Ordinary Men (22 page)

While the policemen’s testimonies offer scant information concerning German attitudes toward Poles and Jews, they contain very frequent and quite damning comment on Polish attitudes toward Jews. At least two factors must be kept in mind in evaluating this testimony. First, the German police quite naturally had considerable contact with Poles who collaborated in the Final Solution and helped them track down Jews. Indeed, such Poles attempted to curry favor with the German occupiers through their zealous anti-Semitism. Needless to say, Poles who helped Jews did their very best to remain totally unknown to the Germans. Thus there was an inherent bias in the sympathies and behavior of the Poles with whom the German policemen had firsthand experience.

This inherent one-sidedness is in my opinion further distorted by a second factor. It is fair to speculate that a great deal of projection was involved in German comments on Polish anti-Semitism. Often unwilling to make accusatory statements about their comrades or to be truthful about themselves, these men must have found considerable psychological relief in sharing blame with the Poles. Polish misdeeds could be spoken about quite frankly, while discussion about Germans was quite guarded. Indeed, the greater the share of Polish guilt, the less remained on the German side. In weighing the testimony that follows, these reservations must be borne in mind.

The litany of German accusation against the Poles began—like the mass murder itself—with the account of Józefów. The Polish mayor provided flasks of schnapps to the Germans on the marketplace, according to one policeman.
²⁶
According to others, Poles helped roust Jews from their dwellings and revealed Jewish hiding places in garden bunkers or behind double walls. Even after the Germans had finished searching, Poles continued to bring individual Jews to the marketplace throughout the afternoon. They entered Jewish houses and began to plunder as
soon as the Jews were taken away; they plundered the Jewish corpses when the shooting was over.
²⁷

The classic accusation was made by Captain Hoffmann, a man who claimed to remember absolutely nothing about the massacre his company had carried out at Końskowola. In contrast he remembered the following in exquisite detail. After the outer cordon had been lifted and his Third Company had moved into the town center at Józefów, two Polish students invited him into their house for a vodka. The young Poles exchanged Greek and Latin verses with Hoffmann but did not hide their political views. “Both were Polish nationalists who expressed themselves angrily over how they were treated and thought that Hitler had only one redeeming feature, that he was liberating them from the Jews.”
²⁸

Virtually no account of the “Jew hunts” omitted the fact that hideouts and bunkers were for the most part revealed by Polish “agents,” “informants,” “forest runners,” and angry peasants. But the policemen’s word choice revealed more than just information about Polish behavior. Time and again they used the word “betrayed,” with its unquestionable connotation of strong moral condemnation.
²⁹
Most explicit in this regard was Gustav Michaelson. “I found it very disturbing at the time that the Polish population betrayed these Jews who had hidden themselves. The Jews had camouflaged themselves very well in the forest, in underground bunkers or in other hiding places, and would never have been found if they had not been betrayed by the Polish civilian population.”
³⁰
Michaelson belonged to the minority of “weak” policemen who never shot and could thus voice his moral criticism with less than total hypocrisy. The same cannot be said for most others who accused the Poles of “betrayal,” never mentioning that it was German policy to recruit such people and reward such behavior.

Once again it was the ruthlessly honest Bruno Probst who put the matter in more balanced perspective. Often the “Jew hunts” were instigated by tips from Polish informants, he noted. But he added, “I further remember that at that time we also gradually
began, more systematically than before, to shoot Poles who provided lodging to Jews. Almost always we burned down their farms at the same time.”
³¹
Aside from the policemen who testified about the Polish woman who was surrendered by her father and shot for hiding Jews in her cellar in Kock, Probst was the sole man among 210 witnesses to acknowledge the existence of a German policy of systematically shooting Poles who hid Jews.

