A rumination on the accountability and on the moral-spiritual implications of mass murder perpetration

Rudolf Höss could not redeem himself from his personal history of grotesque and mind-chaoting atrocities by recognizing his submission to hierarchy, and his indoctrination into authoritarian collectivism - the pyres of his victim's ashes were still smoldering as he regretted himself with all the bitterness of the world! A slave of totalitarianism is one insofar as he is, by the same measuring rod, the slave of his own responsibilities. Remember: the perpertrators of the most barbaric and heinous cruelties more often than not evoke authority as their mechanism of personal corruption - because they do not have in themselves the shame to recognize the true and premier of corrupting mechanisms, which is conformity - and not authority. Top-down authoritarian coercion is not a sufficient model for explaining the sickening crimes of the past and of the present; rather, it is my stern opinion that it should be explained fundamentally either by motivations of sheer psychopathic and/or sadistic malevolence, or by the socio-psychological mechanism of conformity; yes, I acknowedge, that sheer authoritarian pressure accounts for a great minority of the acts of malevolence, but it is hardly a foremost and sufficient model of explanatory intepretation in itself. For example, I can tell you that there is not one single documented case of any German military or SS personell during the Final Solution whom faced brutalizing and grievous penance for refusing to execute whomever regarded as subhuman folk. Even more abrasive - an astounding number of these perpertrators were voluntary in their participation of the systemic and industrial extermination of whole peoples. If that does not scare you, you are either insipid, wilfully blind, emotionally crippled, or, as a worst case scenario - all three of them.