THE DEBATE OVER #HOLOCAUST PERPETRATORS AFTER THREE DECADES BY CHRISTOPHER R. BROWNING

welcome to tjhd talks i'm hallease lee woman director of the toby center for the renewal of jewish life in poland i have the privilege to welcome all of you to what will be a very thoughtful intriguing perhaps provocative conversation between world-renowned holocaust scholars professors christopher browning and dario stolla for those of you who are new a very warm welcome we hope that you will continue to join us throughout the rest of our programming which will continue into 2021 so welcome professor browning welcome professor stolla we're extremely privileged to have you both with us without further ado i turn the program over to you dariosh thank you very much uh you know it's really a very special pleasure for me to to have this conversation with christopher browning today because i'm a great fan of his scholarship and himself personally i still remember our first meeting in 1995 in new york but the book we are going to start our conversation with today uh the book which actually brought in a completely new field of of research which is the perpetrator studies was published almost 30 years ago in 1992 the reserve police battalion 101 and the final solution in poland is a relatively small book with a great impact i think if we can compare the size of the book with the impact it it has had it would be a really high on all the ranking lists um it's been translated into some 30 languages and when i was trying to find out its impact then i used my regular instrument which is google scholar search engine i read that it was cited more than three thousand two hundred times the three thousand two hundred references to it in various scholarly articles and all together uh in google there are more than half a million returns when you google for with the title of of this book so it's really a small book with a great impact and it reminds me immediately a beautiful sentence of one of the micro historians founders of the micro history that you can ask big questions in small places and indeed the place where the events described in this book happened is is a small town in eastern poland eastern poland today in the lublin province joseph near bugot really a small place not known even by many poles so i would like to start our conversation with a question to to you chris what brought you to this small place yes sir thank you darish um i came on the topic while i was uh looking through all the indictments and uh verdicts relating to nazi crimes in poland uh from trials in germany i was at the central agency for the investigation of nazi crimes in ludicksburg just trying to fill in the gap about what happened in poland because half the victims of the holocaust of course are polish jews but nothing like half the the documents we have uh relate to poland so uh there's so much we didn't know about the holocaust in poland and one way i was trying to fill in uh was through the the german court investigations that took place in the 1960s and 70s and when i came across the indictment reserve police battalion 101 two things left out one was the testimony about major trump offering his men the opportunity to step out and not take part in the killing in the first massacre at yoseph on july 13 1942 making very explicit the issue of choice i'd always been looking in my previous research into perpetrators what choices they had why and how did they make these choices so i was interested in choice but i'd never seen it frame so absolutely graphically as on the eve of a massacre a commander saying uh you can shoot or you don't have to shoot uh i'd never seen anything like this in what was then close to 20 years of holocaust research uh and the second thing that leapt out was that the various quotes of the policeman's testimonies unlike so many which were obviously mendacious obviously denial and and whitewashing these had vivid horrific graphic descriptions of what the men did they had a ring of authenticity and truth that was just stunning in comparison to the normal pile of lies one found in much of the german court records in which the defendant simply lied for each other and denied everything so i resolved to go to hamburg and and uh look at the case itself and that's when i discovered that over 200 men from the battalion had been interrogated because the roster had survived this is the first roster of a killing unit that we had found and that the interrogators could get over 40 percent of the unit and to question them in 1962 and carry out a very thorough investigation and most of them will rank and file the officers would lie for one another but the rank and file didn't want to cover for their officers many of them who didn't like them and would tell what the battalion did in a very truthful way so that's what sort of was the origins of the book why i came to that topic uh i'd always been looking at perpetrators but never at the actual grassroots shooters we might say the grassroots killers until this opportunity fell into my lap uh when i uh got the lead uh to the battalion in louisburg and went up to hamburg to look at the entire court record so it was not the place but the sources that you found the exceptional rich sources yes it was it was coming across a lead to these unique collect this unique collection of sources this over 200 testimonies from a single killing unit that was absolutely crucial to this and then of course as i was working on the book the the day at yoseph what happened in that village becomes in a sense the pivotal point of the narrative because that's when trump first offers to the men they don't have to kill and that remains the operating procedure of the battalion thereafter and how that plays out how the battalion in a sense gradually divides into men who learn to enjoy killing other human beings who are called the eager killers men who would kill when they were asked but didn't seek opportunity to do so and men who either in the first day or thereafter at some point took up the majors offer and became what i call the evaders people who