All language subtitles for Anatomy of Evil (2019) BluRay ENG SUB 1080p

Evil can't be seen.

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By the time it is recognized,

it's already too late.

The motives for evil are as diverse as its manifestations

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and they can often be monstrous.

So, are evil people sick or monsters?

It's not only sick people

who commit evil deeds.

I would even say that they are in the minority.

So, what is evil?

What role does aggression play?

Is it the accelerant for a destructive force

that has always lain dormant in each and every one of us?

I don't think that evil behavior as such

actually exists.

In this respect, we need to rethink a little.

But what controls our behavior?

How free is our will?

What role do our genes and our environment play?

What course must our biography take

for evil to break through?

(suspenseful music)

Does the life of a perpetrator provide explanations

as to why a young man killed 77 people?

(lively music)

The deed doesn't justify talk

of a perpetrator development,

but we can learn a great deal from Mr. Breivik,

we just have to understand what.

Norway, July 22nd, 2011.

In the government quarter in the capital Oslo

a bomb exploded killing eight people.

It was the horrific start to a day of mass murder,

which cost a further 96 lives on the island of Utoya.

The tragedy shook the little country

to its very foundations.

The perpetrator was 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik.

He saw himself as a crusader,

as the messenger of an ideology

which he hoped to spread worldwide.

Breivik wanted to attract maximum attention.

(gentle music)

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

This need included media coverage

because it was vital to him to become, in a certain way,

a shining light of history.

And to be honest,

we must say that Mr. Breivik has gone down

in the annals of criminal history,

that is why he is not anonymized in reports.

We all know his name,

and the media, of course,

were an important instrument for him.

As an expert,

Nahlah Saimeh answers the questions of how far indeed,

if at all,

a perpetrator can be made responsible for his actions.

The focus is always on the legal evaluation of the facts,

but it's also about assessing the special features of a case

to obtain general knowledge about evil.

(gentle music)

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

In exemplary fashion,

Breivik reveals the basic conditions

for a pathologically excessive

and highly destructive narcissism

with the aim, so to speak, of come completing history.

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

From the life,

the personal biography of an outsider.

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

If someone recounts the story

of a perpetrator's life,

does that not make them his tool?

A man in Norway killed 77 people.

It seems hard to me not to talk about that.

Mass murder as the inevitable result

of biographical failure?

An explanation of such simplicity would not deal justly

with the crime or the victims.

Yet the different stages in the development of a human life

contain a hoard of events

which scientists are striving to recover.

(gentle music)

69-year-old Daniel Zagury is a criminologist,

forensic psychiatrist, and author.

He began his career as a court expert.

In France he progressed to become an expert on terrorism.

He often encounters evil in the garb

of seemingly normal behavior.

We all intuitively think

that the most appalling crimes are committed

by the mentally ill,

by massive psychos,

by monsters,

but reality shows that those involved in terrorism,

genocide, and many other crimes are quite ordinary people

who in the broadest sense of the word are perfectly normal

and certainly don't have any mental defects.

(Daniel speaking foreign language)

Anders Breivik was born in 1979,

his parents separated not long afterwards,

and he was brought up by his mother.

Theirs was a difficult relationship right from the start.

(soft music)

What is interesting

about Breivik's childhood

is that it involves a transgenerational problem.

Because even Anders Breivik's mother

was rejected as a child.

Her mother suffered from polio,

and vented all her rage, disappointment,

and despair on her daughter.

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

So Breivik's mother herself had never experienced acceptance

or love and kindness in a family scenario.

Yet this woman later became pregnant.

Breivik's mother complained about the child

while she was still carrying it

and even considered an abortion.

Anders Breivik actually came into the world

as an unwanted child.

His mother rejected him,

but as an infant, of course,

that is not something you can comprehend.

You are directly dependent for affection

on the primary attachment figure in your life.

The boy grew up with his mother.

Outwardly he lived in a protected environment,

but behind the middle class facade,

chaos prevailed.

The mother couldn't cope

and wanted to give Anders up for adoption.

He then spent the weekends with foster parents

until his mother put a stop to it.

The rejection motif was to be repeated throughout his life.

We have to be careful

not to reconstruct things in retrospect.

