Masters of Death (42 page)

All these goods were the fruits, of course, of robbery and confiscation. If the confiscation meant that Russians would die, Kretschmer told his wife, Germans would still seize the food; the Führer had given his approval. Moreover, “we have got to appear to be tough here or else we will lose the war. There is no room for pity of any kind. You women and children back home could not expect any mercy or pity if the enemy got the upper hand. For that reason we are mopping up where necessary but otherwise the Russians are willing, simple and obedient. There are no Jews here any more.”

Kretschmer was traumatized by his initial exposure to mass killing. He describes his difficulties only obliquely, censoring himself not only to spare his wife but perhaps also to evade whatever censors were reading his mail. “The reveille is at six o’clock,” he wrote a month after his arrival, for example, “but I always wake up earlier because up to now I have not been able to sleep more than five hours, although I sometimes go to bed early.” He connected his sleep disturbance with the work he was doing: “The first few days I was tired
and could not take very much
but after that
I managed to see the night through
and was actually
the last
to quit the field.
”
⁴⁵
He found the killing sufficiently upsetting that he sought alternative duty as an administrator, an assignment, he told his wife and children, that he had been granted:

I have already told you about the shooting—that I could not say “no” here either [i.e., he wanted to avoid doing it but was not allowed exception or did not risk asking]. But they’ve more or less said they’ve finally found a good man to run the administrative side of things. The last one was by all accounts a coward. That’s the way people are judged here. But you can trust your Daddy. He thinks about you all the time and is not shooting immoderately.

Judging men to be cowards who were unwilling to shoot unarmed victims in cold blood was a form of coercive violent coaching the group used to further the violent socialization of new members. And associating thinking about his children with “not shooting immoderately” emphasizes the difficulty Kretschmer was having accepting the group’s standards. A few lines later in the same letter he responded sardonically to his wife’s news of a neighbor’s military assignment: “It’s nice that Herr Kern is going to France. I think he would have been
too weak
for the East,
though people do change here.
People soon get used to the sight of blood, but
Blutwurst
is not very popular around here.”

A few days later Kretschmer was still feeling precarious. He told his wife and children about the fine meals he enjoyed, then explained, “We have to eat and drink well because of the nature of our work
. . . . Otherwisewe would crack up.
Your Papa will be very careful and
strike the
right balance.
It’s not very pleasant stuff. I would far rather sleep.” At the end of the same letter, Kretschmer summarized the strategies he had adopted to carry him through, a combination of habituation, rationalization and denial:

If it weren’t for the stupid thoughts [he had been having] about what we are doing in this country, the Einsatz here would be wonderful, since it has put me in a position where I can support you all very well. Since, as I already wrote to you, I consider the last Einsatz to be justified and indeed approve of the consequences it had, the phrase “stupid thoughts” is not strictly accurate. Rather it is a weakness not to be able to stand the sight of dead people; the best way of overcoming it is to do it more often. Τhen it becomes a habit. . . . The more one thinks about the whole business the more one comes to the conclusion that it’s the only thing we can do to safeguard unconditionally the security of our people and our future. I do not therefore want to think and write about it any further. I would only make your heart heavy needlessly. We men here at the front will win through. Our faith in the Führer fulfills us and gives us strength to carry out our difficult and thankless task.

If he is not yet converted at this point, Kretschmer appears at least to be moving toward incorporating the values of the violent group he joined almost two months previously. To do so he had progressively blurred the distinction between defensive and offensive violence, casting his murderous work as vital for the protection of his family. Characterizing a victim group as a relentless threat to a perpetrator group is the fundamental mechanism of genocide. It allows perpetrators to interpret their violence as defensive and therefore both justified and unavoidable—in Kretschmer’s words, “it’s the only thing we can do.”