would participate in ghetto clearings and in cordons around shooting sites but wouldn't actually kill themselves wouldn't fire their rifle and shoot another human being directly even if they continued to the other kinds of supportive activities of the battalion that enabled it to to be a killing battalion have you afterwards found another kind of the sources about another event so richly documented like the yazar killing um i don't think we found any killing unit with that depth of sources and that's in a sense why goldhagen came to it as well because i think it is a kind of unique density or an unique intensity of sources uh for this particular unit but of course we now do have studied many other other police units we now have a comparative basis uh to to compare 101 with with other units and of course we've looked at the einsatzgruppen uh one and particularly german scholars have studied uh various uh enzymes group of a and interscripted d have you know very lengthy studies of each one uh so that uh we've done a fair amount now about individual killing units but in terms of the actual voices of the men in the unit i think this collection of testimonies for 101 still remains the single best source we have on getting into the experiential side uh recreating the experiences of the men themselves what made them so sincere in the testimonies comparing to other type of traits well at least initially the men who were conducting the investigation were a special commission because when they went up to investigate they found many of the people who would normally conduct the investigation police investigators were men who had been in 101 or knew people in 101 so they had to create an outside investigation so they had a number of very able people who who did this and were committed to doing it not all german investigators were committed to what they were doing but this was a group that was very committed very conscientious uh and and and very able and they more or less insured the rank and file that they were after the officers in a sense they said nothing will happen to you even if you confess to what you did and indeed none of the rank and file received any any prison sentence some of them were convicted but the judge then exercised discretion not to impose any punishment so i think he could get a large number to talk one because they were told there would be no judicial consequences but in america we call a plea bargain and and that they were very skillful and that many of the men did not like their officers so many of the trials we knew the officers they lied for one another but the men weren't willing to lie for their officers and often uh were quite willing to say bad things about them so i think all of that came together to create this very unique uh perspective a very unique sent a group of sources that could get us inside the unit you've mentioned daniel goldhagen book and the ordinary germans clearly a reply to the title of your book and his book began the best known the biggest debate following your book uh but not the only one there were several of them for example in the polish case the the the the the famous book by janto marsh gross the neighbors on the killing of jews in the advantage by the christian polish neighbors is also clearly in some ways follows your example by focusing on a single event in a small town with a very different group of paper traders so out of this many debates which one you see now from a perspective as contributing or bringing the most novel perspectives of what you had known before i would say for me the the most constructive criticism the one that i found most useful in how i proceeded uh was that of not an historian but a social psychologist leonard newman and he was replying to goldhagen's criticism of using social psychology uh but it also was a answer that i thought was very illuminating and useful for for all historians who are working in this field uh when gold hagan criticized my book they and became the the chief critic it it meant that we that we were assigned sort of binary opposite positions his was then viewed as the ideological cultural explanation and mine was the situational institutional explanation and i was accused of ignoring ideology well certainly he emphasizes ideology much more than i do i don't think i said ideology count i tried to present what i thought was a multi-causal explanation but certainly in weight of emphasis uh and his position in a sense got me positioned as being the one defending a kind of strictly situational organizational institutional response and what newman argued was that is a false dichotomy that is when men find themselves in a situation they are going to read that situation through the cultural lenses that the glasses they're wearing there's no such thing as a tabular rasa situation that everybody in it will see in the same way and so while the situational factors i talked about were very important people who are brought to that kind of situation will will understand their situation read their situation construct their situation depending upon the assumptions and the values and the perspectives they bring with them so they can't possibly do what they're doing in poland strictly as a response to situation their german cultural attitudes have to be included as well and so how we balance those uh and how we try to sort out what how much of what these men were doing were responding to what i would consider more universal aspects of human nature deference to authority conformity role adaptation how much to more german cultural uh factors that shaped the way in which they understood the situation they were in a more militarized society we're putting on a uniform has greater weight than in some other society so that role adaptation weighs heavier uh in a society that's totally anti-military obviously putting something in uniform creates a different situation than one in germany we're putting on a uniform uh really helps significantly shape how you think you are who you are and what you're doing and legitimizes in a sense behavior that you do wearing