OCR Document - Jeff's Readings



Understanding Evil: Week 3 Readings

Klee, Dressen, and Riess, “The Good Old Days”

From The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders (Konecky & Konecky, 1991)

Foreword

This is a horrible book to read, and yet one that should be read - not in order to revive old enmities (after all, it has been compiled by Germans and published in Germany), but in order that we do not forget the most somber lesson of the Second World War: the fragility of civilization, and the ease and speed with which, in certain circumstances, barbarism can break through that thin crust and even, if backed by power and sanctified by doctrine, be accepted as the norm. …

The particular significance of this book is that in it the facts are recorded not by Jewish survivors but by German witnesses: men who, by chance, or in the course of duty, or out of curiosity, observed the events as they occurred and made a record, sometimes a photographic record, of them. Such records were strictly forbidden at the time - the SS did not want any evidence of its work to survive - and one witness at least, SS-Untersturmfuhrer Max Tiiubner, got into serious trouble for taking photographs… ‘such photographs, in the wrong hands, could pose 'the gravest risks to the security of the Reich'.

The verbal and written records come from various sources: post-war interrogations, contemporary official documents, but also - and psychologically perhaps the most revealing - private diaries and letters in which SS men describe, for their wives, children and mistresses, their exploits in the Judenaktionen. …

The 'Final Solution' was carried out in overlapping stages of progressive rationalization. At first, the victims were rounded up by mobile Einsatzkommandos and killed mainly by shooting; later they were transported to fixed concentration camps, to be worked to death and gassed. The Einsatzkommandos were organized in four Einsatzgruppen and operated closely behind the advancing German armies, but under distinct SS command. The army commanders had no jurisdiction over them, and were happy to leave such dirty work to them. The SS, in their turn, were happy to pass much of it on to the natives, under their direction. This occurred especially in the Baltic states, where the natives sought revenge against the 'Jewish Bolshevism' from which the German armies had liberated them. Later, when the fixed extermination camps had been completed, the Jews of all occupied Europe were brought to them in the trains organized by Adolf Eichmann. But the change from mobile to fixed killing centres, from shooting to gas, was not sudden or complete: shooting continued to the end, whereas the gas chambers were destroyed when the prospect of a German retreat threatened to reveal their existence to the enemy. …

How did the ordinary Germans look upon these grisly killings which they carried out or watched? At first there was some apprehension: if the war should be lost, it was said, surely there would be a heavy price to pay. But that stage soon passed: the war was not going to be lost - indeed, it seemed, it had already been won. …

One means of achieving these results was to devolve all the nastiest and most degrading jobs on to 'inferior' races 'in order to preserve the psychic balance of our own people'. That meant using Poles, Balts, Ukrainians, and of course Jews, who were going to be killed anyway. Another was to discover 'a better method of killing'. 'Better' meant tidier, cheaper, quicker, applicable to ever greater numbers, and, above all, less distressing to the executioners. The answer found was gas.

The shift from shooting to gas leads us into the very centre of Hitler's personal policy, 'The Fuhrer's Chancellery', where a special department known as T4 had organized the ‘Euthansia Programme’, the killing by gas, at installations in Germany, of the insane and incurably ill. … The method adopted was, first, by mobile gas vans, then by fixed gas chambers in a remote part of the 'General Government' of Poland. …

The Jews were pushed into the van; the driver started up the engine; as he drove, the poisonous fumes were discharged into the van; and when he reached his destination, which was the burial dump, all the Jews were already dead. … But others found inconveniences in it. The screams of the slowly suffocated Jews in the closed van behind him disconcerted the driver, and those who had to unload the bodies, with distorted faces and covered with excrement, complained that it was 'no pretty business'. So the method was abandoned. The fixed gas chambers, on the other hand, were a dreadful success. They too were the work of T4 experts… they avoided all the disadvantages of older systems. They were more rational, more economic, less public - no survivors' stories (because there were no survivors), no horrible photographs to endanger the security of the Reich - and also less harrowing, or degrading, to the Herrenmenschen, who could parade with their riding-whips (a coveted status symbol) and leave the nastiest jobs to the Affenmenschen, 'the ape-men', the expendable Jews.