After a crime has been committed,

it is always easy to say that the deed can be traced back

to this or that event in the perpetrator's life.

I can, for instance, talk about my experiences

with serial killers.

It's extremely rare,

indeed almost impossible for a future serial killer,

to have grown up in a home with a fire in the grate

and lots of hugs and kisses from his mother and father.

(soft music)

So, what role does childhood play?

What is determined biologically?

What is genetically inherited?

For a long time,

the suspicion prevailed that evil lies in our genes,

a case of unchangeable information,

a kind of genetic predisposition in other words.

We know today that it's not only of interest

which gene or genetic variation of a person

has in their body,

what really matters is whether this gene is active

or inactive.

(Eva speaking foreign language)

But what does active or inactive actually mean?

It's here that a young signs called epigenetics

comes into play.

It involves molecular mechanisms

which read our genes with varying intensity.

So, does this mean that evil has nothing to do at all

with the genes themselves?

(Eva speaking foreign language)

It could well be

that we carry a certain set of risk genes within us,

but that doesn't mean

that these genes really will come into play

because they may not all be active

at a certain point in time.

(Eva speaking foreign language)

In the field of epigenetics,

we are focusing on the question

of whether there are any environmental factors

that could influence these genes.

Eva Unternahrer works together with Anke Kobach.

They know that traumatic experiences

influence genetic activity,

but that's not the only finding

epigenetics has come up with.

The big question is,

how do certain experiences burn themselves

into our epigenetic memory?

Indeed, is there any such thing as an epigenetic memory?

And if so,

can we change it by means of therapeutic measures?

It was long assumed

that a child is only influenced by its environment

after it's born.

Today we know that influences

which co-determine how genes are activated

already have an effect on an unborn child.

Everything we have learned

about the pregnancy phase

indicates that it is extremely important

with regard to how our stress axis is constructed,

and if the mother experiences more stress during pregnancy,

to a certain degree,

this is also transmitted to the child.

A person's genotype is determined

when fertilization takes place.

However, during pregnancy,

it is completely erased and then reactivated.

This complex process shapes our character

and our later behavior.

How our genetic stamp becomes active seems to be dependent

on our living conditions.

(Eva speaking foreign language)

There might, for example, be certain toxins

that can specifically switch particular genes on and off,

and it could also be the case

that emotional neglect in childhood

changes a whole raft of genes.

What's also certain

is that no one comes into this world a perpetrator.

(Anke speaking foreign language)

What's also really important to know

is that no single event which happens during pregnancy

can make a person an evil perpetrator

or a victim in the course of their life.

(Anke speaking foreign language)

Anders Breivik was four

when his mother moved into a new apartment with him

and his half sister.

It was a friendly environment with lots of children,

but Anders mother still couldn't cope.

She turned, once again, to the Youth Welfare Office

to find a foster family for Anders.

His preschool teachers were worried about the boy,

disgracefully aggressive was one comment.

They also said that he had no friends,

yet couldn't amuse himself.

Other children claimed that Anders mistreated animals

and other children as well.

The Youth Welfare Office thought that the family's problems

should be placed in the hands of a psychiatrist.

Six years his elder,

the boy's half sister left the family at an early age

and now lives abroad.

At first, I think,

Breivik's sister looked after him,

but at some point of course,

she had her own life to live and left the family.

That's only natural

and there is no way

that full responsibility for running the family

can be placed on the sister's shoulders.

In those initial years,

I think she played a relatively substantial role,

especially when the mother was unable

to take care of her family

because of her own psychological problems.

In 1983,

the family was examined for several weeks

in the psychiatric center in Oslo.

Doctors found that the mother was suffering

from a borderline personality disorder

in combination with angst and depression.

They found that her attitude towards her son was erratic,

that she lived in her own world,

and that she was unable to think clearly

in stress situations.

"I wish you were dead," she once screamed at her son.

Doctors recommended that Anders be placed

in the care of a foster family,

but his mother put a massive resistance

to the withdrawal of custody.

She hired a lawyer.

Against all expert advice,

the Youth Welfare Office dropped the case.

I think the boy should have been taken

out of the family and most resolutely

and the authorities should have ensured

that the new setting would have enabled a bond to develop.

