Christopher Browning's "Ordinary Men" Revisited Three Decades Later

good afternoon and thank you for joining us for the holocaust center for humanity's lunch and learn program a live transcript for this program is available on zoom for anyone who would like to use it click live transcript at the bottom of the screen and click show subtitles i'm alana cone kennedy and i'm so pleased to share with you the exciting news that i am the holocaust center's new chief operating officer an announcement is forthcoming but you faithful lunch and learned participants are some of the first to know i also would like to congratulate my colleague paul regelbrug our new director of education the holocaust center is close to my heart after 18 years of being a part of this center i can tell you that this organization lives and breathes the values we teach we walk the walk every day our amazing staff dig in and find new ways to reach students support survivors and their families fight anti-semitism and bigotry and hatred and share the stories of the holocaust in less than 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amnesty international and jewish family services today's lunch and learn program is the second in our fall series entitled connecting the holocaust to today for the past 30 years one of the most influential books in the field of holocaust studies has been professor christopher browning's groundbreaking study ordinary men for the first time browning showed the world that nazis were ordinary people they are like all of us and they were not forced to commit the horrific crimes browning's book examined how quickly these seemingly ordinary people were twisted by ideological indoctrination loyalty and ultimately cowardice and bigotry christopher browning was the frank porter graham professor of history at the university of north carolina chapel hill until his retirement in may 2014 before taking up this position in the fall of 1999 he taught for 25 years at pacific lutheran university in tacoma washington christopher browning is the author of eight books his list of awards and honors is so long that if i listed them all here we would not have time for his presentation but a few highlights include browning served as the senior scholar at the u.s holocaust memorial museum he has been a fellow of the institutes for advanced studies in princeton new jersey and on the campus of the hebrew university of jerusalem he is a three-time recipient of the jewish national book award in the holocaust category for ordinary men the origins of the final solution and remembering survival for this last book he is also a recipient of the yad vashem international book prize for holocaust research he was named a fellow of the american academy of arts and sciences in 2006. browning has served as an expert witness in war crimes trials in australia canada and great britain he has also served as an expert witness in two holocaust denial cases the second zundel trial in toronto in 1988 and in david irving's libel suit against deborah lipstadt in london in 2000 professor browning will take questions from our viewers at the end of the program please use the q a at the bottom of your screen and type in your questions at any time professor browning it is an honor to have you joining us today from your home in tacoma thank you so much thank you very much for the opportunity to speak uh i do apologize that the sun is shining in my south window of my study so it is a little bright on one side of my face and deep in the shade on the other but uh one doesn't know when the sun shines here and and when it does not today i want to talk about uh my book ordinary men with kind of a three-decade perspective it was first published in 1992 so we're very close to the 30th year anniversary and i wanted to touch on three aspects of that one how did the book come to be written in a sense what decisions did i make in writing the book secondly what were the initial reactions initial reception particularly what were the criticisms of the book when it came out in the 1990s and then thirdly briefly what have been some of the key developments since then in terms of what we now call perpetrator studies which didn't exist really as a kind of subfield of holocaust studies until uh after 1992 and the debates that revolved around ordinary men and some of the questions it raised so let me begin with saying a little bit about how the book came about to be written i was in germany at the central agency for the investigation of nazi crimes in the small german town of ludwigsburg outside fritguard this is the office that was in charge of coordinating initial investigations into nazi criminals and once enough of a case had been established would then send the case to the relevant uh prosecuting attorney depending upon where the suspect lived and they had a marvelous archive then of all of the previous investigations and all of the indictments and judgments that resulted from previous german trials and i was reading through all of the indictments and judgments that they had leading to poland because on another book i was working on which became origins of the final solution i had realized that half the victims the holocaust were polish jews but nothing like half the documentation that survived related to poland poland was a underdocumented understudied center really of the holocaust and i wanted to fill in through the german investigations gaps in the documentary record and it was in the course of that that i came across uh the indictment of reserve police battalion 101 and two things in that indictment really grabbed my attention the first was the account by one of the witnesses uh that major trump and the opening speech to his men on the eve of their very first mass killing at josephus in july of 1942 had basically told the men he there was a terrible task that he would have never asked the men to do this on his own but these orders came from above and then he gave rationales to his men that if this makes it easier remember that the jews supported the partisans remember that bombs are falling on german women and children basically saying they kill our women and children so we can kill the enemies women and children and all the time that he was saying this he had tears streaming down his cheeks his voice