And another in our continuing series of depressing books: Christopher Browning examines the motivation of a 500 man police battalion assigned to the rear lines of Germany's Eastern Front. This small group of men was personally responsible for the massacre of over 38,000 Jews and the deportation of some 45,000 more to Treblinka. These were not racial fanatics nor committed Nazis. Their motives were quite ordinary: careerism and peer pressure. Browning's book is based on interviews with the participants collected after the war.Not everyone blindly followed orders. The battalion's commander ordered that anyone not wishing to participate in the shootings could be excused and about 12 were. For many of the others rationalization became the order of the day. One later testified he killed only children because his partner was shooting the mothers and he did not think it was right that children should grow up without mothers.
The horrifying aspect of this account is how little it took for these men to become transformed psychologically from "normal" people into willing participants. These were not atrocities one has come to expect from war during the heat of battle (Malmedy, My Lai, etc.), rather an institutionalized, bureaucratic government policy. That bureaucracy may be part of the cause. It distances people from their actions. Bureaucrats never saw the hideous result of their actions, seeing only their small paper-shuffling role.
That still does not explain the actions of the men who were doing the actual killing. Women and children were marched up to graves they had been forced to dig and were shot point-blank in the head. The shooters were even instructed on the best location on the neck to shoot in order to save ammunition. Occasionally the killer would be splattered with brain tissue and skull parts.
There was a deliberate process of dehumanization abetted by Nazi racial policies. In fact, the soldiers found it much more difficult to kill German speaking Jews, especially those who had fled Germany. They saw them not as the barbarians they had been told they were killing. Euphemisms, (protective reaction strikes) were common: killing became "actions" and shipping to concentration camps became "resettlements." Responsibility was diffused by deferring to orders from "above" and dividing the tasks into different parts.
There was a perversion of ethical outlook, too. Those few who were revolted by what they were doing and who refused to participate were called cowards. We need to cultivate a society where those who follow individual conscience are the heroes and those who follow the crowd are the cowards.
As an aside, before my Dad died, I was talking to one of the aides in his nursing home who came from Argentina. We got to talking about my years in Germany and she mentioned her grandfather had emigrated to Argentina from Germany after the war. (Little tiny red flags waving over my head.) I queried if he had been in the German army. Her response was quite unashamedly, yes, he had been in the SS. (Red Banners now waving over my head.) Then she went on to talk about how the victors rewrite history. I decided then I had to visit the men's room.
