What the most macabre case studies in psychology tell us about the minds of war criminals
Radovan Karadzic, convicted of genocide during the Bosnian war, says he was a ‘friend to the Muslims’
By Tim Townsend
The conviction of Radovan Karadzic brought an end to the most important war crimes trial in Europe since World War II. It also contributed to one of the most macabre set of case studies in psychology. It’s been 70 years since the Nazi trials in Nuremberg, the first time the world leveled war crimes charges against individuals. Each war crimes trial since has provided a chance to study the minds of the men who direct mass murder.
When the world holds you responsible for annihilating thousands of your fellow human beings, it must prompt some introspection. If so, such reflection doesn’t seem to lead to remorse. In courtrooms from to Rwanda to Guatemala to the Hague excuses have been common, regret less so. In fact, the history of war crimes trials has yet to produce a single case in which a leading actor in a genocide exhibited what observers felt was sincere remorse. War criminals manage to justify their atrocities instead as acts of love for their own people.
Karadzic fits this pattern. The charges against the former Bosnian Serb leader included overseeing Europe’s worst mass murder since the Holocaust, the 1995 massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica. “I really was a true friend to the Muslims,” he told the court before his conviction. “I know of no one in the Serb leadership who wanted to harm Muslims or Croats.” During his defense, Karadzic portrayed himself “as a man of peace who was driven solely by his desire to protect Serbs.”
That sounded a lot like the words uttered in Nuremberg on August 31, 1946 by Hermann Goering, Hitler’s deputy: “I deny most emphatically that my actions were dictated by the desire to subjugate foreign peoples by wars, to murder them, to rob them, or to enslave them, or to commit atrocities or crimes.” Goering said he’d been motivated by “my ardent love for my people, [Germany’s] happiness, its freedom, its life.”
Most of Goering’s co-defendants gave similar reasons for their actions: a devotion to Hitler, a love of country, a desire to follow orders. A few, though, came close to guilt or remorse. Before the trial, Hitler’s former top general, Wilhelm Keitel, had contemplated taking full blame for his actions. Goering instructed him not to break ranks, and in court Keitel denied knowing anything about Nazi atrocities. But in his final statement to the court Keitel said he’d rather die than repeat what he had done. “I was not in a position to prevent what ought to have been prevented,” he said. “That is my guilt.”
Another Nazi who came close to remorse — but didn’t quite get there — was Hans Frank, the former governor general of Poland. Frank was known as “the butcher of Krakow” for the number of Poles he sent to death camps. His attorney had asked him in court if he’d participated in “the annihilation of the Jews.” Frank replied that he had. “A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased,” he said. Yet months later, in his final statement to the court, Frank took it all back, saying the “tremendous mass crimes” perpetrated against Germany by Russians, Poles and Czechs essentially canceled out his own country’s crimes and, by extension, his.
There has been at least one clear expression of remorse from a war criminal, but not one that his countrymen believed. Kaing Guek Eav was the former commandant of a Khmer Rouge prison in Cambodia. In 2009, he told a court that between 1975 and 1979, when Pol Pot’s communist regime killed a quarter of Cambodia’s population, he was “solely and individually responsible for the loss of at least 12,380 lives.” In a later national TV broadcast, he expressed what he called his “excruciating remorse” and asked to meet his victims’ families to apologize. But most Cambodians thought the apology came of as cold and rehearsed. They didn’t believe he was sincere.
“In trivial matters as well as grave ones, we’re good at deceiving ourselves about the degree of responsibility we take for something by making ourselves look better in own eyes than we ought to,” said David Livingstone Smith, a professor of philosophy at the University of New England and the author of Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others.
An appeal to duty is one way genocide defendants justify their actions and distance themselves from their crimes. “That’s often regarded as disingenuous, but I don’t think it always is,” Smith said. “Genocide tends to be a highly moralistic activity. People believe they are saving the world from evil and that they have a supreme duty to do that, which overrides everything else.”