was choking he was visibly struggling to control himself and the end of the speech with a remarkable statement that any of the rank and file men in the battalion didn't feel up to it they could turn in their rifles they didn't have to engage in the mass killing that day and so this was an open invitation for men not to participate in the first killing action and this became in effect the unwritten law of the battalion thereafter officers could not force their men to take part in killing actions because trump had made clear people were not forced they had the option to participate or to opt out and this certainly for an historian for who had been looking into issues of choice was kind of my archival eureka moment this was the point at which i saw i now had a case that could frame this issue of choice beyond all of the standard alibis that german accused perpetrators gave at their trials their first line of excuse was always that we had no choice we were forced to do this if i had not killed others i would have been killed or my family would have been suffered i would have been sent to a concentration camp and so on and so forth none of which was true and then secondly the line of defense was when it was pointed out there was no record of anyone ever being tried and convicted in a court martial for refusing to shoot unarmed civilians the second line of defense was putative duress well i didn't know i could have gotten away without shooting uh our officers were screaming at us i was afraid uh i couldn't be expected to test the limits of the system so i felt under duress i thought i was under duress in the case of major trump now we had a clear case where neither duress nor peter's address had any role the men knew they could opt out they had the choice and only a handful of men initially took the choice to not take part in the shooting so that was the first thing that immediately drove my attention and the second was that in the indictment i got descriptions of what happened that were so much more graphic so much more details so much more authentic than anything i had counted in previous court records in most of the german corrects what you get is a massive denial and totally mendacious transparently mendacious the excuses and denials of what had actually taken place and that here suddenly i was getting very horrifically vivid graphic descriptions of what it was like to be in a killing unit so i resolved that i would go to hamburg where the trial of reserve police battalion 101 took place and look at the entire record not just at the indictment uh it took some time to get permission to get work into the court records they were still in the files of the prosecuting attorney not in an archive and when i did get permission i did find out that there were 30 volumes of testimony taken from 210 men within the battalion so this was going to be an absolutely unique source that we were going to get over 200 people in a single killing unit that were giving very vivid and graphic descriptions of what their past experience had been in a circumstance where it was clear to the interrogators and to the men that everybody knew that they had the choice not to do what they had done so this would be unlike any record that we had seen so far in trying to write a history of a killing unit and trying to come to grips with the actual dynamics uh within a killing squad after i had read through the uh 30 volumes of testimony the 210 different uh versions uh i've of what had happened i then had to try to make sense of it and my initial uh major conclusions uh were uh were basically the following first the battalion was made up of a unusual group of men these were middle-aged conscripts not volunteers not a collection of volunteer nazis they had no higher notification percentages than the german male population at large they had been scripted in 1941 early 42 so they had very little training or preparation before they were sent to poland in june of 1942 that most of them came from working class background the working class was a social class that was less susceptible to nazi appeal the nazis of course appealed to all sectors of german society was a cross-class movement but among the working class at least the communist party the socialist party were held a greater percentage of their members from seduction by the nazis and working class percentage membership in the nazis was was thus therefore lower than other sectors in society and these men all came from hamburg or their environs of hamburg which had been a city very difficult for the nazis to take over they referred to it as red hamburg because the socialist communist and labor union movements were very strong there so here i had a unit made up of men and average age of the rank and five was 39 and a half years old they had just been made eligible for compulsory wartime service but they were too old for the army to want to draft them so the order police could draft them instead for what was thought would be very far behind the line's occupation duty that would not require young men capable of you know frontline fighting this would be a kind of cushy uh deal a thousand miles behind the german front in eastern south western or central poland in any case these men were too young to have been veterans of world war one so they weren't brutalized by trench warfare they were too old to have been part of nazi socialization their school years their youth group years were all in the 1920s under weimar democracy it was a group of men who basically had other standards ever reference points they were not raised in the nazi bubble and as i say they came from a social group that was less susceptible to nazi appeal and from a city that was less nastified than other parts of germany so if you were looking for a group of men least likely to become full-time hardcore nazi killers it would have been a group of working class middle-aged men from homeboard so this was not only to say it wasn't just a random cross-section of german society this was stacking the deck with people least likely to become nazi killers and the question then of course was what in fact did they do and why so the issue that they had choice the issue that they were a group of men least likely to become nazi killers of course were two parts of why this would be