eyebrow. But isn't that alienation in a nutshell, to have this membrane of abstraction between the constructed personality on one hand and the real self and the world on the other? Hannah Arendt again:

> If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.

She also pointed out that adults don't have the right to obey. Maybe it's "typical" for people to pretend they have that right is them being obedient to a pathological bigger structure, but that doesn't make themselves not pathological in my eyes. The source of the deformation matters less than the fact of it.

> The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

-- Erich Fromm

Hannah Arendt also wrote this in "Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft", this is my crappy translation:

> Though the propaganda of truth does not convince the normal [square] citizen because it is so terrible, it has the more of an effect on those, which know from the possibilities of their own fantasies, that they would be able to do such a thing, and who for this reason are only too happy to believe the reality of the shown [she is referring to videos and photos from concentration camps]. Suddenly it becomes clear that that which human fantasy for millenia put beyond the realm of human possibilities can really be produced. Hell and Limbo and even a shadow of their eternal duration can be constructed by letting people die for an infinite duration with the most modern methods of destruction and healing. What these types, of which there exist more in any big city than we want to accept, realize when they see these films or read these reports, is that the power of humans is bigger than they wanted to admit, and that hellish fantasies can be realized without the sky falling down.

and from the English version of that book:

> For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.

Do not underestimate the pervasiveness and role of psychopathology. Do not put it all into one big bucket. Anyone could do it, yeah, and losing sight of that and othering is just as dangerous; but not everybody, all the time, regardless of anything.