Probst also related another story. On one occasion Lieutenant Hoppner was leading a patrol that uncovered a bunker with ten Jews. A young man stepped forward and said that he was a Pole who had hidden there in order to be with his bride. Hoppner gave him the choice of leaving or being shot with his Jewish wife. The Pole stayed and was shot. Probst concluded that Hoppner never meant the offer seriously. The Pole would “certainly” have been shot “trying to escape” if he had decided to leave.
³²

The German policemen described other examples of Polish complicity. At Końskowola, one policeman in the cordon was approached by a woman dressed as a Polish peasant. The nearby Poles said that she was a Jew in disguise, but the policeman let her pass anyhow.
³³
A number of policemen told of Poles arresting and holding Jews until the Germans could come and shoot them.
³⁴
On several occasions the Jews had been beaten when the Germans arrived.
³⁵
Only one witness, however, told of Polish policemen accompanying the German patrols and taking part in the shooting on two occasions.
³⁶
In contrast, Toni Bentheim recounted what happened when the Polish police in Komarówka reported that they had captured four Jews. Drucker ordered Bentheim to shoot them. After he had taken the Jews to the cemetery, where he intended to shoot all four by himself, his submachine gun jammed. He thereupon asked the Polish policeman who had accompanied him “if he wanted to take care of it. To my surprise, however, he refused.” Bentheim used his pistol.
³⁷

The German portrayals of Polish complicity are not false. Tragically, the kind of behavior they attributed to Poles is
confirmed in other accounts and occurred all too often. The Holocaust, after all, is a story with far too few heroes and all too many perpetrators and victims. What is wrong with the German portrayals is a multifaceted distortion in perspective. The policemen were all but silent about Polish help to Jews and German punishment for such help. Almost nothing was said of the German role in inciting the Polish “betrayals” the policemen so hypocritically condemned. Nor was any note made of the fact that large units of murderous auxiliaries—the notorious Hiwis—were not recruited from the Polish population, in stark contrast to other nationalities in pervasively anti-Semitic eastern Europe. In some ways, therefore, the German policemen’s comments about Poles reveal as much about the former as the latter.

W
HY DID MOST MEN IN RESERVE POLICE BATTALION 101
become killers, while only a minority of perhaps 10 percent—and certainly no more than 20 percent—did not? A number of explanations have been invoked in the past to explain such behavior: wartime brutalization, racism, segmentation and rou-tinization of the task, special selection of the perpetrators, careerism, obedience to orders, deference to authority, ideological indoctrination, and conformity. These factors are applicable in varying degrees, but none without qualification.

Wars have invariably been accompanied by atrocities. As John Dower has noted in his remarkable book,
War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
, “war hates” induce “war crimes.”
¹
Above all, when deeply embedded negative racial
stereotypes are added to the brutalization inherent in sending armed men to kill one another on a massive scale, the fragile tissue of war conventions and rules of combat is even more frequently and viciously broken on all sides. Hence the difference between more conventional war—between Germany and the Western allies, for example—and the “race wars” of the recent past. From the Nazi “war of destruction” in eastern Europe and “war against the Jews” to the “war without mercy” in the Pacific and most recently Vietnam, soldiers have all too often tortured and slaughtered unarmed civilians and helpless prisoners, and committed numerous other atrocities. Dower’s account of entire American units in the Pacific openly boasting of a “take no prisoners” policy and routinely collecting body parts of Japanese soldiers as battlefield souvenirs is chilling reading for anyone who smugly assumes that war atrocities were a monopoly of the Nazi regime.

War, and especially race war, leads to brutalization, which leads to atrocity. This common thread, it could be argued, runs from Bromberg
²
and Babi Yar through New Guinea and Manila and on to My Lai. But if war, and especially race war, was a vital context within which Reserve Police Battalion 101 operated (as I shall indeed argue), how much does the notion of wartime brutalization explain the specific behavior of the policemen at Józefów and after? In particular, what distinctions must be made between various kinds of war crimes and the mind-sets of the men who commit them?