According to experts,

childhood is one of the most important building blocks

in a person's biography,

it is here that the basis for our further life is created.

So, are these the years that can turn someone into a killer?

(suspenseful music)

If I systematically signal to a child

that it is bad,

then that will become its perception of itself.

But you cannot say this will make it develop

into a perpetrator.

What it does show, however,

is disaster does not arise of its own accord.

Virtually all serial killers

have experienced disastrous developments in childhood,

but what is the distinction here between cause and effect?

From the mid-1980s on,

Leszek Pekalski probably murdered more than 80 people.

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

The aim through the act of killing

is to gain a feeling of self-affirmation

and to recreate the experience of being worthless

in someone else.

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

When I kill them,

my victims have no value,

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

so it's no different from me squashing a fly

against the wall.

Pekalski's mother became pregnant with her son

after being raped.

He grew up in the Polish countryside.

Despised herself as the bride of Satan,

Leszek's mother rejected her son.

In the village where they lived,

he was only ever referred to as the bastard.

His mother put the boy in a home

and disappeared from his life.

We have seen that these people

either continue to idealize their mother

or they neutralize the image they have of her.

Despite all the incidences of abuse, rejection, torment,

and all the other brutal things you can think of,

they continue to idealize her.

But it seems as if all the murders

are a form of transferred matricide,

even though at the same time the killer adheres

to this idealization and neutralization

of the maternal image.

After four years in a home,

Leszek Pekalski returned to his village

to live with his grandmother, who tormented him,

and his sister,

pressing their hands on the hot plate in the kitchen

for the slightest misdemeanor.

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

The grandmother's approach to upbringing

can only be described as sadistic.

I have known several cases in which this problem

of an unwanted birth played a role.

It is relatively certain that anyone growing up

in such circumstances

will not turn out to be a great feminist.

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

They are more likely to end up

like Jack Unterweger

who murdered at least 10 women.

Young Jack grew up in his grandfather's house

in the countryside in the Austrian province of Carinthia.

The man was a brutal drunkard and cattle thief.

Jack never met his father who was an American soldier.

His mother was a prostitute who disappeared from his life

when she was sent to prison.

Living with his grandfather,

Jack went to seed physically,

but above all mentally.

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

That is the foundation

for deep emotional brutalization

coupled with a very early stamp of a negative view of women,

because basically women are whores.

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

And this imputation only works

if you have an extremely patriarchal view of society.

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

Leszek Pekalski and Jack Unterweger,

two brutal killers with childhood biographies

characterized by abuse and a lack of emotional support.

Such childhood experiences

don't automatically make someone a killer,

however they do constitute the basis

of a destructive development.

(Daniel speaking foreign language)

When I was young, I worked in a prison.

Statistically it is not the sort of place

where you'll find people who grow up in a carefree

and loving environment.

So from a statistical point of view at least,

education and emotional conditions play an important role

in early childhood.

(Daniel speaking foreign language)

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

When we are loved and cared for

when we are caressed and fed,

when we received positive emotional signals

in this emotional resonance phenomenon,

biologically we are talking about the release of oxytocin.

We learn that we are someone who is loved

and is a good person and that we are wanted.

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

But why do some people develop into perpetrators

while others who have grown up

in similar circumstances don't?

What impact do certain factors have

on the criminal development of a person's biography?

There are certainly some people,

who even under the most extreme stress,

do not change their personality to such a degree

that they become aggressive and criminal.

At the Max Planck Institute

of Experimental Medicine in Gottingen, Germany,

Professor Ehrenreich and her team are carrying out research

into the impact of environmental factors

in childhood and adolescents.

For the first time, it has now been proven statistically

that an accumulation of risk factors can contribute

to violence and criminality being displayed as an adult.

The team focused its research on urbanicity,

physical and sexual abuse,

migration, and drug consumption.

In my opinion,

one extremely important discovery is that basically

even risk factors are interchangeable.

In other words,

we can concoct any cocktail

irrespective of whether it is a combination

of birth trauma, migration, cannabis,

psychotrauma, sexual abuse, and alcohol.

(Ehrenreich speaking foreign language)

It makes no difference which ingredients

are in our cocktail.