a compelling case study uh i also when reading the documentation uh came to the conclusion that initially the killing was terribly difficult uh their first massacre the town of yosefov in july of 42 was traumatic the men's accounts of that massacre were very vivid very graphic and it was clear that they were distraught that they were traumatized by what they had been asked to do and their functions of course involve rounding up the jews in the town of yuzufu this is a picture from a subsequent massacre at the village of omashi but basically they had to bring all the jews into the town center and then take them to the forest in later massacres when they had the experience they had mass graves dug but at the first massacre useful they didn't even dig a grave they simply shot people in the forest and left the bodies lying there so this was going to be a totally amateurish execution carried out people with no experience including the commanding officers who didn't know even how to organize it uh and so that the experience was one that was especially horrific the men paired off with the people they were going to shoot march into the forest and the killing was one on one quite the opposite of trying to get as much distance and impersonality between killer and victim which they would later learn the techniques for that but this first killing was one which was very intimate very personal in which they saw each villain this victim they were going to shoot face to face uh took them into the forest and killed them at point-blank range so understandably this was a horrific memory for these men and they were very distraught by what they had done one of the saddest conclusions of the study was how quickly they became habituated and to what they were doing how it became routinized how they got used to it so fast uh and that after the first several killing actions uh it became so routine that they no longer had graphic memories uh it was much harder to construct what took place where because uh one day blurred into another uh and that the killings i say simply became a kind of routine matter in the course of that routinization of killing the battalion broke into roughly three groups and i argued that the first of these groups were what i termed the eager killers people that over time learned to enjoy killing other human beings and sought the opportunity to do so this was a minority but of course it was a key minority within the battalion they were the ones that gave it its most lethal dynamic and made it possible for the battalion uh to rack up the death count that it would uh there was a middle group that i called the accommodators these were people that didn't seek the opportunity to kill but also sought not to confront their officers not to opt out by taking the offer the trump had made and when asked to be in a firing squad they simply accepted the assignment and did as they were told so they were neither eager to do it nor willing to take any initiative or effort to extricate themselves and then there was a third group that i called the evaders people that did take up trop's offer and over time this group grew uh that uh they became i would guess twenty percent of the battalion uh and uh while they didn't take part in the shooting actions they did continue to provide all of the auxiliary support activities in the ghetto roundups they would go into the towns and help find jews and bring them to the town square before they would be marched to the train and packed into freight cars to be sent to nearby treblinka this became the main activity of the battalion in the fall of 1942. uh they would provide cordons for shooting actions even if they were not the trigger pullers so they would not be in the fighting for firing squads but they would make the firing squads possible by guarding the people who were going to be shuttled to the firing squads to be killed but even simply this very this most simplistic division of labor of doing everything except actually pulling the trigger to kill a human being was tremendous tremendously alleviating for them they would speak of being there witnessing this at point blank range and providing the supporting services without almost any sense of responsibility as long as somebody else was pulling the trigger they felt themselves in a sense exonerated of not having the burden of of for what had taken place uh and uh basically detached uh from what the battalion was doing in the sense of carrying out mass murder uh in terms of the people who who did not take part who took up the major's option the most common thing that they said was not that it was wrong to do so no one wanted to confront the regime and criticize it and above all no one wanted to criticize one's comrades this is a small unit an occupied territory their only social world is the 500 men in the battalion they don't want to become a pariah uh and so when they would opt out they would say i am too weak to do that i'm not strong enough to do that and insidiously this of course validated the people who were doing the killing and taking on to the people who are exempting themselves the stigma and the onus of being too weak and so it created this inverse world people strong enough not to go along strong enough to opt out proclaim themselves weak and people who were too weak to not go along uh and continue to be the the the conformists uh were praised as the strong people so you've got this utterly strange inversion uh where uh the people too weak to stand out uh were the strong and the people who uh exempted themselves had to classify themselves as weak wimps unable to do their share so that again helped to facilitate in a sense the ethos of the killing unit why the fact that 20 of the men who stepped out in no way diluted the capacity of the battalion to kill and kill very efficiently was in part because of the way in which these men chose to exercise the option to opt out and that this in a sense in insidious way also reinforced and furthered the actions of the others who were still killing when i finished sort of writing the the the chronology of the killing actions and the dynamic within the unit i still felt more was needed uh and to give more in a sense interpretive heft uh to explaining why the men had behaved the way they did that i needed to say something