a uniform that you would never consider possible if you were a civilian so i thought that was very useful and then perhaps the the most constructive kind of criticism towards the way that argument between me and goldhagen had developed and one that i've tried to to to to absorb i think a second one related to methodology how do we use these testimonies all historical evidence is problematic i mean you can't just sort of accept it without thinking about what the nature of the sources are if we use nothing but problem unproblematic evidence historians couldn't write much history so the issue is understanding what the problems are with the particular source we're looking at and clearly when you are dealing with post-war judicial testimony given 20 years after the event you not only have problems of frailty of memory amnesia distortion reinvention of one's past which anybody interviewed 20 years after the fact is going to have but we also have traditional interference these men are going to lie because they're afraid of incriminating themselves so it's a doubly complicated kind of of evidence to use and so one of the real important disputes between me and goldhagen was the methodological issue of how do we use this complicated evidence which our post-war testimonies given in the judicial framework 20 years after the event that they're describing goldhagen's response was i will use that testimony that has no potential to be self-exculpatory i'll set up a very high bar and use the pure testimonies that cannot be in any way considered potentially self-exclusive so i won't be duped by i won't be taken in by any of the lives of these policemen and he said very explicitly i had not been careful enough i had been duped i had been suckered i had taken in much too much of the false self-serving testimonies of the man my my counter to that was the following that in fact if you look at this testimony they're kind of three bands they're the testimonies that are obviously mendacious that goaltegan and i would look at this and neither of us would have any trouble throwing it out is obviously false and the other testimonies that were so self-incriminating that we would both use it knowing that no one would say those things falsely to falsely self-incriminate themselves but there's a whole band of middle testimony in which many of the policemen tell some of the truth some of the time or even much of the truth much of the time but not all of the truth all of the time but is still so valuable because they're often not telling the truth about their own behavior but still telling the truth about what the battalion did and what their comrades did and what their unit did and to not use that testimony out of some sense of i only use pure evidence is i think a terrible mistake and part of the reason we differed so much is that uh he used testimony that was guaranteed in a sense by being so selective guaranteed to prove the thesis he was proposing if your if your thesis is that the german killers were all committed hardcore nazi anti-semites and they killed because they believed in what they were doing and wanted to do what they were doing and then you say i'm only going to take the testimony of those who admitted that they gave themselves heart mind heart soul and mind to hitler you can do no other than confirm the thesis that the evidence is supposed to test you screened out all the conflicting contrary evidence and you can't arrive at any other conclusion and what i think he did was to mistake the part for the whole he looked at the eager killers took their testimony and then said that was everybody but if you look at this broadband of middle testimony you get a much more varied picture and you get a much more nuanced picture and you get a picture that includes all sorts of reactions and responses and choices of the man that that covers an entire spectrum of behavior and so i think that methodological difference between us could explain why we looked at the same sources and came to such utterly different conclusions and i think my methodology was right and his was wrong and of course he's the opposite but i do think we were part of our debate helped us to at least flesh out how we were using the evidence in such different ways that would in effect lead to such different and conflicting conclusions this is a beautiful example of the benefits of this agreement between scholars so actually we can sharpen our argument we can make our understanding deeper and when you are listening this this this subtle nuances of of of methodology of using documents relating to to to horrible crimes i was thinking already about the debate we have had in poland for now almost 20 years about the non-german perpetrators polish christians but you know in other countries of eastern europe you have similar debates about lithuanian or ukrainian or slovak or hungarian mostly men who either as collaborators or on their own as bandits as killers as as black males somehow contributed to the jewish tragedy and we have really few sources and i cannot find a single source that could meet the the high standards of gold hagen that would be really completely reliable actually most of them are testimonies given to the communist interrogators in the late 1940s you know very different circumstances but my question is to what extent do you believe that you're finding that your way of thinking about it applies to those people who are not in uniforms who are not drafted to any army who are in a way self-selected either as collaborators or as or as bandits to what extent we can use your insights to better understand crimes committed against the jews but not ordinary germans not any germans at all but other east europeans yeah uh for my own work of course i had within the battalion a group of people from luxembourg so these were luxembourg policemen drafted into the order police after luxembourg is a next to germany so they are not products of german culture uh but come out of a very different background uh and uh it would seem at least uh several things one many of the luxembourg police refused