I am interested in the psychology of the peoples who carried out genocide/massacres for Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin and likekind.

How exactly were these ordinary people convinced to commit such horrible acts? The nazis who had blisters on their trigger fingers from executing so many. The khmer smashing babies against a tree. The red army raping every woman and girl that moved. I do not consider the Stanley Milgram experiment relevant to this as it was conducted blind. Some people believe it all comes down to exposure, the perpetrator of these acts were desensitised to it because of their experiences in the time prior. I think conditioning plays a small role, if conditioning was the majority we could take any ordinary person, train them, have them shooting thousands of babies per day in a year. I don't believe empathy can be suppressed like that. Even if these people were extremely fanatical and true believers, everyone has doubts and time increases potential of doubt. How many unarmed people could you execute before you start to question what you're doing? Even as a camp guard, seeing people decay and die, walking around like zombies, or worked to death, fingers dropping off from frostbite, no longer viable labor so execute. You can't just block your empathy even slaughterhouse workers who have been processing animals for years give it up because of regret, and most people see the life of a human and an animal as very different. I am sure there is a constant fear in the perpetrators, "better them than me", this would be used to justify continuing to follow instructions. I would have thought the mental load would be so great that the physical symptoms of stress would manifest.

If some highIQ/psychology major wants to effort post a reply that would be appreciated.