Ordinary Men as Holocaust Perpetrators: A Reappraisal After Twenty-five Years

thank you everyone for coming out on rainy day I am Ricky law of the CMU history department before introducing dr. browning I'd like to thank the Department of History and chair Donna harsh for sponsoring the event special thanks go to Jesse Wilson for serving as videographer dr. Christopher browning is one of the world's foremost experts on the Holocaust Nazi Germany and genocide he is the Frank Porter Graham professor of history emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before that he was distinguished professor at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma Washington dr. browning is the author of eight books among them the Final Solution in the German Foreign Office ordinary men police battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland the origins of the Final Solution the evolution of Nazi Jewish policy September 1939 to March 1942 and remembering survival inside a Nazi slave labor camp he is a three-time recipient of the Jewish National Book Award Holocaust category for ordinary men the origins of the final solution and remembering survival remembering survival also one day Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research dr. browning has received numerous fellowships including from the Fulbright Program Alexander von Humboldt Foundation German academic exchange service and Woodrow Wilson foundation he has been senior scholar at the u.s. Holocaust Memorial Museum and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton New Jersey and Hebrew University of Jerusalem he has delivered numerous lectures including a Cambridge University Oxford University and many others he has also served as an expert witness in war crimes trials in Australia Canada and Great Britain and in Holocaust denial cases in Toronto and London and London in 2006 he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences please join me in welcoming dr. browning thank you very much Ricky and thank you all for coming out on a late afternoon but I want to talk about today was a sense giving you a prehistory and post history of one of the books that I wrote ordinary men what were the events that led up to it and the circumstances of its taking shape as a book and then it was first published in 1992 and just recently a 25th anniversary edition was issued and talk about what happened between his first publication and the state of what we call perpetrator history looking into the history of the Holocaust perpetrators in those last 25 years in terms of how I came to the topic I had long been interested in examining various case studies of perpetrators trying to get away from the focus on Nazi ideology at the top and the focus on the the prominent Nazi leaders to look at those middle and lower level participants without which of course the mass murder could not have been carried out and to explore who they were how did they become involved and what kinds of choice did they have at what points did they exercise choice and why did they make the choices that they made and so I had written a number of case studies one Ricci alluded to study of the Jewish desk of the German Foreign Office a collection of some five or six middle level German functionaries who were involved in coordinating with Eichmann and the SS to get foreign countries to turn their Jews over to Germany for deportation but first to introduce the parrot ory anti-jewish measures that would make that possible studies into ghetto managers in Poland public health doctors and occupation generals or all of the military and these were all in a sense in that in that middle level but what was lacking I think in our our study above all was a look at what we might call the grassroots killers the people at the very bottom who did the face-to-face killing because much of what we had from Nazi Germany were the written files of the bureaucrats and the people at the very bottom who were carrying rifles on doing the shooting weren't filling out forms and leaving fat files to be captured by the Allies at the end of the war nor did they leave much in the way of diaries and letters or if they did the families kept them hidden or burned them or whatever but they were in a sense vital participants that left very little in the way of a written record behind them and so we didn't know much about what we might call of the for the face-to-face shooters or the grassroots killers and it was my good fortune when I was studying in Germany at the Center for the exits the it's a it's a coordinating agency for the investigation of Nazi crimes in a little town called Ludwigsburg outside of strict guard and it is they keep all the indictments and judgments of cases that they helped start that eventually come to trial and in the late 80s I was reading through various of these just to see what they had and came across the indictment of reserve Police Battalion 101 this was to me a bit of a surprise in a number of ways first nobody talked much about police battalions much less reserve police battalions we talked about the SS and so forth but the people who were outside the SS but were occupying police forces were still a relatively unknown a factor and we didn't know you know who was in these and what role they had played the indictment I read was tremendously important for several reasons one it showed this is a battalion that had been a major killing unit 500 men in this battalion ultimately had a body count of over 83,000 Jews these are participating in shooting actions or clearing ghettos and putting up people on the trains to the nearby death camp of Treblinka and that therefore was a key man power source for the final solution in Poland more importantly on the eve of its first execution when they were I have debarked from their trucks outside the Polish village of yours F hoof in mid July of 1942 to carry out a massacre of the Jews in that village their first action having just been sent from Germany the commander gave them a speech set out a series of justifications to try to make sense about what was going to happen and then ended his speech telling the men those of you who don't feel up to it do not have to take part and those who didn't want to shoot could in fact withdraw from the action this was an open explicit overt invitation not to become a killer that day very few people took up the offer but it was a case now where we could document how clearly shooters at the lower level indeed had a choice and in this case a quite open and overt choice and the more I looked into who the people in this battalion were it was clear that excuse me that they were the least likely they unlikely people in Nazi Germany to become killers on the behalf of Hitler they were middle-aged conscripts from the city of Hamburg mostly of working-class background and that was important one because being of middle age average age was thirty-nine and a half or forty years old they were too young to have participated in World War one so they hadn't engaged in the brutalization of trench warfare they were too old to have been in the Nazi socialization process of nazi schools Nazi curriculum Nazi youth groups they were already out in the adult world by the time Hitler came to power their formative period was the vimar democracy and therefore they knew a world of different standards and then we're not raised in the Nazi bubble that they're succeeding generations would be coming mostly from the working class that came from a class that was the least supportive of Hitler Hitler and the Nazis drew votes from all social groups but statistically they drew less support portion Li from the working class than others and Hamburg was not only a stronghold of the working class it was a stronghold of the socialist and communist parties which were the two parties that most withstood the encroachment or attrition to the Nazis in the part of their membership in Hamburg itself was known by the Nazis this red Hamburg the city where they had difficulty where they did not grow very effectively until they came to power so in terms of geographic origin age group and social background if you were looking to stack the deck if you were trying to find a group least likely in Germany to become Hitler killers not just a random selection but in fact stacked the deck so these would be the least likely people it would have been middle-aged working-class people from Hamburg and so we had in a sense in getting an example not just of a random selection of conscripts but of people who would have been at least predictably turned into killers for the Nazi regime and it turned out that also very fortunately for us this is one of the very few killing units at that time the only killing unit for which we found a roster once the investigation began investigators went to Hamburg and despite the fire bombing of Hamburg which destroyed the city one of the pieces of paper that was not incinerated was the roster battalion of battalion roster and therefore because it was a reserve unit much like a National Guard unit almost all those people came from home work and the environs and people who had survived the war we're still living in Hamburg in the 1960s and of the 500 police in the battalion 210 of them could be interviewed in the 60s in preparation for a trial those renovate inter interrogations comprised about 30 volumes of court documents and that was the source now that I had to work with it would not be contemporary written documents