They were also positively useful: useful to the industrialists who could exploit the labour of those on the waiting-list for death, useful to the SS doctors, who could experiment on such vile bodies, alive or dead. …

Introduction

'Those were the Days' ('Schone Zeiten') was a caption in the photograph album belonging to the last commandant of Treblinka [Kurt Franz]. Underneath the heading were pictures of the extermination camp where at least 700,000 people were sent to the gas chambers. … What kind of men were these who accepted murder as their daily work? They were perfectly ordinary people, with one difference: they could act as members of the ‘master race'. They decided whether a person lived or died, they had power. Hitherto undreamt-of chances for promotion revealed themselves. There were pay bonuses, extra leave and privileges such as alcohol and cigarettes. And at all times a sense of power, for the state was happy to remove all sense of personal responsibility from them. …

Of course, there were isolated protests from the Wehrmacht, the armed forces. … The Oberbefehlshaber Ost - commander of the eastern territories - deplored the free rein given to pathological and bestial instincts. Executioners suffered breakdowns, a number committed suicide (in some units gas vans were used for the executions in order to spare the executioners, a method which further increased the torment of the victims). There were even members of the SS and police who refused to carry out orders to murder. Despite all the propaganda, they did not see Jews as vermin but as fellow human beings, and could not shoot defenseless, innocent people. As a result they were branded cowards or weaklings and on Himmler's orders were transferred to other units or replaced. Contrary to the myth nobody was shot or sent to a concentration camp for refusing to murder Jews. …

Not everybody who is given a say in this book is a 'perpetrator' in the strictly judicial sense of the word. Many were only small cogs in the overall murder machinery, for example people who assisted in transporting the victims or cordoning off the execution areas. … To say nothing of those who gawped at the murder of the Jews out of curiosity or watched stunned. But they were all, like it or not, accessories. …

‘The brutalization … of precious German manpower’: The occupation of Poland

Notes of Eastern Territories Commander, Johannes Blaskowitz:

It is wholly misguided to slaughter some 10,000 Jews and Poles as is happening at the moment. Such methods will eradicate neither Polish nationalism nor the Jews from the mass of the population. On the contrary, the way in which the slaughter is being carried out is extremely damaging, complicates the problems and makes them a great deal more dangerous than they would be if dealt with by a well-considered and decisive policy. The effects are:

(a) It is hard to imagine there can be more effective material in the entire world than that which is being delivered into the hands of enemy propaganda. The foreign broadcasts have hitherto covered only a tiny fraction of what has actually occurred. We have to face the fact that outcry from overseas is continuously on the increase causing very great political damage, particularly since the atrocities did indeed take place and cannot be disproved in any way.

(b) The acts of violence carried out in public against Jews are arousing in religious Poles not only the deepest disgust but also a great sense of pity for the Jewish population, while formerly the Poles' attitude towards the Jews was fairly hostile. Very soon we will reach a point where our arch enemies in the Eastern Territories - the Pole and the Jew with the backing of the Catholic Church – will be united in their hatred against their German torturers.

(c) The effects on the role of the Wehrmacht need hardly be mentioned. It is forced to watch these crimes without being able to do anything. It has irreparably lost a considerable amount of respect especially among the Polish population.

(d) The worst damage, however, affecting Germans, which has developed as a result of the current circumstances, is the tremendous brutalization and moral depravity which is spreading rapidly among precious German manpower like an epidemic.

If high-ranking SS and police officials demand and openly praise acts of violence and brutality, before long people who commit acts of violence will predominate alone. It is surprising how quickly such people join forces with those of weak character in order, as is currently happening in Poland, to give rein to their bestial and pathological instincts. It would still just be possible to keep them in check. They clearly feel they are being given official authorization and that they are thus justified to commit any kind of cruel act.

The only way to ward off this epidemic is to make those that are guilty and their followers answerable to the military authorities and to justice as quickly as possible. . . .

‘Each time a victim was beaten to death they started to clap”: Progroms in Kaunas and elsewhere in Luthuania

'Initially difficult to set a pogrom in motion': Report by head of Einsatzgruppe A:

[Within] a few hours of our entering the city, local anti-Semitic elements were induced to engage in pogroms against the Jews, despite the extremely difficult conditions. In accordance with orders the security police were bent on solving the Jewish question with extreme firmness using all the ways and means at its disposal. It was thought a good idea for the security police not to be seen to be involved, at least not immediately, in these unusually tough measures, which were also bound to attract attention in German circles. The impression had to be created that the local population itself had taken the first steps of its own accord as a natural reaction to decades of oppression by the Jews and the more recent terror exerted by the Communists. …

'Cheers and laughter' Mass murder in Kovno: Report of an Oberst:

… While I was traveling through the town I went past a petrol station that was surrounded by a dense crowd of people. There was a large number of women in the crowd and they had lifted up their children or stood them on chairs or boxes so that they could see better. At first I thought this must be a victory celebration or some type of sporting event because of the cheering, clapping and laughter that kept breaking out. However, when inquired what was happening I was told that the 'Death-dealer of Kovno' was at work and that this was where collaborators and traitors were finally meted out their rightful punishment! When I stepped closer, however, I became witness to probably the most frightful event that I had seen during the course of two world wars.

