Ordinary Men (30 page)
Authors: Christopher R. Browning
What is left out of this portrayal? Goldhagen acknowledges in one footnote, though not in the main text, that one witness
described Trapp as “weeping.” There is no mention of the other seven witnesses who described Trapp as weeping or otherwise displaying visible physical distress.
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He does not mention the testimony of two policemen who recalled that Trapp explicitly said the orders did not come from him,
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nor four of the five who noted that Trapp openly distanced himself from the orders when transmitting them to his men.
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He does not mention the testimony of Trapp’s chauffeur: “Concerning the events in Józefów, he later told me more or less: ‘If this Jewish business is ever avenged on earth, then have mercy on us Germans.’”
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The “pep talk” allegedly activating a demonic view of the Jews turns out, on examination, to be a rather pathetic attempt to rationalize the imminent massacre of Jews as a wartime action against Germany’s enemies, similar to the bombs falling on German women and children at home. The repeated testimony of the men that they felt shaken, depressed, embittered, despondent, dejected, stricken, angered, and burdened is dismissed by Goldhagen out of hand as self-exculpatory or reflecting “momentary” visceral weakness.
Describing the first execution of Poles in a reprisal shooting at Taleyn, Goldhagen argues: “This illustrative episode juxtaposes the Germans’ attitudes towards Poles and Jews.” As proof, he cites just two witnesses—one witness to the effect that at Talcyn Trapp “wept,” and another that “Some of the men expressed afterwards their desire not to undertake any more missions of this sort.”
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In short, precisely the kinds of repeated testimony that Goldhagen excludes or dismisses when discussing the battalions murder of Jews at Józefów is suddenly embraced—even when voiced by just two individuals—to prove how differently the battalion felt about murdering Poles.
Moreover, this double standard in the selection of evidence can also be seen in Goldhagen’s analysis of the men’s motives. The failure of the policemen to opt out at Talcyn is not construed as evidence of a desire to kill Poles, while not opting out at Józefów is cited as evidence that they “wanted to be genocidal executioners” of the Jews. Nothing more than “momentary” visceral weakness is seen in the mountain of testimony about the men’s distress at Józefów,
while the statement of a single witness at Talcyn is cited as valid evidence of the men’s “obvious distaste and reluctance” to kill Poles.
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The double standard concerning Jewish and Polish victims can be seen in yet another way. Goldhagen cites numerous instances of gratuitous and voluntaristic killing of Jews as relevant to assessing the attitudes of the killers. But he omits a similar case of gratuitous, voluntaristic killing by Reserve Police Battalion 101 when the victims were Poles. A German police official was reported killed in the village of Niezdów, whereupon policemen about to visit the cinema in Opole were sent to carry out a reprisal action. Only elderly Poles, mostly women, remained in the village, as the younger Poles had all fled. Word came, moreover, that the ambushed German policeman had been only wounded, not killed. Nonetheless, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 shot all the elderly Poles and set the village on fire before returning to the cinema for an evening of casual and relaxing entertainment.
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There is not much evidence of “obvious distaste and reluctance” to kill Poles to be seen in this episode. Would Goldhagen have omitted this incident if the victims had been Jews and an anti-Semitic motivation could have easily been inferred?
A pattern of tendentious selection of evidence
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can also been seen in Goldhagen’s portrayal of near total uniformity among the men. Lieutenant Heinz Buchmann was the one member of the battalion who articulated a principled opposition to the mass murder and refused to take part in any aspect of the anti-Jewish actions. Concerning the difference in behavior between himself and the SS captains Julius Wohlauf and Wolfgang Hoffmann, Buchmann testified reluctantly that promotion was unimportant to him because he owned a successful business, while Wohlauf and Hoffmann were ambitious career policemen “who wanted to become something.” Moreover, he added, “Through my business experience, especially because it extended abroad, I had gained a better overview of things.”
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Goldhagen quickly glosses over the importance Buchmann himself gives to careeristic motives and construes the second portion of the statement as evidence that Buchmann alone in the battalion was not in the grip of German hallucinatory anti-Semitism.