like so much of our history of Nazi Germany but post-war testimonies extracted by judicial investigation and judicial interrogation as I went through those it was clear as I said several things one that this was a a a skewed section of German society that they were given a very explicit choice not to take part to very key elements third when they first were thrown into action it is I think to me very persuasive in the testimony that their initial action was trauma that they this made no sense to them they didn't understand they weren't prepared for this they were drafted and given very little indoctrination in training and certainly no warning of what they were going to do when they got to Poland and the first reaction of the men is that they were distraught upset bewildered and as one of the men said if I had to do that again I think I would go crazy in fact they would do it again and again and they didn't go crazy but that shows of the adaptive power that the men had over time as the massacres and deportation actions repeated themselves the memory of being distraught and traumatized as on the first day disappears and become such a blur of routine as they go from village to village doing the same thing time and again all of these actions kind of sort of somebody meld into one another in their memories the only way to recreate the itinerary of the battalion is in fact from the testimonies of survivors survivors who hid and were not executed but they knew the exact day that the Nazis came and murdered their families and so they could recreate what the path what the itinerant itinerary of this roving murder squad was and also I felt was apparent in the testimony that over time as the experience became one of routine instead of horror the battalion roughly broke into three groups one group were evaders people that took up the majors offer and in fact the group of evaders grew over time that many people who may have thought the first day then took up the majors offer there after and did not participate again and I estimate that close to 20% of the battalion probably were in the group of non shooters that they evaded that particular duty there was a middle group that didn't volunteer didn't seek out the opportunity to kill but never wanted to engage in conflict with their officers or be seen as weak and therefore killed when asked but didn't take their own initiative and then there was a minority of people that I would call the eager killers people that over time learn to enjoy killing other human beings that in fact would volunteer for the hunts for Jews that were hidden that would volunteer for the firing squads would come home from a killing action have a hefty lunch and joke with one another about what they had done so that the groups I say sort of broke into these three these three basic groups while this was in some ways quite the opposite of a bureaucratic process of rau hilberg in his monumental study of the so called machinery of destruction of the Holocaust emphasize division of labor and if you divide a task into a number of different segmented parts no one reveals responsibility for the overall result just for their one little part I only you know collected the keys from the apartments of the Jews who are being deported or I only drove the train or only did this or that but all the actual you know total program of killing was was something that they felt no identity or width or responsibility for and I thought in a situation like this we had a roving killing squad that went from town to town and murdered Jews that division of labor would not be important but I was wrong in fact the way in which the men talked the evaders who didn't actually pull the trigger but nonetheless took part in the Corden's took part and the clearing actions drove Jews and columns down the streets to the trains that would send them to Treblinka felt a great deal of detachment from the killing process that it doesn't take much to separate yourself from the actual killing as long as they weren't pulling the trigger and someone else was that they felt there was an immense gulf between what they were doing and the people who were doing the actual shooting and in some cases they would even bring in professional shooters from the outside they would bring in travnik II guards these are people from Eastern Europe Ukrainians mostly they were trained at the camp of Krav Nicky in southern Poland and some of them were sent to be guards at the death camps and some were sent to be specialists that would help out units like reserve Police Battalion 101 and do a much of the actual shooting so it turned out that even the most primitive division of labor has a very profound psychological impact and I also felt one for the last conclusion I came in and working on this was that for those who did not shoot and we're trying to explain why they did not the way to to justify that was not to say that the killing was morally wrong or was a tremendous outrage or the regime was a murderous regime it was almost always to say that they were too weak and they couldn't do this and that they therefore excused themselves from the killing actions while at the same time validating a hierarchy in which being tough enough to kill unarmed women and children was to be Maskin and powerful and macho and hyannis team and to be too weak to shoot children was to be weak and wimpy and not doing your share and you would take on yourself the onus of being weak in order to not reproach your comrades to not be seen as criticizing the regime but creating a little space whereby you would not take part in the actual killing at the cost as I say of accepting the stigma of being weak and this was gender coded that is the one expression I remember one policeman said you know they never asked me to go on on the Jew hunts they they knew my feelings and they they wanted only men and they considered me no man so manliness macho nests and the ability to kill unarmed people was considered sort of male and powerful and to not be able to do that was weak and feminine so those in a sense was roughly the the conclusions I drew when I put this narrative together and then the question was sort of how does one frame it what what approach does one take in telling that story and we didn't have much to work with of a Berrien notions of bureaucracy may have worked very well for for hilberg and the machinery of destruction it didn't work for a roving unit of face-to-face killers the Polish sociologist Bauman who talked about modernity and the Holocaust and saw the Holocaust as a product of a very modern society well this was not a very this is very primitive way of doing things it was hardly an exemplar of the pathologies of modernity and that individual psychology that somehow saying that by accident bought the walk of these men were psychologically abnormal psychological disturbed authoritarian personalities simply defied any kind of statistical model when as I say they were all randomly conscripted in 1942 so a psychological model of abnormality a four barian model of bureaucracy or a Bauman model of the pathologies of modernity which were the various things that we had to work with then really didn't help us very much and so I turned then to at least well I thought was a fairly crucial point in shaping what I had done in framing what I had done is to say we had to look at this as a kind of group activity this was a killing say group dynamic and we therefore needed to us to look at social psychology what is it that causes people to do things as part of a group that they would never do on their own as an individual and how do people get harnessed as groups mobilized as groups to do terrible things of this sort which as individuals would never occur to them and they would never commit on their own volition so I went into after writing the narrative in fact then went into looking up the current social psychology and a work through particularly the Zimbardo Prison Experiment on the power of role adaptation and the Milgram experiment on deference to Authority I should have paid more attention then but I didn't reluctantly sadly I didn't help Salomon Ash's experimental in conformity I which I think it's a very powerful one and would have fit in very nicely but all of these emphasize the ways in which people in groups are shaped in their behavior in very powerful ways so the conclusion in the sense to the book was to try to explain what these men had done primarily in terms of their participation in a group dynamic and the various kinds of ways that their behavior was shaped by virtue of being in a German reserve Police Battalion and occupied Poland in the situation of life 1942 that they found themselves when I finished the book I then had to find a publisher I decided I wanted to do it as a trade book to go more ambitiously than a University Press and tried to get it done with a trade book fortunately a colleague of mine had an agent who was willing to look at it and agreed to take it on the book was turned down by three publishers it was only the fourth publisher that accepted it so for all of you out there who are frustrated the obstacles of publication take heart usually know more about your book than they do and you are a better judge of us so don't lose heart in any case I did find one last HarperCollins when they still had a very powerful sort of semi academic sector they have gone much more sensationally commercial now but at that point they had a very good sub line of I think