His experiences in Buchenwald and Dachau, horrible though they no doubt were, also provided Bettelheim with grounds for further inventions, distortions, and exaggerations that formed the basis of his wide acceptance as an authority on the Holocaust and on the Jews role in their own destruction. He boasted of having been imprisoned because he was a member of the anti-Nazi resistance in Austria (no evidence). For all his claims of superiority to what he described as the general run of Jews who meekly submitted to being incarcerated by the Nazis, evidence shows that he offered no resistance when he was pushed into the railroad car. As anyone as well-connected as Bettelheim might have done, he managed to get money to bribe the guards and secure himself relatively safe and sheltered job assignments; a prominently placed American woman used her influence and ultimately got him released from the camps (he was later to claim that it was none other than Eleanor Roosevelt who secured his release).
In 1943 Bettelheim published "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations," a psychological study of concentration camp inmate behavior and attitudes that shocked a world that knew little about the camps and was not likely to question Bettelheims methods, theories, or conclusions. His claim to have lived in five barracks in ten and a half months and to have known personally fifteen hundred inmates, implausible as it may sound now, evidently convinced a stunned public that his evaluation was definitive. This article was reprinted in several of Bettelheims books and served as the basis of his lifelong reputation as an expert on the camps. In Pollaks judgment, it is "full of questionable generalities, invented research, glib psychology, and a good deal of fiction."
Bettelheim never acknowledged or referred to the work of other survivors whose observations and conclusions differed from his own, and as the years went by he increasingly revealed himself as an angry anti-Semite. In a speech to Jewish students, Bettelheim posed the question "Anti-Semitism, whose fault is it?" and answered it himself. Pointing a finger at the audience, he shouted "Yours! . . . Because you dont assimilate, it is your fault. If you assimilated, there would be no anti-Semitism. Why dont you assimilate?" On a more theoretical level, Bettelheim wrote that to comprehend anti-Semitism "one must concentrate as much on the study of the Jew as on the study of the anti-Semite. The complementary character of their respective roles makes it apparent that the phenomenon is an interlocking of pathological interpersonal strivings."
