Dehumanisation marks start of the slide to a holocaust
Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre serves as tribute to the memory of victims and aims to contribute to the prevention of a recurrence of atrocities
There is a pattern to all tragedies such as the Holocaust and similar genocides. An all-too-typical slippery slope starts with an initial malignant mindset followed by a series of steps that follow inevitably. The first step is to dehumanise and demonise people the perpetrator wishes to destroy. In his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen, an associate professor of government and sociology at Harvard University, examines in depth how it was possible for citizens — let alone members of vigilante and paramilitary organisations — to perpetrate unthinkable cruelties on innocent victims. His conclusion is that the perpetrator started by dehumanising and demonising the victims. There is a story told that a little boy was walking with his mother in Munich near the Dachau concentration camp. They saw concentration camp prisoners walking under guard to do slave labour. The little boy asked his mother “who are those people?”, and she replied “they are not people”. Dehumanisati...
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