Masters of Death (4 page)

Schulz emphasized in this postwar testimony, however, that neither in Berlin nor in Pretzsch had Heydrich and Streckenbach mentioned either the Commissar Order or the extermination of the Jews. At the outset of Barbarossa, at least, the work of the new Einsatzgruppen would be similar to the work of the Einsatzgruppen in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland—brutal enough work at that. Heydrich ordered four categories of enemies executed: “[1] All officials of the Comintern
⁹
(most of these will certainly be career politicians); [2] officials of senior and middle rank and ‘extremists’ in the [Communist] Party, the Central Committee, and the provincial and district committees; [3] the people’s commissars; [4] Jews in the service of the party or the government; [as well as] other extremist elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc.).” Heydrich also told the Einsatzgruppen leaders to secretly encourage and not to interfere with “any purges that may be initiated by anti-Communist or anti-Jewish elements in the newly occupied territories.” Which meant that Jews who were not “in the service of the party or the government” were targeted from the outset; if the SS was not yet prepared to be seen murdering large numbers of Jews without at least minimal “political” justification, it was charged with the responsibility of organizing others to do so. (“The aim of
Einsatzkommando
2 from the beginning,” commando leader Rudolf Lange would report from Latvia in January 1942, “was a radical solution of the Jewish problem through the execution of all Jews.”)

The SS probably approached mass murder cautiously because of its past conflicts with the Wehrmacht; it needed first to assess whether the army on the scene would support and ignore the SS’s performance of its murderous “special tasks” in the occupied territories as the high command in Berlin had agreed to do. And in any case, as Streckenbach had informed the new Einsatzgruppen in Pretzsch, Russia was expected to be defeated by December. For now, elimination of the “Jewish-Bolshevik” leadership and intelligentsia; after the quick victory, there would be time to deal with the rest of the Eastern Jews.

But not only the Jews. A more grandiose vision than revenge against the Jews drove the Nazi elite. Himmler had refurbished a Saxon castle, Wewelsburg, for his SS leadership, which he considered “a knightly Order.” Sited on a bluff of the Alme River near Paderborn in western Germany, it looked out grandly across the Westphalian plain. One week before Barbarossa, the Reichsführer-SS assembled his top SS and police leadership at Wewelsburg for a three-day meeting. Heydrich attended; so did Heydrich’s stern, balding rival Kurt Daluege, the chief of the Order Police, and the Higher SS and Police Leaders Himmler had designated to assume civilian control of the occupied Soviet territories once the Wehrmacht moved on. Speaking to the assembled Gruppenführers
¹⁰
in their elegant black uniforms, Himmler repeated Hitler’s arguments about an ultimate contest between ideologies and the necessity of seizing new living space
—Lebensraum—
for the Fatherland. He then put a number on what that seizure would mean. “It is a question of existence,” he said, “thus it will be a racial struggle of pitiless severity, in the course of which 20 to 30 million Slavs and Jews will perish through military actions and crises of food supply.” In Himmler’s vision, the Nazi plan for
Lebensraum
meant clearing the Soviet Union of its indigenous population all the way to the Urals through war, murder, enslavement and deliberate starvation.

Heydrich inspected his troops immediately before they moved out. “On that day of inspection,” Erwin Schulz recalled, the Einsatzgruppen commandos “were gathered together on the marching field . . . and lined up in the open square.” Heydrich hurried his walk through the ranks; a rainstorm was coming that might ground his plane and he needed to return to Berlin. “And then the inspection took place by Heydrich,” Schulz concludes, “and after the inspection they marched out of this place down the road.” No more sinister phalanx was ever loosed on the world.

TWO

Vicious Circles

The Third Reich was built on violence. It governed with violence, dominated Europe with violence and provoked a violent response that finally destroyed it. The scale of its use of violence, not only its anti-Semitism, distinguishes it from other contemporary governments and regimes. Anti-Semitism had a long history in the West and pervaded European society. The Jews of the Diaspora had migrated to Poland and western Russia in the first place because Christian anti-Semitism had driven them out of western Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Millions of copies of the widely translated, bogus
Protocols of the Elders
of Zion,
supposedly a transcription of a secret Jewish council’s plans to subvert legitimate governments and take over the world, were sold internationally in the 1920s and 1930s; Henry Ford took the forgery as literally as Adolf Hitler did. Hitler cherished a fanatic hatred of the Jews, whom he believed to be his regime’s most dangerous enemies, and he put the highest priority on their elimination, but he intended to enslave and destroy with privation the far more numerous Slavic peoples as well, as Himmler’s words at Wewelsburg confirm.

The control of violence is a fundamental responsibility of government. Governments control violence by monopolizing it. They authorize military and police forces to use violence but deem criminal any other individual or institutional use. From this basic division, which evolved across five centuries in the West as governments enlarged and centralized, the common belief has emerged that government violence is rational (or at least deliberate and intentional), while private violence is irrational, aberrant, the product of psychopathology rather than deliberate intention. In fact, violence is violence, whether public or private, official or unofficial, legal or illegal, good or bad. Violence is an instrumentality, not a psychopathology or a character disorder. Violence is a means to an end—domination and control—one of many possible means. Since its essence is injury, its efficacy in the long term is marginal, but its short-term advantages are obvious.