to serve and they paid a penalty for that they wouldn't become part of the police of a conquering power but many others then volunteered to take the spots that had become open in the luxembourg police which they had wanted to get but there was no chance because it was a limited number now these openings a lot of people volunteered and eagerly joined so that you have a degree of volunteerism as well as the greater degree of coercion that is there was greater penalties if you left but there were opportunities that allowed people to volunteer and join as well and so i think uh that kind of paradox of both greater coercion on the one hand uh but also greater opportunities of volunteerism on the other characterize a lot of the east a lot of the european population in the choices they made to be accomplices alongside or collaborators with the germans uh in eastern europe i think in particular uh motives for instance of property the chance to lay their hands on the property of their of the of their jewish neighbors uh was a a factor greater than than the humber place uh i don't think the hamburg police particularly enriched themselves but i think that was a major motive for many uh collaborators uh in uh say the ukraine or or or lithuania or latvia uh certainly uh the the the political dynamics of uh the prior soviet occupation and then at least john gross has suggested some of them had to cover their tracks as if they had compromised themselves earlier the best insurance that you could take out was to now join the germans in doing their worst dirty work uh to make sure nobody could accuse you of uh a past uh suspicious political you know standing uh so it was a kind of a way of of covering for past deeds that now suddenly had made you liable or vulnerable so there's a lot of there's a lot of different factors at play for east european collaborators that weren't at play for the german policemen nonetheless i think that it is still useful to to look at the broader issue of not trying to read these people as individual sadists an individual psychopaths but still looking at the issue of how ordinary people in eastern europe reacted to the series of events that take place between 39 and 4142 that lead them to becoming killers on behalf of nazi germany it's certainly a different path than the german policeman and as i say i think there's maybe some more volunteerism and more coercion than you get with with the case of the of the german police but i still think we're talking about trying to explain people operating within a wider group dynamic we're not simply looking at a collection of individual psychopathic serial killers we are looking at a group dynamic uh of the village of the auxiliary police units the schustman chafton that are being created uh that will be crucial to understanding why they did what they did in that sense ordinary men would in my book would have a similar approach but it is a different story and there's different factors that are at play uh in terms of the auxiliary uh killers uh the east european collaborators but nonetheless i think the the approach uh in unpacking what that different situation is uh would still be valid do you think that we can apply the same i would say the perspective of social psychology not individual psychology but very social psychology situations also to the very different behavior this behavior of helping the jews or remaining passive in face of the top day tragedy to what extent can we explain it as i would say at a christian uh the expression of the christian principles of hyping thy neighbor who is in need and to what extent you would explain it again as situational yeah uh certainly when i teach my course on the holocaust we we focus first on sort of a history of anti-semitism and then the rise of nazi germany and development jewish policy but at the end i go and take about five or six different countries in order to show that what happened in those countries does come out of the indigenous history of that country in an interaction with uh nazi domination of europe so that the way in which the french and vichy regime behaves the way in which the romanians behave the way in which the danes behaved has to be understood in terms of the particular histories and situations of each of those of those countries so we have in a sense a number of different histories of of the whole each country has its own unique holocaust history we might say within the wider european-wide phenomenon in which germany is a major factor but the indigenous elements all have to be and taken into account in each geographical location uh so uh in that sense i think we we we do have to remember since we're we're trying to get this this balance between what you might say are the european wide factors what are the german factors and what are the local factors and there are all those are going to be present and questions what balance do we get there and of course the issue also is of what sources do we have we have sources for the germans for their policy making and their reports they're bureaucratic and they keep records the problem with looking at east european collaborators is we have so many fewer sources it's not nearly going to be documented as well and then we had a 40-year period in which you had some trials certainly the soviets did try a number of people particularly trovnikies and others but these had their their own problems and we couldn't even get at them uh those those sources until they'll tell you know much later uh so uh the the the need is there uh but i do think we have to to look at each region in its own right and at the same time as we try to fit it into the wider picture yeah i i i like your presentation very much when you said that there are some european factors like the the nazi policy in all of german dominated europe although i must stress that there were important differences in the nazi occupation policy like very harsh punishment including death penalty for any assistance extended to the jews in eastern europe like poland or ukraine but not so much in occupied france or netherlands