more about the dynamic within the unit uh and i very quickly was convinced one option was not to follow what had been sort of a center or much holocaust study so far and that was to describe the holocaust as a bureaucratic administrative phenomenon that was an important aspect of it but there's nothing bureaucratic about rounding up people and shooting the point-blank range so the sociological approach of viber babarian bureaucracy which is so central saying ral hillberg's work was not going to be useful for this aspect of the holocaust i also did not think that psychopathology was going to be useful we're not dealing with people who acted the way they did because of their individual disposition people were doing things as part of a group that they never would have done on their own and so it was the group dynamic the way in which they interacted with others that i had to get to and so here the key was social psychology and so i borrowed heavily from social psychologists experiments in the late 50s and early 60s that looked into the way in which conformity deference to authority and role adaptation shaped the way people behaved in groups and indeed these experiments show that people were very strongly affected in their group interactions by conformity by deference to authority by role adaptation and so that became one of the key decisions i made for the conclusion of the book to put very front and center the contributions of social psychology and the focus on the group dynamic of group behavior not to look at as so many previous studies had done what was individually wrong with each of these individuals what was what were their individual flaws because assumption of the latter was they were different than us they did things that none of us would do and of course ultimately one of the key arguments in my book would be no these people did what many of us would have done if we had been in their place and that looking at them on the basis of their abnormality was not going to get to the core problem they posed to historical explanation of why they behaved the way they did having written the book and having then worked on this conclusion i had to get it published i wanted it as a crossover book one that would be as a trade book and not just an academic book and fortunately raul hilberg lent me his agent in effect to to seek that approach and his agent took the project on we went to three publishers who turned it down this was not seen in the early 90s as a hot property two of them turned it down politely one turned it down rudely and then the fourth try harper then did take the book and i got the contract we then had to have a title and my proposed title was becoming killers to focus on the process of change and how these men underwent change transformed into killers but my editors say no becoming has two meanings becoming can be this process of change but becoming an english language can also mean attractive good looking a becoming young man and he said if one can mistake the title someone will and so preemptively he said we're not going to use an ambiguous title where someone could misinterpret meaning and after a while batting things around we came to the top the title of ordinary men it seems self-evident now but it was not self-evident then i mean now it seems to encapsulate the core of the book and the argument that it is making uh but at that point in holocaust studies as i say we did not yet have perpetrator studies we did not yet have this subfield uh and the notion that we could characterize the perpetrators as ordinary men uh was not there it's going to become a cliche but at the time that was provocative not not a cliche but provocative and we did take the title i think now we're very glad that we settled on that uh but it was i say not self-evident at the time when the book came out it was generally very well reviewed i think a number of reviewers realized the innovation of it the important new contribution that it was making but there were a number of critiques that had varying degrees of merit and let me just go briefly into three of those to give you a sense of what the debates over the book were about in the 1990s one of the more important and i think relevant any critiques was that raised the question well is this a representative killing unit is this a typical killing unit can we draw the lessons from this unit that would apply to other killing units or is this simply a a one-off unit different than others and the conclusions and the the analysis i made of it in fact don't apply uh to others there had been a book on the einsatzgruppen and it was a german book but the title translated was ideological warriors and this was the notion of course of most of these killers these are fanatical nazis uh carrying out their ideological commitment and they weren't the average german they certainly weren't middle-aged uh unnotified random conscripts off the street so the question then was uh was this even a typical order police battalion we couldn't answer that question initially because this was the first study we didn't have studies of other police battalions over the next decade a number of other police battalions were studied and we did begin to put together a wide collection and i think we can now say one that reserve police pretend 101 was not typical in important ways but secondly that does not invalidate the argument that the book makes and let me try to explain that there were basically three clusters or three groups of order police battalions uh the first were made up reserve policemen who joined the reserve police in 1937 to 1939 before the war uh so they did summer training they did weekend training in 1939 when the war breaks out they are mobilized and put into these 500 man battalions sent out for two years to various places of europe to undergo uh occupation police work and then in 1949 one are sent into russia where they become one of the key manpower sources for the beginnings of the other final solution now they didn't write brag reports back to berlin like the indus group but we now know is of course often the einsatzgruppen and the order police worked side by side at bobby yar you had not only ons as commando 4a but reserved placed between battalion 45 at communist padules the first great massacre of five figures