On the concrete forecourt of the petrol station a blond man of medium height, aged about twenty-five, stood leaning on a wooden club, resting. The club was as thick as his arm and came up to his chest. At his feet lay about fifteen to twenty dead or dying people. Water flowed continuously from a hose washing blood away into the drainage gully. Just a few steps behind this man some twenty men, guarded by armed civilians, stood waiting for their cruel execution in silent submission. In response to a cursory wave the next man stepped forward silently and was then beaten to death with the wooden club in the most bestial manner, each blow accompanied by enthusiastic shouts from the audience. …

It was, however, explained to me that they were apparently a spontaneous action on the part of the Lithuanian population in retaliation against the collaborators and traitors of the recently ended Russian occupation. …

Report of a sergeant-major from 562nd Bakers' Company:

... I think it must have been one day after we had arrived in Kovno that I was informed by a driver in my unit that Jews were being beaten to death in a nearby square. Upon hearing this I went to the said square. … In the square I saw civilians, some in shirtsleeves, others wearing other types of clothing, beating other civilians to death with iron bars. I was not able to tell whether the victims were Jews. Someone, however, remarked at the time that these were the Jews who had swindled the Lithuanians before the Germans had arrived. I heard from some soldiers standing near by, whom I questioned, that the victims were being beaten to satisfy a personal desire for vengeance.…

I watched as a group of offenders were beaten to death and then had to look away because I could not watch any longer. These actions seemed extremely cruel and brutal. A great many German soldiers as well as Lithuanians watched these people being beaten to death. The soldiers did not express assent or disapprobation for what was happening. They did not interfere one way or the other. The Lithuanian civilians could be heard shouting out their approval and goading the men on. …

Report of a further member of 562nd Bakers' Company:

… Naturally I asked who the men doing the beating were. Apparently they were Latvian [sic] freedom fighters. I could not comprehend this. The people who were making sure no one entered the square were wearing armbands and carried carbines. At no time were any shots fired. Standing round the square were members of the Wehrmacht, like me. We could not believe what was happening and after some time we went away. I could only watch the incident up to when the next group of people were beaten to death. Then I had to leave the square because I could not watch any more. My friends left with me.

Report of a medical orderly:

… The bodies were thrown into a large crater that had a diameter of 15 m and was, I should think, about 3-4 metres deep. Each layer of bodies was covered with chloride of lime. People used to say that the next group of Jews always had to throw the last lot to be shot into the crater and cover them with sand. I only went up to this crater once but couldn't see any bodies because everything was covered with sand. …

On this occasion a Jewish woman of about thirty ran across my path. She had been shot through both cheeks and the wounds had swollen up considerably. Seeing the red cross on my armband she begged me for a bandage, which I wanted to give her. I was just busy getting the pack of dressings I'd brought with me out of my jacket when an SS or SD guard with a rifle came up to me and told me to make myself scarce, saying that the Jewess had no further need of a pack of dressings. The Jewish woman was then pushed back by the uniformed German.

I was very shaken by this experience and told my colleagues about it - they were shaken too. It would have been pointless and dangerous for me to have disobeyed the SS man - they were very ruthless. He threatened to shoot me down if I didn't get on my way. During my visits to the fort I estimate I saw at least 2,000 people of different ages, both male and female, who were all destined to be shot and indeed certainly were. The people in the pictures are only a small proportion of those shot.

'If they get their revenge, we're in for a hard time'

A driver's statement:

The firing squad, which was made up often men, positioned itself at the side of the path, about six to eight metres in front of the group. After this, as far as I recall, the group was shot by the firing squad after the order was given. The shots were fired simultaneously so that the men fell into the pit behind them at the same time. … From our vantage point we could see into the pit and were therefore able to confirm that the (approximately) 400 Jews who had been shot the previous day were also in there. … After about one hundred Jews had been shot, other Jews had to sprinkle sand over their bodies. After the entire group had been executed the firing-squad put their rifles to one side.

