Masters of Death (32 page)

I do not know whether you too, Herr Lieutenant General, saw such frightful Jewish types in Poland. I thank my lucky stars that I’ve now seen this mixed race for what it is. Then if life is kind to me I’ll have something to pass on to my children. Sick with venereal disease, cripples and idiots were the norm. Materialists to the last in spite of everything. Every one of them without exception said things like, “We’re specialists, you’re not going to shoot us, are you?” These were not human beings but ape people.

Similarly, Blobel, questioned at his Nuremberg trial by the president of the tribunal, revealed that he had eased his conscience by belittling the stoicism or realistic fatalism of Sonderkommando 4a’s victims:

JUDGE MICHAEL MUSMANNO: Did you ever have any experience with the victims being recalcitrant as they were being led to the grave, attempting to break away, or was there any demonstration or any attempted struggle?

BLOBEL: I could never observe . . . that there was resistance. They were well guarded, and Eastern men get over things so very quickly and I was always surprised at that. . . . It was quite unbelievable for us Germans.

MUSMANNO: You mean that they resigned themselves easily to what was awaiting them?

BLOBEL: Yes, that was the case. That was the case with these people. Human life was not as valuable as it was with us. They did not care so much. They did not know their own human value.

MUSMANNO: In other words, they went to their death quite happily?

BLOBEL: I would not say that they were happy. They knew what was going to happen to them. Of course, they were told what was going to happen to them and they were resigned to their fate and that is the strange thing about these people in the East.

Humiliation, overcrowding, starvation, fear, denial of medicines and medical care, boundless and debilitating grief widened the apparent distance between the murderers and their victims, making killing them easier.

In contrast to the moral and legal darkness that shrouded the mass killing on the Eastern front, reducing pressure on the killers, the T4 euthanasia murder program inside Germany gradually came to be exposed to public scrutiny. As a result, on 24 August 1941, after at least seventy thousand handicapped and mentally ill German citizens had been murdered, Hitler ordered the gassing program stopped (although the covert killing of German children and handicapped adults by lethal injection continued, bringing the “euthanasia” total by the end of the war to more than two hundred thousand). “Popular history and special pleading have credited the opposition by the churches with this abrogation of the killing operation,” Friedlander writes. “But Hitler was probably pushed to issue his so-called stop order primarily by widespread public knowledge about the killings and far less by church opposition, an opposition that merely reflected general popular disquiet about the way euthanasia was implemented.” Friedlander adds that while “the organizers of the killings could disregard the protest of the churches, they had to neutralize the [German] judiciary if they hoped to continue the killing program.” Hitler had no such problem where non-Germans in occupied territory were concerned; the writ of the German judiciary did not extend so far.

Despite these efforts of ideological, social and psychological preparation, many of the men assigned to mass killing found it difficult to do. Holocaust survivors and historians have often (and understandably) greeted assertions of such difficulty with skepticism and contempt, but the evidence is sufficiently widespread and detailed to be credible. And surely any indication that slaughter is challenging and takes it toll on the slaughterers ought to be welcomed, if only as ironic justice. Dismissing perpetrators as inhuman monsters rather than human criminals positions genocidal killing beyond comprehension, beyond prevention or repair.

Blobel, continuing his exchange with Judge Musmanno, testified to the difficulty his men experienced at the beginning—testimony cankered by his continued belittling of the victims:

MUSMANNO: And did that make the job easier for you, the fact that they did not resist?

BLOBEL: In any case, the guards never met any resistance. . . . Everything went very quietly. It took time, of course, and I must say that our men who took part in these executions suffered more from nervous exhaustion than those who had to be shot.

MUSMANNO: In other words, your pity was more for the men who had to shoot than for the victims?

BLOBEL: Our men had to be cared for.

MUSMANNO: And how were they cared for? Did you have nurses along to cheer them up in this task that they had to perform? In what way were they cared for?

BLOBEL: The people had to be told before these executions about the crimes of the executees, why they had been sentenced. They were told about these facts and that the order . . . was the death sentence and that they had to carry out these orders by actually shooting these people. These men of our commandos—where did they come from? They came from all classes of the population. One was a criminologist. One had a free-lance profession. One had been a merchant. They had never shot anybody before and for these people it was something quite unusual.

MUSMANNO: And you felt very sorry for them?

BLOBEL: Yes, these people experienced a lot, psychologically.

If many of the men of the Einsatzgruppen and the Order Police were experienced killers, others were novices, as were perhaps a larger number of young Waffen-SS fresh from training. Men under command observation who have not been fully violently socialized can pull the trigger and kill when ordered to do so, but those without sufficient violent experience are likely to break down just as people break down following other traumatic social experiences for which they are unprepared.

Even among persons with violent experience, there is a sharp and commonly recognized distinction (recognized by police and military authorities and in the law, as well as in Athens’s findings) between those who use violence only defensively and those who use it without provocation, instrumentally and even expressively. These three kinds of perpetrators — novice, defensive and malefic — can all be identified among Einsatzgruppen, Waffen-SS and Order Police operatives. Browning, looking at reserve police battalions, similarly identifies three types: a “significant core of eager and enthusiastic killers . . . who required no process of gradual brutalization to accustom themselves to their murderous task”; “a middle group that followed orders and complied with standard procedures but did not evince any eagerness to kill Jews”; and “a significant minority of men who did not participate in the shooting of Jews” and whose “nonparticipation was both tolerated and brushed aside as inconsequential.” Einsatzgruppen members could not so easily choose not to participate, since mass killings were their primary duty. As SS members they were volunteers, however.

