Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations: Bruno Bettelheim. J. of Abnormal and Social Psychology, XXXVIII, 1943, pp. 417–452.

Mass behavior today in the United States and elsewhere is conditioned by factors such as the broadcast media as well as traditional institutional agents of socialization. Mass panics and political thought control are norms. Even in Anchorage Alaska Elton John songs are played nowadays profusely as socialization tools of homosexual political militancy- sometimes on two stations simultaneously. Political incursions into public thought conditioning are perennial in the modern world. It is useful to learn of experiences by former inmates of concentration camps in order to discover how powerful controllers affect subjective perceptions.

The Nazi S.A. was one agency of adverse socialization applying negative reinforcement. Even in the Balkans and Greece tens of thousands of children were starved to by the Nazi power. Cycles of war, revolt, and revenge with common human atrocities were elements of Balkan history. Often the Great Political Powers enabled local insurrections against rivals controlled by other Great Powers. In North Africa today, the United States must be cautious about giving false hope to the rebels that might forestall on military organization of resistance believing that the U.S. warplanes may come to send Dictator Khadafy back to the Stone Age.

Quote from 'an abstract by Martin Grotjahn of Bettleheim's article.

"The author, who has spent one year in two German concentration camps for political prisoners—Dachau and Buchenwald—reports his psychological observations. He stresses the fact that his observations are to a certain extent based on self-observation and thus subjective in character. They were actually started as a diversion to enable the author to bear his experience.

The aims of the concentration camp as an institution are to break the prisoners as individuals, to spread terror among the rest of the population, and to provide the Gestapo with a training ground and an experimental laboratory. In most cases, the shock of unlawful imprisonment is followed by the even more stunning shocks of transportation to the camp and the first experiences there. Nonpolitical, middle class prisoners experience comparatively more suffering than either politically oriented prisoners or members of the upper classes. The typical initial reactions are feelings of detachment: 'this can't be true … things like this just don't happen'.
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