quality books and I had a wonderful editor there to work with and we had to wrestle over a title and the title I had proposed was becoming evil to focus on the process of transformation and he said we can't have becoming evil because becoming in English also has a second meaning of being handsome attractive good-looking and somebody you know if somebody can misinterpret they will and somebody will say why are you calling this book attractive evil and and so he said we can't use the title becoming evil and we batted things around and really very late in the game we came well first of all the notion of ordinary people came up but that had been a movie so we couldn't do that and finally I said well what about ordinary men because we really are talking about a group of men this isn't people these are men as though they're as I said there was a gendered aspect to their own way in which they portrayed what they were doing and we settled on the title ordinary men now it seemed self-evident it seems almost like a cliche but in fact it was a long struggle to come to it at that time was nothing it wasn't any it was anything but self-evident back when we were still searching for the title when the book came out it was generally very well received but there were a series of important criticisms that were made and it's what I'd like to turn to now in a sense or what were the objections to it what were the claims of the flaws that people claimed to see in it one was an attack upon my reliance and use of social psychology now social psychologists themselves have done studies and have argued that a uninformed public thinks that social psychological explanations are exculpatory that they remove individual responsibility and they're aware of dilemma and in fact that's exactly what happened a number of people objected to the use of social psychology thinking this was giving a pass to the men that had committed these deeds that somehow I was removing from them their agency and their human volition that they were merely statistics of a Milgram experiment or of a Zimbardo experiment and that I had then been insensitive to the moral dimensions about what I had written I think that was a very mistaken criticism first of all the experiments themselves show the Milgram experiments for instance I think probably most of you have heard of it of the people that participate in the key experiment something like two-thirds do go to the extreme of inflicting a thinking they're inflicting severe pain on the on the subject but a third don't don't that every one of those made an individual decision and one-third of them did not in fact do what the other two-thirds did so that immoral decisions were very in fact proven in that experiment people did make decisions what the experiment simply does is allow us to predict roughly at what level of people will decide one way or another but it doesn't all at all argue or say that people do not have moral agency or not basically making their own are not engaged in and their own human responsibility and indeed when I argued in my book that the time breaks into three groups and there's a significant group of evaders that I am arguing likewise that there are people who made decisions to not do what the others were doing and if that isn't as clear a demonstration of human responsibility and moral decision-making then I don't know what is a second attack upon the book was that reserve place battalion 101 was not typical and that it wasn't representative because their image of course was the Einsatzgruppen and hardcore SS and there was something to that but I think it was an argue that misses the point and now we know a whole lot more about the battalion the police battalions than we did then and what we know now is in fact they came in a sense three types between 1937 and 1939 there were the creation of these police reserve of police battalions composed of of reservists who would like a National Guard unit do summer training camps and weekend training camps and so that they're going through a process of training and indoctrination they were at that time in their late twenty so when once the war started by 1942 the people in that cohort would average an age of about 32 or 33 but they had been basically in the police in this function since 1937 so over the time they get to 42 we're talking about five year veterans who have lots of training lots of indoctrination and our still have started out in their late 20s and ending up in their early 30s when the war begins they are mobilized and sent out to occupation duty in Poland and then of course by 41 they're sent to occupation duty in the Soviet Union as well and some of these were very significant killer units a second group a younger group were police battalions that were numbered with a 300 level designation as you had Italians like 101 or 133 or 45 to name them randomly but then you had a group of that were 300 between 300 and 325 and these are 25 battalions that were created in 1939 in an agreement with Himmler and with the military when the war breaks out the military is in desperate need of a large number of military police MPs and so the police turn over to them a significant number of professional policemen who trade in their police uniform and become members of the German army or Vermont and are but the Germans called the felony or a feel place where we call an MP in return Himmler and the or the army allowed the police to select from a pool of volunteers a set number of people in their late 20s to be trained into the place who would become enter into these 300 level battalions so these people are chosen from a larger pool and they too are subjected to a fair amount of indoctrination training before they get into killing actions they've been experienced in occupied territories for a long time the membership in both the first generation of battalions and the 300 level battalions was a high level of Nazi membership so these are fairly these are cases where a part of Himmler's program was to nullify the place and they reflected that but by 1942 when the german when the war has now clearly gonna be a long war America is into the war now the blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union hadn't succeeded that more manpower was needed and basically they're reaching the dregs is agreed now that they will conscription up to the army but for wartime service people in their late 30s and early 40s now the army doesn't want these people but the police will take them so a third generation of reserve police are created made up of people like 101 who are going to be thirty nine and a half forty years old in 1942 are going to be hastily conscripted with virtually no training very little indoctrination no prior experience a relatively low level of of Nazi Party membership that is not different from German society of that age group at large thrown into these third generation of battalions and sent off to Poland and Russia and that is what 101 is so my critics has said this was not representative it wasn't typical they were right most of the battalions were much more hardcore not seeing much more indoctrinated much more carefully trained much higher Nazi participation but my question to that was I was never arguing that 101 was typical I was arguing that as a typicality was what one of the most frightening aspects of it that is the assumption is if these people had been if many of the killers were indeed of high nazi members party membership highly indoctrinated highly trained experienced and corrupted by racial imperialism of occupying foreign countries long before they engaged in killing the assumption was well that must have been essential to what they did the frightening lesson of reserve police was town 101 is you can take a group of people without training without indoctrination without high Nazi Party membership without careful selection without prior brutalization in terms of occupying foreign territories throw them in and they become one of the most deadly killing units of the German order place if you rank the order place by which battalions were the most deadly out of those several hundred police battalions that we hand reserve Police Battalion 101 this drags this out of this late comer of misfits was the fourth most lethal police battalion an entire Third Reich higher body count than any 300 level battalion of younger more hardcore Nazi membership so to my mind that is hardly dismisses the findings of the book of ordinary men and in fact affirms and confirms the dangers of the regime being able to enlist and turn ordinary men into professional killers a last criticism that was made arson there's two more one was that I didn't pay enough attention to ideology that mine was a situational explanation and in particular the most severe criticism in the book came from Daniel Goldhagen who four years after I wrote my book published a book called Hitler's willing executioner's and about and one of his key case examples was also battalion 101 he's using the same men in the same testimonies but coming to a radically different conclusion and which he argued that in fact would explain is the capacity of Germans to have care ordinary Germans who have carried out the final solution is that ordinary Germans were all little Hitler's that German culture had imbued Germany and Germans to a very high percentage with a unique kind of anti-semitism all Europe was anti-semitic but in Germany this was a lethal murderous elimination ax Stan tae Semitism