Deadening Their Consciences
Historical Account★★★★In his book Hitler’s Cross, Erwin W. Lutzer gives chilling details about the training of the dreaded SS troops in Nazi Germany. The head of the SS was Heinrich Himmler, who was faced with the problem of how to take decent young German men and deaden their consciences so that they would be willing to perform ghastly deeds of cruelty. Both Hitler and Himmler believed that each of the SS troops had to perform some deed that violated their conscience and sense of decency.
Only when they did what others found f() be reprehensible would they break away from their old values. The conscience had w be deadened through these acts of barbarism; that would serve the dual purpose of cutting the recruit off from his past ties, his family and friends, and of bonding him w his new peers and his leader. The break would be so complete that he could never go back. An act of torture or murder would unite him with blood brothers who had crossed the same line, felt the same numbness, and sworn themselves w uphold the same cause.
The Nazis proved that ordinary people, if controlled with ngid discipline and the power of mass psychology, can be induced w carry out the most brutal and destructive crime the human mind can devise. The troops could say with Hermann Goering, “I have no conscience! Adolf Hitler is my consciencef 111 1 Erwin W. Lutzer, Hitler’s Cross (Chicago: Moody Press, 1995), 92-94.
The point
This historical illustration from Hitler's Cross describes how Heinrich Himmler deliberately trained SS troops to deaden their consciences through acts of brutality, severing them from their past and binding them to their new group. It serves as a sobering example of how conscience can be seared and moral values overwhelmed.