so the stakes were higher in a sense but also speaking about incentives motivation to collaborate or to rob robbed the jews you know a pair of shoes were a highly valuable thing in the winter of 1943. so there were people who were killed because of the pair of shoes yeah well i i yeah i think i think economic material factors the temptation to be a parasite or beneficiary of the persecution of the jews for material benefit was the strong became stronger as you got into poorer and more impoverished areas uh and as you say uh you don't hear about killing for a pair of shoes in in france but it does uh happen in in the ukraine yes very much so in addition to the social psychology of of these perpetrators or or auxiliaries you have also the the the the economy of of of collaboration or the economy of the trial or the economy of helping the jews you know a very complexion of how you can feed a family you hide in your barn when you have limited resources and i think this is a this is a a future for the research because we have seen really significant progress in this field of research in the last last special last 20 years primarily in poland but also in some other european countries but i i see there is a we have a lot of things to do in the future and here i come to to my next question which is uh this field of perpetrator studies in a way which you are you know you're you're the founding father of this party for european research how do you see the future for it or at least the future of the perpetrator studies for the world war ii period what are the topics what are the methodologies you would advise younger scholars to take uh i would say the first change that is that has come on uh one of the one of the things that has developed particularly uh after after the goldhagen browning debate kind of ended and then where did people go from there was to take a much wider look at german culture beyond the narrow focus on anti-semitism i mean sort of the debate between goldhig and i was too narrowly focused on how anti-semitic were the killers and worked by people like thomas kuna who were looking on other aspects of german culture that the nazis could harness could co-opt and use for mobilizing people and he first worked on the issues of comradeship and folks coming shaft as being notions that had broad resonance in german society that could be weaponized by the nazi regime so effectively that are not so narrowly focused on anti-semitism but in fact are broader and help to explain a whole wider degree to which you could create a criminal regime that got you know so much of the german population actively supporting these policies that went well beyond just the murder of jews i mean we we know for instance the general planos was planning all sorts of uh that there were 30 to 40 million too many slavs that were going to have to disappear uh that the the the killing the jews was round one uh but that there was much that was going to follow so i think in that sense getting a broader sense of the regime's ability to mobilize ordinary germans for criminal activities while having them not being to use uh golden's term not because they wanted to do it but were nonetheless willing to do it without thinking of themselves as being criminal uh that that i think in this regard uh helmut walter uh with his work on reserve please pretend 45 thomas cuna with his work on folks mineshaft and uh and and comradeship uh have been for me uh i think the the the cutting edge where i think things uh things are going uh and and where i would see at least in terms of grassroots perpetrators where the most advanced most most progress i think has been made i'm glad you mentioned i'm glad you mentioned the the the the slavic targets of the nazi policies because actually the the first multi-million group of victims of of of germany uh in the horror were the soviet prisoners of war so even before the gas chamber started to operate you know two to 2.5 million soviet prisoners of wars will start to death yes yeah if if hitler had been assassinated in the spring of 1942 the greatest crime of the nazi regime would have been the murder of two million soviet pows in the first nine months of the war uh it is with the beginning of the clearing of the polish ghettos that the number of jewish victims then of course in the terrible year of 42 exponentially passes that of any other victim group under the nazis but up until 42 the the the jews were not the the singular victim or even the most numerous do you see that there was a relation between these other crimes like we you have written about the role of the youth so-called euthanasia program in preparation of the of the final solution uh now we have mentioned the fate of soviet prisoners of war do you see a casual relation between these crimes and the final solution i mean the the the holocaust uh i would say we see this in several ways certainly say between the euthanasia or t4 program of course you have uh the technology the use of carbon monoxide gas shifted from there the personnel is shifted uh and uh so that you've got a very direct kind of of connection there i think uh also important uh is the uh in a sense the crusade against bolshevism the crusade against uh seeing this isn't not both a race war and an ideological war for instance one one of the areas where i was working in was that not was the nazi occupation of yugoslavia and what happened in the summer fall of 1941 in serbia uh where once the once the the communists were you know no longer in a sense hindered by the nazi soviet non-aggression pact and then become ordered by stalin to raise as much resistance behind the lines uh you know after the nazi invasion of the soviet union the uprising in serbia begins primarily not exclusively but primarily as a as a communist partisan group and then others come in but the initial response of the german occupiers is of course to carry out these terrible reprisal policies where they liquidate uh 100 you know they kill 100 serbs for every german killed by the partisans so you have german units before they even start shooting