The result is an extremely enhanced risk

of someone reacting with aggression and criminality

as an adult.

(Ehrenreich speaking foreign language)

If three of those five factors are applicable,

the probability increases to up to 50%.

It plays a major role

if this impact occurs before the age of 17,

because up to then, the brain is highly vulnerable

in its development.

I think it is extremely important

to transfer this information

and say that if a person reveals one, two,

or three of these risk factors,

irrespective of what they are,

then we must be on our guard

and think about how we can intercept the consequences.

In Anders Breivik's case,

nobody intercepted any consequences.

In Oslo at the age of 13,

he embarked on a career as a sprayer and tagger.

He wanted to belong.

In those early teenage years,

it was already clear what would characterize his life

up to his crime.

He wanted to play with the big boys,

not only to be in the group,

but also one of its leaders.

Actually, he was always an outsider.

He always made every attempt to join a group,

but most people noticed

that there was something strange about him

and didn't want anything to do with him.

To some extent, they didn't take him seriously

or they even found him spooky and kept their distance.

At this time, Anders Breivik had friends

who tagged with him,

but basically the tagging scene made fun of him,

laughing at his ambitions,

the way he walked and the way he dressed.

He just didn't fit in.

In the end, the tagger gang turned against him

and so did other people he knew.

"He was always the odd man out,"

his friend said after the killing spree.

At some point, they'd simply had enough of him.

But Anders Breivik too lacked a stable family life.

After he had been arrested several times

for obtaining spray cans illegally and for tagging,

his father permanently broke off all contact with him.

(upbeat music)

In addition to the effect

of environmental factors on humans,

scientists at the Max Planck Institute

of Experimental Medicine in Gottingen, Germany,

are studying the degree

to which aggressive behavior lies in our genes.

It's a broad field.

(gentle music)

Over the last few years,

we have focused specifically on just a few genes

and drawn up mouse models

which show a genetic change in one or two of these genes.

(Ehrenreich speaking foreign language)

In manipulating suitable candidates

in an animal mode,

attention is paid to whether aggressive behavior

is intensified.

In this way, researchers want to find out

if a certain gene really does control aggression.

The researchers apply a special mouse experiment

known as the resident-intruder paradigm.

(Ehrenreich speaking foreign language)

This means that we have a mouse

living alone in a cage.

(Ehrenreich speaking foreign language)

Suddenly it finds another mouse has been placed in its cage.

(Ehrenreich speaking foreign language)

We then observe how the resident becomes violent

when a young cheeky male mouse suddenly moves in.

(Ehrenreich speaking foreign language)

Of decisive importance

is how long it takes for the mouse to attack the intruder.

The assumption is that male mice

with the manipulated aggression gene

will attack more quickly

than others of the same species.

The one mouse is not happy

that the intruder is lying in its bed.

It's not immediate,

but slowly the intensity begins to build up.

Now they're wrestling.

Soon the researchers will have to intervene.

The experiment is stopped

before one of the animals gets hurt.

The object of the experiment

is to determine the number of genes

which influence our behavior.

The advantage of the mouse models

is that the results can often be applied to humans.

With both mice and humans,

researchers are interested in the expression of a gene,

as it's known the process by which genetic information

is translated and made usable in the cell as protein.

(Ehrenreich speaking foreign language)

We studied one gene, MECP2, in the mouse

and were able to determine that it really is associated

with aggressive behavior.

When the expression of the gene,

the protein volume changes.

(Ehrenreich speaking foreign language)

And we really did succeed in showing that this gene,

when it changes its expression in humans,

produces greater aggression.

(Ehrenreich speaking foreign language)

In animals like these chimpanzees,

brutal aggression is rarely unmotivated.

Rank, territory, and mating rights are fought over,

but such conflicts rarely have a fatal outcome.

In competition situations,

dominant male chimpanzees display the same physical reaction

as male humans.

The aggressive behavior is regulated by the sex hormone,

testosterone.

So, is evil a male characteristic?

(chimpanzees screaming)

(Ehrenreich speaking foreign language)

As an extremely diplomatic answer,

I would say that aggression is easier to identify in males.

Going for one another, fighting,

or as in the case of the mouse, attacking a rival,

is more of a male reaction.

You might say in reply that some women even box.