so that basically Hitler performed the function and these are his words of unshackling and unleashing the Germans to do what they always wanted to do was just to kill Jews with great enthusiasm and gusto and that these men enjoyed what they were doing and did it with enthusiasm and with utter conviction that it was just and necessary and he had said I think Nord the whole ideological dimension well I hadn't but I certainly had played it down compared to previous explanations but if you're attacked from one direction everybody sort of then sees it as a binary so I got pushed into being the example of the situational explanation because he had so emphasized the ideological and cultural side I became the situational and organizational explanation in opposition and that was often the terms in which this debate was described I think that was a false binary and certainly the man I think who articulated best how to get out of that cul-de-sac was the social psychologist Leonard Newman who writing after this controversy had erupted a very important article in which he pointed out that these are not opposites but in fact are two sides of the same coin situations are culturally red people do not go into a situation that is a tabula rasa a blank page or identical to everyone each of those situations is read by the individual who finds himself in it based upon the cultural assumptions that he brings with him based upon the glasses through which he sees it and Germans in some cases we're wearing different classes than others and there are certain aspects of German culture that were determinate --iv but on the other hand the situation also obviously had very strong universalistic characteristics that involve human nature in general as I argued and that one had to have an explanation that attempted to blend in a sense cultural perceptions and attitudes and understandings with the situation in the group dynamics that I had emphasized in my book and I think that was a very important intervention in this and the last criticism that Goldhagen made was basically that we had both looked at the same sources and since he was right and I was wrong I must have been duped and read the sources and were in a very bad way and the argument was these policemen were of course all hardcore Nazi killers they couldn't be trusted and that one had to approach this post-war testimony much more cautiously than I had now some people in fact I read the book and said I didn't take that into account but they couldn't have read the preface because a fair part of the preface explains exactly that but what can you do with people who criticize the book that they haven't read you're it's pretty you know you're kind of left in a dilemma but in any case it did raise a very important methodological issue and that was how does one use this kind of source and I would argue that in fact this was probably the most interesting part of the controversy though it got maybe the least attention and the coal thing and I could agree on some parts of our approach some of these testimonies were just totally and obviously and transparently mendacious and that where they're just made up of denials you know lieutenants and commander you know in charge of whole companies simply claiming on the first major action of the company while I wasn't there that day you know I was off shopping or whatever I mean just and at every action they just don't happen to be in there in charge of the unit that they're the commander of or people who are always on vacation at every killing action or in the caz one as the investigators found one company where seven different people commit to have been the company cook and that they wore his back home playing with their pots and he then brought them all together and it was a bit embarrassing for the six that weren't the cook but in any case there obviously are much muscle test one is mendacious and it is obviously mendacious and that is testimony that is so self incriminating so unbelievably graphic in which these people confess to what they were doing and what had happened that nobody would make that up and Goldhagen and i could agree that utterly self incrementing testimony was stuff that we could use but there is a middle band of testimony which tells some of the truth some of the time people who would say a lot about what the battalion did even if they would not be honest about what they had done as individuals and of course one of the approaches these people take when they're being investigated is trying to persuade the investigator that they're credible and that they're cooperating so one tactic of many of the police was to say as much as they could and as much detail as they could about everything other than what they themselves had done to give us good history about the battalion even if they were not going to incriminate themselves so this is a for me was just a treasure trove of valuable information for Goldhagen this was a minefield you didn't want to go into for him as he put it the most important thing was not to be snookered by one of these lying policemen to not be duped by them and therefore as he put it he would only use testimony that had no potential of self exculpate exculpation and now what was his test for having no potential for self exculpation it was that the policeman in question basically gave such incriminated testimony that he admitted they had given himself heart body and sold out of hitler well if your hypothesis is that the nazi final solution was carried out because all the killers were basically little Hitler's carrying out an ideological mission identical to Hitler's anti-semitism and you rule out the testimony policeman who is other than a little Hitler you can do no other than confirm the hypothesis of evidence was meant to test how convenient and I think it was simply a very flawed methodology and he never got called on it but I think that the historian has to take the risk he has to he or she has to attempt to use this middle level of testimony sort through it be careful be critical but it is a goldmine of information that cannot be passed by if one wants to get a picture of the battalion that is a spectrum of responses not a monolithic group of little Hitler's if you want to see the battalion as being transformed over time but what they are doing not a group of men that arrive at the battlefield eager and enthusiastic to kill Jews and that that was we had this very basic difference of methodological approach to using these sources and that raises the question in a sense can we test our different approaches can we find other sources against which we can look at these propositions and see if the Goldhagen approached or if my approach can be vindicated by sources other than the potentially mendacious policemen who have Rhian sent 'iv to not be truthful because they don't want to incriminate themselves and let me look at two examples where in fact we can do just that one case is my argument that in fact these men are transformed over time they're changed by what they do and that some of them turn into eager killers and others become routine killers a few of them become evaders and his notion was no people don't change in that way and my argument was yes you can profoundly change people in a fairly short time in depending on the situation they find themselves in now we have a series of letters not from battalion 101 but from a sister but battalion 105 from Bremen so it's another Bolton you know North Sea coastal city almost the same social group very much the same part of Germany and there was a policeman who wrote his wife knew almost several music several times a week who was part of Italian 105 when it invades the Soviet Union in June and the letters run all the way through the fall and what does those letters demonstrate at the very beginning he basically is given the orally the so-called criminal orders when every unit went into the Soviet Union they were given the criminal orders orally because didn't want anything in running the that the Soviets might capture that basically made the civilian population of Russia free game that authorized the killing of communist functionaries not to be treated as prisoners of war and a number of other things that we would consider to be war crimes and his reaction to hearing this pronounced by his commander was that that they were putting them on he writes the major said every suspect is to be shot immediately well I'm in suspense the gentlemen fancy themselves very important and marshal and he goes on to say that you know they've put on their airs in the özil and the oslo casinos they have been stationed in Norway before this and he thinks that they are just strutting they come in however to Lithuania at the end of the first week of July July 7 he writes the following the Jews are free game anybody can seize one on the streets for himself I would not like to be in a Jews skin they have no food how they actually live I don't know and he said tell it Rice's father they have two servants so they made their claims on Jews as their kind of menial labor and he writes we give them our bread and more I cannot be so tough one can only give the juice some well-intended advice bring no more children into the world they have no future this is a realization that in the long term life is going to be made impossible for the Jews in this area even if he too tough at the moment this is the long-term fate and so he both has an inkling of what may happen but he is not yet