Erich Naumann, who took over commanding Einsatzgruppe B in Byelorussia at the end of November 1941 when Nebe felt he could no longer go on, offered a variation on Kretschmer’s “it’s the only thing we can do” during his testimony at the postwar Einsatzgruppen trial in Nuremberg. “[The Führer order] was very harsh,” Naumann told the court, “terribly harsh for the
Einsatzkommandos
and others who were involved in it. Everyone knew that it was not pleasant but was very much against one’s inner feelings.” Naumann insisted that he questioned the Führer order all the way up to Heydrich, who told him finally and with exasperation:

“That is a clear Führer order. This Führer order has been issued for the security of the rear of the combating forces and of the entire army area. It can only be understood in one way, and it has to be carried out accordingly. All Jews, both male and female, all Gypsies, and all Communist officials fall under the Führer order.” He repeated, “There is no discussion. The order must be carried out. The Führer issued the order for reasons of security of the army areas.”

Naumann continued his testimony under questioning from the president of the court, Michael Musmanno:

NAUMANN: These discussions concerning this order, its seriousness and its terrible burden when executing it . . . were confronted, on the other hand, with another discussion—namely, that this order had been issued by the Führer—that is to say, by the man in supreme command, the supreme head of the state. We were now faced with the problem of our personal feelings and this order. Each one of us had to make up his mind whether, during the war, we could decide according to our own personal feelings or whether we had to obey an order which was issued during the war by the supreme commander of the state. The decision was for us, as obedient soldiers, not easy, but it was clear we had to carry out the order, for the very simple reason that a soldier during the war has to carry out orders. If every soldier only carries out an order after having considered whether he likes it or not, then there would be no more soldiers. . . .

Guilt and remorse I can only feel for crimes I personally commit. If I myself have carried out killings and cruelties then I would have to feel guilt and remorse. If I have carried out an order then I have no guilt at all, and therefore I cannot feel remorse for a guilt that does not exist.

MUSMANNO: Did you have any misgivings at that time?

NAUMANN: Yes, your Honor.

MUSMANNO: Then you did not agree with the order?

NAUMANN: Insofar as I had misgivings about the execution of this order and it was contrary to my nature to kill defenseless people.

MUSMANNO: And you believe it was wrong to kill, especially women and children?

NAUMANN: Not wrong, your Honor, because I was given the authority to do so, because there was a Führer order.

MUSMANNO: I have asked you whether you believed it was wrong at that time to shoot down women and children.

NAUMANN: No, I did not hold that opinion owing to my convictions. It was my conviction that it had to be done.

Naumann’s argument that he was only obeying orders was unacceptable to the court, which sentenced him to death, but its value to him as a rationalization should not be discounted. If the highest authority of the state told him to do something, then he could convince himself he had no choice and was therefore not personally responsible. The problem with such appeals to higher authority, as psychologist Herbert C. Kelman points out, is that everyone in the chain of command, up to and including the supreme authority, may feel authorized and therefore freed of moral restraint:

According to a view that is widely held (although it has been challenged by the Nuremberg principles), the state itself is an entity that is not subject to the moral law; it is free to do anything it deems necessary to protect or promote its national interests. The central authorities, in acting for the state, are similarly not subject to moral restraints that might be operative in their personal lives. . . .According to this view, the freedom from all restraints devolves on the central decision maker [e.g., Hitler] from a higher authority, the state, of which he is merely the servant. . . . He too claims that he had no choice in that he was responding to authoritative demands. . . . The whole doctrine is, of course, extremely dangerous because of its total circularity.

But the repetition of massacre after massacre, the screams and pleadings, the faces and bodies glimpsed in their helpless final agonies that unavoidably recalled a sister, a brother, a wife, a child, an aging parent at home or the perpetrator himself, made such rationalizations difficult for some perpetrators to maintain at the edge of the killing pits, if not in the extravagant security of the Führer bunker. A few among the SS leadership succumbed. Erwin Schulz asked to be relieved of duty as commander of Einsatzkommando 5 (Einsatzgruppe C) in September 1941. In a Nuremberg affidavit he explained why: “The reasons for my [request] lay, among others, in the ever-intensified orders for the ruthless extermination of the entire Jewish population.
SS Brigadeführer
Dr. Rasch distinguished himself by particular ruthlessness. He ordered the leaders also to participate personally in the shootings. [SS-GRUPPENFÜHRER Bruno] Streckenbach himself described the activity of the
Einsatzgruppen
in the East to me as murder.” Schulz, like Hitler and Himmler, was prepared to organize massacres but not to participate personally.