This gave me an opportunity to talk to one of them. I asked him whether he could really do such a thing just like that, and pointed out that the Jews had done nothing to him. To this he answered, 'Yes - after what we've gone through under the domination of Russian Jewish Commissars, after the Russians invaded Lithuania, we no longer find it difficult.' During the course of our conversation he told me that he had been suspected of spying by the Russians. He had been arrested and had been thrown in and out of various GPU prisons, although he was in no way guilty. He told me he had only been a lorry-driver and had never harmed a soul. … He went on to tell me that a Jewish Commissar had broken into a flat, tied up a man and raped his wife before the man's very eyes. Afterwards the Commissar had literally butchered the wife to death, cut out her heart, fried it in a pan and had then proceeded to eat it. …

At the time I said: 'May God grant us victory because if they get their revenge, we're in for a hard time.'

Co-driver's statement:

… The leader of the Lithuanians spoke good German and we went up to him and asked what was going on, saying that this was a downright disgrace. He explained to us that he had once been a teacher at a German school in Konigsberg. For this the 'Bolsheviks' had torn out his fingernails. … Why they were now shooting these Jews, if indeed this Lithuanian's story corresponded with the truth, which I found highly improbable, and whether these particular Jews 'were the ones who had been involved in that action, he did not tell us. …

I would also like to say that we all said to one another what on earth would happen if we lost the war and had to pay for all this. …

‘Pushed to their psychological limits’: Members of the Einsatzgruppen on the stresses and strains of killing

Problems during mass shootings: 'If the victims didn't do as they were told…’

Affidavit of Otto Ohlendorf, Head of Einsatzgruppe D:

… When the German army advanced into Russia I was the commander of Einsatzgruppe D in the southern sector and during the year that it was under my command it liquidated about 90,000 men, women, and children. The majority of those liquidated were Jews but there were also some Communist officials amongst them. … In Einsatzgruppe D I never sanctioned shootings by individuals. I always gave orders for several people to shoot simultaneously, in order to avoid any individual having to take direct, personal responsibility.

Gustave Fix, member of Sonderkommando 6:

I would also like to mention that as a result of the considerable psychological pressures, there were numerous men who were no longer capable of conducting executions and who thus had to be replaced by other men. On the other hand, there were others who could not get enough of them and often reported to these executions voluntarily.

Tatigkeits- und Lagebericht, No. 1, 31 July 1941:

All the men coped with the tough physical stress well. No less considerable were the extreme psychological demands made on them by the large number of liquidations. The morale and self-possession of the men was kept up by personally reminding them constantly of the political necessity [of what they were doing].

Statement of Schutzpolizist Togel, member of Einsatzkommando 10a:

… The victims - several hundred, or even a thousand, men and women - were transported in trucks. I cannot recall whether there were any children. These people were made to lie or kneel about a hundred metres from the well in a depression which had been hollowed out by the rain and remove their outer garments there. They were lined up ten at a time at the side of the well and were then shot by a ten-man execution squad, which included myself. When they were shot the people fell forwards into the well. Sometimes they were so frightened that they jumped in alive. The firing-squad was switched a great many times. Because of the psychological pressures to which I too was exposed during the shooting I can no longer say today, try as I might, how many times I stood by the hole and how many times I was relieved from that duty.

Obviously these shootings did not proceed in the calm manner in which one can discuss them today. The women screamed and wept and so did the men. Sometimes people tried to escape. … The execution area was a terrible sight. The ground round the well was covered in blood; there were also bits of brain on the ground which the victims had to step in when they were brought over. …

Something I still remember clearly about this execution is that afterwards the SD people got drunk, so they must have received a special ration of schnapps. We Schutzpolizisten did not receive anything and I remember that we were very angry about that. …

Statement of teleprinter engineer Kiebach, Einsatzgruppe C:

In Rovno I had to participate in the first shooting. . . . Each member of the firing-squad had to shoot one person. We were instructed to aim at the head from a distance of about ten metres. I can no longer say today who gave the order to fire. At any rate it was a staff officer. There were a number of staff officers present at the shooting. The order to fire was 'Ready to shoot, aim, fire!' The people who had been shot then fell into the grave. I myself was detailed to the firing-squad; however, I only managed to shoot about five times. I began to feel unwell, I felt as though I was in a dream. Afterwards I was laughed at because I couldn't shoot any more. … It was obvious that I was in no state to go on shooting. The nervous strain was too great for me. When I am asked whether I was reprimanded for my refusal, I have to say that this was not the case.

