Special Report Transcript Episode 83, Section 3, Time 32:21

We know what unbelievable mechanisms of repression, of forgetting, of distortion perpetrators use of justification in order not to remember what they have done. When the victims come and tell their stories it reminds, it can remind the perpetrators of what they have done and it is a very difficult confrontation which really …. I admire your process that you’re doing, I think it has never been done before in such a way. We know about processes of amnesty from the South American countries, it wasn’t done on an individual basis. It wasn’t done with names and stories and I think this makes the process here such an amazing process which will be for your coming generation something to learn from, because through these stories they will really know what has happened. At the same time I’m sure it must be also an imperfect process because – and I looked at some of the session and – you look at some of the perpetrators and as they are so occupied with the question of how to get amnesty they don’t really deal with their own feelings and they also don’t deal with the feelings of the victims and some of the victims get very upset with it. So these processes can’t go so fast, they need much more time. You know there are psychological tools which can divide people into different pathologies and we know that some people have this pathology and the other pathology and clearly some small proportion of the perpetrators have these pathologies. I mean, some of them are really sadist. But it’s relatively a very small proportion. I would assume on the basis of what I know from our work with Nazi perpetrators, they might be five percent of them. All the others, there is no psychological test, which could identify ahead of time that these people would become perpetrators. What that actually means that maybe under certain circumstances, with a certain bit of training, with a certain socialization, with a certain infrastructure of ideology, of power structure, almost every one of us could become to some extent a perpetrator. Aspsychologists, especially we became aware with the years that this need to create a character which is a typical perpetrator is too simple an assumption and we have to think about that many of the perpetrators, let’s say the Nazi perpetrators, I interview their children, they were very nice parents to their children. Some of them were very polite people, some of them after the war, trained their children not to lie, not to steal and so on. So this mixture in people, these contradictions in people, people probably are not made out of one thing but have different parts which sometimes don’t fit together. And under such circumstances some part of a person can be led to do such horrible things where other parts may be still functioning within the normal, social setting.

Notes: Dan Bar-On (Post-Holocaust psychologist)

References: there are no references for this transcript