Many of the most notorious wartime atrocities—Oradour and Malmédy, the Japanese rampage through Manila, the American slaughter of prisoners and mutilation of corpses on many Pacific islands, and the massacre at My Lai—involved a kind of “battlefield frenzy.” Soldiers who were inured to violence, numbed to the taking of human life, embittered over their own casualties, and frustrated by the tenacity of an insidious and seemingly inhuman enemy sometimes exploded and at other times grimly resolved to have their revenge at the first opportunity. Though atrocities of this kind were too often tolerated, condoned, or
tacitly (sometimes even explicitly) encouraged by elements of the command structure, they did not represent official government policy.
³
Despite the hate-filled propaganda of each nation and the exterminatory rhetoric of many leaders and commanders, such atrocities still represented a breakdown in discipline and the chain of command. They were not “standard operating procedure.”

Other kinds of atrocity, lacking the immediacy of battlefield frenzy and fully expressing official government policy, decidedly were “standard operating procedure.” The fire-bombing of German and Japanese cities, the enslavement and murderous maltreatment of foreign laborers in German camps and factories or along the Siam-Burma railroad, the reprisal shooting of a hundred civilians for every German soldier killed by partisan attack in Yugoslavia or elsewhere in eastern Europe—these were not the spontaneous explosions or cruel revenge of brutalized men but the methodically executed policies of government.

Both kinds of atrocities occur in the brutalizing context of war, but the men who carry out “atrocity by policy” are in a different state of mind. They act not out of frenzy, bitterness, and frustration but with calculation. Clearly the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, in implementing the systematic Nazi policy of exterminating European Jewry, belong in the second category. Except for a few of the oldest men who were veterans of World War I, and a few NCOs who had been transferred to Poland from Russia, the men of the battalion had not seen battle or encountered a deadly enemy. Most of them had not fired a shot in anger or ever been fired on, much less lost comrades fighting at their side. Thus, wartime brutalization through prior combat was not an immediate experience directly influencing the policemen’s behavior at Józefów. Once the killing began, however, the men became increasingly brutalized. As in combat, the horrors of the initial encounter eventually became routine, and the killing became progressively easier. In this sense, brutalization was not the cause but the effect of these men’s behavior.

The context of war must surely be taken into account in a more
general way than as a cause of combat-induced brutalization and frenzy, however. War, a struggle between “our people” and “the enemy,” creates a polarized world in which “the enemy” is easily objectified and removed from the community of human obligation. War is the most conducive environment in which governments can adopt “atrocity by policy” and encounter few difficulties in implementing it. As John Dower has observed, “The Dehumanization of the Other contributed immeasurably to the psychological distancing that facilitated killing.”
⁴
Distancing, not frenzy and brutalization, is one of the keys to the behavior of Reserve Police Battalion 101. War and negative racial stereotyping were two mutually reinforcing factors in this distancing.

Many scholars of the Holocaust, especially Raul Hilberg, have emphasized the bureaucratic and administrative aspects of the destruction process.
⁵
This approach emphasizes the degree to which modern bureaucratic life fosters a functional and physical distancing in the same way that war and negative racial stereotyping promote a psychological distancing between perpetrator and victim. Indeed, many of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were so-called desk murderers whose role in the mass extermination was greatly facilitated by the bureaucratic nature of their participation. Their jobs frequently consisted of tiny steps in the overall killing process, and they performed them in a routine manner, never seeing the victims their actions affected. Segmented, routinized, and depersonalized, the job of the bureaucrat or specialist—whether it involved confiscating property, scheduling trains, drafting legislation, sending telegrams, or compiling lists—could be performed without confronting the reality of mass murder. Such a luxury, of course, was not enjoyed by the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, who were quite literally saturated in the blood of victims shot at point-blank range. No one confronted the reality of mass murder more directly than the men in the woods at Józefów. Segmentation and routinization, the depersonalizing aspects of bureaucratized killing, cannot explain the battalion’s initial behavior there.