Masters of Death (31 page)

The killing of handicapped adults was also organized out of the KdF beginning in autumn 1939; Brack came to manage both programs. The adult program central office took over a confiscated Jewish villa at 4 Tiergarten Strasse in Berlin, resulting in its code name Operation T4, soon abbreviated simply to T4. Murdering adults was not as simple as murdering children. The physicians who did the killing, all volunteers, initially considered using narcotic injections but rejected that slow poisoning as inhumane (more probably, it was unreliable and inconvenient). Other physicians among the killers recommended carbon monoxide, which in pure form is colorless and odorless and which in sufficient concentration is rapidly fatal. “The technology for gassing people had to be invented,” notes historian Henry Friedlander. A pilot killing center was constructed in an old jail building in Brandenburg-on-the-Havel, with a gas chamber disguised as a shower room, and a successful demonstration gassing of eight male handicapped patients was conducted probably in later 1939 with several high Nazi officials and physicians present as well as Brack and Stuttgart police officer Christian Wirth, who would later work for Globocnik. “The old prison in Brandenburg on the Havel was history’s first operational killing center,” Friedlander concludes. T4 eventually established six adult killing centers throughout Germany and Austria, although only four operated at any one time.
Krematorien
(mobile or fixed oil-fired standard mortuary ovens) were acquired to dispose of the bodies and
Knochenmühle
(bone mills) to pulverize the burned bones. When the T4 program was paused late in August 1941, this unique technology and, perhaps more significantly, the personnel who had learned to operate it became available for mass-killing operations in the East.

In September 1941, having ordered up a chemist, Albert Widmann, from the Criminal Technology Institute in Berlin, Nebe conducted his dynamite experiment in Minsk. He justified it to his deputy, Paul Werner, with the argument that “he could not ask his troops to shoot these incurably insane people.” Nebe had Widmann rig a pillbox — a reinforced-concrete machine-gun emplacement—with dynamite, lock the Russian mental patients inside and detonate the dynamite. The experiment was not a success: the dynamite destroyed both the victims and the pillbox, catapulting body parts in every direction, and the experimenters had to retrieve arms and legs from the surrounding trees.

The next day, moving to a mental hospital in Mogilev, Nebe continued experimenting. Pure carbon monoxide gas was too expensive for mass killing on the Einsatzgruppen scale; Nebe had decided to generate the gas using an automobile engine. Widmann described the procedure at his postwar trial:

During the afternoon Nebe had the window [of a hospital room] bricked in, leaving two openings for the gas hose. . . . When we arrived, one of the hoses that I had brought was connected. It was fixed onto the exhaust of a touring car. . . . Pieces of piping stuck out of the holes made in the wall, onto which the hose could easily be fitted. . . .After five minutes Nebe came out and said that nothing appeared to have happened. After eight minutes he had been unable to detect any results and asked what should be done next. Nebe and I came to the conclusion that the car was not powerful enough. So Nebe had the second hose fitted onto a transport vehicle belonging to the regular police. It then took only another few minutes before the people were unconscious. Both vehicles were left running for about another ten minutes.

Nebe presumably communicated his results back to Himmler, and that same month, September 1941, a Reich Security Main Office department head named Walter Rauff asked the head of the RSHA transportation service to look into the possibility of remodeling a closed truck into a mobile gas chamber. The reason, Rauff later testified, was to find a way to relieve “the psychological stress felt by the men involved in the [Einsatzgruppen] shootings.” Gas vans had already been used by the Lange commando in Poland in 1940, of course. Those had been charged with pure bottled carbon monoxide, but the basic idea of a mobile gas chamber would not have been new to the SS leadership. Blobel testified that Sonderkommando 4a received one of the new exhaust-charged gas vans from Einsatzgruppe C headquarters and used it to carry out an execution “in September or October 1941”; use of such a gas van is documented at Poltava, in the southern Ukraine, in November 1941.