in august of 1941 uh you had not only uh the forces of higher ss police leader jekyll uh but reserve but police battalion 320. uh so uh they didn't in a sense get the the iss group who never gave their partners credit they took all the body count for themselves and the ein's house group and don't explain how they were using the manpower order place to accomplish what they were what they were getting in any case uh one group then were these people who had been reserved police and 39 to 7 37 to 39 and then are well trained well doctrinated have two years of experience getting used to being racial imperialists before they're even sent into the soviet union in 41 to carry out mass killings of jews a second group were younger men that when the war broke out the army asked the police to send them a large number of people to become mps military police and in return the police will be allowed to select from a large pool of people that the army could conscript a selection of thousands of men for their own order police and these people are put into a other police battalions that were given 300 level designations that is this younger met group uh was had a different number of the order the reserve battalions were in the were from basically you know one uh to 100 and something 133 145 uh but uh order police were all of the second generation these younger men were all in the 300 level they were reserved they were police battalions 300 through 320. so these are younger men they're much more notified uh that they're uh also highly trained and uh are sent off on much more arduous duty because they're younger so they're sent into russia in in great most all of them were sent to russia in the summer of 41. as germany hits the manpower bottom of the barrel then the declaration is made that men from their late 30s and 40s have to provide compulsory wartime service and that's what opens up the conscription of the men of reserve police battalion 101 that they are drafted in late 41 early 42 and with almost no training no indoctrination sent off to poland what was supposed to be cushy behind the lines duty and of course are then taken by the local ss there and assigned to carrying out uh what is just emerging in poland as the great ghetto liquidation operations through executions and deportations to death camps so 101 was uh much less nastified than most police battalions older than most police battalions a lot a lower nazi uh you know uh lower left indoctrination uh less training nonetheless uh by the end of the war when we can add up the body counts of all of the police battalions reserve police battalion 101 was the fourth most lethal police battalion in the entire german order police even though it started a year later and it started until the summer of 42. so my argument is yes it was atypical but nonetheless despite not having all of the factors that we assume would have facilitated and even may have been necessary to create a killing unit careful selection of personnel indoctrination high percentage of notification gradual brutalization of occupation policy over time none of those applied to reserve policy town 101 and yet it became the fourth most murderous police battalion in the third right uh so the idea of the book that ordinary men can be transformed into professional killers uh is uh is reinforced is sustained in in the most horrible way in fact i think it makes the story of police protection 101 even more alarming in his implications than if it had been typical it's very atypicality makes the story even scarier than it would have been if it was uh the typical kind of police battalion a second uh criticism uh was uh that i ignored ideology uh and that i was working solely on what was called a situational explanation and of course when the book was most severely criticized it was criticized from that direction by daniel goldhagen's book killers willing executioners where he said single and only necessary explanation for the men's behavior is their elimination of anti-semitism so he had a monocausal explanation and then my book was the target of that and so it got put into the opposite end a situational explanation and i think that was uh unfair because i had a more multicausal explanation and one of the most astute observations in the debate that followed between goldtaga and myself was made by the social psychologist leonard newman who said the whole notion of an ideological versus a situational explanation is a false dichotomy because situation is never neutral the people in a situation are always constructing that situation interpreting that situation and they do it through the cultural lenses that they're wearing through the ideological assumptions they're taking with them so that you can't have a situation situational explanation that does not include culture and ideology as shaping factors that determine how they understand the situation that they are in so i think that was a very key and it helps us to to move beyond the the simplistic uh false dichotomy of an ideological anti-semitic explanation for the men's behavior and the situational organizational institutional factors that shaped how they how they operated both are there they are not mutually exclusive and i think that that was an important point to make a third criticism uh was made uh was basically that i had been snookered by the german testimony after all these were men who were facing trial they would be investigated for judicial purposes so not only did you have all the issues of a an account based from memory 20 years after the fact these testimonies were taken down in the mid-1960s uh in which you have forgetfulness you have repression you get capacities people's tendencies to reinvent their own version of their past in order to accommodate it to changing circumstances in which they find themselves we find this in memoirs all the time that people uh basically massage spin uh reinvent uh alter uh how they understood what they have done uh in previous years and that's all very typical simply a part of the tricks the human memory plays but in addition to that of course these people had a motive to lie and to obfuscate and to evade telling the truth because there could be judicial consequences if they were too truthful in terms of being put on trial and in the end i would