How were the thousands of perpetrators of the Holocaust able to change their paradigm to view women and children as less than human and how did this affect them psychologically?

Answer 1

This is an interesting and important question. Obviously, I assume that you're talking about perpetrators and victims in general, not only women and children. Most accounts and most studies suggest that the vast majority of those who committed atrocities were NOT psychopaths or even sadists in any strict sense of the word. The overwhelming majority were very ordinary, in many ways boringly ordinary, if this can be said without giving offence. When Adolf Eichmann was put on trial, people expected to see a monster of depravity. Instead, what they saw was a typical middle-ranking bureaucrat, a convinced Nazi, of course, but essentially a very ordinary man. Many people found this deeply shocking. In many ways the man in the dock wasn't that different from neighbours, from friends, or even from us ourselves. Hannah Arendt, who was covering the trial coined the expression 'the banality of evil', which means something like the 'sheer ordinariness of evil people'. For those involved in face-to-face killings and atrocities, significant factors seem to include these: * 1. Group dymanics. So many people desperately want to be 'like everyone else'; they don't want to be different or make themselves conspicuous. This is, of course, servile and conformist, but it's very widespread indeed. * 2. The victims are usually first demonized, portrayed as outsiders, as fiendishly dangerous enemies, as something other than human. In sociology, the term often used for this process is 'othering' - that is, making people appear 'other' and 'different' in a highly negative way. The Eichmann trial inspired some interesting experiments on people's willigness to commit atrocities if (1) ordered to do so by an authority figure and if (2) they were together with people committing the same kinds of atrocities. Obviously, this isn't the whole answer, and I hope that others will add to it. Also, there were some few depraved people involved in committing atrocities, but they were a small minority. The longer term effects on the perpetrators is very hard to assess. Few showed remorse; many went home after the war, got denazification certificates (nicknamed 'Persil coupons') and led very ordinary lives, lied to their kids about 'what Daddy did in the war', and so on.