Historical background:
In 1941 Germany, Einsatzgruppen commanders warned Himmler that mass shootings were breaking their men. The men who carried out the executions suffered elevated rates of suicide, alcoholism, and breakdown, and Rudolf Höss recalled that many could not endure the killing and took their own lives.
Historian Christopher Browning documents how this psychological toll, along with manpower and secrecy problems, pushed the regime toward gas vans and then death camps.
The Nazis choose death camps because it was a final solution that would also help reduce the suicide rate of their elite shock troops.
The camps did not cure the damage. They just put distance, bureaucracy, and euphemism between the killers and their victims.
The lesson is that dehumanization is not something you do only to others. You have to suppress your own empathy to do it, and that suppression never switches off cleanly. You always end up dehumanizing yourself in the end.
A regime built on fascism and hate must keep spending resources on propaganda, euphemism, and enforcement just to keep its own people functional, which is one reason these systems run hot and brittle.
Often times it’s why fascist regimes collapse under their own weight. It’s hard to force all the people to be evil all the time as a group.
The inhuman requirement to mechanize cruelty demands the impossible from human psychology.
When two IDF soldiers took their own lives in Gaza after refusing or absorbing the horrific reality of their operations, they demonstrated that no modern military apparatus can fully insulate a soldier's mind from the self-destructive weight of ongoing dehumanization.