(In order to avoid losing your place on this page when viewing a
different link, I would suggest that you right click on that link
with your mouse and select “open in a new tabâ€. Then, when you
have finished reading that link, close the tab and you will return
to where you left off on this page. FWIW!)
Fear can make a person divide against himself in this way. When Franz Stangl was first assigned to oversee a euthanasia clinic for the Nazis, he didn’t want to be involved in the killing. But he was afraid of what he would lose if he didn’t do as he was told. So he took the job and tried to hide from himself what he was doing. Out of fear, he willed to do what he himself didn’t want to do.
Fear of death can get a person to do even worse things than putting the ill and disabled to death. Stangl wound up as the commandant of the notorious death camp Treblinka, where he oversaw the killing of many thousands of men, women, and children, because he was afraid that the Nazis would kill him if he didn’t.
The horrors of that job left Stangl severely alienated from himself...