Statement of Kurt Werner, member of Sonderkommando 4a:

… The marksmen stood behind theJews and killed them with a shot in the neck. I still recall today the complete terror of the Jews when they first caught sight of the bodies as they reached the top edge of the ravine. Many Jews cried out in terror. It's almost impossible to imagine what nerves of steel it took to carry out that dirty work down there. It was horrible. I had to spend the whole morning down in the ravine. For some of the time I had to shoot continuously. … Afterwards we were taken back to our quarters. That evening we were given alcohol- (schnapps) again.

'A new and better method of killing had to be found': Gas Vans

Statement by August Becker, Ph.D., Gas-Van Inspector:

…I had been working as a specialist in the gassing processes involved in exterminating the mentally sick in the mental asylums and sanatoriums. Since this action had been suspended a short time before - I do not know why [gassings were suspended: the murders continued by means of drugs - Ed.] … Himmler wanted to deploy people who had become available as a result of the suspension of the euthanasia programme, and who, like me, were specialists in extermination by gassing, for the large-scale gassing operations in the East which were just beginning. The reason for this was that the men in charge of the Einsatzgruppen in the East were increasingly complaining that the firing squads could not cope with the psychological and moral stress of the mass shootings indefinitely. I know that a number of members of these squads were themselves committed to mental asylums and for this reason a new and better method of killing had to be found. … When in December 1941 I was transferred to Rauff's department he explained the situation to me, saying that the psychological and moral stress on the firing squads was no longer bearable and that therefore the gassing programme had been started. …

SS-Standartenfuhrer Walter Rauff:

I cannot say whether I had misgivings about the use of gas-vans. What was uppermost in my mind at the time was that the shootings were a great strain on the men involved and that this strain would be removed by the use of the gas-vans.

Statement of Wilhelm Findeisen:

… One of the officers said to me, 'Findeisen, shoot these people in the neck.' I refused to do this as did the other men. The girl must have been about eighteen or nineteen. The officer shot the people himself as the others refused. He swore at us and said we were cowards, but apart from that he did not do anything else. …

'Quite happy to take part in shootings': Forced to obey orders - the myth

A police official from Neu-Sandez Grenzpolizeikommissariat:

Members of the Grenzpolizeikommissariat were, with a few exceptions, quite happy to take part in shootings of Jews. They had a ball! Obviously they can't say that today! Nobody failed to turn up … I want to repeat that people today give a false impression when they say that the actions against the Jews were carried out unwillingly. There was great hatred against the Jews; it was revenge, and they wanted money and gold. Don't let's kid ourselves, there was always something up for grabs during the Jewish actions. Everywhere you went there was always something for the taking. The poor Jews were brought in, the rich Jews were fetched and their homes were scoured.

Auxiliary policeman from Einsatzkommando Stalino:

It was made clear to us that we could refuse to obey an order to participate in the Sonderaktionen ['special actions'] without adverse consequences.

A member of Third Squadron Mounted Police, section III, on executions of Jews in Hrubieszow:

… The Jews were unloaded within the barracks compound behind the prison camp, where the Russian prisoners of war were held, and were to be shot close by to where we were. As I was absolutely opposed to this action, I went and stood behind the lorry in which the Jews had been brought. I did not think I had to take part in the shooting. However, Meister Kozar found me standing there and ordered me to take part in the execution as had been previously planned. I refused, because I had no desire to shoot defenseless people. I had no wish to become a murderer. I said this to Kozar and he did not press me further to carry out this order. …

I did not experience any disadvantage as a result of refusing to be involved in the shooting. Although I said to Kozar that he could send me to the front or anywhere else but that I would not shoot any defenseless Jews, there were no such consequences. How many Jews were shot I do not know.

A member of Third Police Battalion 307 on an execution in Brest-Litovsk:

I too was to have been detailed to an execution squad. I received this order either from Leutnant Kayser or from the platoon sergeant, Zugwachtmeister Steffens. I was very disturbed by the sight of the execution areas. I therefore refused to take part in the execution. Nothing happened to me as a result of my refusal. No disciplinary measures were taken; there were no court-martial proceedings against me because of this.

A police reservist (First Reserve Police Battalion 69) on his refusal to take part in cordon duty during a Jewish action:

In the few weeks when I was in Vinnitsa one of these executions took place there. … For this reason I and some of the other men went to see our sarge, Raderschatt, and asked to be released from having to take part in this action. Although Raderschatt made some scathing remark about my request, he nevertheless gave his permission. Instead I had to do an extra guard duty. I was naturally only too happy to do this swap. Afterwards I did not experience any negative consequences whatsoever as a result.

