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If you have not picked up or borrowed Blood Lands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder yet, I suggest you do so.  It is a shockingly candid dissertation on what happened to the people on the Eastern Front between Stalin and Hitler.  I quote from that text:

   “Partisan operations, effective as they sometimes were, brought inevitable destruction to the Belarusian civilian population, Jewish and gentile alike.  When the Soviet partisans prevented peasant from giving food to the Germans, they all but guaranteed that the Germans would kill the peasants.  A Soviet gun threatened a peasant, and then a German gun killed him.  Once the Germans believed that they had lost control of a given village to the partisans, they would simply torch the houses and the fields.  If they could not reliably get grain, the could keep it from the Soviets by seeing that it was never harvested.  When Soviet partisans sabotaged trains, they were in effect ensuring that the population near the site would be exterminated.  When Soviet partisans laid mines, they knew that some would detonate under the bodies of Soviet Citizens.  The Germans swept mines by forcing locals, Belarusians and Jews, to walk hand in hand over minefields.  In general, such loss of human life was of little concern to the Soviet leadership.  The people who died had been under German occupation, and were therefore suspect and perhaps even more expendable than the average Soviet citizen.  German reprisals also ensured that the ranks of the partisans swelled, as survivors often had no home, no livelihood, and no family to which to return.

    The Soviet leadership was not especially concerned with the plight of Jews.  After November 1941 Stalin never singled out the Jews as victims of Hitler.  Some partisan commanders did try to protect the Jews.  But the Soviets, like the Americans or the British, seem not to have seriously contemplated direct military action to rescue Jews.  The logic of the Soviet system was always to resist independent initiatives and to value life very cheaply.  Jews in ghettos were aiding the German war effort as forced laborers, so their death over pits was of little concern to the authorities in Moscow.  Jews who were not aiding but hindering the Germans were showing signs of a dangerous capacity for initiative, and might later resist the reimposition of Soviet rule.  By Stalinist logic, Jews were suspect either way: if they remained in the ghetto and worked for the Germans, of if they left the ghetto and showed a capacity for independent action. The previous hesitation of local Minsk communists turned out to be justified: their resistance organization was treated as a front of the Gestapo by the Central Staff of the Partisan Movement in Moscow.  The people who rescued Minsk Jews and supplied Soviet partisans were labeled a tool of Hitler.”

-Timothy Snyder.  Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. p 238-239.

That is a small sliver of what war is.  The systematic destruction of empathetic thoughts in pursuit of ideology and conformity.

The first step – always the first step – is to identify another human being as the ‘other’.  Once that othering has been established there is no evil, no heinous action,  that is out of reach.  (Funny how religious belief is all about othering, but I’m sure it’s a completely different situation.)

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This book is best read in small doses, as it is chock full of humanity doing horrible things to itself.   Consider yourself warned.