Indeed they do,

and this means developing a certain degree of aggression

because in sport too aggression is important.

If your aggression is inhibited,

you won't be able to box,

but that is certainly not the prototype.

Professor Svenja Taubner

from the University of Heidelberg

works with so-called antisocial adolescents.

She treats young people who have attracted attention

through their disturbed social behavior.

This also includes violent crime and aggressive behavior.

There's no way I want to be a victim.

That is a central issue for the adolescents

in therapy with me.

On no account do they want to become a victim.

Victim is a dirty word,

and so a certain degree of strength has to be shown.

That is also massive motivation to commit crimes

or display aggressive behavior.

(Svenja speaking foreign language)

Research into the brain helps scientists

to understand the mechanics of violence in adolescents.

The brains of those young people

prepared to resort to violent

reveal different activation patterns

from those of non-violent adolescents.

In order to test this in a scan,

they were shown different situations,

some of which were threatening.

In cases of extreme threat with non-violent adolescents,

a kind of shock-induced paralysis set in

which initially allowed them to assess the situation.

But the adolescents who were ready to use violence

reacted differently.

(Svenja speaking foreign language)

The aggressive young men

didn't have this shock-induced paralysis.

The activation here shows that they would go straight

into reaction mode.

They would either flee or fight.

Where do we have to start

to prevent a pathological development

in aggressive adolescents?

In addition to biological factors,

social factors in particular favor the risk

of disturbed social behavior.

Difficulties in early relationships neglect abuse.

The best intervention is family therapy,

working with families and intervening

at as early stage as possible.

(Svenja speaking foreign language)

The best thing to do is to give adolescents and children

a feeling of self-value, acknowledgement,

and the ability to be able to perceive others and themselves

in an empathetic way.

(suspenseful music)

We have all encountered evil

at some time or other,

but it remains abstract.

It can't be measured, it can't be categorized or grasped.

It changes its appearance,

adapting to what we want to understand of it.

(suspenseful music)

Often not even the person doing evil recognizes it,

even when the evil is inside them.

(suspenseful music)

For a doctor, evil is basically a series

of destructive modes of behavior,

which a person doesn't think about

because they themselves don't see them as evil.

It is extremely rare for evil to claim to be evil.

I don't really believe

that there's such a thing as evil action per se.

So in this respect, we need to rethink a little.

Each person acts in their reality

or in their biological conception in a specific way.

(Anke speaking foreign language)

Science, however, is absolutely central

with regard to why a certain mode of behavior

seems to be the best option to a certain person

at a certain point of time.

Science focuses on the dark side

of a person's character.

At the University of Koblenz-Landau,

Cognitive Psychologist, Professor Benjamin Hilbig,

and his colleagues have even developed

a kind of measuring instrument they call the dark factor.

The theory behind it is that all dark characteristics

of a human being have a common denominator.

(Benjamin speaking foreign language)

Basically, this common denominator

is the tendency to maximize one's own advantage

at the cost of someone else.

This is done partly by ignoring the harm they have suffered.

One particular finding of the dark factor

is that more unites egoists, Machiavelli persons,

narcissists, psychopaths, and sadists

than separates them.

First and foremost,

what is really part of this dark factor

is that a person is absolutely full of himself,

he believes that he deserves more than others,

but there are many other convictions

which justify such behavior.

I might believe, for example,

that the world is evil,

a violent place where everyone is fighting for himself,

so that's what I have to do.

Basically, I have to protect myself from the others

who only want to exploit me anyway.

I might also believe that there is no such thing as justice,

so my behavior can't be evil or wrong.

All these are convictions that justify forms of behavior

which a person might perhaps not show otherwise.

To determine the level of a person's dark factor,

professor Hilbig relies on questionnaires

and behavioral experiments like the dictator game.

(upbeat music)

Test persons receive a certain sum of money,

and normally unobserved,

have to share it with an anonymous stranger.

(upbeat music)

This can be seen as an extremely simple way

of determining how egoistic or altruistic a person is.

Basically, the test persons are free to divide up the sum

as they wish,

and we don't know in each individual case

how they have done this.

But this sharing out really does take place,

another person does receive the money,

so everything is genuine, so to speak.

