10 - Lynch Mobs

Summary

The time has come to address the political dimension of lynch mobs. Were the mobs that attacked defenseless prisoners expressing legitimate (berechtigte Empörung) or extreme (äusserste empörte) indignation, as was claimed in the administrative documents that encouraged or approvingly took note of the assaults? Were they driven by anger (Wut), fury (Zorn), rage (rasende Wut) or even hate and fury (in seinem Hass und in seinem Zorn), as Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, maintained?¹ One must not neglect the scale of destruction visited upon Germany. Over the duration of the war, Germany lost six times as many inhabitants as Britain or France, with a population between 1.5 and 2 times as large.² Once a certain threshold was crossed, a social mathematics proportionally linking the number of deaths under the bombs to a degree of violence may have been set in motion. But this mechanism demands closer study. Until now, there has been no effort to scrutinize the shift from anger to violence against the subaltern agents of destruction. The handful of books and articles that consider the fate of airmen in Germany and Austria present this link as obvious. It is here, however, that any discussion must begin.