A police Oberwachtmeister from Police Battalion 322:

Sometimes some of the men refused to participate in shootings. I myself refused a few times. None of my superiors took any action against me and the same applied to other people who refused to carry out orders. We were just assigned different duties. We were not threatened with any kind of punishment, certainly not where the executions were concerned.

An SS-ScharfOhrer and Kriminal-Assistent from Kolomea Grenzpolizeikommissariat:

The only answer I can give to the question what could I have done to be released from taking part in such actions is: there was nothing I could do. During the actions I kept as much in the background as possible, far away from the shootings. There was nothing else I could do. I did not ask Leideritz to be released from certain duties and be given guard duties instead. The reason I did not say to Leideritz that I could not take part in these things was that I was afraid that Leideritz and others would think I was a coward. I was worried that I would be affected adversely in some way in the future if I allowed myself to be seen as being too weak. I did not want Leideritz or other people to get the impression that I was not as hard as an SS-Mann ought to have been. …

I carried out orders not because I was afraid I would be punished by death if I didn't. I knew of no case and still know of no case today where one of us was sentenced to death because he did not want to take part in the execution of Jews. … I thought that I ought not to say anything to Leideritz because I did not want to be seen in a bad light, and I thought that if I asked him to release me from having to take part in the executions it would be over for me as far as he was concerned and my chances of promotion would be spoilt or I would not be promoted at all. That is what I thought at the time and that is why I did not say anything to Leideritz.

A police reservist from Third Police Battalion 91:

… Ahrens requested twenty volunteers for an execution that had been planned. No one responded. Ahrens repeated his request. Only after he had asked a further time did the first hands go up timidly. He did not however get his twenty, so Ahrens said, 'Since we're not getting anywhere I'll have to pick them myself.' Whereupon he walked along the ranks of the assembled company and picked out people at his own discretion. When he got to me I tried to make myself inconspicuous because I wished to avoid under any circumstances taking part in the execution squad. Ahrens could see that immediately. He asked my name, which I gave him. He then detailed me for the execution squad. Without hesitation I asked whether he would allow me to be excused from taking part as I could not shoot defenseless people. …

Ahrens called me a coward and a sissy and the like. He reprimanded me for unsoldierly conduct etc. It was only when Meister Neubauer whispered something to him, which I could not catch, that he declared he was prepared to release me from execution-squad duty, but he ordered me to stand guard right by the hole (mass grave) in order to harden me up. I did not try to go against this order. Ahrens was probably just trying to show me that a soldier has to do everything he is ordered to do. Finally he said scornfully, 'He is not even worthy of that kind of duty,' by which he wanted to emphasize my uselessness for 'tough action'.

A Kriminalsekretar to the Commander of the Security Police and SD in Riga:

Question: Could you say what disciplinary measures would have probably been taken against Security Police and SD men who refused to take part in shootings of Jews or the planning or running of such operations, or who refused to order such shootings against the will of the Estonia Sicherheitspolizei and SD commander?

Answer: Not a lot. I never knew of such a case at the KdS in Estonia.

An SS-Hauptscharfuhrer and Kriminalangestellter:

When the executions of the Jewish population started in an organized way, people in our branch were saying that no one was obliged to take part in a shooting if he could not reconcile it with his conscience. Allegedly there was an order by Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler to the effect that no one could be forced to participate in a shooting. …

Raschwitz was already pretty drunk. He ordered me to go to the grave and to shoot Jews there with my pistol. I, however, refused to comply with this order. I gave no reason but just said that I would not do It. Raschwitz then hurled some abuse at me. I still remember the expression he used: 'You Austrian swine.' Apart from that he also, as I recall it, used the word 'coward' and other terms of abuse. He then sent me back to the lorries. Apart from that Raschwitz did not do anything else. At any rate I was not taken to any further shootings and was left in peace.

A member of Einsatzgruppe A:

… After the first wave of shootings it emerged that the men, particularly the officers, could not cope with the demands made on them. Many abandoned themselves to alcohol, many suffered nervous breakdowns and psychological illnesses; for example we had suicides and there were cases where some men cracked up and shot wildly around them and completely lost control. When this happened Himmler issued an order stating that any man who no longer felt able to take the psychological stresses should report to his superior officer. These men were to be released from their current duties and would be detailed for other work back home. As I recall, Himmler even had a convalescent home set up close to Berlin for such cases. This order was issued in writing; I read and filed it myself. …

SS-Obersturmfuhrer Albert Hartl:

Question: As we know, during the Nuremberg trial, amongst other things, you testified that Einsatzgruppenfuhrer Thomas expressly gave the order that people who were either too weak or who could not reconcile themselves for reasons of conscience to take part in shooting should be sent back to Germany or be redeployed fur other duties. Please describe what happened and the context in which it happened.