Experiments like the dictator game

have a long tradition in behavioral research,

and on average, the result is always the same.

Around 1/3 of the test persons divide up the money equally,

and in some rare cases, even give more than half.

Another third gives something, but less than half.

And the final third keep everything for themselves.

Coincidence?

When you consider which modes of behavior

are evident in this game,

then each, I think, can be explained.

I can say, why not?

The money is here and for now it's mine.

Why should I give it away?

I think it's plausible to reason like that,

especially when it corresponds to the views you hold.

You can equally say, my goodness, I've got to be fair,

or you might want to opt for a middle cause.

For example, it would be nice to be fair,

but on the other hand,

I've got the money, I've got the power,

so I deserve a bit more.

The dark factor doesn't claim to measure evil,

it establishes a value for dark personal traits.

But is it not really a bit evil for someone to keep most,

or indeed, all of the money for themselves?

It is not evil.

Many economic models, in fact,

would say it is simply rational,

but we can also say that it's not fair

and it's not what most normal people would expect.

So if you ask someone

what they would expect to find in the envelope,

then most would say some money.

There is only one person who can decide

whether his behavior is justified,

the individual himself.

One of our central needs

is to have a positive image of ourselves,

to be able to say that what I am doing is acceptable.

My actions serve a certain purpose,

and this purpose is good and proper.

And as long as we can claim this about ourselves,

we are also in a position to display behavior

which could possibly be seen by others

as harmful or even evil.

Developing a positive self-image

is one of the biggest challenges facing adolescents.

Anders Breivik changed schools several times.

After being cold-shouldered by the taggers,

he was regarded by many fellow pupils as a loser,

he was an outsider.

What I find important in his case

is that this rejection was so problematic

because he seemed to have had

a relatively high opinion of himself.

Only then, of course, is rejection or failure a problem.

You see this with out-and-out narcissists.

They function superbly and don't have any problem

as long as they're successful,

as long as they find acknowledgement.

But if that is lacking or if they are not successful,

then things like depressions threaten.

(Benjamin speaking foreign language)

His last school, a commercial secondary school,

also proved to be a dead end.

Breivik left without any qualifications,

but he had other plans anyway.

He started a part-time job with a telemarketing company,

even though he was moving in a gray area of law

as it was described later.

School no longer seemed important to him.

He had also found and joined a new group.

Breivik became involved

in the right-wing populist progress party,

the party which opposed the tagger scene

he had once wanted to belong to.

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

It is about combating what caused you pain,

and if this party had caused him pain,

he would've moved on to yet another party

and then fought his previous one.

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

So it is always about combating

what a person imagines has caused him suffering

as a kind of mighty ruler passing the last judgment,

so to speak.

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

At this time,

Anders Breivik was quite successful in his job,

albeit not always legally.

Within the space of a few years,

he had earned a sizable amount of money online

with forged US diplomas,

but he was close to being arrested.

What's more, he had lost his last financial reserves

on the stock market

and in his party he had not even been considered

for a leading position.

Rejected once again,

Anders Breivik moved back in with his mother.

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

When external elements

of someone's life collapse

and they are faced with failure once again,

it is typical for radicalization to be chosen

as an exit strategy.

Such people have to reorientate,

but they can't reorientate,

they can burn all the bridges.

There's actually nothing more to hold them back.

Over the next five years,

Breivik rarely left his room,

often spending entire days on the internet.

He rarely met up with old friends from his childhood.

He told them that he was collecting articles

on the Islamization of Europe,

but then he even broke off those contacts.

(lively music)

The internet provided him with the fuel

for the world of ideas

in which Breivik was moving at the time.

Over the first few years,

he played excessive online games,

but now it was very specific websites he was visiting.

In the majority of cases,

it's offline radicalization,

it's your group of friends co-radicalizing each other.

In a minority of cases, it's social interaction online.

The idea of someone just watching videos

without any interaction whatsoever

or reading books without any interaction,

the few cases that do exist,

we can't say for sure

that there wasn't other people involved,

we just don't know if there were or were not.

(gentle music)

But how does radicalization work?

To find out

on behalf of an international consortium of scientists,

Nafees Hamid spent two years carrying out research

in a Jihadist milieu.