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But if Buehmann is to be cited as a prime witness providing evidence for a uniform anti-Semitism within the battalion, ought not the following statements also be included? Concerning the differing reactions of the men to Buchmann’s own refusal to take part in the anti-Jewish actions, he said: “Among my subordinates many understood my position, but others made disparaging remarks about me and looked down their noses at me.”
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Concerning their attitude to the killing itself, he stated that “the men did not carry out the Jewish actions with enthusiasm…. The men were all very depressed.”
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One final example of tendentious selectivity of evidence. Goldhagen consistently emphasizes that the perpetrators “had fun” killing jews, and that these “men’s accounts of conversations that they had while in the killing fields suggest … that these men in principle approved of the genocide and of their own deeds.”
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A typical example of this is his account of Sergeant Heinrich Beke-meier’s squad carrying out the “Jew hunt” in Łomazy after the massacre. Goldhagen writes:
When Bekemeier’s men did find Jews, they not only killed them but, in one instance that has been described, they, or at least Bekemeier, also had fun with them beforehand:
He then quotes directly from the policeman’s testimony.
One episode has been preserved in my memory to this day. Under the command of Sergeant Bekemeier we had to convey a transport of Jews to some place. He had the Jews crawl through a water hole and sing as they did it. When an old man could not walk anymore, which was when the crawling episode was finished, he shot him at close range in the mouth….
At this point Goldhagen breaks off the quote and resumes the description of this same incident from testimony given at a later interrogation.
After Bekemeier had shot the Jew, the latter raised his hand as if to appeal to God and then collapsed. The corpse of the Jew was simply left King. We did not concern ourselves with it.
How different this testimony sounds if the witness’s account is not broken off, for after describing Bekemeier’s shooting of the old Jew in the mouth, he continues: “I said to Heinz Richter, who was walking next to me, ‘I’d like to bump off this trash.’” Indeed, according to the same witness, within the “circle of comrades” Bekemeier was deemed “vile trash” and “a dirty dog.” He was notorious for being “violent and cruel” to both “Poles and Jews” and even for kicking his own men.
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In short, by tendentious selectivity Goldhagen portrays this event as part of a pattern of generalized and uniform cruelty and approval, when the full testimony provides a picture instead of the cruelty of an especially vicious and disliked SS officer, whose behavior evoked disapproval among his men.
In contrast to Goldhagen, I offered a portrayal of the battalion that was multilayered. Different groups within the battalion behaved in different ways. The “eager killers”—whose numbers increased over time—sought the opportunity to kill, and celebrated their murderous deeds. The smallest group within the battalion comprised the nonshooters. With the exception of Lieutenant Buchmann, they did not make principled objections against the regime and its murderous policies; they did not reproach their comrades. They took advantage of Trapp’s policy within the battalion of exempting from shooting those who “didn’t feel up to it” by saying that they were took weak or that they had children.
The largest group within the battalion did whatever they were asked to do, without ever risking the onus of confronting authority or appearing weak, but they did not volunteer for or celebrate the killing. Increasingly numb and brutalized, they felt more pity for themselves because of the “unpleasant” work they had been assigned than they did for their dehumanized victims. For the most part, they did not think what they were doing was wrong or
immoral, because the killing was sanctioned by legitimate authority. Indeed, for the most part they did not try to think, period. As one policeman stated: “Truthfully, I must say that at the time we didn’t reflect about it at all. Only years later did any of us become truly conscious of what had happened then.”
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Heavy drinking helped: “most of the other men drank so much solely because of the many shootings of Jews, for such a life was quite intolerable sober.”
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That these policemen were “willing executioners” does not mean that they “wanted to be genocidal executioners.” This, in my opinion, is an important distinction that Goldhagen consistently blurs. He also repeatedly poses the interpretational dispute in the form of a false dichotomy: either the German killers must have been “of one mind” with Hitler about the demonological nature of the Jews and hence believed in the necessity and justice of the mass murder, or they must have believed that they were committing the greatest crime in history. In my view the majority of the killers could not be described by either of these polar-opposite views.