participating in it one month later he writes to his wife and he's telling rights back about all the things he's grabbed you know it's basically stolen pillaged and is shipping back to them including canisters of butter which he says he hopes they will find very tasty and the next paragraph reads as follows here all the Jews are being shot everywhere such actions are underway yesterday night hundred and fifty Jews from this place were shot men women children all killed the Jews are being totally exterminated and then he goes in to say say nothing about it to the children there's a hint of shame that this is not something that you share what you know something you don't share with the children and it's in the anonymous passive it isn't we're shooting Jews I'm shooting Jews our universe our shooting Jews is here Jews are being shot now that is our common post-war phraseology everything is done anonymous and there's somebody else it just happened here we see that psychological defense is already there in the summer of 1941 here Jews are being shot as if his unit in this town has nothing to do with it with the Jews having been killed in the rural towns of Lithuania in the summer of 41 they penetrate deeper he writes constant complaints that they're nothing to pillage anymore the Soviets are engaged in a scorched earth policy but he passes one of the prisoner of war camps aware of the red army soldiers are locked up and simply left to starve to given no food for their own and he but he's complaining the main problem with that scorched earth policy is that he can't loot and send packages to his wife for that their own prisoners must go hungry yes that is quite clear when one sees a prisoner of war camp one can see miserable scenes the people would be better off dead he writes most of them is whom were dead in any case as they engage in resistance behind the lines and when remarkable thing about the ad for most all the invaders of Russia was the notion that resistance to them was illegitimate that somehow people defending their own country is really unfair and Germany is entitled to Empire without effort but partisans resisting around the lines he begins to refer to as beasts and dogs and trash and of course when they're captured they're executed and he's the company photographer and he writes to his wife this is now in October he's sorry he missed photographing the execution quote it was said to have been fun and then he goes on when another casualty is taken by a partisan ambush that his comrades were angry they would quote would like best of all to shoot down all Russians genocide not only of those Jews but of anybody in the area was now envisaged and then finally a last letter in November this time he does have his camera he gets the execution on his film and this time he writes to his wife in the future my film will be a document and of great interest for our children so we see a you know just almost was a breathtaking degeneration a very short period of time so it is possible in fact people are profoundly changed by what they see and what they take part in a second issue was whether in fact the battalion broke into the spectrum that I had written about into the eager killers the compliers and the evaders and Goldhagen pronounced that to be absurd that he just announced so kind of by Fiat that if that had been the case of the morale would have collapsed and the unit's could not have continued not giving any evidence for it but just simply making that pronouncement well in fact we now can look at whether other killing units experience the same kind of division into these groups and particular testified to by a very different kind of source and here I turn to a man named Oswald roof hisin awful roof haizen was a from Silesia Silesia is that borderland between what had been the austro-hungarian Empire Austria and and Czarist Russia and Germany and it was a mixed population area and Jews there spoke German and polish most the population is bilingual unlike further East where the Jewish population almost all was giddy speaking here they could speak fluent polish and German without betraying their Jewish identity by a strong Yiddish accent one of the dilemmas almost any Jew trying to hide in Eastern Europe was they open their mouths and their Yiddish accent immediately identified who they were Jews from Silesia that was not the case Oswald Ruth haizen flees Silesia in the fall of 1939 when the Germans invade and he goes to Lithuania and of course in the summer of 1941 the Germans show up and he flees the cold no ghetto and he flees south into what is now present-day Belarus to the town of beer where as a 17 year old he is intercepted by the local police captain in mere a man named Simeon Serafima vich who asked him for his papers and he says well I have no papers say they were stolen I'm just trying to survive in the countryside and of course in the chaos of all of this not having that was implausible explanation but above all most cleverly he identified himself as a person of Polish German ancestry he had a German father and a Polish mother he was a mixed mixed by German terms of mixed race and he could speak both languages fluently and Serafima says well that's very handy the German police are coming and setting up a headquarters here in a couple of weeks I need a translator so come home with me and be my translator so the 17-year old Jew passing as a half Paul half German comes to live in the house of the Belarusian police captain Simeon Serafim of age two weeks later the Germans arrive in town and sergeant Hine has with him 13 German police there middle-aged reservists exactly like mono wa reservists from northern Germany who are now going to set up a police station in this town when sergeant Hine meets with Serafima vich of course there is young Rufus and translating and sergeant Hine says I need a translator you'll come work for me so here we have a 17-year old Jew living by day at the right hand side of the German police commander translating for all of his business with the local population and sleeping at night in the house of the Belarusian police captain so he has as inside a view of the dynamics of the German police as anybody could possibly have eight frayed months he has an inside front-row seat of the dynamics of this German police unit that is identical to that of 101 and what does he what does he write after the war basically he said when killing actions took place there was those who were the eager killers particularly the one corporal and his buddies who he called beasts in the form of men who were eager to go out and kill men ever they could there were those who wouldn't go on Jewish actions as he put it no one seemed to bother them no one talked about their absences It was as if they had a right to abstain so even if there was no command or giving them that right it was just assumed that they didn't have to take part in that kind of action and then there were the middle group which he referred to as the passive executor zuv orders it was clear that there were differences in their outlooks he says I think that the whole business of Jewish extermination they considered unclean the operations against the partisans were not in the same category for them a confrontation with partisans with a battle a military move but a move against the Jews was something they might have experienced as dirty so basically he portrays the same tripartite division in that group as I had found in in my battalion and as I say here we have someone who has no motive to be exculpatory about the Nazis and every reason to portray them accurately it was my good fortune that I was at a trial in which he was also a witness and in London trial it was actually the pre-trial hearing a Simeon Serafima vich and we spent a weekend sequestered in a hotel and so I had a long talks with with Oswald roof eysan and then when interviewed him later in Haifa six weeks before he died so I would say that in this case the the outside evidence we get in fact vindicates my interpretation the approach I took not that of Daniel Goldhagen well what can we say happened after that if once the the fury of the so-called Goldhagen controversy died down where did perpetrator research particularly into the grassroots killers go I would say two things in particular one is to look once more carefully into indoctrination in training to what degree were these people shaped by the indoctrination materials we know that him or wanted to nullify the German police worked at it hard and that they prepared many indoctrination materials thing with 101 as they simply were drafted and sent off before they were ever subjected to them so that was kind of moot there but part of the question was how much did this affect others and certainly some have argued that that you know indoctrination must have played a major role but at least two scholars you're gonna Matthias at the Holocaust Museum and Tallis Michael Nyman a German historian have taken I think a more nuanced approach to this and seen in a sense that it is not so much causal as facilitating that what the indoctrination provided was a buffet of rationalizations that every individual in the battalion are killing unit could draw a pond based upon their own needs and so if you needed to frame this as a military operation you could take that part that claim Jews or partisans and Protestants or Bolsheviks and this is all part of the war and you're simply engaged in a military anti-partisan move as you're