say there were three kinds of testimony that came out of these this mass of 210 people who testified there was one band of testimony that i think both goldhagen and i would agree you didn't use this was the transparently mendacious testimony most of the officers of course the ones most on the hook denied even being at the executions as if the men simply led themselves uh or the jews marched to the pits and shot themselves on their own uh you got the most ridiculous kinds of of explanations uh that were so unrealistic and so filled with self-serving denial that no serious historian would would use them and then you got testimony at the other end that was so graphic so horrific so self-incriminating that nobody uh would say such things if they had been if that hadn't been the case no one is going to incriminate themselves gratuitously so there was one band of testimony goldhage and i agreed you didn't use and there was one band of testimony that gold taken i agreed we did use but in between was a broad middle band of people who told some of the truth some of the time but not all of the truth all of the time and in particular they would tell the truth about what the battalion had done even if they didn't tell the truth about what they personally had done so this is a very valuable source for the historian who's trying to recreate the story of the battalion even if the person is not fully confessing to their own responsibility goldhagen's approach was to say that's self-exculpatory and i'm not going to touch it i will only use the testimony that has no potential to be self-exculpatory and i said i have to use this gray material this mixed material and as an historian take the risk that i can sort through and carefully apply historical criticism and analysis uh to decide what what parts of this testimony i will use and which i won't and that's why uh i think his book basically mistakes the part for the whole he takes the counts of one band of men and applies it to everyone and i take a much broader bunch of testimony that's much more ambiguous uh and i come up with an account that shows the men and a broad spectrum of behavior and we simply had different methodologies in using the policeman's testimony uh and uh so that you get a a a a difference of interpretation from a difference of methodology one can ask how do we sort that out one argument i would make is well you try to find other types of evidence that you can combine with the interpretation of the policeman and see whether it supports his approach or mine and in one case uh maybe the most graphic uh case in which i did this would be the testimony of a man named oswald roofheisen now oliver's roofheisen was a jew born in east silesia east upper silesia east upper silesia had been a part of austria-hungary before world war one it's a mixed polish german population area it was partitioned uh in after world war one and oswald roofheisen grew up in polish east upper silesia but was fluent in polish and german with no yiddish accent pole jews born in central eastern poland they opened their mouth and anybody immediately knew that they were jewish they spoke with the yiddish accent not flawless unaccented polish in german rufaizen as a teenager fled east upper salish when the germans invaded in 39 went to lithuania he flees lithuania in the summer of 41 when the germans arrive moving south into what is now belarus there he was intercepted by the bella russian police captain in the town of mir and is asked for his papers and uh the 17 year old ruth licenses that don't have papers they were stolen but he's speaking polish to the police captain and and explains and claims that he is a man of mixed polish german uh ancestry he had a german father polish mother from salisha he speaks both languages and his accent free polish and german seem to confirm that rufai the police captain simeon serafinovic knows that the germans are coming to set up a police station in mir and that he will need a translator and so he takes young rafism home to live in his house to serve as his translator the german police arrive they're exactly like 101 their north german middle-aged reservist same profile and the commander of that police station sergeant hein takes a liking to rufus and said you'll come and translate for me so ruffheisen spends each day in the german police station taking his meals with the german police and translating for the german sergeant uh and sees everything from the inside uh before he escapes after the war he he and i were both witnesses at the simeon seraphimavic trial in england in the early 90s and he also talked to others and so of course i wanted to know what was his view of the inside of the dynamics of a german police station and he basically said surprise they broke into three groups four of these men at this police station were the eager killers they sought opportunities to kill they bragged and boasted about what they had done a second group were the accommodators the ones that were afraid to say no but when they came back from killing actions of jews they were ashamed they thought what they'd done was dirty when they went on partisan actions they came back proud to be warriors and fighters and a third group four men out of 13 refused to take part in any jewish actions and there was no problem nobody bothered them they was assumed they had the right to do that in short roofheisen from the inside of the police station as a jewish witness with no motivation to exculpate german killers came up with exactly the same uh three-part dichotomy of the internal dynamics that i had from my analysis of the german testimonies and so i felt quite vindicated by that lastly i might say where if things gone since then there's been of course much development of what we now call perpetrator studies uh and there's one work or one story in particular that i would like to close with uh because i think uh several contributions he makes were very key this is thomas kuhne of clark university and he's written two books on elements of german political culture that the nazis appropriated and harnessed that had broad resonance within german society that helped them to in a sense mobilize germans not just on the basis of what they were against anti-communism anti-semitism and so forth but what they were for and