jews have gone into a town like kaguyabots rounded up all the high school students and murdered hundreds of school kids uh they find out that when you shoot servers many of them then flee to the forests and join the partisans so they then switched to shooting jews who had been in camps and have the perfect alibi the one group in in serbia that could never have been involved in the uprising were jews because they had already been interned but they have to fill the quotas but we have this remarkable uh quote from the commander of the german army there where when he's ordering these initial punitive expeditions to punish the entire population as he puts it for the uprising before they begin shooting jews you must shoot everybody you know but the whole population must suffer uh to pay for this and then he says anyone who has in a sense false humanitarian inhibitions sins against the life of his comrades so what you've done is created an inverse moral world if you don't go out and kill unarmed civilians you are sinning against your comrade uh the real sin is is not shooting civilians rather than the real sin being the murderer of unarmed civilians and you created this utterly upside down moral universe in which basically only german life counts and nobody else's life has value even before you started killing jews then of course to take these people and turn them on to killing jews instead of serbs there's no problem uh you've already crossed the the rubicon you've already crossed the threshold uh but it's done and so unions have seen it's done initially against pfws and serbia is done against initially against all sorts of serves before they go on to exterminating the the jewish population so these things are interrelated uh and the ability to harness and get people to kill one group of of innocent people opens the door for them of course then to be used to kill any other group as well you have mentioned several countries affected by this moderate policy so you know i would like to go back to the to my initial question which was in a way geographic when you have a look at the map of europe during world war ii during the expansion of nazi germany heat less domination in europe what would be the darkest place the head of darkness of heatless europe you know i have invented a measure for it which is how many people there one thousand of local populations were killed in a given province or county or a region from your perspective what would you look for the darkest place in europe of that time um well probably either either northern ukraine or belarus at least eastern poland belarus northern ukraine i think it would be that that area there where you had both of course all sorts of devastation from the fighting but also uh devastating genocidal policies as well uh and roundups of vast numbers of slave labor that are sent off uh to to germany uh so vast enslavement as well as i mean i i don't i i forget was um the tim snyder say that sort of 25 percent of the bella russian population is dead by the end of the war uh the figure in serbia i think is is not that high but it's still alarmingly high something like 15 percent because they of course had a vicious partisans you know many-sided civil war going on of which the german occupation is part but also uh a large amount of killing of one ethnic group against another of course in in serbia croatia uh but certainly uh uh i guess my feeling is it would be in that in the in the bella russian volcanian ukraine area that you probably get the highest death rates of of total population so i'm i'm looking at my watch because i see that we have many questions coming from the from the audience so maybe i will give three minutes of of mime time to this many people who would like to uh ask them i see that we have we have people uh sending questions from all around the world actually you know from new zealand to to to to canada and of course from from europe so maybe i will give back the floor to elise who has been reading this this question thank you darius thank you christopher i don't even want to interrupt because all of us are actually glued to your conversation and we don't want to end it i think we've opened up many many many issues and we can see from all of the incredible questions the conversations that are going on among people on the chat is worth we will happily share with you because it's igniting both an intellectual and an emotional response from those of us who are sharing this program with you so several of the questions which you uh many you you alluded to you addressed you touched on um come from different people as you pointed out darius we have people from all over the world and people asking questions from very different perspectives very personal um perhaps more intellectual and let me just start off with a comment and ask for your one of you to respond one of our participants wrote one of my young university students let's say 20 30 years ago was shaken by browning's book he was in the canadian reserves perhaps as a cadet and he said he could see his unit acting like 101 for the sake of unit solidarity how does solidarity apply here you mentioned it christopher in terms of how things move forward i shouldn't say forward but move in these classical you know terrible environments and terrifying environments how might we respond to this young man or this gentleman who shared his well i think what we find is virtually every military around the world knows that small unit cohesion and small unit loyalty is at the very center of the upholding the morale and the fighting efficiency of any of any military force and that armies train this as part of the training of virtually every army uh i'm very gratified that at the all the military academies in the united states at one time or another have used ordinary men so that they are conscious of the need of the officers that they're training future officers to be aware of what the dark side of that is that while small group cohesion and unit solidarity is essential for military effectiveness uh one also must be aware of what abuse of that