My grandmother was going through her sock drawer after my grandfather passed away and found a small case full of medals that my grandfather had brought back from WW2. He served in the European Theatre as a tank commander in the 43rd Tank Battalion, 12th Armored Division. I would like to know if anyone could help me identify these medals. Thank you

Welcome to a belated Monday Methods – our bi-weekly feature where we discuss, explain, and explore historical methods, historiography, and theoretical frameworks concerning history.

“The children will go bathing” is what the Nazi officer said to Dounia W. after she arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau with her two kids in 1943. Her children did not go bathing. Instead, they were forced together with other children and old people into the gas chamber, where they died a gruesome death. Dounia, on the other hand, was brought into the camp as a forced laborer. Because she spoke Polish, Russian, and German, she was able to survive as a translator and tell the story, of how she was separated from her children and how she realized she would never see them again, at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial after the war.

Sessions of this and similar trials are full examples like this, which is one of many such stories historians of Nazi Germany and other eras in history encounter regularly in their work. The cruelty of both individuals and regimes that forcibly separate children from their parents, detain and imprison people they regard as "alien" or "unworthy" under horrible circumstances, force people into slavery, and commit atrocities and genocide.

“Is such a thing possible today?” and “How was it possible back then?” are frequent questions, and the answer for the historian both regarding the cruelty of individuals and the cruelty of state policy often lies in larger social and political processes, rather than solely individuals, psychopathology or something similar. The descend into cruelty and abhorrent deeds is one that in almost all historical situations is not caused by one individual's personal cruelty but by a socially and political accepted mindset of necessity and acceptance of cruelty.

A central tenet of historians dealing with cruelty is that there is always a larger social, ideological, and political dimension to it.

Nazi Germany will be the example I use but the same methods and ideas can be applied to other eras and examples in history and since the early ‘90s, historiography has shifted focus strongly to the perpetrators and their motives for killing and cruelty. Christopher Browning is one such prominent example, but another researcher who has had a large impact in studying this topic is the social-psychologist Harald Welzer.

“Abolish certain established rationalities and establish new ones” is how Welzer describes one of the most central processes pursued by the Nazi regime. Exploring the issue in his book “Täter. Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden” (Perpetrators. How normal people become Massmurderers), he starts off with the psychological evaluations of the main perpetrators indicted in Nuremberg. These tests by the official court psychologists as well as further studies undertaken by George Kren and Leon Rappoport (who evaluated SS-members) could not find a higher percentage of psychopaths and sociopaths among the perpetrators of the Holocaust than are usually assumed to be in any general population. These men weren't psychologically abnormal. Their process of justification was rather quite "rational" in a sense.

“Ice cold killers brought to explain their deeds, assumed that their actions were plausible – as plausible in fact as they had been in 1941 and onward when they killed thousands of people”, describes Welzer. They were able to integrate mass killing and other horrible deeds into their perception of normality. They had been able to make these actions part of their normative orientation, their values, and what they identified as acceptable in interpersonal interactions.

In his explanations for why this was possible, Welzer uses Erving Goffman's concept of frame analysis as way to explain individual actions. Goffman's idea holds that an individual tries to principally act in a way that's right, meaning that they want to emerge from a situation according to their perceptions and interpretations if possible without damage and with a certain profit. What influences their perception of what constitutes "right", "no damage" and so forth is however something that depends on the framing of the actions and the situations. These frames are the connecting nodes between larger ideas and concrete actions; they contain ideas about how the world works, how humans are, and what one can do and must not do. In that they are similar to Bourdieu's Habitus term and they are deeply influenced by our surroundings. Examples for such frames could be the kind of upbringing a person has enjoyed, f.ex. if they grew up in a religious household. Other such frames can stem from the education an individual enjoyed, but crucially, frames of reference for our behavior are formed and provided by the society and the institutions around us. Welzer uses the example of a surgeon to exemplify this: A surgeon is a person who, speaking on some level, horribly injures another person. They literally cut another person open with a very sharp knife. That an individual surgeon is able to do what they do and often use it as a point of pride is because they can rationalize and legitimize their actions with their outcome – lives being saved – and through their social framing. Cutting another person open with a sharp knife is what the surgeon is employed for – how the institution they work in frames their actions. This is why the surgeon can act with what Wlezer calls "professional detachment", meaning that they are on a psychological level able to detach themselves from the full reality of cutting another person open with a sharp knife and instead frame it as a step necessary to save a life.

Despite the vast gulf between a surgeon and a Nazi perpetrator, the underlying processes and the effects of framing work similarly: Countless recorded conversations between German soldiers in Allied POW camps reveal that these soldiers thought about their cruel deeds in similar ways: Tearing families apart, rape, killing hundreds of people, shipping people into camps and putting them in barracks and cages – they regarded these actions as legitimate. The frames they referenced were the necessity for security threatened by Jews and Partisans, their orders, flimsy legal justifications, standing with their comrades-in-arms.

In the protocols of a certain Feldwebel (Sergent) S., who was stationed first in the Soviet Union and then in France, S. argued that the Wehrmacht does have a “legal right of revenge” against the civilian population in case of Germans dying. S. sitting in Fort Hunt as POW explains his thinking to his comrades:

Partisans need to be mowed down like every warfaring power has ever done. This is the law! We can only act energetically. (...) I have sworn myself, if we ever occupy France again, we must kill every male Frenchman between 14 and 60. Everyone of them I'll come across, I'll shot. That's what I am doing and that's what everyone of us should do.

His friends agreed.

From the exchange between between the soldier Friedrich Held and Obergefreiter Walter Langfeld about the topic of anti-Partisan warfare:

H: Against Partisans, it is different. There, you look front and get shot in the back and then you turn around and get shot from the side. There simply is no Front.

L: Yes, that's terrible. [...] But we did give them hell ["Wir haben sie ganz schön zur Sau gemacht"],

H: Yeah, but we didn't get any. At most, we got their collaborators, the real Partisans, they shot themselves before they were captures. The collaborators, those we interrogated.

L: But they too didn't get away alive.

H: Naturally. And when they captured one of ours, they killed him too.

L: You can't expect anything different. It's the usual [Wurscht ist Wurscht]

H: But they were no soldiers but civilians.

L: They fought for their homeland.

H: But they were so deceitful...

The framing is clear here: The distinction between civilians and partisans is basically a moot point because of the deceitfulness of both of them and because they belong to a group that has been painted as en gros dangerous. That's how people like Held, Langfeld, and so many others could justify shooting women and children – the group they belonged to was dangerous by itself. “That people weren't equal was evident to them”, as Welzer writes.

Welzer further describes that Nazism even managed to incorporate an individual's struggle with their deeds into their frame of reference. They knew that what they were doing was immoral on some level but it was framed in a way where an individual who struggled with what they had to do and did it anyway was perceived as a "real man" because he would put the good of the people's community over his own feelings. Hence, when Himmler describes the Holocaust in his Posen speech, he highlights that despite the hard mission that had been given to them by history, they had always remained civilized (anständig). This is a particular nefarious aspect of these mechanism of ideological framing: Wherein overcoming doubt in the face of cruel acts becomes a virtue.

The transformation of a collective of individual's frame of reference doesn't happen overnight and encompasses a social process that is ideologically and politically driven.