Ordinary Germans or Ordinary Men?
By: Christopher R. Browning*
Published by Emory University, 1994
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J. Geffen
1.
On one of the first occasions that I heard Raul Hilberg lecture on the Holocaust,
a questioner asked him if only the Germans could have perpetrated such a deed. For
years Hilberg had noted that, because he was afraid that he would not be able to
answer the big questions about the Holocaust, he had concentrated on asking and
answering the little ones. Faced with a hypothetical question of such a nature, Hilberg
was clearly uncomfortable. Nonetheless he attempted an answer, replying to his
questioner: “I hope so”. Quite frankly, I was not so hopeful then, due in no small part
to the logic of Hilberg’s own interpretation of the Holocaust as an administrative
process carried out by relatively apolitical bureaucrats little influenced by ideology
drawn from a cross-section of society in a modern nation-state. After more than
fifteen additional years of my own research into the Holocaust, I am even less hopeful
now.
2.
In expressing such pessimism, I am not attempting to take issue with the
uniqueness of the Holocaust itself. The bloody record of human history has indeed
provided us with many examples of mass killing similar to the Holocaust in at least
some ways. Stalin’s policies caused more deaths outside of war than Hitler’s, though
of course he had more time in power. A greater percentage of native Americans
perished in their fateful encounter with European conquerors than Jews did facing the
Nazi onslaught. Ideologically-grounded mass murder of an allegedly contaminated
target group in order to attain a Utopian purification of society was attempted not only
by the Nazis but also by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. And racist-nationalist regimes
from the Young Turks to the current Milosevic government in Belgrade have made
genocidal “ethnic-cleansing” an all-too-common 20th century phenomenon, while the
deteriorating situation in the multi-ethnic territories of the former Soviet Union poses
the stark possibility of even worse to come.
3.
Within the Nazi empire, mentally and physically-handicapped Germans as well
as so-called Gypsies were systematically murdered not for what they had done or
believed but merely for how they were perceived and defined ideologically as
biological threats to the Nazi racial Utopia. They died before firing squads and in gas
chambers as did the Jews. But neither victim group held the same central, demonic
position in Hitler’s Weltanschauung, and hence their mass murder was less complete
and systematic on the one hand and characterized by more contradictions and
loopholes on the other. Hitler halted adult euthanasia in Germany in the summer of
1941, when it became a public relations liability, though the covert murder of infants
*
Professor of History, Pacific Lutheran University
Ordinary Germans or Ordinary Men? / 2
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continued to the end. Pockets of gypsies were left alive in certain parts of Europe,
unaccountably passed over by German occupation authorities who had other
priorities, lacked the drive to kill all they could kill, failed to perceive their mandate,
or exercised the liberty to make local exceptions. In contrast, the mass murder of
Europe’s Jews was pursued relentlessly and totally to the end.
4.
In short, other governments have committed crimes that were in some ways
similar but not identical to the Final Solution. The Nazi regime itself perpetrated
similar but not identical programs of systematic and ideologically-grounded mass
murder against groups other than the Jews to achieve their racial utopia. Nonetheless,
the Holocaust has still not lost its capacity to astonish us by its significant historical
singularity. So far, at least, only once has the governing regime of a western nationstate, grounded in the traditions of both Christian civilization and the European
Enlightenment, and empowered by the technological and bureaucratic developments
of modern western society, set out with both clear and express intent and obsessive
and uncompromising determination to murder every last member of a targeted ethnic
group scattered across an entire continent – down to the last man, woman, and child.
5.
But the longer I study the Holocaust, the more I am convinced that a strange
paradox lies at the heart of its uniqueness. While the event in its totality remains
singular, the constituent elements that made up that event increasingly strike me as
anything but. Among such non-singular constituent elements I include the vast bulk of
the perpetrators.
6.