Alfred Filbert, a lawyer who commanded Einsatzkommando 9 (Einsatzgruppe B) from June through October 1941, suffered what he later called a “nervous collapse” after organizing massacres in Grodno, Vilnius and Vitebsk and applied for a transfer to military duty in the Waffen-SS. Instead he was recalled to Berlin, charged with illegally withholding 60,000 Reichsmarks confiscated from his victims and sent home on extended unpaid leave. (He was exonerated in 1943 and assigned to the Reich Security Main Office.) A British psychiatrist, Henry V. Dicks, interviewed Filbert many years later in prison, where he was serving a life sentence for his part in murdering eleven thousand people in massacres in Lithuania and Byelorussia.

Dicks offers a rare view into the background family experiences of an Einsatzkommando leader. Filbert had been born in 1905 in Darmstadt of Protestant parents. He mentioned to Dicks several significant occasions of childhood brutalization. “In my home and family,” the tall, gaunt Filbert told the psychiatrist, “we only knew command and order. I was born in military barracks. My father started as the sergeant major of the Guard of his Highness the Duke of Hesse. We had a good life then. Of course I wanted to become a soldier. After all—the Guards!” Dicks commented that the SS’s rule of absolute obedience must have appealed to him. “The Kaiser demanded worse,” Filbert responded— “he said ‘When I order you to murder your father and mother you must obey!’ The Kaiser’s orders were like God’s.” Evidently
Kadavergehorsam,
corpse-like obedience, predated Nazism.

Protesting his sensitivity, Filbert revealed that his brother handled him violently. “I always went to great lengths to avoid anything to do with death or corpses as a child,” he told Dicks. “When I was very young my brother, eighteen months older, took hold of me and held me out over the window sill. Ever since I’ve had a dread of heights—a feeling it draws me down.”

Another memory focused on his violent subjugation by his mother during the years when his father was away at war. Dicks paraphrases Filbert’s recollection:

[Filbert] had looked up to this kind, warm-hearted father and missed him terribly as a child. . . . It was left to his mother to be the disciplinarian. Yes, she was too strict. [Filbert] recalls how he had a bad fall during his father’s absence and lay on the ground yelling in great pain. The mother came out to him with her stick and gave him a beating for weeping. It was only after that had been done that she even looked at his leg and found that he had broken it.

(“In [Filbert’s] case,” Dicks comments, “we are afforded a glimpse of how far back dates his sense of being surrounded by hard, unloving, even murderous figures, with his good daddy not there to save him. . . . I think that insofar as [Filbert] was relating a fact of his own experience, we are justified in recoiling as much from this piece of cruelty by the mother against her own child as from a typical SS man’s atrocity.”)

Filbert had gone to the universities of Giessen, Heidelberg and Mar-burg, winning his dueling scars at one of them, earning his doctorate in law in 1933. He moved up rapidly in the SS, participating with Nebe, Eichmann and others in the conference Heydrich held in 1939 to organize Einsatzgruppen for Poland. At his postwar trial the court established that Filbert had taken command of Einsatzkommando 9 with a speech to his men announcing “hard consequences for any who demurred at taking part in the destruction of Jews.” He told his men that “every man must fire,” including himself, “to set a good example.” Dicks reports that “his bearing was described by some of his subordinates in evidence as ‘ruthless,’ for example in dismissing objections to the herding and stripping of women and in his lack of consideration for the youth of some of his personnel taking part. It was clear to the court that [Filbert] presented himself as the zealous as well as ferocious executor of his Führer’s policies.” The psychiatrist quotes the prosecution as acknowledging “ ‘that [Filbert] stopped the wild shooting of the Lithuanian auxiliary police, but he substituted for it the routine mechanical slaughter of the Chicago stockyards at the rate of 500 a day.’ ”