is potential is possible and what uh what militaries have to if if they don't want to sense ambulate uh 101 if they want to uh you know have a professional army that still accepts uh old-fashioned notions of chivalry and honor and that sort of thing that they have to be aware uh that they must counter that or balance that uh with uh making their men aware of such things as you don't have to follow criminal orders in fact you must not follow criminal orders and and uh to be aware that they still have to maintain their what i would call their moral autonomy even under military discipline thank you darius did you want to speak to that like making you please darius did you want to add something to chris's comments when i was actually when i was reading your book this almost 30 years ago it reminded me about my own military service because i did my military service back in communist poland i was drafted to the polish army and i remember exactly drafted it was not a professional army there was a you know compulsory military service for all young men and i was watching how we were being trained to become killers or daily killers you know military not not not shooting civilians but that was it was exactly this direction and it took our officers only a few weeks we began with shooting at a very abstract round target and a few weeks later we were using our kalashnikovs to to fire at targets looking like human figures and then you can automatize it and then i realized it's not so difficult maybe not everybody i suppose that some of my colleagues were not doing their best to really hit the target but in in the in massive armies the armies of the industrial era you don't need to make everyone into a killer you know just make a majority of the unit and then it works and then you have this dynamics which you have mentioned that some people find a pleasure in it probably and some others try to evade but they are also useful because they can have these auxiliary roles like you know clearing houses and doing things other than killing which are nevertheless necessary so uh i think the yeah i'm really glad that in the us army in the u.s academies you have you have cadets reading your book i i wonder if in the polish army the officers know it has as well i would advise it very strongly and especially as this is a part of polish history you know it happened in poland uh so it's not such a such a distant event you know far away from the united states for example thank you both um you give us much i would say food for thought as we think about it and we come to a question which i think many of us who are educators and whether it's on a university campus or in a community setting or a school are asking ourselves how do we transmit this using such extraordinary materials as your book chris or or the work that you've done dario the question that keeps coming up and sort of comes around is the word relevance and we were asked you're asked the following is there a way you might suggest explaining this phenomena to young students such that it would seem relevant to them and relevant being the operative word i guess i've never had students who didn't think it was relevant but i will qualify that my book was also used in uh by a a person in new orleans who was working on reforming reforming the new orleans police and she was running workshops and so she used ordinary men and she was telling me the story that some of the men came in and said oh it's a very good book but what does poland have to do with us they didn't uh see it as relevant to them so uh but but for students to sign up for the course uh i've never had them wonder about this because really i mean the crucial question is is that if you read the book and i think understand what it's saying you're understanding that what it's saying is that people like us can do this under certain circumstances it is not others and only others it is not only abnormal people that can become killers it is normal people ordinary people that can become killers and that is relevant to any ordinary person uh and so i i think uh that uh make sure that that that that part of that aspect of the book is understood if and and i haven't had trouble getting that conveyed thank you darius i was using chris book with my students actually and i had parallelly a class of polish students in the class of of foreign students you know we had incoming foreign students in my college and that was really interesting because it was more among my polish students that there was some resistance that means the idea that okay after all these were germans you know these were they they invaded our country you know every child in poland knows that germans during the war behaved horribly so it's not a surprise so telling them i was using you know the first person listen when i say that these were ordinary people i mean i could have been one of them okay under different circumstances this is basically for me the message and i was telling them how i was trained in the army to kill at targets looking like human beings and first i resisted but after like couple of weeks i was doing it it would say quite well and then when you're in action you don't have much time for thinking so there is all this dynamics and so initially there was some resistance especially among our my polish students but then when they got it when they got they really appreciated this insight i think that realizing the capacity for evil in ourselves is one of the greatest discoveries that we can make so after this initial reluctance there was a certain appreciation that i brought it to them i see now among the questions a question which i would actually i would like to ask please do forgot to ask it it's a question coming from about what these people did after the war how did they come back to the you know civilian life in west germany of the 50s and 60s that's a fascinating question and it's one that's a bit hard to answer because of course the interrogators did not focus on or ask them directly about that so it's only when uh occasional comments were made that seep into the