In addition to a multilayered portrayal of the battalion, I offered a multicausal explanation of motivation. I noted the importance of conformity peer pressure, and deference to authority, and I should have emphasized more explicitly the legitimizing capacities of government. I also emphasized the “mutually intensifying effects of war and racism,” as “the years of anti-Semitic propaganda … dovetailed with the polarizing effects of war.” I argued that “nothing helped the Nazis to wage a race war so much as the war itself,” as the “dichotomy of racially superior Germans and racially inferior Jews, central to Nazi ideology, could easily merge with the image of a beleaguered Germany surrounded by enemies.” Ordinary Germans did not have to be “of one mind” with Hitler’s demonological view of the Jews to carry out genocide. A combination of situational factors and ideological overlap that concurred on the enemy status and dehumanization of the victims was sufficient to turn “ordinary men” into “willing executioners.”
Goldhagen claims that we have “no choice but to adopt” his own explanation, because he has “irrefutably” and “resoundingly” disproved the “conventional explanations” (coercion, obedience,
social-psychological observations about human behavior, self-interest, and attenuation or fragmentation of responsibility). Several problems emerge. First, these “conventional explanations” are not invoked by scholars as sole and sufficient causes of perpetrator behavior but are usually part of a multicausal approach, what Goldhagen derides as a “laundry list.”
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Thus they do not have to meet the same high test of allegedly accounting for everything that Goldhagen sets for his own explanation. Second, to claim that one has disproved something irrefutably sets a high test that Goldhagen does not meet. And third, even a comprehensive refutation of the “conventional explanations” would not necessitate accepting Goldhagen s thesis.
Let us look more closely at Goldhagen’s alleged refutation of two of the so-called conventional explanations: a German propensity to follow orders, and general attributes of human behavior studied by social psychologists (deference to authority, role adaptation, conformity to peer pressure). Goldhagen abruptly dismisses the notion that a propensity to follow orders and unthinking obedience to authority were prominent elements of German political culture. After all, he notes that Germans battled in the streets of Weimar and were openly disdainful of the Republic.
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But one incident does not make a country’s history or characterize its political culture. To claim that German political culture displayed no tendency to obedience because of opposition to Weimar is no more valid than to claim that anti-Semitism was not a part of German political culture by citing Jewish emancipation in nineteenth-century Germany—a notion Goldhagen emphatically resists.
More important is the historical context of Weimar disobedience. Goldhagen notes that Germans were obedient only to government and authority that they deemed “legitimate.” This is indeed vital to the issue, for it was precisely the democratic, nonauthoritarian character of Weimar that delegitimized it in the eyes of those who disdained and attacked it. It was precisely the Nazis’ demolition of democracy and the restoration of an authoritarian political system, emphasizing communal obligations over individual rights, that gave them legitimacy and popularity among significant
segments of the German population. Indeed, many historians have argued that Germany’s incomplete and halfhearted democratic revolutions in 1848 and 1918 opened the door for successful authoritarian counterrevolution and restoration, and that failed democratization—not anti-Semitism—decisively distinguished Germany’s political culture from that of France, England, and the United States.
The same kinds of evidence and arguments that Goldhagen cites as proof of the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism inculcating hatred of Jews in Germany can also be found in support of the notion that Germany had a strong tradition of authoritarianism inculcating habits of obedience and antidemocratic attitudes. All the elements that Goldhagen himself cites as decisive for shaping political culture—education, public conversation, law, and institutional reinforcement
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—were at work inculcating authoritarian values in Germany long before the Nazis also used them to incessantly disseminate anti-Semitism.
Moreover, the most outspoken anti-Semites in Germany were also antidemocratic and authoritarian. To deny the importance of authoritarian traditions and values in German political culture while arguing for the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism is to insist that the glass is half-full while denying that it is half-empty. To the extent that Goldhagen’s arguments about German political culture and anti-Semitism are valid, they are even more so for German political culture and obedience to authority.
