GPT

The Machinery of Evil: Why Societies, Not Monsters, Build Death Camps

It seems necessary to begin by stating the obvious: there is a moral difference between looking at a thing and understanding the system that makes the thing possible. This distinction is both simple and foundational—and yet, somehow, perpetually overlooked in practice. For instance, we can all agree that standing in front of the ruins of a gas chamber, noting its bricks and twisted metalwork, even cataloguing in exquisite detail the machinery used, is an act of historical witness, even reverence. But there is something fundamentally askew about stopping the analysis there, about treating the chamber as if its existence is a natural event—like an earthquake or a meteor strike—rather than the product of a long and collaborative enterprise of social organisation, bureaucratic management, logistical planning, cultural acquiescence, and human evil.

To phrase it another way: If you want to understand why a death camp exists, the individual acts that occur within it are, in a sense, horrifyingly compelling. The less compelling and more urgent question is what happens outside of it, far away from its walls—the factories making the gas, the railways bringing the victims, the clerks stamping the papers, the politicians giving the orders, the civilians nodding their indifferent assent or deliberate approval. To discuss the chamber as if it is a problem in isolation—a discrete event of cruelty—is to misunderstand the entire nature of the moral catastrophe it represents.

But this is precisely what many of us, consciously or unconsciously, tend to do when we confront history’s darkest moments.

On the Pathological Allure of the Individual Case

Part of the problem is human nature, or at least how we are conditioned to perceive morality. We are instinctively drawn to individual suffering. A specific victim, with a face and a name, elicits a kind of visceral emotional response. We can imagine their terror, their helplessness, and the moment when their breath failed. This kind of imaginative empathy is, of course, necessary and good. But it is also, ironically, a trap. The more narrowly we focus on the individual—the terrified person in the chamber—the more we risk obscuring the context and the collective mechanisms of horror.

There is a certain sick brilliance to the design of death camps: they function precisely because the system diffuses responsibility so widely that no one person need feel the full weight of moral guilt. The guards on the railway cars can tell themselves they did not build the chambers; the chemists who developed the gas can say they never pushed the buttons. Bureaucrats, engineers, guards, and civilians alike participate in an industrial process of murder that allows for plausible deniability and personal innocence at every step.

And here’s where the real moral inversion happens—and where we, as a society, are complicit in perpetuating it. By fixating on individual villains or martyrs, we allow the machine of atrocity to recede into the background. We pretend that if we can only name and punish enough perpetrators—or, conversely, mourn enough victims—we have done the necessary moral work. We have not.

On the Comfort of Familiar Narratives (and the Inconvenience of Systems)

Stories are easier to tell than systems are to explain. We are narrative creatures by default, which means we prefer to frame moral questions in terms of heroes and villains, victims and perpetrators, courage and cowardice. And, to be clear, there are heroes and villains, victims and perpetrators. But the simplicity of this framing is also its limitation. Systems are complex, boring, full of abstract structures and banal mechanics. Systems are not cinematic.

It is much simpler, for example, to condemn a single sadistic camp commandant than to grapple with the larger, more insidious question of how a society builds and tolerates a structure of genocide. The latter requires analysis of economic interests, national mythologies, legal frameworks, cultural biases, propaganda techniques, educational failures, and—perhaps most uncomfortably—the ways in which ordinary people become willing collaborators in extraordinary evil. These factors are interconnected, diffuse, and deeply embedded within the fabric of collective life. They are the necessary conditions without which the gas chamber cannot exist.

Why This Matters 

The moral urgency of shifting our gaze from individuals to systems is not an abstract philosophical point. It has immediate, real-world implications for how we respond to present and future atrocities. Consider how the language we use today around mass suffering often mirrors the same rhetorical traps we fell into in the past. We lament the rise of extremist violence as if it is the result of a few bad actors, failing to interrogate the broader sociopolitical forces that incubate extremism. We are quick to condemn individual acts of brutality by police officers while remaining far less willing to dismantle the institutional frameworks that enable systemic violence.

This is not a call for less empathy but for better empathy—an empathy that expands outward to encompass the structural and systemic, not just the personal. It is harder, yes. It is less emotionally gratifying. But it is also the only way to do justice to the full moral weight of human atrocity.

The Hard Part (That We Would Prefer Not to Think About)

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the societies that produce death camps do not necessarily appear monstrous to themselves. They appear normal. Comfortable. Even humane, in a self-justifying way. People go to work, raise families, make art, and pay taxes. The trains run on time. The paperwork gets filed. The machinery of mass murder is woven into the same social fabric that produces birthday parties and Saturday markets. And unless we are willing to confront this fact—to admit that the most horrifying things grow from the ordinary soil of human complacency and conformity—we will continue to miss the real lessons of history.

Conclusion: Stop Looking at the Gas Chamber

This, then, is the thesis: Stop looking inside the gas chamber. Stop analysing the architecture of atrocity as if it exists in isolation. Look outward instead. Ask how the death camp came to be. Ask how the machine was built, who profited from its construction, who maintained it, and—most of all—who looked away. Ask what systems and assumptions made it not just possible but inevitable. We do not honour the dead by merely cataloguing their deaths. We honour them by dismantling the world that killed them—and by recognising that the seeds of that world are always closer than we would like to admit.