The recognition of this paradoxical discrepancy between the commonplace
perpetrator and the singular historical event is, of course, not new. It was most clearly
articulated by Hannah Arendt, when she argued that “the dilemma between the
unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who
perpetrated them,” namely Adolf Eichmann, could only be understood by realizing the
“banality of evil.” Arendt based her concept of the banality of evil primarily on the
self-serving self-portrayal of a single, key SS perpetrator. But even if her
methodology and credulity were suspect, the concept itself was not thereby
necessarily invalidated. In short, she may have been right, even if for the wrong
reasons.
7.
For many years I studied a variety of bureaucratic perpetrators – the so-called
“desk murderers.” Ultimately I found Arendt’s interpretation more valid for the cadres
of obscure bureaucrats I had been studying than for Eichmann himself. It was only
very recently, when I commenced my study of Reserve Police Battalion 101, that I
turned to what we might term the “grass roots” killers themselves. This was no
accident. Dealing with desk murderers, who distanced themselves from the killing
both psychologically and physically, was one thing; confronting the men who did the
actual killing and immersing myself in their testimonies was another. I came to my
study of Reserve Police Battalion 101, however, not as a conscious case-study of the
applicability of Arendt’s banality of evil to the “grass roots” killers. Rather I had been
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overwhelmed by the stark manner in which the case illuminated the issue of choice.
As often happens in historical research, however, the pursuit of one line of inquiry
soon opened up others.
8.
What did I find in my study of Reserve Police Battalion 101? In its composition,
the battalion was a Hamburg-based unit composed of middle-aged conscripts too old
for the German army. The average age of the rank and file was 39. Over 60% were
unskilled working class who enjoyed no exemption for skills vital to the war
economy. They were truck drivers, dock workers, warehouse workers, waiters,
seamen, and so forth. Another 35% were from the lowest echelons of lower middle
class – white-collar office workers, sales clerks, and the like. About 25% of the rank
and file were members of the Nazi party by 1942, though most of them were
relatively late joiners. In short, in geographical origin they came from a city that was
by reputation one of the least nazified in Germany. In social origin, nearly two-thirds
came from the social class most underrepresented in Nazi party membership, and
whose pre-1933 political culture – shaped primarily by the Socialists, Communists,
and labor unions – was prominently anti-Nazi. In age, they were men whose schooling
and formative years were in the pre-Nazi era and who knew pre-Nazi norms and
standards. They were not merely a random cross-section of German society; as
middle-aged, mostly working-class men from Hamburg, they would seem to have
been a group of Germans least suited to become professional Nazi killers.
9.
Just before the initial action, in which the battalion had been sent to murder the
Jewish community in the Polish village of Jozefow, the commanding officer explicitly
offered to excuse any of the rank and file who did not feel up to the killing
assignment. Only about a dozen men, in fact, initially took up the major’s offer,
though later others also either evaded or dropped out of the shooting. By my estimate,
at least 80% and perhaps even 90% of the men sent to the forest that day continued to
shoot. The prevailing mood afterwards was one of bitterness, resentment, and anger
about what they had been asked to do.
10. Over the months that followed, the battalion was assigned to many killing and
ghetto-clearing actions. In the end, this unit of nearly 500 men participated in the
shooting deaths of at least 38,000 Jews and forced at least 45,000 Jews onto the trains
headed for Treblinka – a total body count of at least 83,000. What happened to men
whose daily routine was comprised of shooting and ghetto-clearing? It was my
conclusion that over time the battalion divided roughly into three unequal groups. The
first became hardened professional killers who learned to enjoy their job. They sought
opportunities to kill by volunteering for firing squads and forest “Jew hunts” and
joked about what they had done afterwards. The second and largest group was
comprised of men who did everything that was asked of them and never risked
confronting authority. They formed the cordons and guard details essential to the
killing process; they participated in large-scale shooting actions such as at Jozefow
but otherwise did not seek the opportunity to shoot. The third and smallest group was
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the non-shooters, who took part in the cordons and roundups but invoked the major’s
offer and their own self-confessed “weakness” to evade the pressure of comrades and
officers personally to pull the trigger.