shooting down women and children there are total but somehow to fit it into a framework that you consider you know valid and or to dress it up as a kind of historic mission that this is a point in history when things are at stake and the Nazi genocide is basically a self defense against the Asiatic Bolshevik Jewish threat and they will get us and Yorkshire our children if we don't get them first and so it allows them to pretend what they're doing is self-defense Klaus Michael Michael anomalous in a sense what they really were doing was whittling away at and and the the traditional inhibitions of what he calls humanitarianism and and chivalry idea legitimizing these and raising up notions that that's all bunk and you can't take that in and that therefore you wouldn't be inhibited both you had to both in a sense neutralized previous inhibitions and provide new rationalizations and namaz phrase was that much of this indoctrination was what he called Anna Karthik a narcotic after the fact something that you took to deal with the stress that was imposed it wasn't something that turned you into an ideological driven killer but one that helped you to be a killer and cope with the stress and and that that caused and finally an another approach which i think is very important is to get the argument about the cultural ideological side beyond anti-semitism earlier or the goys question of more than an anti-semitic or not and and somehow this is the single issue argued about in terms of ideology and more recently some scholars and I have a single out one in particular Thomas Cunha at Clark University has been looking for more broad attitudes or more broad terms that have special residence injury society that in a sense captures Germans harnesses Germans you know pulls them in in ways that other people other cultures where these words don't have the same resonance would not be subjected to and here we get in the sense do you know what in what ways were people doing this because they were German different than and then others that would have come from a different background and his argument really is there were two concepts the Nazis appropriated and Exploited that go far beyond transcend anti-semitism and much broader that appeal to knots the idealism appealed to people to in a sense the positive side it wasn't just we hate us we hate Bolsheviks we hate gypsies but these are the good things we're doing and this is what we're all about and why you want to be part of this movement and these two concepts for comrade chat or comradeship on the one hand and the racial community or the German term for this was the folks combined shaft on the other now some most all you probably have read all Quiet on the Western Front and then you know that in that though he's bitterly anti-war remark has that conversation where since the one soul redeeming thing to come out of this war is the power of comradeship between the soldiers and one approach to that was a kind of universalization that is the the soldiers all are on one side and the government's and generals are on the other side there's a brotherhood of the trenches and it's a more universal concept and indeed at the beginning of World War one even Kaiser velcome uses the folks combined shaft or I'm sorry I'm something from one to the other but comradeship then on the one hand was all was a was invoked by the left as a kind of Brotherhood of the trenches as opposed to the Brotherhood of the working-class but the Nazis managed to capture the term for their own use and turn it into the Brotherhood of German soldiers and the German race against everybody else and to turn it into an exclusionary term and above all into a term that created a sense of community beyond which you didn't have moral obligation and I'm fine in a very early book on genocide I talked about the notion people being outside the community of moral obligation and those are people and sense that you don't have morality only deals with the people who are of your community and those beyond it basically are dehumanized are set outside the normal normal rules and comradeship in a sense was that positive term the Nazis captured to create the community that it was important and which others didn't we're not part of and that justified you're always doing whatever was necessary to be in good to Steve with your comrades this gets back to the group dynamic very powerful more powerful I would say when it's harnessed to this notion of comradeship than just a simple notion of peer pressure why peer pressure was so strong is because it was harness to and part of this notion of comradeship and the other he argues is the term folks come on shaft and this is basically it means the people's community or the national community or the racial community it's a term that has all of these these different meanings at the beginning of World War one the Kaiser used it in a very inclusive way that when Germany went to war he gave his famous speech I know no classes I know no confessions I know no parties I know only Germans we're overcome social divisions religious divisions political divisions in Germany and now fight as a unified nation and that was a term again that had a very powerful resonance and it is a contested term and again the Nazis are successful in appropriating yet and turning it from an inclusive to exclusive term that the people's community becomes the racial community and not part of the community therefore Jews and Gypsies and others that behave in a social manners that don't accept the norms of and devotion sacrifice to the community and so it becomes again setting up a world of us against them and them being outside the community of moral obligation and the result then is that it creates a world not in which Germans went to kill because they enjoyed it because they you know couldn't wait into to kill Jews or whatever but it created a world in which killing Jews and killing any other enemies of the Reich were not considered criminal or immoral they did not consider themselves criminals when they were doing this and neither during the war and he argues effectively either after the war did they see what they had done as a moral and criminal because they had created a in a sense a moral world in which other victims were outside the protection of normal morality so I think that sort of creating and looking in terms of the questions of German culture going beyond the the issue of how anti-semitic to look more widely at what other ways where Germans mobilized by the Nazis what things to the Nazis find employ that had residents in Germany that were more powerful in Germany than they would have been elsewhere that does give a certain particular arity to through German behavior but also recognizes the broader Universal aspect of this the ability to create communities that put people outside the moral boundaries which then of course make them vulnerable to genocide thank you very much yes that'd be fine yes yes in fact one of the I mean I think in terms of say the book Eichmann in Jerusalem I study in the banality of evil I think she had the right broad concept of banality of evil and the wrong person that's the example of that that is what Eichmann took as a defense strategy was to portray himself as the ordinary German functionary of which there were so many that kept the wheels the machinery of destruction turning but simply took orders from evolving implemented things below was kind of a cog and passed on messages Eichmann was much more important and much more ideological than that I would put him in the true believer category but the concept he was hiding behind I think was important and and what his defense was seemingly plausible because there were so many people like that who were ordinary banal people who do in certain circumstances get themselves harnessed to a killing enterprise and we find out that that when Russia when regimes want to commit genocide the obstacle that is never a shortage of willing executioner's it's never not finding enough people willing to kill and in that sense that's part of the message of the book ordinary men that this is what ordinary men can be mobilized to do so I think that notion is an important one yes unfortunately this is not a question the additional interrogators were interested in pursuing they're trying to build evidence against the people in the dot they're not trying like an Australian to say why did these people behave differently so the interrogations are not rich in answering that question but I can say the following sometimes people would just simply either blurt out telling statements even if they weren't asked and say things that that were addressed to that question even if not nearly as often as we would like what is most conspicuous is nobody invokes religion nobody says I couldn't do this because I was a Christian sadly enough this is a group of German Christians for whom being a Christian wasn't a reason to not kill Jews in Poland a few of them would remark to their old political loyalties I was from an old socialist family I was a communist and so they would they would identify a prior set of political ideals that they still clung to even though clearly not openly that moved them but religion was not one of those they did invoke the other thing that sometimes people would say is that issues of career ISM did not affect them and what they saw obviously and among their comrades was the hope that you would get jump up from a unskilled working class these people