Obersturmführer Albert Hartl, head of the staffing section of Einsatzgruppe C under Rasch’s successor Max Thomas, clearly distinguished the two extreme types (malefic and novice) in his postwar trial testimony:

SS-Gruppenführer Thomas was a doctor by profession; he was very preoccupied with the psychological repercussions of the Einsatz on his people. From my conversations with him I know that these effects took many different forms. There were people whose participation awakened in them the most evil sadistic impulses. For example, the head of one firing squad made several hundred Jews of all ages, male and female, strip naked and run through a field into a wood. He then had them mown down with machine-gun fire. He even photographed the whole proceedings. . . . [Participation] also had the reverse effect on some of the SS men detailed to the firing squads. These men were overcome with uncontrollable fits of crying and suffered health breakdowns. Thomas once told me that a very common manifestation in members of these firing squads was temporary impotence. It also happened that one member of the Einsatzgruppe who had participated in mass shootings one night suddenly succumbed to a type of mental derangement and began to shoot wildly about him, killing and wounding several men
³⁰
. . . . A number of SS officers and men were sent back to serve at home “on account of their great weakness.”

A staff officer with Einsatzgruppe A in Riga reported similar problems. “After the first wave of shootings,” the officer testified, “it emerged that the men, particularly the officers, could not cope with the demands made on them. Many abandoned themselves to alcohol, many suffered nervous breakdowns and psychological illnesses; for example we had suicides and there were cases where some men cracked up and shot wildly around them and completely lost control.”

A German war correspondent stationed on a minesweeper in the harbor at Liepaja, Latvia, in July 1941 described witnessing a massacre and observing both extremes: “I saw SD personnel weeping because they could not cope mentally with what was going on. Then again I encountered others who kept a score sheet of how many people they had sent to their death.”

With the order in late July 1941 to begin killing women and children, which made it more difficult to rationalize the killing as the defensive execution of enemy partisans, some defensive killers also broke down. Robert Barth, a member of Einsatzkommando 10b (Einsatzgruppe D), witnessed such behavior during a mass killing at Cherson, in the Ukraine, on 20 September 1941:

About six kilometers from Cherson there was an anti-tank ditch. The Jews, among them women, children and old men, were brought up to the ditch in trucks. There they had to surrender their valuables and good clothing, then they were driven into the ditch where murder commandos had been posted to shoot the unfortunate victims. For the most part, Waffen-SS, regular police, Russian auxiliaries and members of the security service of the Gestapo and criminal police were employed for these shootings. Ghastly scenes took place during these shootings. Several members of the killer gangs had to be relieved, as their nerves had broken down completely. Even before they had started on their sanguinary jobs, the killer gangs were issued liquor and cigarettes before carrying out the shootings.

The SS leaders tolerated breakdown more than excess. From afar, such a distinction seems absurd: If the idea was to kill Jews, why would Himmler not welcome initiative and enthusiasm? Answering that question invokes the long history of what the sociologist Norbert Elias called “the civilizing process.” European society in medieval times and earlier had been dominated by malefically violent nobles who enforced their authority with serious physical violence, which they took pleasure in and celebrated. Homicide rates in medieval Europe even among commoners, who settled their disputes privately with little local interference from the law, were twenty to fifty times as high as in modern Europe. Violence declined across seven hundred years of Western history as monarchs moved to monopolize violence in order to monopolize taxation and thereby limit the power of the nobility and as an emerging middle class sought protection in official justice from the burden of settling disputes at personal risk. Social controls over violence, primarily increasing access to courts of law, developed in parallel with changes in child-rearing practices away from physical brutalization.

The criminal justice system vividly demonstrated this transformation. When official justice began to take control it advertised its authority with public torture and executions, spectacles attended by enthusiastic crowds. As private violence declined — that is, as populations were socialized to less personally violent identities—people lost their taste for such spectacles. Punishment retreated behind institutional walls.

The nature of punishment transformed as well. Michel Foucault summarizes that transformation:

The body now [comes to serve] as an instrument or intermediary: if one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the individual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as property. The body, according to this penalty, is caught up in a system of constraints and privations, obligations and prohibitions. Physical pain, the pain of the body itself, is no longer the constituent element of the penalty. From being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of suspended rights.

By the twentieth century in western Europe, the civilizing process had reached the point where, with the exception of small numbers of officials trained in torture, only violent criminals were prepared to use unprovoked serious violence, and such behavior (which had been normal upper-class conduct in the medieval world) was considered to be deviant and even pathological.

The Wehrmacht, for example, as Raul Hilberg points out, distinguished clearly between malefic and defensive behavior in making its men available to assist at Einsatzgruppen atrocities, and strongly censured malefic “excesses”:

There was an overall objection that was rooted in the whole psychology of the destruction process. The killing of the Jews was regarded as historical necessity. The soldier had to “understand” this. If for any reason he was instructed to help the SS and police in their task, he was expected to obey orders. However, if he killed the Jews spontaneously, voluntarily, or without instruction, merely because he wanted to kill, then he committed an abnormal act . . . dangerous to the discipline and prestige of the German army. Herein lay the crucial difference between the man who “overcame” himself to kill and one who wantonly committed atrocities. The former was regarded as a good soldier and a true Nazi; the latter was a person without self-control, who would be a danger to his community after his return home.

Himmler similarly distinguished between obedient killing and spontaneous excess, though it is not at all clear that his subordinates were equally punctilious. Barth testified, for example, that “
SS-Obersturm bannführer
Zeezen, leader of
EK
10a, was referred to as particularly brutal. He is said to have boasted that his commando had shot the most Jews. It was also told that at one time in the course of executions of Jews when the commando ran out of ammunition the Jews were thrown alive into a well about thirty meters deep.”