(suspenseful music)

Part of what radicalization does

is it gives you agency again,

it makes you feel important,

it gives you purpose, it gives you a direction,

it gives you action, it gives you identities and values,

it gives you a community

that you may not even see around you,

but you're led to believe that 100 years from now

that community exists and is going to reward you

for your heroic actions that you're doing today.

What makes a person ascribe to radical ideas,

to kill for them, to put his own life on the line,

to place his own agenda above the well-being of others?

(suspenseful music)

Researchers claim that the value system

of radical terror sympathizers is askew.

Like most of his kind,

even a Jihadist has so-called sacred and non-sacred values,

which play a major role.

Sacred values are values that probably most people have.

Any moral conviction that you really strongly believe in

could potentially be a sacred value.

For some people, freedom of speech is a sacred value,

for other people, civil liberties can be a sacred value.

It's any value that you would not negotiate on

and you would never violate.

And when people perceive their sacred values

to be under threat,

that's when they're willing to fight for those values.

But what happens exactly

when a sacred value is threatened?

One answer why the Jihadists who were examined

were prepared to commit extreme acts for their cause

is revealed by a look into their brain.

When they were thinking about their sacred values,

what happened was that you had decreased activation

in an area of the brain that's associated

with deliberative reasoning.

So when they thought of their sacred values,

deliberative reasoning went offline.

Sacred values are non-negotiable,

but maybe the way they are acted out is.

These values also seem to be important

in the evaluation of terrorist attacks.

Here we see that not every operation is supported

by all Islamists.

So the Bataclan attack was not as popular

amongst sympathizers.

It got a lot of backlash.

In fact, right after the attack,

I think there was something like 50,

more than 50 Jihadist groups that signed a letter saying,

we condemn these attacks.

But that wasn't the case

with regard to the attack on the Paris offices

of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo

when two Islamist assassins murdered 12 people.

We did all these surveys on sacred values

just amongst normal Muslims in Europe

and the one value that was always sacred, regardless,

even the most peaceful person, the most pacifist person,

was we should never draw cartoons of Prophet Mohammed.

Anders Breivik became more and more radical.

He now had a new mission.

He spent days and nights surfing websites

which reflected his crude view of the world.

He tried in vain to establish contact

with the leaders of the scene.

Rejection once again.

He was a hermit who expressed his hatred of the world

in a 1,500-page manuscript.

Generally you see overall fewer lone actors

than group actors.

And we haven't yet seen

who the radicalizing milieu could have been,

whether it was online or offline,

and that's also very rare,

that's kind of exceptional.

Usually you're able to find a mentor

or someone who's co-radicalizing a friend.

The fact that this kind of perpetrator

is not the rule,

but no longer the exception,

is shown by the case of Stephan B

from Halle in eastern Germany.

He failed in his attempt to commit mass murder

in a synagogue.

Instead, he shot dead a woman in the middle of the street

and a man in a kebab takeaway.

In initial interrogation,

Stephan B expressed right-wing extremist

and anti-Semitic motives.

He described himself as a loner,

saying he'd never had friends or a girlfriend.

He was, quote, "A discontented white man."

(suspenseful music)

(Daniel speaking foreign language)

When you look at the biographies

and the writings of mass murderers,

it's most surprising to see

that they all say the same thing,

I've had a rotten life.

Women have never been interested in me.

I've lived in a nightmare.

(suspenseful music)

There are alarming parallels

between Stephan B's life and that of Anders Breivik,

a young man cut off from society who lived with his mother

in a room with the door permanently closed.

Stephan B also found his right-wing

extremist view of the world

confirmed in anonymous internet forums,

and before committing his crime,

left behind a manifesto.

A lost biography, an inevitable development?

Experts are of a different opinion.

They believe there can be a turning point

in everyone's life which changes everything,

but that wasn't the case with Anders Breivik.

He rented a farm outside Oslo

and prepared to carry out a crime

he had spent years planning meticulously.

He purchased several tons of artificial fertilizer,

using it to make various explosive charges.

He honed his body, he took steroids,

he practiced shooting,

and he also trained how to react with minimal emotion

when the day came.

But can empathy be switched on and off like a lamp?