were unskilled workers I should emphasize if you did a skilled job you were your draft deferred if you're building submarines they're not sending you off to Poland to shoot Jews but if you're a warehouse worker lifting boxes or you're a caste register you know worker at a store or a waiter in a restaurant then you're easily dispensable and you're sent off to Poland so these are unbasic the unskilled workers so for them to be into the place and put on uniform offered the prospect that after the war this could become a career with status and lift them up on the social scale immensely higher than anything they had done before so when a number of the men say is is you know I didn't do that because I didn't need to you know to have a good recommendation I I was a watchmaker and I had my practice back home and I was economically secure and so I didn't care whether they thought I was a good policeman or not another one was that was one of the reserve officers he came from the middle class and and he basically said well you know I came from business I wanted to get back to my family business but the two young SS captains they needed a career and he distinguished himself from them basically on the fact that his circumstances didn't require worrying about a career and others did so career ISM was among the things they themselves mentioned that they weren't compelled by that they in effect saw many of their comrades compelled by was that they didn't have any career aspirations in the police which many of the others did well in that statistic part of that vyas they may not want to shoot but the other part maybe they don't want to lift their head out of the foxhole because somebody else is shooting at them no one's shooting at these people they can do this with total impunity in no danger they don't have to expose themselves to get a shot at the enemy so I think we have part of the reduction there I think comes simply out of the fact that these people are not threatened or endangered in any way what we do have the number of people in the first action that they would be taken out and they forced the Jews lie down in rows and they would go up in a point-blank range proof to the liver and neck shot and in fact they often just shot them in the back of the head and the skulls would explode and to be covered in blood and when the description what happened were ghastly but some of the men said basically either they either at the beginning or after the first shot they would miss at point-blank range they would shoot past and then the officer would come by and give the coup de Gras with this pistol to people who hadn't been killed so there were men who shot but would miss their target that's lying on the ground right in front of them and part of it was just the horror of the what they were seeing and this is that blood and gore were just flying everywhere these men were absolutely saturated in the blood of their victims and and I other I think is what you referred to some people just just don't but I think that's not necessarily because it's a deep moral conviction but for a number of different reasons that they don't want to peek out of the foxhole or they don't want to get their uniform dirty or or whatever yes I'm afraid I didn't understand the question I hope so I would like to think so because there's this you know that at that point this was a part of this was the beginning of this subfield in Holocaust Studies that we do call perpetrator studies one of the problems we face is the asymmetry in sources we have for holocaust killers and for other genesee there if I may use that term we know almost nothing about the Stalin killers we know nothing about the Mao killers we know some about Paul Pott killers because of trials and escapees we know very little about Turkish and Kurdish killers in the Armenian Genocide we do know some more about Rwanda and I had the experience of being at the Museum as a visiting scholar for a year at the same time that a psychiatrist in Rwanda was there man named Ethan aza hug and kimono and he gave a presentation that for me was stunning because how closely it replicated in a sense what I had been looking at as in background he was half who - half Tutsi he had one had a number of sisters one of whom had been murdered as a Tutsi and one of whom was in jail as a Hutu genocide air so I mean he was just absolutely down the middle on this and didn't have any axe to grind either way after the genocide he went to the refugee camps on the Uganda border to use his profession as a psychiatrist to deal with the trauma of the survivors and then decided that he also had a duty to go into the prisons where they were holding the genesee there that had been captured and to find out what he could based upon him his expertise as a psychiatrist so we got permission and he went in and first of all he gave out a a a survey that was basically self reporting in which people would describe answer a series of questions that would reveal how deeply implicated they had been how much of a Genesee there were they who were the true hardcore killers now I think some people would have falsely answered that and and not been included but it's hard to imagine anybody answered in such a way who you know that were not hardcore genesee there that got into the pool so he didn't have a pool that was complete but he had one that was uncontaminated and then he gave them a second survey in which he tried to think of every kind of a question that would deal with every conceivable motivation and when he got it back he said he had never seen anything like this in his previous research is a psychiatrist almost all the questions were flatlined no correlation and then two clusters of questions as a spiked off the map the first cluster of questions that spiked were those that dealt with the ideological framing and what they were doing the dehumanizing of their victims that they were cockroaches they were vermin that they were defending the who the Hutus against this external threat that that these people were not what they had done was not murder and the second set of questions had to do with esteem how were they killed in the eyes of their comrades where they considered tough where they considered strong were they considered to have done their share and so that these two people these two things the group dynamic of being held in high regard by your comrades and the dehumanizing in your victim were the two key things that came out of his study so in that sense he hadn't read my stuff but I heard him give his talk I was blown away because I think it was so so close and shows that that there is a wider significance that transcends polikov perpetrators in terms of looking at the capacity of to organize people to commit genocide on the Milgram experiment itself all of these experiments Isambard Oh Milgram whatever are not experiments we could do today because they have a they don't have a consent of an informed subject the subject is unwitting and that's the whole experiment it's designed to keep them clueless so we would consider you know that we couldn't repeat them as they are done today because the human resource people would never you know give their permission there was I mean they were certainly attempts after Milgram to replicated in other countries and they basically came to the same results when it was still allowed to do it that way I have not seen the details on but I was told by a sociologist at a neighbor university to where I live now that someone was able to devise a very similar experiment that somehow got around those rules and it did replicate what Milgram had done that that that as the findings remain robust even if we are skeptical about the what would now be an impermissible methodology so in that sense I think the notion that deference to Authority is a powerful shaper of how people behave in relation to people around them and particularly people who they see as legitimate Authority above them I think is still valid even if that experiment has been subject to a much criticism for a variety of reasons that question has been studied and my conclusion and I think it's shared by a number of others is one of the most uncomfortable conclusions we draw is how cheap genocide is to commit and how few marginal resources are needed to kill six million people and the Nazis in no way sacrificed the military campaign in order to kill Jews it wasn't an either-or they fought their war and with the small margin of resources at the side they carried out a terrible genocide and the number of trains involved was minuscule compared to total German rolling stock that the number the men they committed like middle-aged men of 101 weren't going to have been at Stalingrad and prevented you know the encirclement in any case so that I would say the answer know that the Holocaust did not compromise the German war effort except in one crucial regard and that is in the killing of skilled labor Germany did experience a major manpower shortage labor shortage to fill that they rounded up labor from all over Europe which stirred up resistance because people would run to the mountains instead of being taken off to Germany so it fed the resistance the resistance required resources to keep order in the countries they occupied and that they would have had to do less requisitioning of Slay of forced labour had call it would have caused less resistance in the countries they occupied if they had used the Jewish slave labor they had rather than exterminating