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March 7 - March 12, 2022
In mid-March 1942 some 75 to 80 percent of all victims of the Holocaust were still alive, while 20 to 25 percent had perished. A mere eleven months later, in mid-February 1943, the percentages were exactly the reverse.
It was fortunate that Stalin had given the order for partisan warfare, Hitler said, because “it gives us the opportunity to exterminate anyone who is hostile to us. Naturally the vast area must be pacified as quickly as possible; this will happen best through shooting anyone who even looks askance at us.”2
There was a constant tendency to assign the actual shooting duties to these units, in order to shift the psychological burden from the German police to their collaborators. This psychological burden was serious and extended even to Bach-Zelewski himself. Himmler’s SS doctor, reporting to the Reichsführer on Bach-Zelewski’s incapacitating illness in the spring of 1942, noted that the SS leader was suffering “especially from visions in connection with the shootings of Jews that he himself had led, and from other difficult experiences in the east.”
In late September 1941 Hitler approved the commencement of Jewish deportations from the Third Reich, to be organized by Reinhard Heydrich through his Jewish expert in Berlin, Adolf Eichmann, and the regional Security Police offices throughout Germany.
The deportation of largely unsuspecting Viennese Jews, most of them elderly and/or female, passed with so little incident that Lieutenant Fischmann could concentrate on the hardships of a third- rather than second-class car, insufficient rations, and the summer heat that spoiled his butter. No mention, of course, was made of what the incarcerated Jews, without food or water, must have been suffering in the closed cattle cars during the sixty-one-hour journey.
The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were from the lower orders of German society. They had experienced neither social nor geographic mobility. Very few were economically independent. Except for apprenticeship or vocational training, virtually none had any education after leaving Volksschule (terminal secondary school) at age fourteen or fifteen.
These were men who had known political standards and moral norms other than those of the Nazis. Most came from Hamburg, by reputation one of the least nazified cities in Germany, and the majority came from a social class that had been anti-Nazi in its political culture. These men would not seem to have been a very promising group from which to recruit mass murderers on behalf of the Nazi vision of a racial utopia free of Jews.
Upon learning of the imminent massacre, Buchmann made clear to Hagen that as a Hamburg businessman and reserve lieutenant, he “would in no case participate in such an action, in which defenseless women and children are shot.” He asked for another assignment. Hagen arranged for Buchmann to be in charge of the escort for the male “work Jews” who were to be selected out and taken to Lublin.2 His company captain, Wohlauf, was informed of Buchmann’s assignment but not the reason for it.3
But he did not go to the forest itself or witness the executions; his absence there was conspicuous. As one policeman bitterly commented, “Major Trapp was never there. Instead he remained in Józefów because he allegedly could not bear the sight. We men were upset about that and said we couldn’t bear it either.”13
One of the policemen in Hergert’s unit likewise noted the difficulty the men had in aiming properly. “At first we shot freehand. When one aimed too high, the entire skull exploded. As a consequence, brains and bones flew everywhere. Thus, we were instructed to place the bayonet point on the neck.”49 According to Hergert, however, using fixed bayonets as an aiming guide was no solution. “Through the point-blank shot that was thus required, the bullet struck the head of the victim at such a trajectory that often the entire skull or at least the entire rear skullcap was torn off, and blood, bone
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Even twenty or twenty-five years later those who did quit shooting along the way overwhelmingly cited sheer physical revulsion against what they were doing as the prime motive but did not express any ethical or political principles behind this revulsion.
Being too weak to continue shooting, of course, posed problems for the “productivity” and morale of the battalion, but it did not challenge basic police discipline or the authority of the regime in general.
The problem that faced Trapp and his superiors in Lublin, therefore, was not the ethically and politically grounded opposition of a few but the broad demoralization shared both by those who shot to the end and those who had not been able to continue. It was above all a reaction to the sheer horror of the killing process itself.
Agitated and vexed, I immediately went into the school and drank a schnapps.