The notorious gas chambers and crematoria of the death camps have come to typify the Holocaust, but in fact they were exceptional. The primary means of mass murder the Nazis deployed during the Second World War was firearms and lethal privation. Shooting was not less efficient than gassing, as many historians have assumed. It was harder on the shooters’ nerves, and the gas vans and chambers alleviated the burden. But shooting began earlier, continued throughout the war and produced far more victims if Slavs are counted, as they must be, as well as Jews. “The Nazi regime was the most genocidal the world has ever seen,” writes sociologist Michael Mann. “During its short twelve years (overwhelmingly its last four) it killed approximately twenty million unarmed persons. . . . Jews comprised only a third of the victims and their mass murder occurred well into the sequence. . . . Slavs, defined as
Untermen
schen, were the most numerous victims —3 million Poles, 7 million Soviet citizens and 3.3 million Soviet POWs.” Even among Jewish victims, Daniel Goldhagen estimates, “somewhere between 40 and 50 percent” were killed “by means other than gassing, and more Germans were involved in these killings in a greater variety of contexts than in those carried out in the gas chambers.”

So the Nazi hecatomb was not “modern” and “scientific,” as it is frequently characterized, nor was it unique in human history. It was accomplished with the same simple equipment as the slaughters of European imperialism and, later, Asian and African civil war. State-sponsored massacre is a complex and recurring social epidemic. Understanding how its perpetrators learn to cope with its challenges is one important part of understanding how to prevent or limit further outbreaks, and no twentieth-century slaughter is better documented than the Third Reich’s.

To begin with, how were perpetrators chosen? Were they “ordinary men,” as Christopher Browning and, from a different perspective, Goldhagen have asserted? The question misses the point. If people only become capable of committing serious acts of violence voluntarily and without debilitating trauma by undergoing violent socialization, as Lonnie Athens’s research confirms, then the right question to ask about the SS’s choice of perpetrators is, Did they have previous experience with serious violence? Mann analyzed the largest sample of perpetrator biographies yet assembled, “of 1,581 men and women involved in the Nazi genocide,” and concluded that “they resemble ‘Real Nazis’ [i.e., fanatic Nazis] more than they do ‘Ordinary Germans.’ ” For 90 percent of Mann’s sample (excluding Sudeten Germans, women and foreign ethnic Germans), “two-thirds were long-term Nazis, a third had been prewar extremists and ‘careers’ in violence were common. Perpetrators came disproportionately from ‘core Nazi constituencies.’ The more committed Nazis were of higher rank and longer experience—bringing the pressures of hierarchy and comradeship to bear on newer recruits.” Of the 311 Einsatzgruppen members in Mann’s sample, “only 14 had been [only] raw recruits, only 21 had been policemen and 6 had served only in the
Waffen-SS;
76 had only been Nazi or SS members, 144 had been Nazis and policemen and 48 were Nazis and had served in a [concentration] camp or the T4 [euthanasia murder] program.” Even within Police Battalion 101, the unit that was the subject of Browning’s book
OrdinaryMen
and that Goldhagen revisited in
Hitler’s Willing Executioners
to challenge Browning’s interpretation of the men’s behavior, Mann found four signs . . . that things might actually have been a little out of the ordinary. First, 38% of the policemen were Nazi Party members, which was double the membership level among all German men at this time. . . . Second, the higher the rank, the higher the proportion of Nazis. . . . Third, this was a battalion whose main officers, NCOs and the more experienced lower-ranking enlisted men were career policemen: 20% had several years experience of policing, and since their average age was 39, most would have only had experience policing in a Nazi state—obviously not a training in genocide, but police work without effective limitation or regulation by the law. Fourth, the worse the complicity in genocide [as measured by postwar convictions for war crimes], the more these tendencies appeared.

And Battalion 101, Mann adds (paraphrasing a German historian), “was probably less Nazi, less steeped in violence than other police battalions formed from career policemen and volunteers and serving in Poland in 1939.” The SS needed large numbers of killers on the Eastern front, Mann points out, more men than Himmler or Heydrich could personally vet as they had vetted the dossiers of the men to be assigned to the Einsatzgruppen; they “must have thought that reserve police battalions would provide relatively pliable instruments: the German police forces were already bent to the will of the Nazi state, had often killed civilians in Poland already and were likely to contain a disproportionate number of Nazis. This was not quite so ordinary a bunch of Germans.”