11. Why did the bulk of the battalion become killers? The traditional alibi that has
been invoked by the killers themselves, of course, is binding orders. This alibi is not
even accepted in German courts, given the failure of the entire body of German
defense attorneys over the past 50 years to turn up even one single case in which the
refusal to shoot unarmed civilians resulted in punishment in any way commensurate
with the crime not committed. The fall-back position for Nazi defendants has been
“putative duress” – they had sufficient reason to fear terrible consequences for refusal
even if that would in fact not have been the case. Given the major’s offer, putative
duress does not hold for the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 either. What then
does explain their actions?
12. From my own interpretation of the men’s testimony given some twenty years
later, I concluded that the most important factors were rather universal ones not
unique either to Nazi ideology or German political culture. In modern, secular society,
governments have a tremendous power to legitimize. Pervasive societal racism and
the polarizing effect of war, especially “race war,” dehumanize the “other,” the enemy
– and make them terribly vulnerable. The complexity of modern society, with its
concomitant bureaucratization, specialization, and division of labor, attenuates any
sense of personal responsibility. Everywhere society conditions people to respect and
defer to authority. Careerism and self-serving ambition are the monopoly of no
culture. And everywhere peer pressure – not autonomous conscience – sets moral
norms. My conclusion to the book’s conclusion was expressed in a final, rhetorical
question: “If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such
circumstances, what group of men cannot?” Only after the book had long been written
and following considerable discussion with my publisher, did I decide on the title:
Ordinary Men.
13. My universalistic conclusion and especially the title has displeased some. What
we are dealing with here, my critics say, are not “ordinary men” but “ordinary
Germans.” My interpretation suggests that human personality is relatively malleable,
that in responding to situational factors people re-invent themselves and become what
they do. My critics suggest that cultural conditioning is much more ingrained, and
ideological conviction much more determinative than I have allowed. I have no doubt
that ideological conviction was very important for key Nazi leaders, though I doubt it
explains nearly so much about the behavior of Hamburg dockworkers and sales
clerks. I likewise do not dismiss the importance of cultural conditioning: the Nazis
found it much easier to enlist participation and acquiescence in the murder of the Jews
– stigmatized for centuries in Europe – than in the murder of the German
handicapped. But clearly antisemitism is not unique to Germans, ordinary or
otherwise.
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14. I suggest we approach the problem from several perspectives. First, the 20th
century has witnessed all too much mass-death perpetrated by all too many
governments grounded in a variety of cultures and ideologies. Where in this sorry
century, I would ask, has a government that wanted to commit mass murder failed to
do so for a lack of executioners?
15. Second, concerning the “grass roots” killers of the Holocaust itself, we know
that they were not solely a German phenomenon. The list of non-German killing units
stretches from Croatia and Rumania through the Ukraine to the Baltic, and this does
not include many others who provided vital support functions of all kinds to the mass
murder enterprise. How ordinary such non-German grass roots killers may have been
is an issue still open to further research, but Germans they most certainly were not.
16. Finally, Reserve Police Battalion 101 provides us with a striking case for a
controlled study of cultural vs. situational factors. Though predominantly composed
of men from the Hamburg region, Reserve Police Battalion 101 also contained a small
contingent of Luxemburg police. Luxemburg was annexed to the Third Reich in 1940,
and its young men were thereafter subjected to the mobilization policies of the Nazi
war machine. In Luxemburg the personal guard of the Grand Duke was composed of
fine young men who would thereby earn subsequent preferential treatment for
positions in the civil service. Until, that is, they were conscripted by the Germans,
marched off to the train station, and sent to Weimar for police training. This was not a
case, it must be emphasized, of local Nazi sympathizers, ambitious and careeristic
collaborators, or a despised social underclass. These were men being groomed for
respectable positions in Luxemburg society.
17. One unit of such Luxemburgers was attached to Reserve Police Battalion 101
before it departed for Poland. They did not take part in the first massacre at Jozefow,
because they were in the platoon of the one lieutenant who said he could not order his
men to shoot unarmed women and children and thus asked for a different assignment.
The lieutenant and his Luxemburgers were assigned to escort the work Jews to labor
camps in Lublin, and departed before the shooting at Jozefow began.