it now I don't know that we can quantify how crucial that was but that's the one area in which they shot themselves in the foot that's the only one only thing I see were they what they were doing to Jews had a significant economic impact on how they were waging the war the rest of it is really pretty marginal death camps are very cheap to build a number of trains used was a minute fraction of the total rolling stock that they had at their disposal the manpower often was recruiting local collaborators to do lots of the work you know in France there's only a few Germans there most of the running ups were done by the French police in the French bureaucracy same in Hungary so they they found ways to do this that were extraordinarily economical in terms of the war effort way in the back well yes and in the sense they took Kamaraj camaraderie which could be a more universal term and racialized it and turn it into a term of racial exclusion and racial obligation to your racial comrades but not to anyone else it certainly does tailed with overlapped with their notions of what we're fighting for is living space territory from other people who are outside that group who are our enemy so yeah I mean it fit in a present was appropriated and tweaked by the Nazis that fit into the wider Nazi ideology very well I guess I didn't quite understand the question the the sources the story so you know ultimately of course each each trial after the war is of a individual for a particular act and we generally in in Western jurisprudence that is this is what's key and then other issues become mitigating factors once you've established did somebody actually do this criminal act or not so it doesn't block the trial but it may shape the way in which say the sentence is given and we have this in American trials first you have the trial and then you'll have the impact faced in which the victims talked about with the this and the prosecution will present the tragic circumstances of this poor disadvantaged person who grew up in such terrible circumstances and he could hardly expect it to be normal and the court has to weigh those various factors in coming to what would be a fair sentence but that is not germane to establish who did the person commit the crime so we at least in the American legal world and most I think in the Western legal world we try to keep those two separate they're both relevant but they're two separate proceedings or do their post-traumatic stress syndrome yeah we have very very few cases of suicide by perpetrators during the war just a handful of such cases after the war we certainly have some circumstances not so much as suicide but maybe in Germany even more than elsewhere of men coming back who were so changed at the marriages break up and and some wives do testify at the trial and they do testify of what their husbands told them they had done and as or the wife saying now that I hear this trial I can understand why my husband wasn't the same person when he came back but I would say alongside that what was maybe most remarkable is how initially almost none of these men gave symptoms what we would call post-traumatic stress syndrome I think it wasn't because this is despite my guest cuz I'm not you know a psychologist but I think that that basically all Germany together wanted to want to repress and bury this very deep so nobody's asking and what did you do in the war daddy that's the question you don't ask in a German family after the war and and and nobody wants to hear it nobody wants to think about it so it doesn't get brought up and when you think American troops coming home Vietnam they came back to a country in political turmoil arguing about this war and they couldn't escape it in Germany nobody want to talk about this and what a number of people remarked is that in their in their transcripts they would be invited to an interrogation they would go home and then to come back to a second session for to continue because they couldn't do it all in one day and another of them would make remarks like now for the first time I'm having nightmares now that you forced me to think about this and to recall what had happened I know I can't sleep at night and one did commit suicide one guy when they came he didn't show up for his hearing when they came to find him he jumped out of his window and killed himself so it was not so much as a media post war but the being forced to relive it and to talk about it and to be questioned about it in the 60s that was for some of the men highly disturbing yes yeah there's a number of areas in which I think where we are sort of still finding really important stuff one of these is that researching the Holocaust I would say has gone eastward and downward now as it started out as a study of Germans and what Germans did to Jews but after 1989 the East European archives opened and we could begin to do much more research on what happened in Eastern Europe and above all we are seeing putting that into a broader context of the collapse of the multi-ethnic empires and in almost all you know Tsarist Russia Austria Hungary and then in almost all of these areas you had the Jews are always part of a ethnic mix it's usually poles and Ukrainians and Jews or poles and Bell Russians and Jews or poles and Lithuanians and Jews or Hungarians Romanians and Jews and everybody else after World War one is trying to create their own nation and they envisage that nation as ethnically homogeneous and wherever they are the Jew is always the lab Ottoman with no hope of their own state and always viewed by everybody else as on the other side and an enemy and a problem if you're creating a new nation state that they see the model of being ethnically homogeneous in a territory where there's no such thing as ethnic homogeneity so you have these deterioration in what had been I guess one person used to phrase we didn't they didn't live together but they live side by side they coexisted and coexistence diminishes and and the the insulation off the live wires is worn away over the 20-year through 1919 to 1939 then of course comes the Soviet occupation in many of these areas on top of this frustrated and thwarted nation-building you've got a Donnell misreading and then in 41 the Germans come they're the last ones to show up but you have this combustible pile and then Nazis light a match and they throw it's like foreign ganna light on gasoline it just explodes and it is this absolute collapse of of these ethnic inter-ethnic relations and the turning of neighbors into killers the fact that much of the killing in the East is not done by Germans but by auxiliary police that they recruit and it's not just for property it's for all sorts of reasons they locals have their own agendas often and and that the complexity of that is so dense that that's what we're trying to unpack and of course that's different in each area so we're creating a vast mosaic of Eastern Europe and which each little corner has its own particular tease even if broadly what we're looking is at the unraveling of a multi-ethnic society and and the that it's being impinged upon both by the Soviets and then the Nazis that's one thing that that we have a lot to do another is what I would call after mass Studies we're looking at I mean that's the Holocaust we used to say you know and in 1945 the impact of that and the aftershocks of that are still going on and so from now for instance we have in Poland a new law that makes it a crime to attribute to poles the crimes of the Nazis well we don't have case law yet to find out whether that's actually going to be used to stop all serious history writing or they just want to get at young grouse or this one discouraged a new generation of young poles from ever going into it but we are caught up in memory Wars that directly traced back to the whole I went to Tallinn in Estonia a couple of years ago and I had heard about the museum saying Lithuania whether it was the Museum of the of the double genocide and you know what the Soviets did to Lithuanian is and whether the Nazis did to choose and I got to Tallinn and and there was a resume called the Museum of the occupations well I said oh well this will be interesting I'd like to see how they handle this well I went there and to our surprise the occupations weren't the respect of Nazi and Soviet occupations the occupations were the Soviet occupation of 4041 with the interlude of liberation by the German Army and the second occupation from 45 to 91 now and then there's a hierarchy of bad guys the worst of course are the Soviets the next worst of the Americans who didn't come and fight World War 3 to rescue them after the war the good guys of the Germans itself I'm moving 90,000 death when Ian's proudly fought in the Vermont in them and the s waffen-ss to preserve the liberty of their country just absolutely unashamed openly avowed identity with the Nazi side in World War two now that's you know in that sense this the the memory wars are still going on and particularly in Eastern Europe how countries are coming to grips with and how they're trying not to come to grips with I mean 1989 opened up the door and now they're desperately trying to close that door again and pull down the shades they want to go back into the hermetically sealed world in which that is no longer a major historical event again so that's another area there are others but I think I'd better stop with that

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Published: Tue Oct 23 2018