Order Police
Among the Jews in Komarówka was a woman from Hamburg who had formerly owned a movie theater—the Millertor-Kino—that one of the policemen had frequented.
If mass murder was giving Hoffmann stomach pains, it was a fact he was deeply ashamed of and sought to overcome to the best of his ability.
The German police then went in search of the owner of the house, a Polish woman who had managed to flee in time. She was tracked to her father’s house in a nearby village. Lieutenant Brand presented the father with a stark choice—his life or his daughter’s. The man surrendered his daughter, who was shot on the spot.19
By 1942 standards of German-Jewish relations, a quick death without the agony of anticipation was considered an example of human compassion!
Distancing, not frenzy and brutalization, is one of the keys to the behavior of Reserve Police Battalion 101. War and negative racial stereotyping were two mutually reinforcing factors in this distancing.
Shortly after the war, Theodor Adorno and others developed the notion of the “authoritarian personality.” Feeling that situational or environmental influences had already been studied, they chose to focus on hitherto neglected psychological factors. They began with the hypothesis that certain deep-seated personality traits made “potentially fascistic individuals” particularly susceptible to antidemocratic propaganda.9 Their investigations led them to compile a list of the crucial traits (tested for by the so-called F-scale) of the “authoritarian personality”: rigid adherence to conventional
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Normal individuals enter an “agentic state” in which they are the instrument of another’s will. In such a state, they no longer feel personally responsible for the content of their actions but only for how well they perform.23
If so, conformity assumes a more central role than authority at Józefów.
To win this struggle, the Volk needed to do two things: conquer living space to provide for further population growth and preserve the purity of German blood. The fate of peoples who did not expand their numbers or preserve their racial purity could be seen in the examples of Sparta and Rome.
The main threat to a healthy awareness of the need for territorial expansion and racial purity came from doctrines propagating the essential equality of mankind. The first such doctrine was Christianity, spread by the Jew Paul. The second was Liberalism, emerging from the French Revolution—”the uprising of the racially inferior”—instigated by the Jew-ridden Freemasons. The third and greatest threat was Marxism/Bolshevism, authored by the Jew Karl Marx.
To break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behavior, was simply beyond most of the men. It was easier for them to shoot.
Why? First of all, by breaking ranks, nonshooters were leaving the “dirty work” to their comrades. Since the battalion had to shoot even if individuals did not, refusing to shoot constituted refusing one’s share of an unpleasant collective obligation. It was in effect an asocial act vis-à-vis one’s comrades.
Those who did not shoot risked isolation, rejection, and ostracism—a very uncomfortable prospect within the framework of a tight-knit unit stationed abroad among a hostile population, so that the individual had virt...
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Insidiously, therefore, most of those who did not shoot only reaffirmed the “macho” values of the majority—according to which it was a positive quality to be “tough” enough to kill unarmed, noncombatant men, women, and children—and tried not to rupture the bonds of comradeship that constituted their social world.
Nothing helped the Nazis to wage a race war so much as the war itself.
Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?
Kershaw emphasized the same point with his memorable phrase that “the road to Auschwitz was built by hatred, but paved with indifference.”
Nearly 10,000 Soviet POWs arrived in Auschwitz in October 1941 and were sent to Birkenau. By the end of February, four months later, only 945 were alive—a survival rate of 9.5 percent.
The Germans presided over the death of some 2 million Soviet POWs in the first nine months of the war—far more than the number of Jewish victims up to that point.
But does Goldhagen’s methodology avoid bias? What in practice is Goldhagen’s standard for judging testimony as self-exculpating and thus to be excluded unless corroborated? For Goldhagen testimonies are “in all likelihood” self-exculpating if the witnesses deny giving “their souls, their inner will and moral assent” to the killing.56 In short, testimony about any state of mind or motivation at odds with his initial hypothesis is excluded unless corroborated, and finding corroborating evidence concerning state of mind—given the absence of contemporary letters and diaries—is nearly impossible.
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I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce “ordinary men” to become their “willing executioners.”