18. Subsequently, the lieutenant in question – upon his own request – was excused
from all further participation in Jewish actions, but his platoon was not. Orders for
Jewish actions bypassed the lieutenant and were delivered to his first sergeant. This
man – characterized as a “110% Nazi” and “real go-getter” – then led the platoon in
the ongoing assault against Polish Jewry. It should be noted that, among the more than
thirty volumes of testimony, scarcely any reference is made to the Luxemburgers at
all. However, according to one witness, the Luxemburgers were invariably called
upon by the company commander precisely because they were young and fit. No
witness suggested that the Luxemburgers were conspicuous among the non-shooters.
This amounts, I admit, in large part to an argument from silence, but it is nonetheless
scarcely supportive of the notion that German political culture and Nazi ideology
were the decisive factors in turning “ordinary” Germans into people quite different
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from other “ordinary men” and causing them to kill in circumstances where others –
like you and me, and respectable Luxemburgers – would not.
19. The notion that “ordinary men” could never do what these middle-aged,
working class conscripts from Hamburg did, that the grass-roots perpetrators of the
Holocaust were a fundamentally different kind of people – ordinary in the context of
Nazi Germany but not elsewhere – would be very comforting. It would distance us
from these events in a reassuring way. In the world we face today, however, I would
suggest that is a comforting reassurance that we cannot afford.
Ordinary Germans or Ordinary Men? / 7
Questions should be answered in your own words, in English, unless otherwise
indicated.
Answer the question below in English.
1.
How could one – paragraph 1 – use Hilberg’s own interpretation of the
Holocaust to show that his expression of hope is over-optimistic?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Mention some of the other historical examples – paragraph 2 – that are in some
ways reminiscent of the Holocaust.
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
2.
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
3.
How did the Nazi policy towards the Jews – paragraph 3 – differ from their
other acts of mass murder?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
4.
Why was the extermination of the Gypsies not carried out in all parts of the
continent with the same vigour?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Choose the best answer.
5.
How would you describe Nazi policy – paragraph 4 – towards the Jews?
a. Fickle and opportunistic.
b. Ruthless and utterly consistent.
c. Entirely rational.
d. Devoid of prejudice.
Ordinary Germans or Ordinary Men? / 8
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
6.
What is the apparent paradox that should strike – paragraph 5 – any serious
student of the Holocaust?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
7.
Who are the desk murderers referred to in paragraph 7? (not names)
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
8.
Answer the question below in English.
On what points does Browning agree with Arendt – paragraphs 6-7 – and on
what point does he disagree?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
9.
It is suggested that a psychological and sociological analysis of the members of
the Reserve Police Battalion 101 would not have made one expect them to
become professional Nazi killers. Why? Specify the reasons. (paragraphs 8-9)
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
10. In what sense should the members of the Police Reserve Battalion 101 be
considered atypical in the ranks of the Nazis?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
11. What line of defence – paragraph 9 – would be totally unacceptable in the case
of defendants charged with the murder of the Jewish community of Jozefow?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Ordinary Germans or Ordinary Men? / 9
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
12. How does the author account for the fact that the men in Police Battalion 101 –
paragrapah 12 – became professional killers?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
13. What does the experience of Police Battalion 101 suggest? (generalize)
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
14.
Explain in Hebrew the underlined expression in paragraph 12: Careerism and
self-serving ambition are the monopoly of no culture. And everywhere peer
pressure – not autonomous conscience – sets moral norms
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
15. What made it easier for the Nazis – paragraph 13 – to enlist the support of more
people in the killing of Jews than in the extermination of the German
handicapped?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
16. Why would the conclusion that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were ordinary
Germans rather than ordinary men be so comforting?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
17. How could the fact that so many non-Germans – paragraph 15 – played an
active part in the Holocaust be accounted for in terms not necessarily acceptable
to the author?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Ordinary Germans or Ordinary Men? / 10
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
18. Why could one have expected the Luxemburgers to have behaved differently
from the rest of the members of Police Battalion 101?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
19. What thesis is the example of the Luxemburg contingent supposed to illustrate?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________