To say that governments monopolize violence is to imply that violence is a commodity that can be collected and stored. Violence is a behavior. As such, it resides in individuals, people who have experienced it and out of that experience learned to produce it more or less on demand. Weapons enter the picture as tools violent people may or may not use to amplify their violence production. Governments monopolize violence by authorizing some of their citizens to use violence in circumstances deemed legal and official. These citizens may have come to their official duties already experienced with violence, or they may gain their violent experience through official training. However they learn to use violence, even these violent officials are authorized to do so only under specific circumstances, and if they use violence under unauthorized circumstances, such acts are deemed criminal. Police brutality and military atrocity, for example, are two categories of criminal violence. The violence that police and military apply illegally—against noncombatants, for example, or against citizens who have not committed a crime or are not resisting arrest—is similar to the violence they use officially. Ironically, such illegal but otherwise comparable acts by violent officials are often characterized as “irrational” or “crazy.”

Many theories have been proposed to explain violent behavior, including loss of control, involuntary impulse, unconscious motivation, lack of conscience, character disorders, genetic inheritance or neurological damage. Some of these theories are anecdotal, based on an observer’s interpretation of a violent actor’s intentions. Others derive from statistical correlational studies, which by definition do not reveal causal relationships but merely identify qualities that may be associated in some way with violent behavior. That people become violent because they have low self-esteem, for example, is a widely accepted theory that minimal interaction with violent people, including violent professionals, quickly disconfirms: violent people usually have overweeningly high self-esteem verging on egomania, because they are confident of their ability to handle conflict and because other people, fearing them, show them great deference. Not all sociopaths are violent; not all violent people have neurological damage; unconscious motivation is by definition unprovable; and any theory of violence development that fails to account for official violent behavior as well as criminal is incomplete.

In his history
Hitler’s Willing Executioners,
the young Holocaust scholar Daniel Jonah Goldhagen ascribes Nazi mass murder to what he calls “eliminationist anti-Semitism,” which he defines as “the belief that Jewish influence, by nature destructive, must be eliminated irrevocably from society.” Besides being tautological — because it includes the effect (elimination) in the cause (“eliminationist anti-Semitism”)— Goldhagen’s theory fails to explain the Third Reich’s fervor for murdering not only Jews but also Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals and the disabled. It assumes that violence is essentially an overflow phenomenon, so that when too much of some volatile substance has accumulated in an individual or a society (in this case anti-Semitism), it will overflow in the form of violent behavior; as Goldhagen writes naively and again tautologically, “People must be motivated to kill others, or else they would not do so.” In fact, motivation is not sufficient by itself to produce serious violence; people must also have undergone prior violent experiences: they must have
learned
to be violent and must have come to identify themselves as violent. Otherwise their intense hatreds will emerge as ugly but nonviolent behaviors, such as expressions of contempt, denunciations, discrimination, ostracism—exactly the sort of behaviors that the rest of twentieth-century Europe, and Germany before Hitler, demonstrated toward the Jews. As several critics have noted, Goldhagen’s theory that eliminationist anti-Semitism explains the Holocaust also isolates the most destructive genocide of the twentieth century as a unique event (in Goldhagen’s formulation, “a radical break with everything known in human history”), disconnected from the other genocides of the age, when in fact other genocides — of the Armenians, for example, or of the Tutsi in Rwanda—resemble the Holocaust in etiology if not in scale even though anti-Semitism played no part in their occurrence. There is much of value in Goldhagen’s book, but the evidence, including the evidence he cites, does not support a theory that ideology
causes
violent behavior, though it may well be used to justify it.

One theory that accounts for violent officials as well as violent criminals and is based on causal rather than correlational evidence is the violent-socialization theory of the American criminologist Lonnie Athens. Using the method of universals formulated by the Scottish philosopher David Hume, which identifies cause and effect retrospectively (and therefore always provisionally) by discovering the unique attributes of an exemplary population, Athens interviewed incarcerated violent criminals and isolated from their narratives the minimum sequence of violent social experiences that they
all
had in common, a sequence that he found to be missing or incomplete in people with experience of violence who had not committed serious violent acts.

Athens did not study violent officials. Some violent officials (notably police) are self-selected and come to their profession already experienced with violence, as many of the Einsatzgruppen did. For those officials who acquire their violent skills in official training, there are clear parallels between their training experiences and the four-stage developmental process that Athens identified in the backgrounds of violent criminals. Since violence, official or private, is learned through violent experience, such parallels are to be expected and should not be surprising. If Athens’s violent socialization model is correct, however, there should also be significant
differences
between the formal programs of training of violent officials and the informal violent socialization process, because violent criminals use violence in situations where violent officials are constrained. Such differences do emerge on analysis, and Athens’s theory explains them. None of the other theories of violence development passes this crucial test.

The violent socialization process, Athens found, divides into four stages, which he calls (1) brutalization; (2) belligerency; (3) violent performances; (4) virulency. The stages are sequential: each stage has to be fully experienced before the subject advances to the next one, a process that can occur cataclysmically in a short period of time or across a period of years. Brutalization is inflicted on novices and is thus involuntary, but passage through the three later stages results from
decisions
the subject makes. So people become violent by choice, not by chance. Their choices may be constrained by their circumstances, but they are never the only possible choices available. (Many people brutalized in childhood, for example, do not become violent adults. They make other choices that lead to nonviolent outcomes.) And once a subject has completed violent socialization and has become dangerously violent, Athens found, each act of violence he perpetrates is a further deliberate choice, not merely an automatic reaction or a loss of control. Which means that people who use violence against other people choose to do so and are therefore responsible for their acts. That violence is a choice rather than a compulsion or a release is taken for granted in the military and among police; the concept has been obscured where private violence is concerned simply because such violence has become deviant in modern civilized society, relatively uncommon and unfamiliar. Criminal law, however, drawing on centuries of common experience, is founded on the presumption that violent acts are deliberate.

Distinctions such as these are important for assessing the responsibility of Einsatzgruppen personnel for the atrocities they committed.