record in a sense that i could get some take on that uh my one one question i always ask does these men have post-traumatic stress syndrome did they have you know real psychological problems in the period after the war and as far as i could tell no the men did not talk about having psychological problems after the war in part because virtually all the men coming back were coming back from the military service of some kind virtually all of them had witnessed terrible things virtually everybody in germany was not asking them what they did but was helping them to forget they were all framing themselves as the victims we're the victims of the red army and the rapes were the victims of the bombing we were the victims of the nazi dictatorship we were victims of everything so we can't be perpetrators if we're victims uh and so everybody agreed in a kind of collective amnesia and an eclectic and a kind of collective uh exculpation several things became apparent when they had to come back and talk about this in 1962. for many of the men this is the first time they had thought about it in years i remember one man's comment he says now that i'm coming in every day and being interrogated about this for the first time i'm having nightmares now i am having nightmares that cl there's been a collective amnesia about this and the society has supported a collective amnesia but when he's forced to come in and remember and talk then suddenly all of this comes up and for the first time he's having nightmares about what he had done 20 years ago i think the second thing that was very prevalent in the tone of the interrogations is not a tone of remorse not a tone of guilt but overall above all a tone of self-pity that in 1942 they were drafted and given the dirtiest job to do poor them and 20 years later somebody has changed the rules and is now interrogating them as potential criminals doubly poor them what a bad deal they got in life not a word about the victims not at all any identification with the victims and the people to whom they did things but a sense that they are really unlucky that they had such a bad draw of the cards in life to have been sent to poland to do this in 1942 and then to be punished for it in 1960s so i don't want to be the one to bring this extraordinarily provocative conversation to an end um chris and darius you've brought us to a new space i think certainly pulled us back into questions that uh we thought we answered or thought we had addressed and we i really want on behalf of toby jewish here tours toby center and our talk program to thank you both for this very stimulating conversation um before we finish and say our final thank yous i'd like to introduce very briefly the chief rabbi poland rabbi michael shudrick michael all right thank you very much really and thank you thank you at least thank you christopher thank you fascinating and um uh christopher i've never met we spoke briefly just before eight o'clock and i wanted to share with all of you something as a kind of um is a follow-up to the work that professor browning has done and uh and kind of like a little bit the old paul harvey the rest of the story in the very back of um professor browning's book appendix table one is the number of jews shot by reserve of police battalion 101 and there's a list of yo say it's district uh second woman district madonna pontia we started work here in through the rabbinic commission for cemeteries and uh the foundation memory uh everlasting memory about seven years ago trying to find unidentified mass graves and one of the first things that we had as a resource was your book professor browning and the appendix which told us these are places where jews were killed and when we started looking into it we discovered that basically none of them are commemorated and and we have to do research to find out where they you know it's somewhere in walmart but we're in uh and since that time we've slowly been able to do we've done walmasa we've done a place called la smugla which is outside of parchev and for me this is just unbelievable we actually put up and i'm not real good at screen sharing so i'm not going to try to do it to waste people's time but we've now succeeded in doing in two places and we fully intend to do in all the other places to to identify really where the jews are buried to put up a proper matsuvatum stone and at least to give these victims of this horrible murder a proper grave 80 years later thank you michael thank you rabbi shudrick so again chris darius thank you for opening up again this conversation bringing it to off of the bookshelf and into our reading space you've given us a lot of thoughts to consider a lot of issues that we as individuals and members of communities and members of societies and nations need to think about i hope that we will have the honor and pleasure of hosting you both again and you as well rabbi shudrick as we go through the conversations that deal with polish jewish history polish jewish life contemporary issues and issues from around the global world that have an impact on how we see the jewish legacy from poland and contemporary life so thank you all for joining us thank you dear audience for spending the time with us we hope that you've found this as provocative as we have and hope that you will join us again a couple just one word about our next event our next tjh talk session will be on november 18th our guests will be film makers agnieszka holland and roberta grossman and one last word on behalf of the team who i want to thank very much for making this all happen and bringing to you all around the world is that we rely on your contributions and support and hope that you will help our program go forward i hope you have a good rest of the week and we will see you next month thank you bye thank you thank you you

Channel: Taube Center for Jewish Life & Learning

Views: 5,558

Keywords: TJHTalks, Christopher Browning, Dariusz Stola, Holocaust, Ordinary Men, Browning, Work war 2, Jews

Id: HoLuhAW1RSI

Length: 58min 17sec (3497 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2020