one of these was comradeship kamaraj shaft and that this had been an ethos that came out of the trench ethos of world war one uh and uh that uh comradeship was part of what the germans valued in military and police units uh and even in german society more widely and the nazis were able in a sense uh to co-opt this and to make themselves in a sense of the model and the successor of the trench warfare society of the society of comradeship and the second was the german term folks mineshaft which basically initially meant the people's community was an inclusive term it's the term the kaiser uses in august of 1914 when he's bringing together all germans he gives a speech in the reichstag i know no classes i know no confessions uh i know only germans the nazis co-opted and basically bend it to be meant meaning not the people's community but the racial community and it is exclusive you define it by who is not in it which is to say jews and gypsies and handicapped and everybody else that they are going to expel from the folks combined child but it keeps its resonance and so it is on the basis of folks mineshaft and kamaraja i think cuna quite accurately argues uh that is part of what creates the german view of the world of the germans together and against everybody else and that uh to use helen fein's term to put everyone else outside the community of human obligation germans care for and are obligated only to other germans everybody else is on the outside and so this is what helps to explain in a sense the destructive power of nazi germany not just to kill six million jews but three and a third million russian prisoners of war uh and thousands and tens of thousands of villagers who are massacred in various anti-partisan operations in serbia and russia and elsewhere uh and to carry out a systematic extermination of the polish intelligentsia to try to in a sense and denationalize uh the polls uh so that uh this this notion of of creating a moral system in which you are responsible to and morally obligated only to germans and to no one else is part of what he argues the wider ethos beyond not excluding but beyond anti-semitism and explaining the destructive power of national socialism let me give one last example of this when i first came across this i was studying the german occupation of serbia and after the anti-partisan communist tito partisan uprising begins the nazi the nazi response the military army response was to carry out uh reprisal shootings in mass numbers they kill one german we kill 100 serbian villagers in the in the vicinity to drown uh the partisan uprising in blood and then the german commander phil marshall burma decides he will have a mass partisan sweep will simply clear an entire area and he gives an order to his men uh that you must go into this area and strike the entire civilian population most hard uh that there's to be no distinction between fighters and civilians between soldiers and non-combatants and then he says uh that and this is the key of it uh that uh for any of you who think they can't do this and want to maintain as he puts it uh your humanitarian scruples your humanitarian inhibitions you must remember to not do this is to sin against the life of your comrades now this is the ultimate nazi moral inversion to kill non-combatants on the other side is virtue to not kill non-combatants on the other side is to commit a sin to commit a sin against the lives of your comrades and this ability to carry out this moral inversion in which mass killing becomes virtue and refusally killed becomes immoral and sinful uh is in a sense at the crux of what enabled the nazis to harness their their regime and so many in german society uh including the average ordinary men of reserve police battalion 101 and many other units as well uh to become the mass killers of the holocaust with that i will stop and we have time i think for some questions thank you so much professor browning actually your your last statements are a good segue into a great question that we got here from tom who says what sort of penalties would these men have faced for trying to reject their conscription into the police units altogether do we know much about the existence of anti-war germans yes our prime example of course is jehovah's witnesses who refused military service and they were put into camps i mean they were arrested as was the case for americans who didn't get conscientious objective status uh if they didn't uh report to the draft we all remember not all remember but you know as late as 19 late 60s muhammad ali was three years in prison because he wouldn't report to the draft of the vietnam war uh so this is uh is not untypical that societies with military conscription will punish those who don't report for the draft on the other hand in this case it was not that they didn't have any choice to report to the draft is they had a choice not to shoot in organized mass killings and we know here the key difference is this that not only in 101 but in other units as well we know from further research people who said i won't do that or i can't do that did not get punished the line they could not cross was to try to persuade others also not to shoot if you said the regime is engaged in a sinful immoral policy don't do this if you try to persuade others to join you if you try to organize opposition to the nazi policy rather than just accept refusing to participate as an individual then you were arrested but you were arrested and tried not for refusing the order to shoot you were arrested and tried for trying to subvert morale and undermine the morale of the unit because they didn't want court cases of well i'm sorry i wouldn't shoot women and children but they would have no problem bringing you into a court martial in which you had tried to subvert the morale of the unit persuade people not to follow the policies of the unit so that was the real dividing line where the option was you could excuse yourself but if you tried to organize others to also not follow then you could cross the line and then you would be punished professor browning this uh there's another question here um that comes from david and he says do you see parallels between ordinary soldiers in germany and acts done by u.s military personnel uh i'm sorry i'm not sure i've got the question the difference between the police and the military do you see parallels between ordinary soldiers in germany and acts done by u.s military oh yeah of course uh when i was first getting into holocaust studies the the one of the main framing experiences of my own was the vietnam war and uh milai of course was for us at that time uh absolutely a horrific and uh electrifying revelation when it came out in the press uh that confirmed lots of the rumors that were running around but hadn't been concretely reported uh and uh we do know that uh that uh some of the dynamics in of lieutenant cali's company that carried out the miele massacre uh we're not that different that is you know you're somebody wasn't taking part in the shooting he was uh chided as being a coward not doing his share trying to bring to bear prayer pressure uh to get men to take part uh but those that refused to take part in the shooting nothing happened to them they would be viewed by their comrades as having let them just let them down but certainly no court martial nobody's going to go up to their commander and say i killed a bunch of women and children and me lied and he wouldn't take part you've got a court martial that that was not going to happen uh so in in that sense uh uh there's another book a book by uh by kellman and um blanking on the other name but it was called crimes of obedience and this was a study basically of criminality in vietnam not the holocaust but again it basically sort of tried to say the different ways in which people participated in this kind of criminality and on the one hand they were the ideological killers the people who believed in what they were doing and the rightness of what they were doing uh and they could be left to carry out be instructions and confident uh that they would carry out village sweeps with napalm villages and whatever because they believed in it and then there were those who were the role adapters the ones that never would have done this on their own but once they put on a military uniform felt it was important to be the best soldier they could be and would live up to what people expected them to do by virtue of the fact that they were an american soldier even if they personally didn't like it and personally knew it was contrary to the to the morality they had been raised with in their church and their school and their family uh they too could be relied upon to carry out orders on their own and then there were those that were the nominal compliers they didn't want to get in trouble with their officers and when ordered to do something they would do it but the minute the officer was gone they would stop doing it and light up a marijuana cigarette or whatever and refused to continue any further and they couldn't be trusted to carry out crimes of obedience without supervision and constant watch and the problem of course in this and this i think was similar to the killer's nazi killers is that there is a is this these are not stable categories once people begin to kill uh then if there's a if there's a cognitive dissonance that is they know that what they're doing is contrary to their own personal beliefs even if they're doing it out of deference to authority not a role adaptation to relieve the conflict that arises internally you can't change the unit you're in you can't change the order you receive but you can change how you're framing what you're doing and so you basically adopt a new morality that justifies and rationalizes what you're doing and people that started out as nominal killers and role adaptive killers will begin to justify and rationalize what they're doing and become ideological killers and so that you get this genocidal momentum and this is part of why of what i talk about when the this becomes routine when the unit begins to take this on as something that doesn't even bother them anymore and units once they sort of cross the threshold uh can and can become killers without inhibition so yes i think there are dynamics the policy of the government is not the same i mean we weren't asking american soldiers in vietnam to carry out a genocide against all vietnamese we were asking to carry out war crimes to do things that would have been violation of the hague and geneva conventions uh but uh basically the dynamic within the criminal units and the what what uh these crimes of obedience to use the term of that book uh were in some way similar between the two thank you so much professor browning i'm i'm sorry we don't have more time to get to some of these other questions i'll send them your way so you can see them then i want to thank everybody for submitting these very thoughtful and interesting questions and thank you professor browning for this amazing presentation that is so insightful and deeply disturbing um we're grateful for you for taking the time to be with us here today i wanna also thank you um this program today was recorded and you will find it on our website starting tomorrow i want to give a special thank you to richard greene our museum and technology director who is running the technical side of the show also a huge thank you to our ceo dee simon who steers the ship and thank you to our entire team lori warshall cohen nicole bella julia thompson paul regelbrug amanda davis katie lawrence morgan romero and devonshire lockheed please join us next week for the third program in our series of connecting the holocaust to today next week's program will take place on wednesday and doubles as a continuing legal education program the program is entitled restitution after world war ii suing hitler's business partners and is presented by professor michael basler from chapman university professor basler will discuss how america's civil justice system provided a measure of long-overdue justice to holocaust victims and heirs we will examine claims for return of nazi looted art stolen jewish property in europe holocaust era insurance policies slave labor and bank deposits held by swiss banks thank you so much to all of you for the support and for being a part of this program and this concludes our program for today

Channel: Holocaust Center for Humanity

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Id: XKW7ownAV9E

Length: 60min 20sec (3620 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 28 2021