Answer: SS-Gruppenftihrer Thomas was a doctor by profession; he was very preoccupied with the psychological repercussions of the Einsatz on his people. From my conversations with him I know that these effects took many different forms. There were people whose participation awakened in them the most evil sadistic impulses. For example, the head of one firing squad made several hundred Jews of all ages, male and female, strip naked and run through a field into a wood. He then had them mown down with machine-gun fire. He even photographed the whole proceedings. Without Thomas's knowledge these pictures fell into the hands of Army Group and they were delivered to him by the liaison officer. The Einsatze also had the reverse effect on some of the SS men detailed to the firing-squads. These men were overcome with uncontrollable fits of crying and suffered health breakdowns. … It also happened that one member of the Einsatzgruppe who had participated in mass shootings one night suddenly succumbed to a type of mental derangement and began to shoot wildly about him, killing and wounding several men.

On one occasion Thomas asked me whether I would be prepared to take over command of a firing-squad. I replied that this was completely out of the question. Thomas answered that in his view no man should be forced to do this extremely difficult job, which brought with it enormous psychological conflicts and that he had given very clear instructions to this effect. From my position as head of Abteilung I (Staffing) I also know that a number of SS officers and men were sent back to serve at home on account of their great weakness. …

Question: Was it possible to refuse to take part in a shooting in Einsatzgruppe C?

Answer: In my experience it depended very much on the mentality of the individual commanders of a particular Einsatzgruppe. Thomas was, as I said, a doctor. Some of the individual Einsatzgruppe heads were lawyers, like Dr Stahlecker, some were academics, like Professor Dr Six, who I think lives in either Heidelberg or Darmstadt, or some were economists like Ohlendorf. Some of them were very ambitious and they wanted to report the highest possible shooting figures to Berlin; then there were others who sabotaged the order to shoot as far as possible when the true significance of their squad assignment became clear to them, in order to report back from the Einsatz after a shorter time. An example of the latter type was Brigadeftihrer Schultz, who, as he told me himself, was against these mass shootings and thus very soon gave up the command of his Einsatzkommando, which if I remember correctly was stationed in the Lemberg [Lvov] area. As far as I know, he did not suffer any serious consequences as a result. It was, however, clear that as a general rule such people could not expect to be promoted in the foreseeable future. …

I do not know of any case where the commanding officer of a Kommando . . . was sent to a concentration camp or sentenced to death. At worst he would find his promotion blocked or he would be given a punishment transfer. … In my experience, amongst the lower ranks there was not so much an objective necessity to obey orders, more of a subjective one.

To the Comrades from Troop Welfare:

Vinnitsa, the town on the edge of the Bug,

is famed throughout the world.

Nobody could hear its name without terror.

Through murder and sadism at the hands of the Jews

the Ukrainian land was tainted.

These vile deeds were allowed to go on completely unhindered

as even the most courageous were afraid-

the same could have happened to us.

But he who has seen this pest with his own eyes

stands firm for ever more.

And then you came, comrades of one blood,

brought with you German, holy goodness,

the fearless will to live.

You brought cheer, good spirits in the most difficult of times,

how full you make our hearts.

We saw two worlds

and will allow only one to hold sway,

this we have sworn to the Fuhrer;

a peace which our sword protects,

a peace which serves our people.

A war correspondent on the 'unfortunate' murderers:

… As a journalist what interests me are the people who had to carry out such an action and I had the opportunity to study these people closely. The reason … is that I saw SD personnel weeping because they could not cope mentally with what was going on. Then again I encountered others who kept a score-sheet of how many people they had sent to their death. During the course of long conversations I learned that they had been ordered to join this firing-squad and that there was nothing left for them but suicide, and that some indeed had already committed suicide. They said that if they refused they themselves would have been shot or sent to the Sonderkommandos, where their days would be numbered. Death was certain for them, they said, and they would not survive the war since such afflicted people would never be permitted to return to the homeland. I spoke for a long time with these unfortunate people. …

Who today can determine which were those who wept as they carried out their duties and which the ones who kept a score-sheet? …

