The Inhumanity Of Evil In Antelme's The Human Race

Throughout the book of The Human Race, Antelme stresses the importance of only having one race which is the human race. These SS soldiers who committed atrocious acts were, as Antelme described, “only men like ourselves”. The SS soldiers may have resembled animals or devils, but in the end he acknowledges that they are human. Although he does not specifically mention the banality of evil, he raises the question of the SS soldiers doing evil that is normalized in society. However, in this specific passage Antelme discusses the idea of the human race. He states in prior passages that the SS conducted the mass killings not because of the inhumanity of the prisoners but because they saw humanity in them. Arendt does something similar with Eichmann, while others say he is the epitome of a monster, Arendt is stuck between his monstrous acts and his average behavior. Her conclusions
Between Antelme and Arendt, they both acknowledge that humans who commit evil are just humans. A perfect example that would support both Antelme’s and Arendt’s claim would be the Stanford Prison Experiment. In this experiment, students were assigned the roles of a prison guard or prisoner all by a random flip of a coin. No one was told what to do or say, it was all secretly recorded by the psychologists. The prisoners were identified as numbers and had gone through a number of humiliating routines each day (i.e shaving head was to minimize one’s individuality). The guards were feeling out their new roles and were not yet sure how to assert authority over their prisoners. Push-ups were a common form of physical punishment that imposed by the guards to punish those who display improper attitudes toward the guards or those who do not follow the rules. In Nazi concentration camps, this was also a common form of punishment. The more the study continued the more the guards acted aggressive and displayed similar actions to those of the SS soldiers in the