"The Schutz Stafel: Introducing ―Blutkitt‖ 

Another organization of violence that employed this idea, that complying with a request to engage in a morally-difficult act produces strong social bonds, was the infamous Schutz Stafel (SS) of Nazi Germany. In fact, in the ranks of the SS, a term was even coined for it, Blutkitt: blood-cement, and it was rumored to have been an explicit feature of Adolf Hitler‘s personal approach to leadership (Alexander, 1948). Robert J. Lifton (1986) theorizes that among the SS doctors serving at Auschwitz, who engaged in terrible killings and experiments, such mutual blooding served to bond the group together tightly, committing the person to their fellow doctors and to the further atrocities entailed in continued service in the camp. In order to conduct their experiments and select people to be killed, the Nazi doctors were required to comply with orders and violate a plethora of norms about what constituted decent conduct. These were no doubt strong internalized social and professional norms that spoke in favor of compassion, against inflicting needless suffering and harm and against following authorities that promote these things. This was Blutkitt, ―direct participation in the group‘s practice of killing‖ (Lifton, 1986, p 432). For low-level recruits, the SS‘s policy of requiring their soldiers to initially serve in the concentration camps was usually sufficient to bloody their consciences enough to bond them to the organization and render them compliant enough to be trusted to commit further atrocities outside the camps (Alexander, 1948) Staff officers of the feared Einsatzgruppen were also rumored to use this technique in bonding soldiers to their units. The Einsatzgruppen were a paramilitary force associated with the SS. Their work was tragic, bloody and extremely personal and they were responsible for the deaths of some 1.5 million men, women and children; the large majority of these being shot face to-face with machine-guns and hand-held firearms (Lifton, 1986). As with the initiation practices of Militias in Africa, one staff officer in particular is quoted as stating that he, ―insisted on principle that all officers and non-commissioned officers‖ that served beneath him ―participate in the executions‖ so that they might ―overcome‖ themselves as he had done (Hennicke, quoted in Hillberg, 1961, p215). Clearly, the Einsatzgruppen were engaged in morally-difficult activities, the resulting internal conflict, the guilt of which was being actively shared as a matter of principle: blood was being used as a social binder. Through these (and again many other) examples, it can be surmised that, in the context of Nazi Germany as with street-gangs and militias, that the perpetration of a morally-difficult act at the command of an authority-figure may be useful in bonding soldiers to their units and commanders and extracting compliance from them. This theorizing is consistent with the thinking of Ernest Becker (1973), who argues that Blutkitt is exploited by leaders to bond others to themselves''.

Michael Richardson