So a higher percentage of men with previous experience with serious violence was probably recruited into Daluege’s police battalions than historians searching for an explanation of their willing participation in atrocities have recognized. Indeed, a minimal qualification for police work anywhere is willingness and capacity to use serious violence at least when seriously provoked. Einsatzgruppen members, many of whom had previous experience in Poland, were even more likely to have been fully violently socialized by the time they were recruited.

They were then indoctrinated, which included violent coaching. At Pretzsch, and repeatedly later on by Einsatzgruppen commanders, Higher SS and Police Leaders and even by Himmler himself, the men were coached in their fundamental responsibility to obey orders, including violent orders. Höss, the Auschwitz commandant, though not an Einsatzgruppen officer, underwent comparable indoctrination and described it candidly after the war to the American psychologist G. M. Gilbert:

We were all so trained to obey orders without even thinking that the thought of disobeying an order would simply never have occurred to anybody and somebody else would have done just as well if I hadn’t. . . . Himmler was so strict about little things, and executed SS men for such small offenses, that we naturally took it for granted that he was acting according to a strict code of honor. . . . You can be sure that it was not always a pleasure to see those mountains of corpses and smell the continual burning. — But Himmler had ordered it and had even explained the necessity and I really never gave much thought to whether it was wrong. It just seemed a necessity.

Of the order he received from Himmler in mid-July 1941 to prepare Auschwitz for mass killing, Höss told Gilbert:

It was always stressed that if Germany was to survive then World Jewry must be exterminated and we all accepted it as truth. That was the picture I had in my head, so, when Himmler called me to him, I just accepted it as the realization of something I had already accepted — not only I, but everybody. I took it so much for granted that even though this order, which would move the strongest and coldest nature—and at that moment this crass order to exterminate thousands of people (I did not know then how many)— even though it did frighten me momentarily — it fitted in with all that had been preached to me for years. The problem itself, the extermination of Jewry, was not new—but only that I was to be the one to carry it out, frightened me at first. But after getting the clear direct order and even an explanation with it — there was nothing left but to carry it out.

The realization by the rank and file of the Einsatzgruppen and Order Police that they were to be the ones to carry out the killings often frightened them at first as well. But as police battalion member Kurt Möbius testified at a postwar trial, the indoctrination they received helped prepare the men to push through any fright they might feel:

I would also like to say that it did not at all occur to me that these orders could be unjust. It is true that I know that it is also the duty of the police to protect the innocent, but I was then of the conviction that the Jews were not innocent but guilty. I believed the propaganda that all Jews were criminals and subhumans and that they were the cause of Germany’s decline after the First World War. The thought that one should disobey or evade the order to participate in the extermination of the Jews did not therefore enter my mind at all.

The Einsatzgruppen and Order Police perpetrated their mass murders not in Germany but in territory the Wehrmacht had occupied in Poland and the Soviet Union. They operated away from home under quasi-military conditions, beyond the range of domestic public opinion and outside the bounds of domestic morality other than whatever personal morality they carried within them. No German police or judges watched over their shoulders to challenge SS authority, which they knew derived directly from the Führer, and the lands they scoured had surrendered sovereignty, and thus legal prerogative, to the invaders. The Wehrmacht looked the other way when it was not actually complicitous. The Einsatzgruppen were judge, jury and executioner all in one; anyone who even looked at them sideways, as Hitler had crowed, they could shoot.

Most of the people they were ordered to kill were different from them: came from different cultures, spoke different languages, often lived more rudely than they, dressed differently, were colored and featured differently, differently shorn (some of Himmler’s SS noblemen found amusement sawing off and even burning off Jewish beards). Gendarmerie Master Fritz Jacob, writing from Kamenets-Podolsky in the summer of 1942 to a Wehrmacht lieutenant general who was a friend of his family, characterized the people he and his men were murdering this way: