[ Music ] >> Good afternoon, everyone. Good things come to those who
wait, and so we have long waited to welcome Professor Christopher
Browning to Sonoma State -- and as of noon yesterday,
I thought we were going to be waiting a lot longer. But he's here! All's good. Nevertheless, we persisted. And so, after 25 years
of trying, we are honored to hear Professor Browning
speak about ordinary men. Dr. Browning is recently
retired from the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, where he was the Frank Porter
Graham Professor of history. He has written many important
studies of the Holocaust, including "Fateful Months,"
"The Path to Genocide," "Origins of the Final Solution,"
and "Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp." This earned the Yad Vashem
International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. Two of his studies have earned
the National Jewish Book Award in Holocaust category. He has given expert
witness testimony in trials of accused Nazi war criminals
in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. He has also testified at
the Holocaust denial trials of Ernest Zundel in
Toronto and David Irving versus Deborah Lipstadt
in London. In 2006 he was inducted
into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Last year, Dr. Browning
was the Schapiro Scholar at USC's Shoa Foundation Center
for Advanced Genocide Research. This is their most
prestigious fellowship. Scholarly literature on
the Holocaust is extensive, but one volume stands
apart for its contribution to our understanding of
how the Holocaust happened. As Professor Browning states, "ultimately the Holocaust
took place because, at the most basic level, individual human beings
killed other human beings in large numbers over an
expended period of time. Ordinary men considered the
essential question of genocide. How and why do normal people
become the instruments of genocide. What drives the everyday
citizen -- your neighbor, you -- to become a perpetrator." This is the question that
will be asked anytime we speak of genocide. You will undoubtedly
hear it again from some of the distinguished
lecturers in our series, including Peter Hayes
and [inaudible]. Today we are truly
honored to listen to Professor Christopher
Browning. [ Applause ] >> Thank you very
much and indeed, it's good to finally
get to Sonoma. We've had various problems that have blocked this
even taking place earlier. So I'm glad that it
has finally occurred. Today I want to talk about in
a sense revisit "Ordinary Men" and talk about it 25 years --
now it's about 26, 27 years -- after the book was published. Of course basically it was
trying to get at the issue of Holocaust perpetrators. And one of the reasons why
historians have struggled with the question of
explaining the perpetrators is that in fact there isn't a
single kind of perpetrator. There is no one model fits
all kind of explanation. We have, when it breaks
down into rough categories, we have the ideologues --
people like Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich -- the ones
who were at the top with a very well worked out,
concrete ideological vision that justified the
Holocaust that to them in a sense made the
Holocaust make sense. So for them motive
is not great mystery, they did it because they thought
that history demanded this. The next group we
had were people who we might call the experts, the kinds of people
that no modern. [ Audio Problem ] Okay, we're back on. No? Got the green light here. Are we back on now? No. How's it now? Trying once more. We do have it now. Okay. A second group that we
have are often simply referred to as the experts, the kinds of
people that are indispensable for the working of any modern
government, modern society. Prime here would be of
course the officer corps of the German Armed Forces
that conquered the territories on which the Jews were killed. The Industrialists that
basically built the equipment and the economy that enabled
Germany to conquer Europe. We know also the
medical profession that provided people -- like
Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz -- but also all sorts of doctors
who worked in one way or another with the Nazi regime,
such as the euthanasia -- so-called euthanasia program. And then we have what I
would call the middle-level functionaries, these
mid-level bureaucrats that are in a sense the organizers
of the genocide. The people that knowing what
the leadership wants implemented figure out how to do it. Most of the leaders
are not micromanagers. They do not sit there
working out the details. This is done by the mid-level
organizers and managers. Archetypal here would of course
be someone like Adolf Eichmann. And then at the bottom of
course there are the people that do the actual killing
-- the grassroots killers, the face-to-face killers
that run the death camps and manned the killing
squads, death squads that roamed over Eastern Europe. And so these people
participate in the genocide in very different ways, and
therefore, I think we have to understand they're not going to be necessarily
explained in the same manner. And certainly of
these four groups, the group that was often
hardest to track down, the hardest to try to penetrate for the historian were
the face-to-face killers, the people at the bottom of the genocide pyramid
of perpetrators. Because of course they didn't
leave scads of written documents like the mid-level bureaucrats. They didn't give lots of
speeches like Hitler at the top. So they didn't explain
themselves or record what they were doing. They very seldom in fact
wrote letters or diaries. And most of those that did, the families obviously did
not keep those after the war or share them with historians. So we had a circumstance
where tracking down and trying to get inside the
minds and the lives of the face-to-face killers was
a very, very difficult challenge for Holocaust historians. It was my good fortune when
I was working at the archives of the Central Agency for the
Investigation of Nazi Crimes -- this was the investigating
agency that sort of organized and initiated most
of the prosecutions of Nazi war criminals after
the war and had, therefore, collected huge amounts
of testimony. And then they would
farm out the cases to the appropriate courts once
they'd helped prepare them. I was working at that agency. It's a little suburb of Stuttgart called
Ludwigsburg in 1987. And I was looking at all the
cases that related to Poland. I was trying for my book
"Origins of the Final Solution" to fill in a map of
Poland where, after all, half the victims of the
Holocaust are Polish Jews. But nothing like that -- the number of documents
really didn't probe Poland, of course it was a
mere fraction of that. So that Poland is vastly
under-represented proportionally in terms of documentation. I was trying to fill
in the missing gaps on the Holocaust in Poland. And therefore, looking at every
indictment and every judgment of every court case that
had come about in Germany that had been initiated
by the Central Agency for the Investigation
of Nazi Crimes. And that's when I came
across the indictment of Reserve Police Battalion 101. And for historians,
you have rare in your life these eureka
moments when something that you hoped was out there
but you had no way of knowing about how to go looking for the
needle in the haystack suddenly and unexpectedly
falls into your lap. And this was the case
of the indictment of Reserve Police Battalion 101. And it was key for
a number of reasons. In particular, I had long
been working with perpetrators and always trying to find issues
or documentation that would deal with the issue of choice. How much choice did people have. After the war of
course, they always said, we were simply coerced,
we had no choice. If we hadn't done as
we were ordered to do, we would have suffered
drastic punishment. Now, they could never -- the
defense attorneys for people who claimed coercion could
never once find a single case in which someone who had refused to shoot unarmed civilians had
suffered any dire consequences. So they couldn't prove
the case that, yes, you would have suffered
punishment. But the historian
needed the adverse. We had to find the case that proved they didn't suffer
punishment when they refused or when they did not -- when
they opted not to take part. And this is what happened when
I was reading the indictment and the opening massacre that the unit is
conducting in July of 1942. The troops are assembled
outside the village of Eusefoof [phonetic],
where they're going to end up shooting 1500
Jews in one day. The commander, Major Troph
[phonetic], has to explain to the men what this
is all about. They'd never had a
killing action before. They'd come from Germany
three weeks earlier. They're total novices. They had no idea about
what this is all about. So he has to give them a speech. And in that speech
he basically tells -- gives them a series
of justifications for why they are going to
shoot the Jews in this village. And at the end of that
speech, remarkably, he says, to what was a group of
middle-aged reserve police, if any of the men
among you do not feel up to this, you can step out. And anybody who didn't want
to shoot unarmed civilians that day was allowed to step
out and turn in their rifle and absent themselves
from the firing squads. And initially only about a dozen
did so out of about 500 men. But that remained the
rule of the battalion for the remaining years
that it was in Poland. That no officer could force
one of his men to shoot. Everyone knew that it
was the rule of the major that people had the right
to opportunities out. So the whole issue of
coercion, of duress was gone. And the backup defense of accused war criminals
has always been, well, maybe I wouldn't
have been punished but I couldn't have
known it at the time. And this was the defensive of
putative duress: I thought I was under duress even if I wasn't. Clearly when the major is
making an explicit offer, there was no duress and
there was no putative duress. And therefore, this
was going to be a case in which the two major alibis that cloud virtually
every other investigation and trial were off the table. The other thing remarkable
about the case as I went through it was that I was
getting testimony that was so much more vivid, so
much more in detail, so much more clearly truthful
in describing the horrors of what the men were doing then
I had encountered in the trial of any other killing unit. What normally happened
was that people knew who the officers of
these units were. They didn't know the men were. And the officers
lied for one another. And what you get is a series
of obviously mendacious denials in which they all
just stonewall. But without any outside
counter-testimony, the prosecution had a
hard time piercing a kind of coordinated wall of denial by
all of the officer defendants. What turned out in this
case was that the roster of the battalion had survived
and that the investigators of this group were able to
go to Homburg, find all -- who had the 500 names,
find 210 men who had been in the unit and interrogate
them. Bring them in, interrogate
them, sometimes many times over. And now you had rank-and-file
men who had no interest in covering for their officers,
no interest in being part of the conspiracy
of stonewalling, and in many cases didn't
like their officers and were willing
to rat them out. And the prosecution also in
a sense gave them a budge and said, we're not interested
in you, we're interested in the officers, you're not the
subject of this investigation. And the men talked much more
vividly, much more in detail than I'd seen in any other case. So here I now had finally
what I'd been looking for: the source base for the study
of a face-to-face killing unit. Testimonies of 210 men of a
single unit that was going to be in Poland from the summer of '42
till the Russians chased them out in 1944 and was deeply
involved in the final solution, the killing of Polish Jews,
from the day they arrived in Poland till the last main
massacres in this region, the Lublin District,
in the fall of 1943. So I certainly have come
across this, went to Homburg, went through the 30
volumes of testimony, the 210 men that had testified
and came roughly to some of the following conclusions. One in terms of the
composition of this unit. If the goal had been
to find a group of men who were not simply a random
cross-section of German society but were a group of men who
would be the least likely people in Germany to become
Hitler killers, it would've been this group. And let me explain that. Age-wise, the battalion's
average age was 39 « years old. This is a draft -- these people
were conscripted in 1942. The war has now gone
quite a while. This is the first time in which
war-time service is imposed on people who were
35 to 48 years old. But they are too old
for the German army. The army is not yet ready
to use people like that. So they are drafted for war-time
service but not in the army, so they're serving
as reserve policemen, to do duty far behind the lines
which wouldn't be so strenuous. So they're put into a
reserve police battalion and sent to Poland. So their age, as I say,
is 39 « years old. What that meant was
they were too young to have fought in World War I. These are not people
brutalized by the trenches. They were too old to have been
in Hitler schools, Hitler youth, any of the socialization
mechanisms by which the next generation
was easily and quickly Nazified. These are people whose formative
years were the Weimar Republic. They're raised in a democracy. They have a yardstick by
which they can measure what is going on. These are not people who do not
know anything except life inside the Nazi bubble. They have a life experience
from living in a democracy against which they can measure
what is happening at that point. When they're conscripted in
1942, of course one thing was that the military did not want to take people valuable
to the economy. They're not drafting engineers
constructing submarines in Homburg. They're drafting mostly
unskilled labor not essential to the war economy. So two-thirds of this unit
are going to be working class and they're going to be
unskilled working class -- truck drivers, dockworkers, restaurant waiters,
what have you. The lower middle-class members
will be low-level white-collar workers -- sales clerks, office
workers, and that sort of thing. Now, in Germany, the Nazis
ultimately did get support from all across society. Hitler was not wrong when he
said he had a People's party that encompassed all
aspects of German society. But proportionately, the working
class was most resistant. The parties of the
working class -- the Social Democrats
and the Communists -- lost the least folks to
Naziism and were able to maintain their strong support
up until they were outlawed after Hitler came
to power in 1933. So the bulk of the
battalion not only comes from an age group whose
formative years were the Weimar Republic, they come
from a social class that was the most anti-Nazi
or least not seduced by Nazism before 1933. And indeed Homburg by
the Nazis referred to and it wasn't a compliment -- referred to as Red Homburg because of the labor
movement there and the working class movement
there were very strong. And Homburg was a city
where they did not do well in the pre-1933 political
contest for power. So Homburg geographically
was an area where the Nazis had
been relatively weak. So if you wanted to
pick a group, as I said, that was not a cross-section,
not a random drafting of people from German society but were in
many ways the most likely not to be willing executioners of
Hitler, it would've been people from a city like Homburg,
from the working class, and from an age group that
was about 40 years old. And that's exactly what the
composition of this group is. Now, they are set to
carry out two kinds of key actions during
the final solution. One was out right massacres. That is simply firing squad
executions of Jews as they wiped out one village or another, either because these villages
were too far from railways to put them on deportation
trains, or the trains couldn't be
scheduled because of the demands of the Eastern front and
trains were not available. So they carry out a number
of shooting massacres. They also carry out a number
of ghetto clearing actions, rounding up Jews in one town
after another and marching to the train station,
forcing them onto the boxcars that are going to be sent
to Treblinka, which is just about 60 miles north from
where this group is operating, in what was known
as the northern area of the Lublin District. So Lublin is here, Warsaw here,
they're sort of two-thirds of the way towards
Lublin from Warsaw. And they are heavily
involved in both of these. The very first action they carry
out, as I say, is the massacre of 1500 Jews in the village
of Huzefoof [phonetic]. And from the testimony,
I think it is very clear that this action came as a
horrific shock to the men. Nothing had prepared
them for this. They are traumatized by it. They are distraught. As one of the men said -- told
the interrogators at that time, you know, I said to myself
as I read through this again, I think would go crazy. And that was sort of the
state of mind of many of them after the first massacre. That this was something for which they had not been
prepared, trained, forewarned, and suddenly in one
day out of the blue, they are shooting
women and children in the forest outside
of Huzefoof. And their uniforms are
covered with blood, with the brain matter of the people whose
heads they'd blown off at point-blank range
in the forest. And, as I say, this is a
traumatic experience for them. However -- and this is one of
the discouraging discoveries of the research,
was the discovery of just how quickly
people got used to doing very terrible things. Though the first massacre may
have been horrifically described in great detail -- they
remember, you know, some of the people they
killed as individuals. They remember the
procedures of the day. Can tell about that
day in great detail. Very rapidly the killing
becomes a numb routine. That as each massacre proceeds, they remember less
and less of it. They can't even remember the
names of the towns any longer or what was particular
about them. That once they get
used to doing it, this basically not only loses
any capacity to horrify them, but it loses any
capacity to be remembered in any kind of particular way. So the speed with
which they adjusted, the speed with which
they became numbed, the speed to which they
accommodated themselves to a profession of
day-to-day killing was one of the very discouraging
results that I came to. I also concluded from the
testimonies that, over time, not only do they become
increasingly numb, but the battalion
basically broke into three rough
categories of people in terms of how they reacted. One group of men, a plurality,
nothing like a majority but a plurality, simply came -- learned how to enjoy
killing people. They got increasingly high
on what they were doing. They volunteered
for firing squads. They volunteered for the
so-called Jew hunts to track down Jews who had
fled to the forest. And they would come back to a
hearty lunch and joke and laugh about what they had done. There was a middle group that
I would call the accommodators. The first group were what
we call the eager killers, the ones that learned
to enjoy killing. The second group were what I
would call the accommodators, people that would
never volunteer. Didn't enjoy their job. In fact often thought of
it as dirty, as unpleasant. But nonetheless would
do it whenever ordered but would never go out
to seek the opportunity and never volunteer, but
also would never do anything to avoid it. They did not take up the major's
offer to excuse themselves because they didn't
want to appear -- as we'll talk about
a little more -- appear weak or get stigmatized
as not doing their share. A third group are what I call
the evaders, people who took up the major's offer either
the first day at the speech or even during that
day thereafter when they would present
themselves to one of their noncommissioned
officers and say, I can't do it anymore. Or later would make it clear
that they weren't going to belong to a shooting
unit any longer. Now, that meant that they
weren't trigger-pullers, but they also continued to
do other supporting jobs that made the killing possible. They continued to provide
guards for the cordons around the shooting actions
so people couldn't escape. They continued to participate
in the roundups of the ghettos that would drive people out of
their houses to the town square and march them to the train. So they continued to
do essential jobs even if they weren't trigger-pullers. So when I say evader,
they evaded the actual act of face-to-face killing
but continued to do supporting actions
that enabled other people to do the killing,
even if they did not. In terms of those that didn't
kill, the so-called evaders, overwhelmingly after the
war in these interrogations, their explanation
-- or I should say, even at the time they did it -- and they stuck with this
explanation after the war -- was not to evade by
saying that it was wrong or that it was immoral
or that it was sinful. It was to say that they were
too weak, to basically say, this job was too tough for them, they weren't tough
enough to do it. Now, what that accomplished for them was two very
important things. It meant they didn't
criticize the regime. They were not criticizing
the policy of mass murder. Nor were they criticizing
their comrades who were carrying
out that policy. They were taking on themselves
the stigma of being too weak to do what they accepted as
legitimate policy in order to not have to take part in it with the least friction
with their comrades. That this perversely
then of course in a sense validated what
the others were doing. By saying, you know, I'm
not tough enough to do that, they were in a sense labeling
as strong and positive those that could kill and accepting
upon themselves the label of being weak and
inadequate in order not to take part in the killing. And that's how they carved
out for themselves the space that would enable them
to not be trigger-pullers but still remain a part of
the community of the unit. Remember, this is an occupation
unit deep in Polish territory. There no other society around them except the
500 men in that unit. And no one wants to be a
pariah or be ostracized in that kind of situation. And so the way they avoided
that was basically, as I say, taking the blame on themselves
for not participating, not criticizing the
regime or their comrades. So those are kind of the outline
of the conclusions I made about the men when I went
through these interrogations. But when I was done,
I still needed a kind of broader framework,
something that would get at the basic question that we
had, and that is why did people as part of a unit do things
they never would've done as individuals? Why did they become killers
when they didn't have to be, when there was a way out? And so that in a sense was
the bigger question behind describing what they did
and what the dynamics of the unit were, was to try to find a more interpretive
framework behind that. Now, at that time, of
course one answer was to look at the psychiatry. The psychiatry is looking
basically at individuals. And certainly the attempt made
initially after World War II was to look at Nazis as
abnormal and to diagnose them on the basis they're
individual abnormalities. So we had the so-called
totalitarian personality was one thesis that was brought
out and others. And all of that I think
was quite mistaken because these people
weren't acting as individuals on their own. They didn't behave this way. That this was not a case of them
being psychologically abnormal. Sociology at that point
was not very helpful because there was sort of two things sociologists
were contributing that. One was kind of the Bavarian
study of bureaucracy, which was very useful for studying the middle-level
echelon perpetrators. Those who were in a sense
absorbed in their task, that they only judged themselves
and what they were doing by how well they carried
out the task assigned, not by how good was
the task that they were in fact carrying well. In a sense they didn't set
judgment on the higher purpose of what they were doing but only on how well they
accomplished it. And also the fact that this
task was -- the whole task -- was sort of segmented
and subdivided. Every person was always
through a very refined division of labor only responsible
for one small segment. So they never had a sense
of owning the whole thing. It was always they
were just one -- the phrase then was just
one cog in the wheel, one tiny little cog
in a big machine for which they had no sense
of personal responsibility. The other contribution at that
time was the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, his book
on Holocaust and Modernity. Who was trying to talk about
the pathologies of modernity. We often look back
on the Enlightenment and the modernization as of course being a very
positive thing in rise of Western civilization. And he was pointing
out in his book that there was an
underside to this. When people basically
think that man in fact has through their rational
capacities the means of improving and
perfecting their own lives, this is not something that is
brought about by divine aid but is a man-made product. That the whole goal then in a
sense to match ends and means, and, therefore, you can
rationally choose what means will achieve a particular end. And he used the analogy
that if you wanted to perfect your garden,
you pulled weeds. And if you wanted to perfect
mankind, you pulled human weeds. And that basically the
whole mentality of deciding who should live and
whose life had value for the Nazis was an
exercise in radical modernity. That wasn't very useful
to what I was looking at. My middle-aged policemen
were not theorizing about perfecting mankind when they were blowing
people's heads off. So neither of those approaches
provided me with any kind of analytical framework. What did in the end provide that
framework was social psychology. That is the study of how
people react within a group, the dynamics of group
interaction, of group behavior. And here, a number of
experiments had been undertaken in the 1960s that provided
some insight in terms of how people's behavior
is shaped by virtue of being part of a group. Why people as a group behave
differently than they would as an individual on his own. One of these is a conformity
experiment of Solomon Asch, in which he demonstrated
that people will go along under desire not to challenge
a group opinion, a group norm. This is a famous experiment
when you have a group of people and you usually have classroom
format and the professor puts on the board, you know,
three long lines of chalk and one short line, or
holds up three sticks that are long and one is short. And you around the classroom
and you ask everybody which is the shortest stick. And one after another of course
the confederates all choose one of the long sticks and
say it's the shortest. And then you finally get to the unsuspecting
subject who has a choice. Either he can give
you the right answer or he can give you the answer
that conforms to the group. And overwhelmingly, the much
greater propensity is not to challenge and confront
your mistaken classmates and you confirm their
error rather than say, you guys are all crazy, this is
obviously the shortest stick. And assert your own ability to
make your own judgment contrary to an open contestation
with the people around you. So the conformity is a very
powerful factor shaping group behavior. And there was of course the
experiment by Stanley Milgram on what he called
obedience to authority. I'd prefer the term
deference to authority. Where an unsuspecting
person subject is put at a control board rigged
up to make him think that he is inflicting pain on somebody hooked
up with electrodes. And that it is posed as
a learning experiment in which the man at the board
basically pushes buttons and levers that go in
ascending order that start with mild shocks,
medium, severe, dangerous, and then XXX at the end. And the man in the
electric chair is of course an actor
who's going to go through a prescribed
response for each level that the subject moves
to on his control panel. And the question for Milgram
was in a sense, could someone with nothing more than a
scientist in a white coat and a lab board -- clipboard -- telling him that what they
were doing was essential for scientific progress and that if they didn't complete the
experiment it would ruin the results. And that the experimenter,
scientist, took all responsibility,
all this man had to do was simply carry
out the instructions that he had volunteered to do. He volunteered to be
part of this experiment. And Milgram found
that about two-thirds of his subjects would
routinely -- not routinely because they
in fact were quite upset about what they were doing
while they were doing it but did it anyway -- would
move to the very high end of thinking they were
inflicting very severe pain on another human being. And they've replicated this
experiment in various ways that confirms that
someone will defer to an authority figure rather than assert their
own responsibility. And it's only the minority
that will walk out -- stand up and walk out
or refuse to comply. And there was of course
the Zimbardo experiment, prison experiment, that dealt with the issues of
role adaptation. You took volunteers, you
divided them in two groups. One group are the prisoners. The other group are the guards. And you simulate a prison. The prisoners are all there
and the guards go in shifts. So the guards are
always outnumbered. But the guards are urged
to devise every kind of technique other than physically abusing their
prisoners to gain control of the situation, to humiliate
and dominate their prisoners. And Milgram -- sorry,
Zimbardo wanted to see how far they would go, how far a randomly-selected
group would become dominators of another group. He planned to go two weeks. He had to call it after one week because it was spinning
out of control. And in terms of --
again, the dynamic here, interestingly enough, three
groups emerged among the guards. They were -- of the 12 guards, there we two so-called
good guards. Guards that when they didn't
know they were on camera and thought no one else was
watching what they were doing, would do acts of
mitigation for the prisoners. But never wanted to be caught
by their comrades doing this but would do it secretly. There was a middle group
of guards that would get out their manual and
follow the orders and do exactly what
was prescribed, standard operating procedure. And then there was a
dynamic minority that in fact from the beginning set out to invent ever new more
draconic ways to dominate and torment their prisoners and
to gain and keep the upper hand. And it was the dynamics
of that group that finally had caused
Zimbardo to call things off. People who very quickly putting
on a police guard uniform, being empowered over others, very rapidly changed their
behavior to adapt to the role that they had been
given and then to in a sense exploit
it to its full. To get high in effect on what
that empowered them to do. So role adaptation, deference
to authority, conformity, I found were all
important factors that influenced the
way people acted -- interacted with others as part
of a group that were all useful for explaining the dynamic that
I had empirically observed. That at first I wrote in a
sense everything except the last chapter. And then said, how do
we make sense of this? And then went through a
number of different things but found social psychology
perhaps the most useful analytical framework in
explaining why so many of the men -- even when
they have the option not to take part -- continued
to do the killing that went on in Poland in this unit. And then I had to of
course get the book -- having gotten the book written,
I had to get it published. I was fortunate enough
through a friend to get -- borrow his agent. Three publishers
turned the book down. Two of them said
it was a good book but a University Press
book, this won't sell, nobody will buy this
in enough numbers. One book I had somebody who had
gotten out of bed the wrong day and said, my God,
another Holocaust book. When are you people
stop writing this stuff? And then the fourth one took it. So any of you aspiring
authors out there, remember that publishing
is a lottery in which an editor gets
what is often a matter of luck of the draw. We then had to find a title. I had thought of the
title Becoming Killers, and my editor said, no way. You can't use that. And I said, why? He says, well, becoming in
English has two meanings. One is a transformation,
becoming something. And the other is attractive. And he says, if somebody
can misunderstand a word, they will misunderstand a word, and you don't want
this book being, you know, good-looking killers. Incidently then, Jim Waller did
take the title that I was going to use but he got -- and
no one objected then. So it really was a false
alarm, but it did mean that that title Jim got. But we hit then, after
much of going back and forth, on Ordinary Men. That was by no means
self-evident when we started. Once we had it, it
seemed so obvious and you don't know
why did it take us so long to get to that title. But in fact that was
the very last thing that got settled before
the book was published. When the book came out,
there were a number -- it was generally well-received. In fact it continues to be
used, so it's done well. But there were criticisms. And I think some of them had
varying degrees of merit. And in a sense the
post-publication history of the book is what I
wanted to talk about now. What were the major
lines of criticism? Which ones had how much
merit and which ones did not? One line of criticism was
one that basically argued that the invoking of social
psychology was exculpatory. Now, social psychologists
themselves recognize that when they try to
provide social psychological explanations, others
perceive that as a diminution of individual responsibility. Because they interpret it
as being deterministic. And neither the social
psychologists themselves nor myself agree with
that accusation. Obviously when you're
dealing with Nazis and you're accusing someone
of being exculpatory, this is not complimentary to the
book or the author of the book. And so the issue was,
did that hold any weight? Was I letting the
Nazis off the hook? Was I exculpating them
from relieving them of individual moral
responsibility by the interpretive
framework that I had taken. And my argument is, no, that
in each of those experiments that I cited, there are always
some people who do not go along. That in fact those
experiments showed that a third of the Milgram people say, no. And the Zimbardo
experiment showed two of the guards basically
are doing, you know, good things for the prisoners when they think they
can get away with it. And that what you have in
those experiments is our series of individuals each who is making an individual
decision how they will respond to the test that the
experimenter is putting them to. There's nothing deterministic
in it. What it does do is allow us to
predict roughly what proportions in the population
will respond one way and what proportion
will respond another. But it doesn't mean that those
are merely reflecting a whole series of individual
decisions made by individuals who are not relieved of their
individual responsibility for the decision they take. Can you imagine somebody in a
courtroom who's been convicted of vehicular homicide because
he was driving while drunk, and he tells the judge,
well, statistics say 50% of all vehicular homicides
are caused by people under the influence of alcohol. So what could I do? It's predicted that
I have to do this. Somebody's got to do it. I mean, that's not
a moral excuse. That because we can predict
that a very large number of drunk drivers are going to do terrible things does
not mean you're not morally responsible for driving drunk. And this is the sense the false
criticism that was being made of the book and trying to
shape it as copping out and letting the Nazis
off the hook. A second argument or
criticism of the book was that Reserve Police
Battalion 101 was not typical. And that I was making
generalizations broadly from a case that was an anomaly. There is some truth to that. But I would argue, they
may win one battle, but I will win the war in this. And let me explain why. As much more research was done
on the police battalions -- once "Ordinary Men"
was out there, in fact we began
researching all sorts of other police battalions. We learned much more about them. And indeed I would argue
there are three kinds of police battalions and one
of them is not representative of more than one of
those three groups. And then I'll try and
explain why that's not terribly comforting. The first group all
were reservists who joined the reserve
police between 1937 and 1939. So for two years in Nazi
Germany, before the war, they're going out every weekend
and doing their training -- much like a National Guard. And they go to summer camp. And so they're getting training. They're getting indoctrination. Come to war in '39. They are pulled into
full-time duty. And then of course they're
given very intense training for at least six months,
full-time training, lots of indoctrination. And of course the people who
were taken into the reserve from '37 to '39 are basically
people who were going to be much higher percentage
of Nazi party membership and they were going
to be indoctrinated as Nazis and so forth. So this is a group that by the
time they are pulled together into battalions in 1939,
1940, are then sent out to the occupied territories, where long before the
final solution started, they already are in practice in what I would call
racial imperialism. They're already learning
how to be instruments of German racial domination
over other peoples of Europe. Increasingly they learn how to
be brutal and show, you know, the local populations
Germany's power over them. And it's only in '41
then that they are sent in to actually begin
doing mass killing. So they are people that with
a much higher percentage of Nazi party membership,
then in 101. They are people that will have
a long period of indoctrination, long period of training,
much more selective in terms of being allowed in
back in '37 to '39. A period of brutalization
in which they get used to being the enforcers
of the Nazi regime and occupied territory, and then
are finally sent in to killing. These people are
roughly in the early 30s. They're about eight years -- by average maybe seven
or eight years younger than the average
membership of 101. Then we have a second group. In 1939 when Germany
goes to war, a lot of the army needs a large
number of professional policemen to become military police, MPs. And so an agreement is made
between the army and the police that the police will turn over
to the army a large number of men to become
military police. What they call feltron
numere [phonetic]. What we would call MPs. In turn the police was able
to select from a large pool of younger people being
basically volunteering -- because this would give them a
chance to get into the police which would have a
later postwar career -- choose who they wanted from
that group of young volunteers. Those people are then trained
very extensively and they become in a sense the league
battalions of the police. These men are in their
late 20s, early 30s. They are very highly Nazified
because they've been chosen out of a pool of a
larger pool, very select, and they too have training,
prior brutalization. They're in Poland and
elsewhere before they go in to start becoming
Holocaust killers. So in both those cases, you have
people that have long periods of indoctrination, long
periods of training, relatively high rates
of Nazification, a period of brutalization
in which they become used to being the enforces of the regime before
they begin mass killing. 101 is in neither of those. 101, as I say, is an ad hoc
unit, conscripted in 1942, when military --
compulsory military -- service is extended for
people 35 and older. They are slapped together in
Homburg with very little period of training, very little
period of indoctrination. And that there is
virtually no selectivity. Their average number of members
of the Nazi party, for instance, are not higher than the
population at large. So that in this case
you have a group of killers unlike the first two
cohorts this is quite different. Now, what's important here
is that despite the fact that Reserve Police Battalion
101 was composed of people who were much older
-- 39 « years old -- despite the fact that they
had virtually no training, virtually no indoctrination,
that they had very -- no particular level
of Nazification, no prior period of
brutalization. When you look at
body counts by unit, of all the police battalions
in the Nazi Third Reich, Reserve Police Battalion 101
was the fourth most deadliest battalion among them all. Even though they're a year
later coming into action than many others, and as I
say, come in without anything like the training and
preparation of the others. But in the end, these
500 men kill about -- shoot about 38,000 people, take
part in the shooting of others with them -- take part in the
shooting of about 38,000 people and put on the train to
Treblinka, about 43,000. They have a body count well
into the 80,000s for 500 men. And, as I say, this
puts them in a sense with the fourth highest
body count of any battalion and certainly higher than any in
the younger men, they exceed any of that second group
that I talked about. So the reality is that, yes, many battalions did
have Nazification, did have that careful
selectivity in choosing the people in
it, did have indoctrination, did have brutalization. But if your argument is that
that is either a necessary or sufficient explanation for
why they did what they did, then you cannot explain 101, because it didn't
have any of those. So 101 may have been different,
but we can take no comfort from the fact that 101 was
different because it shows us that you can create a
killer unit that is one of the most deadly of the
battalions with none of that. And so in the end, I
say, yes, it's atypical, but that is not a comfort,
that is not a doing away with the importance
of this battalion. In fact, makes it
even more important because of its atypicality. It's precisely its atypicality that makes it an even
more remarkable case study than it had been before
we knew anything about all of the other kinds of
battalions that took place. That took part in
the final solution. Another attack, accusation,
another criticism that was made was that I
didn't pay enough attention to the issues of ideology
and German culture. And this in particular was
an argument that was made by Daniel Goldhagen in his book
"Hitler's Willing Executioners." And because his was the
main criticism of my book and he quite explicitly said his
was a cultural, anthropological, ideological explanation,
my book got categorized as the opposite --
situational, organizational, institutional explanation. I didn't think -- I
hadn't pigeonholed myself. But because of the direction
from which that attack came, mine got labeled
as the opposite. So we got these two
books who were presented as a kind of dichotomy. Either you have a
cultural explanation that says Germany is
a culture that was in a sense prepped for genocide. That I think his phrase
was, Germany was pregnant with genocide for 500 years
and Hitler was the midwife that gives birth
to the genocide. And that the Germans, because
of their culturally-embedded, murderous anti-Semitism -- his terms was elimination
of anti-Semitism -- killed with gusto
and enthusiasm. And basically described
the eager killers -- I think mistook the part for
the whole described everybody with descriptions that
would have been appropriate for the eager killers but not
for the battalion at large. And his claim was I
simply ignored the cultural and ideological side. Well, I hadn't, but I
hadn't given it anything like the prominence that he did. Because he dismissed the social
psychological interactive side entirely and said
this is the one -- the sufficient and necessary
explanation is German culture. Now, one of the most important
and I think useful contributions to the debate in the
post-publication period after his book -- after
my book and then his book, which came out four
years later -- was a contribution by a
social psychologist named Leonard Newman. And he argued that was so
totally a false dichotomy. That in fact you don't have a
situation that is a blank tape that is a tabula rasa. That anybody in a
situation is in a situation that they construct,
that they act in a situation depending
upon how they interpret that situation, how they
read that situation, how they understand
that situation. And that means that
they're looking -- well, how they read that situation depends
upon the cultural lenses through which they're looking. Think back to the
Milgram experiment. The average Western person
with great, you know, value in science can be
hooked by the scientist in his lab coat saying, this
is important for science. Put a New Guinea Highlander
in that situation and say, this is important for science,
and he says, what's science? He comes to it with a totally
different cultural outlook that will not be
-- will not read that situation in the same way. Now, that's an extreme
example, but it does -- what Newman what was arguing
is I think quite right, that situation and
culture are inseparable. Because you will read
the situation you're in, respond to the situation you are
in, in part through how you see that situation as is shaped
by your cultural assumptions. So the notion that, you know,
that there is either this one or that one I think is wrong. And Newman was bright enough,
knew how to explain it. I only wish he'd done that
before I wrote my book, but I couldn't come
to that myself. But I'm very glad that he
put that on the table later, because I think it is a very
essential element to add. That in fact we're not talking about either a cultural
explanation or a situational explanation, because those two are
intertwined and inextricable. The last criticism that was
made, also by Daniel Goldhagen, was simply that I'd been duped. That we had both read
the same testimonies, both read the same
policemen testimonies, and that I'd been snookered by
the false accounts that some of the policemen gave and
that he had avoided that trap. His argument was that you
must not use any testimony that has the potential
to be self-exculpatory. Any testimony that
could be interpreted as letting yourself off the
hook basically is suspect. Anything suspect
you must kick out, because you can't let
yourself be fooled by a Nazi in any of this. And so he has a very high
purist test about evidence, that only people who
admitted they'd given themself to Hitler mind, body, and
soul could be trusted to say, you know, when they confessed, that you could trust
those confessions. And everything else
had to be discarded because of the potential to be
self-exculpatory, particularly if they were in error in
one area or untruthful here, then you had to discredit
everything else that they had said as well. My argument was as follows. That these testimonies
really come in sort of three, again, rough categories. One of those categories
is transparently mendacious testimony. Much of this testimony,
particular by the officers, Goldhagen and I can both look
at and we immediately dismiss it and say, this is
such obvious lies that no serious historian would
pay attention to any of this. Then there's another band
of testimonies that is so self-incriminating, so
horrific in what it admits that these people did, that
that nobody would make that up and self-incriminate themselves. Nobody is lying to make
themselves look that bad. And so highly self-incriminating
testimony we both agree you can use. But there is a broad middle
band of people who tell some of the truth some of the time but not all the truth
all the time. In particular, they will
tell a great deal of truth about what the unit did but
will not tell the whole truth about what they individually
did. Now, for a historian, because
he's not telling me what that person himself did
but telling me all sorts of valuable stuff about what the
unit did, I say you can't throw out the baby with the bath. A historian has to
use that material because it's extraordinary
and, I mean, this is a major part
of the testimony. To exclude that and to say, I won't use that because
I won't risk being duped by a Nazi is too purist. And that I insisted on using it
and taking the risk of using it, but of course using
it critically. Historians always have to look
at their evidence critically. There is no unproblematic
evidence out there. If we could only write history
on unproblematic evidence, we'd have damn little history. So of course you have to use
historical critical methods. Of course you have to look at it and compare what this person
says compared to the other, what sort of sense of
plausibility you get after reading through 210
different stories and so forth, to make how you make
your judgments about what you will
trust in a testimony. You're never going
to be infallible. But it's better than
throwing them all out in some kind
of fit of purity. So I incorporated that kind of
testimony, and the result was that I came up with a
very different description of what drove these
men than what he did. I would argue in fact that
if you have a hypothesis that the Germans killed because
they believed in the necessity and the justice of killing Jews
-- this is ideologically driven, they're doing this for
ideological reasons. And you take only the
testimony of the true believers who believe that
Jews should be shot and exclude everything else, you
can come to no other conclusion than to confirm the hypothesis
the evidence is meant to test. If you cannot disprove
your hypothesis, you've got a methodology that
is guaranteed but not guaranteed to persuade, it's guaranteed
to confirm your own prejudices or your own suspicions. And that's not valid
social science. You can't devise a methodology that can't disprove what
you're trying to test. Now, I think that's what
Goldhagen basically did. Now, in addition to what I think
is the highly flawed methodology on his part, there are some
propositions concerning our differing descriptions of what
the men did that can be tested by reference to other
evidentiary sources that have nothing to
do with the policemen. That is we can look at the same
phenomenon from a different -- certain cases from a
different body of evidence which cannot be impeached
by saying, these are mendacious policemen. And let me give you
two examples of two of the propositions
on which we differ. He basically -- I basically
said, the men are transformed by what they're doing. After the first killing --
which was terribly traumatic -- many of them very quickly
become eager killers, others become numb. And that the issue is, can
people be changed so quickly? Goldhagen said they came
to the killing fields with these attitudes, this
is what was imbued in them by German culture,
and nothing changes. And those that said
they felt bad after the first massacre
again are self-exculpatory. I argued they're
transformed by what they do. They're changed by
how they behave. Now, we do have the case
of a series of letters, not from Police Battalion
101 but Police Battalion 105, the city of Bramon [phonetic]. So it's exactly the
same type of people. A north German city of
reservists pulled out and very similar to 101. And we have a series
of letters that a man who was the photographer
for Third Company in this battalion -- which was
in Lithuania, Northern Front in 1941 -- writes back to his
wife basically every week. And so we can see, we can track
week by week how he changes in terms of how he writes
about what's going on. Right before they
enter Soviet Union -- first of all, this
battalion had been in Norway. Now, Norway, you want a cushy
assignment, it is, you know, sitting in Norway in 1940. They get taken out of Norway
in the spring of '41, sent up and then they're
sent into Lithuania. So this is going to
be a real change. But before they go in, the first
thing the commander does is to read to them the
so-called Secret Orders -- things the Germans had to pass on to the rank-and-file
soldiers orally because they didn't
want anything in writing that would be captured
by the Russians in which they explained some
of the policies they're going to carry out, including the
execution of captured Communists who were not going to
be treated as POWs, or collective retaliation
and these sorts of things. His response -- this
is on June 24, the day before they
cross the border, three days after the
war breaks out -- the major said that
every suspect is to be shot immediately. Well, I'm in suspense. The gentlemen fancy themselves
very important and marshall. He doesn't get it. He thinks that the officers
are putting on a kind of bravado show and that all of this new policies are
simply sort of high talk. And then of course they go
in, July 7 they are in a town where they're stationed
for a short period. And he writes and describes
things about the Jews there for the first time to his wife. The Jews are free game. Anybody can seize one on
the streets for himself. I would not like to
be in a Jew's skin. They have no food. How they actually
live, I don't know. We give our bread and more. I cannot be so tough. Oh, and then he goes on. One can only give the Jews
some well-intended advice, to bring no more children into
the world, they have no future. I mean, he can foresee
that if you're not going to feed a whole population
sometime down the line, this is not good. But this is before
the massacres begin. But the key thing here,
I cannot be so tough. And basically he's feeding his
two Jew servants that they have, he and his buddy picked up. One month later, August 7, now
the mass killings are underway, and he writes back,
one month later -- first of all, the first
part of this letter, he's telling his wife all the
food packages he's sending back. Because of course they're
looting everything they can get and sending back the spoils. So he's so sending back
various goods and he says, he helps [sic] it
all tastes very good. And after hoping they have a
good meal, he then writes this. Here all the Jews
are being shot. Everywhere such actions
are underway. Yesterday night, 150 Jews
from this place were shot. Men, women, children,
all killed. The Jews are being
totally exterminated. And then he goes on to say, say
nothing about it to their child. Don't read this part of the
letter to their daughter. So he's, you know
-- two things here. One, there's a little
bit of shame. Don't tell our daughter
about this. And secondly, it's in
the anonymous passive. It isn't we're killing Jews. It's not I'm shooting people. Here Jews are being shot. Now, this was the common
formulation after the war in virtually every
interrogation. Always the anonymous passive. Somebody else did
something, but it's never me. And here we see it
even at the time that it's actually happening. Here all the Jews
are being shot. As they move into
Lithuania thereafter, increasingly they're
meeting partisan activity. And he begins to talk about
the Russians with words like beasts, dogs, trash. Then -- he's the photographer. And he says they
captured some partisans, they had an execution. And he laments that he wasn't
there to take pictures because "it was said to have been fun." And then finally, he
does get an execution and he gets the pictures of it and then he writes
his wife this. Remember earlier he said
don't talk to the daughter? He tells her about
filming an execution and in the future my
film will be a document and of great interest
for our children. So people can get
drastically transformed. I mean, you can trace the
degeneration that goes on in these letters in a case where just the process you
can visibly watch week by week as you read these letters. There's one argument in fact
where a source totally different than post-war testimony. This is current letter writing. Shows in fact dramatically
how much people can be changed by what they're seeing
and what they're doing. A second proposition
that we differed on was, do these groups actually
break into three groups. He said they're all -- 95% of
these people are eager killers. And my notion that there was
a significant group of people that were evaders, he
just dismissed as fantasy. Said, if you'd had that many, the battalion could
not have functioned. He didn't provide
evidence for that, he just announced
it as self-evident. Now, we do have a
case where we can look at the internal dynamics
of how a group of policemen breaks down. And this comes from a
very unusual source. And this is Oswald Rufeisen. Oswald Rufeisen was a
Jew born in Silesia. Now, Silesia is that
border territory of Polish German
mixed population. Jews there did not
speak basically Yiddish as their home language
like Poles further -- like Jews further east. And he was raised Krakow. He spoke fluent Polish,
fluent German with no accent. Further east, a Yiddish speaking
Jew opens his mouth trying to speak Polish, and
everybody knows immediately that he's Jewish. Oswald Rufeisen was fluent
in Polish, fluent in German. When the Germans invade
in 1939, he flees Silesia and gets to Lithuania. Now, the Germans come
to Lithuania in 1941. So he flees Lithuania
and goes south into what is present-day
Belarus. He's now a 17-year-old boy. He's walking across central
Belarus, and he's intercepted by the Belarusian police
captain from the town of Mir. Now, Mir was famous for
having Hasidic school studies and so forth. But this was also the site where
a man named Semion Serafinowicz, the Belarusian captain,
intercepts Rufeisen and asks for his papers. And Rufeisen says, my
papers were stolen -- which was quite plausible,
these things happened. And then he explained
who he was. He said, I'm a half
German, half Pole. I had a German father,
Polish mother from Silesia, and I fled to Belarus. And the fact that he speaks
Polish and German fluently without accent made all
this perfectly plausible. And the police captain,
Serafinowicz, says, oh, that's useful. The Germans are coming to
set up a police station in town in a few weeks. You'll come and be
my translator. So the Jew passing as a half
Pole, half German is brought into the household of Semion
Serafinowicz and lives in the house of the
Belarusian police captain. Two or three weeks
later, the Germans arrive. They are a contingent of 14 reserve policemen
from North Germany. Almost identical in
their composition to Police Battalion 101. Under a man named Sergeant Hein. Sergeant Hein of course
meets with Serafinowicz. Rufeisen is the translator. And Sergeant Hein immediately
takes a liking to the young boy and says, you'll come
and be my translator. So Oswald Rufeisen
lives in the house of the Belarusian
police captain at night and by day takes his meals
and sits at the right hand of Sergeant Hein,
conducting all of his business with the native populations for which Sergeant Hein
needs a Polish translator. And so he from the inside for
eight months lives basically day by day in the German police
station and sees all that goes on and is in a position
then to tell us about the dynamics
of that group. And of course as a
Jew, has no reason to be exculpatory
about Nazi policemen. He has no reason to hide. Whatever one might say about
the testimony of the policemen, Rufeisen is not covering
for them. I would say Rufeisen --
I'll just finish the story, part of the story first. Of course no one knows
he's a passing Jew. And so in the summer of '42
when he tries to warn the ghetto that the ghetto is about to be
liquidated and they should run and flee to the forest, some of
them think he's tricking them and trying to provoke them. And then report him
to Sergeant Hein. And Sergeant Hein calls Rufeisen
in and says, after I've been so nice to you -- it's almost like a europa [phonetic]
relationship. Sergeant Hein is very
found of Rufeisen. Calls him in and said,
how could you betray me when I've been so kind to you? First he said, did you do it? And he said, yes. And then he said, well,
how can you betray me? And Rufeisen says,
you must understand, I didn't betray you, I'm a Jew. And Sergeant Hein says,
oh, well, that's a problem. I'm going to have
to think about that. So he leaves him in the office
with the back window open, walks out the front door,
and lets Rufeisen bolt out the window and escape. Rufeisen survives the war,
and he was the eyewitness and I was the historical expert
witness at Serafinowicz's trial in London -- or magistrate's
hearing in London in the early 1990s. So this is how I got much
of my story from Rufeisen. And Nechama Tec has also
written a book about him, called "In the Lion's Den." So Rufeisen, we know
a great deal about. In any case, what did --
Rufeisen survives the war. What did Rufeisen say
about the German police? Basically he said they
broke into three groups. One were four policemen who
were the eager killers led by Corporal Scholz [phonetic],
who he said was a best in the form of a man, who kept
a notebook in his back pocket where he kept his body count. And had personally
killed 80 adults. He didn't even bother to
keep track of children. He'd killed 80 adults by
the time Rufeisen fled. And they volunteered for
all sorts of actions, killed as many people
as they could. There was another group that would not take
part in Jewish killings. As he says, this is the
nonparticipants, another four. So there's as many eager
killers as they are evaders. He says, no one seemed
to bother them. No one talked about
their absences. It was as if they had
a right to abstain. So if you said, I'm
not going to do this, nobody was going to
court martial you. They just said, okay, we have
enough to do it, stay home. And then there were
a middle group that Rufeisen calls the
passive executors of orders. And here he writes,
"It was clear that there were differences
in their outlooks. I think that the whole business of Jewish extermination
they considered unclean. Their operations against
the partisans were not in the same category. For them a confrontation with partisans was a
battle, a military move. But a move against the Jews
was something they might have considered as dirty." So he came up with the
same breakdown that I had. Mine was based on reading
the 210 testimonies and using the critical
methods of historians to sort all of this out. He came to it by his own
personal observations, having been there on the spot. So in terms of where
we can check this, I think I can confirm that my
interpretation can be backed up by other kinds
of evidence for some of the major conclusions
that I came to. There are several other angles
we can take on this as well. One is kind of the
comparative one. Now, one reason the study of the Holocaust has
been very useful is that it's so well documented. We know much more
about the Holocaust than virtually any
other genocide. And in fact if one tries to find
out and do studies of, you know, the genocide of the
Armenians, you can't even get into the Turkish court records. They don't accept
that it happened. If you're trying to go back
and deal with, you know, Southwest Africa in 1904 and
Herero, you know, good luck. So for historians, the
difficulty has been finding out enough about other genocides
to do a kind of comparison. The one area where
we can do that and where it's become
possible to do that is Rwanda. And I was very fortunate
when I spent a year at the Holocaust
Museum in 2002, 2003, that there was a
psychiatrist from Rwanda -- a man named [foreign]. You won't be tested
on that name after. Who was at the museum because
he had become very involved in the whole issue
of the psychiatry and psychology of killers. And his background
was very interesting, that he had one parent
was a Hutu, one parent who was a Tutsi. He had one sister
who was in jail as a Hutu Genesee [phonetic]
there and one sister, a Tutsi, who'd been murdered. So his family was just
absolutely, you know, split. He had no reason to be
favoring one side or another. After the genocide, he
goes into the refugee camps on the Uganda border to try to
use his medical training to deal with the trauma of
the survivors. So he's trying to come to their
aid, trying to help them heal. And then he realizes, in this
town there was also a prison where many of the Genesee
[phonetic] there are held. And it occurred to him that
this was a unique historical opportunity for him
in fact go in and to use his psychiatric
training to deal with a collection of genocidal
killers who were awaiting trial. So he asked for permission to go
into the prison and he got it, and then he gave out two
what he called surveys or questionnaires. The first was basically
an opportunity for people to self-report on how deeply
implicated they'd been in the killing. Now, it may well
be that some people who were deeply implicated
didn't answer truthfully on that. It's hard to believe anybody who wasn't implicated did
answer that they were. So he didn't have a complete
set of deeply-involved killers, but he had I think an
uncontaminated pure set of people who had all
confessed, self-reported as being deeply involved
in the killing squads. To that group, he then gave
a second questionnaire. And the questionnaire
was one that he put on every question he could
think of that would be key to some kind of motive,
to try to allow him to find correlations
between the questions and the motives they involved and how these have
been answered. And when he got the
questionnaire back, he said it was unlike any
other questionnaire he'd ever circulated as a professional. And that almost all the
questions was a flat line, no significant correlation. And in two clusters
of questions, it just simply spiked
off the charts. So he had a flat line
and two big spikes. Now, the first cluster
of questions that spiked off the
chart is correlation between self-confessed
killers and motive, had to do with how
they framed or talked about the people
they had killed. And that is they weren't people. That they had dehumanized
their victims. They talked about Tutsies, that they were cockroaches,
they were vermin. They'd been engaged in
a purification process. They had not been murdering
fellow human beings. So the dehumanization capacity,
the ideological framing of what they were doing,
to be something other than killing fellow human
beings, had been key to allowing them to do this. So basically a dehumanization
of the victim was one area where he found very
high correlation. The second was questions that
related to the importance of the esteem of their comrades. Were they held in high
regard by their comrades? Had they been tough? Had they carried their weight? Had they done their share? Had they gone beyond and above
what is expected of them? To be valued by and
esteemed by your comrades, to have done what you should
and more was very crucial. So part of what was in this was
how they dehumanized the victim, the ideological side, part of
it is the need for affirmation from their comrades to
be valued, esteemed, praised by them, and that
comes from the group dynamic that I've been talking about. So here was a case
that had nothing to do with the Holocaust, but I think in which we can see there are
some remarkable similarities with the Nazi killers,
the genocide of the Jews under the Nazis. One other development
I'll just touch on briefly because I know we're running
late here, would be the attempt to cast this and particularly
the ideological side in somewhat wider framework. So much of the ideological
question has focused on anti-Semitism. How anti-Semitic
were the killers? And more recent research
has said, what other factors in terms of if we go back to
Newman, shaping the situation, would explain why people
not only killed Jews but why they would kill
Roma and Centi [phonetic] and Russian prisoners of war
and massacre local villages. These people were often
equal opportunity killers, they're killing everybody,
not just Jews. Jews are the biggest numbers because that's the
policy of the government. But their capacity to kill and
kill, we can find repeatedly. And so the argument particularly
of a man like Thomas Kuhne at Clark University is to say, what other things explain
this moral revolution, this change in moral norms,
that allowed people to do this without thinking of
themselves as criminals? To detach normal moral
concepts that they would have for their relations with others, but not to be applicable
in these cases. And he says, in German
culture -- and so here we're getting to the particularities
of German culture. He thought two concepts in
particular had more resonance in German culture that led to a more intense
group identification that would expel -- to use
Helen Thie's [phonetic] term -- expel others from the
community of human obligation. And you're measured by how
well you do for your group, not how well you do for
humanity, how well you are loyal and operate by a group dynamic,
not by individual conscience. And these two were
comradeship and the German term, the [foreign], which
can be translated as the people's community
or the racial community. It's a word that
has no exact synonym or equivalent in English. But the comradeship
was something that came out of World War I. If you've ever read, you know,
[inaudible] Western Front, and his stories of
the trench war. In the end he says,
the only good thing about the war was
the comradeship. This is the one redeeming
factor. Now, in the '20s,
Kuhne points out, comradeship in a
sense was fought over. Whose concept of
comradeship was going to win? There was the view that
[inaudible] expressed, all the trench soldiers have
comradeship in the trenches against their evil governments
and evil officers who send them to be sacrificed like
sheep to the slaughter. The other comradeship is
a racial comradeship among Germans, and everybody
else is outside the circle of German comrades. The Nazi's appropriate
comradeship to of course the racial
part and they win. And all the resonance the
notion of comradeship had -- comradeship had, basically is
harnessed to creating people who feel they have
obligations and loyalties only to their group and that no moral
limits apply to what they do to people outside that group. A second is this term [foreign]. Germany had been a very divided, tense society before
World War I. When the war breaks out, the
kaiser gives his famous speech. He knows no parties, he knows no
religions, he knows no classes. He knows only Germans. And there was this kind of
euphoric sense of unity. And after a long period of
division, internal tension, Germany is kind of
high on this sense of unity, of this community. After the war, again, the Nazis
and others fight over who gets to use the term [foreign] and
what meaning will it have? In 1914, it had an
inclusive meaning. Everybody is in -- Protestant,
Jew, Catholic, Social Democrat, Conservative, worker,
middle class. It was a conclusive notion. What the Nazis do is capture,
appropriate that term, and turn it into
an exclusive term. You define the [foreign]
by who is not in it. Roma and Centi are not in it. Jews are not in it. Mentally and physically
handicapped are not in it. Asocials are not in it. And so it's good
Germans that are in it. Again, you create a community
that has this morality that extends only to itself and
does not apply to those beyond. When you do things to
those people beyond, it's not like you were doing
it to people that mattered. And so killing people outside
that community, particularly if you're killing them
for the sake of the Reich, is not only not a crime but
it is a necessary action. And often even described
in terms of self-defense. So he was trying to make us
think wider and think more about wider aspects of German
culture than the continual focus on anti-Semitism, to
understand the inverted morality of Nazi Germany that allowed it
to become such a killer regime, not only of Jews but
of many others as well. In any case, that's where things
have gone in the now 27 years since "Ordinary Men"
was published. Anytime, you know, you
can publish a book, you're glad it gets published. If you publish a book that
remains part of the conversation for that long, it is
especially gratifying. So I'm very glad I could
share that with you today. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] Yes? >> You mentioned Goldhagen. One thing that. You mentioned the Goldhagen
book and I wanted to ask -- mention that Goldhagen
did not address -- one area that he
did not address -- and I wondered what your
opinion of it was -- was the extensive effect
that the propaganda had on the German society, especially in the period just
before assumption of power and up through the war years. The continuous portrayal
of Jews as vermin, as [foreign], and so forth. I was wondering what effect that
had outside of the poisoning of the -- the anti-Semitism
over centuries, outside of that. >> The difference would be, he basically thinks the Nazi
regime was not transformative, it simply unshackled and
unleashed the Germans to do what they always
wanted to do. Therefore, the propaganda
simply reflected what they already believed. My view is the regime
was very transformative. That you create the Nazi
bubble where it's very hard to to have -- particularly
for the younger people -- you have no outside reference
by which to judge this. And so the younger -- and we know of course the
Nazi's very strong particularly in the younger generation, because they have
no other signpost, they have no other
yardstick by which to measure what's going on. And the phrase of one of men
in Police Battalion 101 was -- you know, he didn't think
of himself as anti-Semitic, because he wasn't an activist
and go out and, you know, buy their sterner or
hound Jews in the streets. But he did say, it was
the air we breathed. I mean, how did you escape it? It was everywhere. You grew up in a society in which the assumptions were
Jewish evil, Jewish inequality. And for him it was the air we
breathed, was his expression. And so I think clearly
that has an effect. To say for Goldhagen,
it didn't persuade because somebody told them
they already believed. I think that saturation
over time of course narrows your
capacity to have other ideas, to see things from
another point of view. In contrast to that, for
instance, the lieutenant who is one of the people who
evades -- and he was a merchant, did overseas trade
from Homburg -- he said, I had friends in other
cities outside of Germany, I had another perspective. >> Thank you. >> Sorry. Which student
was raising their hand? >> Jew -- or half Pole,
half German, excuse me. >> The question was, what
was the book about, Rufeisen? It's Nechama Tec, T-E-C, and
it's called "In the Lion's Den." And it's really the story -- she
interviewed Rufeisen at length. He becomes interesting because
when he hides in a convent -- it becomes interesting
for other reasons as well. He actually becomes a Catholic
convert and then is the man who tries to exercise the
right of return to the state of Israel as a Catholic priest. And he ends up in Haifa
where he ministers to a Catholic community. But he viewed himself as
both a Jew and a Catholic. >> Thank you. >> You had talked a
lot about the process in which these ordinary
men became killers. Like I was just wondering if
you had looked into the process of them after the war, if they,
you know, lose the structure and it almost like deteriorates. Or do they feel guilty after? >> Yeah. Often I'm asked --
just amplifying the question -- do these men experience post
traumatic stress syndrome, for instance. And the answer would
be, not that I can tell. One, of course they come
back from the war as -- men who come back from war,
there's a high divorce rate, because the men have been
changed in many ways. And some of the wives who
were interviewed said, now I understand why my man,
my husband, was so different when she's hearing
about the trial. For the men themselves, it
would appear that they managed to repress this and
bury it very deep. Of course all the society
around them was repressing it and burying it very deep. The Germans were framing things in the post-war period,
they were the victim. The victim of Red Army rapes. The victim of the bombing. The victim of expulsions, the
Germans from Eastern Europe. The victims of Hitler. They're victims of
the occupation. We poor Germans,
we're just getting -- everybody's dumping
on us everywhere. So they had their own
victimization syndrome that allowed them not to deal
with the underlying issue of what they had done and why. And everybody kind of
agreed on this amnesia. So no one -- you know,
in the Vietnam War, of course we had the opposite. Poor people coming from
Vietnam getting shouted at, how many babies did you kill? And it was thrown in their face. It was very different
in Germany. Everybody was agreeing
to go along with, let's not talk about it. What happened when the
interrogations began and these people are called
into the police office, a number of the men remarked --
not a large number but enough that I think it was
very significant. Said, now that you are
forcing me to call all this up and to remember it
and talk about it, now I am having nightmares. For 20 years they
didn't have nightmares. But if they're forced to talk
about it and to bring it back up to the conscious level,
now I'm having nightmares. One of the men committed
suicide before -- he jumped out of his
window before he could go in for a second interrogation. The police car had
come to get him and he just leaped to his death. So I think the interrogations
were more traumatic because it broke the repression. And rather than post
traumatic stress, what you had was a very
effective repression that was very broad
up until that point. What I did not get in
any of or virtually none of the interrogations
was any sense of guilt. What was the overwhelming
ethos was self-pity. In 1942, I had the bad luck
to get sent to Poland to be in a killing unit, and
now 20 years later, they've changed the rules
and I had the bad luck to be considered a war criminal. Poor me. Nothing
about the victims, but poor me was the
predominant ethos in this. >> I was just wondering if
you would see the same kind of three categories
of the men in like in the actual German army, or
if it was just kind of more in the reserved units? >> I don't know for sure, but
certainly the suggestions are that that is likely as well. I had a grad student who did a
-- who was a West Point graduate that served in the
Army for five years, then come to graduate
school in North Carolina. And he did his dissertation on
the German army's participation in killings in Belarus. Which is one of the areas where the most intense
killing took place. He came across one case where
there a company gets the order to join a killing action
and there's three platoons in the company, and the
three lieutenants act in different ways. One's very eager and says yes. One says, my men won't do that. And one says, do I
really have to do it? Him-haw and then finally, okay, if that's an order,
we'll comply. So you had three
different companies with three different
leaders each -- one in each of those
three categories. So in that sense I think that
that probably is the spectrum that you would find in
the Wehrmacht as well. >> In the last two years, I
read in the New York Times and The Guardian quite a few
interviews with ISIS fighters and their families,
especially in the UK. For example, a family
that their son joined ISIS and the relationship -- and
there were testimonies of those who -- a few Americans were
able to drop ISIS and come back. So a lot of what you
described really resonated with those interviews. Maybe the edited facts were
that in ISIS there is a culture where before they go into
major killings, there is a lot of using hallucinating drugs. That the men and the women are
really numb when they do it. The other fact of course that they're young people
and not older people. The other fact that
strikes me was that in ISIS, if you don't participate, you
are being shot on the spot, or there was the feel. But overall, it did resonate
a lot of the three groups, the extreme groups that
really volunteered. And the families are very,
very traumatized with that. So I just wanted to add that. >> Thank you for the comment. I would say that perhaps
ISIS is more comparable to say the NAZI SA,
which are made up of self-radicalized,
self-selected people. But even there, I think
you would have a spectrum of degrees of involvement. But that's much more
voluntaristic. These are Middle
East conscripts. So in that sense,
there's some similarities but also some differences
we should keep in mind. >> Were there any evaders
who used a moral reason for not agreeing to kill? >> One person cited, well,
he was an old socialist. So it was kind of a
political, you know, grounding that he
was an anti-Nazi. Sadly, no one cites Christianity
or religion as having -- it just isn't referenced. There's total absence of, you
know, were you a church-goer, how Christian do you
think of yourselves. I mean, unfortunately,
for the historian, traditional interrogators don't
ask all the questions we wish they would ask. Because their job is to find
evidence in the courtroom, not to answer puzzles about
motivation, particularly about people who are not
going to be among those who are being charged. So there is almost none of that. There's a couple of hints at it. As I say, one guy, who
said, well, you know, I had a different
perspective because I did work around outside of the country. One said, I'm an old socialist. And that's about it. >> Very briefly,
very quick question. Kind of a generic question. Do you think genocide, the
prerequisite for genocide, is dictatorship, or do you think
it could arise in a democracy? >> In so far as a democracy is
based upon notions of equality and human rights, if it is a
living democratic culture, no. If it is a populist manipulated
democracy which is there to give the appearance of
legitimacy of popular support, while not in fact honoring
the ethical groundings of democracy -- which
is human equality -- then, yes, those regimes could. [ Applause ] >> So I know that as
far as with Naziism, there was a real big turn to
females being back in the home, their role was at the
home and not exactly like in the bureaucracy
of the state. But do you know if like any
areas where women, females, were more involved
in Nazi Germany? And do you think that if
there had been more female involvement, do you think it
would've been the same outcome or perhaps slightly different? >> Okay. I very explicitly -- well, I named my book
Ordinary Men rather than Ordinary People
for two reasons. One there was a movie
"Ordinary People." And the second is, these men
-- these people were men. And they themselves had
a gendered conception of what they were doing,
that to be tough enough -- well, in a sense to be so weak
that you couldn't buck others, that you caved to conformity
and you deferred to authority, that made you tough
enough to kill, and that was considered manly. If you in fact were strong
enough not to go along but you disguised that
by saying, I'm too weak, that was considered
weak and feminine. One person's testimony was
basically the following. They soon learned
not to ask me to go on the firing squad Juhanz
[phonetic], that was for men, and they considered me no man. So they themselves had a code
that tough killers were men and abstainers were
weak women-like. Now, in terms of were
women actually involved -- Wendy Lower had written a
book called "Hitler's Furies." And she looks at the deep degree
to which women were involved in the Nazi occupation
in the East. We know they certainly
were involved as nurses of the euthanasia program. And so that we know
clear that they -- particularly the so-called --
or the decentralized euthanasia. Up until '41, they
were being sent off to the six killing centers
and killed in gas chambers. After that, particularly
child euthanasia, is carried out in the child's
wings of certain hospitals where the nurses either overdose
them or starve them to death. And this is done by the nurses. We do know that in the East
of course many nurses are sent to be in the hospitals there. And particularly in the
so-called Germanization program, where they were bringing
in ethnic Germans from what had been
the Soviet territories after the Soviet Russian --
after the Hitler-Stalin pact. And they're being resettled. Many of the welfare workers who
are settling them are engaged in the ethnic cleansing of
Poles and the resettling of ethnic Germans are women. Many of the secretaries at
the police stations are women, and they see everything. And they're usually
sleeping with the commander. And so you get degrees
of involvement even if they're not pulling
the trigger. They are in fact very large
numbers of German women in the East participating
in their roles and often that role is certainly
supportive of tangental to the killing even if
they're not actually pulling the trigger. So I don't think we can
come to the conclusion that only men can do this. That in so far as German society
allowed a marginal participation of women, they never had trouble
finding women to do that. >> You mentioned the
three types of people are like the eager killers, like -- my question is, is that
universal in the findings of other genocides, or is it
primarily to the battalion? >> I certainly don't know that
we could call it universal because we don't have anything
like the depth of study of other killing units. It's what I found in this unit. It's what Oswald
Rufeisen observed in the police station at Mir. It's what Zimbardo found
in his prison experiment. Three pieces of evidence
don't make a universal rule. But it suggests that that
is a possibility that -- well, I think we can
almost say intuitively in almost any situation, there will be a spectrum
of human response. You're not going to have
everybody doing the same thing or reacting in the same way. So they will stretch
out over a spectrum in this kind of situation. I think it's highly
likely we will find that, but I certainly can't say we
can say that's a universal rule. >> How rare were salvatories
[phonetic] like Rufeisen, either overtly or through
feigned incompetence? Like I didn't know he was
a Jew, or I didn't think that area was important
to cordon off, so some people escaped. >> We do have enough
stories from survivors that they survived --
let's put it this way. Almost every survivor has
a story where a German who could've killed them didn't. And that they wouldn't have
survived if it hadn't been that somebody who
was in position to have killed them did not. So we certainly know
that there were cases where people abstained
from killing that they could have done. Even people that were killers
that killed other people, but for some reason they liked
this person or had some sort of a relationship
or just didn't feel like that day, we don't know. We also know of course there
were some very small number of very active resistors,
people who were hiding Jews, giving them forged documents
and this kind of thing. That's a very, very
small number. We know there's a handful -- in the case of the people who
say are the evaders, you know, as long as they took that
position that I'm just too weak and they don't oppose the
policy, nothing happens to them. The line they cannot cross
is to switch from saying, I can't do it, to persuading
others you should do it. And that's where -- No SS wanted
somebody in a court-martial because they refused to
shoot an unarmed civilian. But to court-martial for
the sabotage of morale, for undermining company unity,
they're perfectly fine with. So you cross that line and try
to persuade your comrades not to kill, then that's
when they come down and you will be court-martialed
and you will be put in jail. And we do know at least of a
handful of cases like that. So there's very small
numbers, but there are cases. >> So you mentioned
that most of the people from the Police Battalion
101 were from Hamburg, which is like a predominantly
Protestant area. And I was told by like in school that Marty Lotter
[phonetic] had some of his like later works basically
said that you pick up the sword for the state and you do
not fight against the state. Like you basic -- and he also
had some quite anti-Semitistic things to say. Do you think because of that,
because of the expectations within the Protestant church to basically do everything
the state says they did it? Like it was like a ground level of just conforming
to their superiors? And do you know if there
is like a difference between like the southern
states and the northern states of how they acted
within the war? >> Let me start the
answer with a story. I started my teaching career
at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington
in the fall of '74. I went back to defend my
dissertation in January of '75. And on my committee was the
very noted historian George Massa [phonetic]. Which ended up being a very good
friend of mine, fortunately. But he knew I was coming back
from a Lutheran university, so he was going to
have fun with me. So he basically said,
well, isn't it true that this is a Lutheran thing? That we explain this
by Martin Luther and this is what Lutherans do. So my answer to him I
will also give to you now. And that is in fact, we can
find equal number of cases in which Catholics
from South Germany and Catholics particularly
from Austria were deeply, deeply involved in the killing. There is no shortage of
participation of Catholics that would distinguish
them from Lutherans. So my answer to there is,
in terms of those two, that that does not help us. What we do know in effect
is that of all the theology and teachings of
the Catholic church that Luther did not reject,
did not reform, unfortunately, was the anti-Semitism he took
from the Catholic church. Calvin did not. I mean, we have branches of
Protestantism that did not carry over the medieval anti-Semitism
of the Catholic church. And so you have areas where Protestantism has not
been terribly infected by that. Lutheranism is not one
of those, unfortunately. And so Catholic and Lutheran on that issue come
out pretty identical. >> Thank you, Dr. Browning. [ Applause ]