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

We know from a totally different case,

that of the 9/11 terrorists,

that in his will, Mohamed Atta, for example,

had stated categorically

that it was essential not to think of other people

because that would stop you carrying out the deed.

So assassins definitely calculate

what kind of a situation they might encounter

that would prevent them from implementing their plan.

They prepare mentally for this contingency.

Breivik killed many of his victims face to face.

He showed no sympathy.

At the end of the day,

77 people were dead.

A killer like Anders Breivik is quickly regarded

as mentally ill.

His crime seemed simply too monstrous.

And indeed, an initial assessment diagnosed schizophrenia,

an evaluation which caused a few roar

among the people of Norway.

We are talking about a man

who had planned his deed for years,

announced it,

and then carried it out meticulously in two phases,

and in doing so, sought maximum publicity.

So from a legal and medical point of view,

with such organization and continuity involved,

I find it impossible to say

that the deed can only be explained as a mental disorder.

That is out of the question.

(Daniel speaking foreign language)

And the Norwegians

didn't accept the initial diagnosis either.

It was an acid test for the stricken country.

Its liberal population were stunned

by the medical assessment.

Can a perpetrator not be criminally liable

because of mental illness,

even though he planned the most evil of deeds

in great detail over many years?

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

In normal civil life

there are also people with personality disorders

who are a pain in the neck,

but managed to get by.

In normative terms,

what is of interest in a constitutional state

is the degree to which a person's ability to cope with life

is inhibited by their personality disorder.

And I must say that Anders Breivik

had a relatively large number of balances,

including all his deception campaigns,

so he coped very well in life.

He had the potential to handle his life differently

in some way or other.

The court ordered a second expert's report

and it came to a different conclusion.

Breivik was criminally liable.

He was sentenced to 21 years in jail

to be followed by preventive detention.

Our legal system is based on the concept of free will.

This assumes that, as a rule,

a perpetrator consciously decides to commit a criminal act.

But is this system still in keeping with the times,

or do we need to take new findings

in the fields of gene genetics and epigenetics

into account and assessing and sentencing an offender?

In the past,

there have already been several court judgements

in which genes played a role.

In Italy, for instance,

a killer was given a lighter sentence

because an expert's report confirmed

that he had a predisposition towards violence.

But what role will biological factors play in future?

(lively music)

I think it's ridiculous

to give someone an MRI scan and then say,

he couldn't help doing what he did.

You then have to ask,

what else wasn't he capable of in everyday life?

And I can be a gambling addict and rob a bank

and be not criminally liable

because everything else in my life has gone awry.

And I have a personality differentiation

as a result of this addictive process,

which doctors regard as so pathological

that it has to be compared with schizophrenia.

But criminal law operates in such an individual way.

Up until a few years ago,

the voices of experts claiming

that evil was to be sought in our genes were a lot louder.

Today, even leading scientists take a more rational view.

I think that the level of aggression

can be influenced genetically,

but so many other genes are present

which have a protective effect.

In other words, they modulate the degree of aggression

through other characteristics

so that we can certainly not say,

if a person has this gene, he or she will become a killer.

So in this respect,

I would be very, very careful.

(Ehrenreich speaking foreign language)

I hope and believe that judgment will never be passed

on a person solely on the basis of genetic information.

(Ehrenreich speaking foreign language)

Evil is invisible,

yet it has many faces.

Today it's going into a hiding more and more,

forming groups or radicalizing itself

in its own cutoff world,

and then in individual cases,

suddenly reemerging in the form of lone wolf terrorism

with fatal consequences for the victim.

But how can a modern democratic state

protect itself from evil?

Radicalization reduces complexity,

that's what makes it so attractive.

(Nahlah speaking foreign language)

I believe that the biggest challenge for complex societies

lies in enabling people to live in these complex societies

and have an inner compass within these societies,

and that means making people emotionally mature.

What can we do for our children?

Give them something perhaps,

give them the capacity for rebellion,

teach them to be themselves and not to renounce that,

not to melt within a group

the moment history calls

for its murderous collective impulses.

(suspenseful music)

There is no clear recipe against evil.

Step-by-step, science is decoding its biography,

its origins, its forms, and its motives

in order to be able to intervene before evil strikes.

(suspenseful music)