‘Practical work for our Fuhrer’: Daily life during the Holocaust

Dear Herr Lieutenant-General Querner,

… We men of the new Germany have to be very tough with ourselves even when we are forced by circumstances to be separated from our families for quite a long time. This is the case right now. We have to settle up with the war criminals once and for all so that we can build a more beautiful Germany for our children and our children's children. We're certainly not being idle here: three or four Actions a week. First gypsies then Jews, partisans and other such riff-raff. …

I do not know whether you too, Herr Lieutenant-General, saw such frightful Jewish types in Poland. I thank my lucky stars that I've now seen this mixed race for what it is. Then if life is kind to me I'll have something to pass on to my children. Sick with venereal disease, cripples and idiots were the norm. Materialists to the last in spite of everything. Everyone of them without exception said things like, 'Sei'mer Spezialisten, werd'n sie uns schiess'n nicht' ['We're specialists, you're not going to shoot us, are you?']. These were not human beings but ape people. …

Heil Hitler

Jacob, Meister der Gendarmerie

Letters of SS-Obersturmfuhrer Karl Kretschmer

Sunday, 27 September 1942

My dear Soska,

… How I'd like to be with you all. What you see here makes you either brutal or sentimental. …

As I said, I am in a very gloomy mood. I must pull myself out of it. the sight of the dead (including women and children) is not very cheering. But we are fighting this war for the survival or non-survival of our people. You back home, thank God, do not feel the full force of that. The bomb attacks have, however, shown what the enemy has in store for us if he has enough power. You are aware of it everywhere you go along the front. My comrades are literally fighting for the existence of our people. The enemy would do the same. … There is no room for pity of any kind. You women and children back home could not expect any mercy or pity if the enemy got the upper hand. …

O.U., 19 October 1942

Dear Mutti, dear children,

… We have to eat and drink well because of the nature of our work, as I have described to you in detail. Otherwise we would crack up. Your papa will be very careful and strike the right balance. It's not very pleasant stuff. … After all, fate permitting we Germans are the people of the future. The future depends on how we bring up our children and their understanding that all those who were killed in battle did not die in vain. So teach Dagi that she must study hard and always obey her parents and her teachers. Only a person who has himself firmly under control can judge or rule over others. …

If it weren't for the stupid thoughts about what we are doing in this country, the Einsatz here would be wonderful, since it has put me in a position where I can support you all very well. Since, as I already wrote to you, I consider the last Einsatz to be justified and indeed approve of the consequences it had, the phrase: 'stupid thoughts' is not strictly accurate. Rather it is a weakness not to be able to stand the sight of dead people; the best way of overcoming it is to it more often. Then it becomes a habit. … For the more one thinks about the whole business the more one comes to the conclusion that it's the only thing we can do to safeguard unconditionally the security of our people and our future. I do not therefore want to think and write about it any further. I would only make your heart heavy needlessly. We men here at the front will win through. Our faith in the Fuhrer fulfils us and gives us the strength to carry out our difficult and thankless task. For everywhere we go we are looked upon with some degree of suspicion. That should not however divert us from the knowledge that what we are doing is necessary. …

You deserve my best wishes

and all my love

Your Papa

Goldhagen, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” (Vintage, 1996)

Police Battallion 101 was divided into a battalion staff and three companies, with a total strength, if a gradually changing membership, of about five hundred men. The Battalion was led by Major Trapp. ...

Who were the men of Police Battalion 101? ... Since the men did not choose to join an institution known to be devoted to mass slaughter, the purpose here is not to seek the elements of their backgrounds that might explain their participation. Rather, assessing their backgrounds allows us to gauge how representative the men of Police Battalion 101 were of other Germans, and whether or not the conclusions drawn about them might also apply to their countrymen.

Police Battalion 101 was manned overwhelmingly by reservists, by men who were called to duty between 1939 and 1941, men who were not yet in any military or security institution, the men least likely to be martial in spirit and temperament. Of the 550 men who are known to have served in Police Battalion 101 during its genocidal stay in Poland, the birthdays of 519 are known. Their age profile was extremely old for a military or police institution. Their mean age, when their genocidal killing began, was 36.5 years old. Only 42 of them were younger than thirty, a measly 8.1 percent. That they were older is significant. They were not the impressionable, malleable , eighteen-year-olds that armies love to mold according to the institution's specified needs. These were mature men who had life experience, who had families and children. The overwhelming majority of them had reached adulthood before the Nazis ascended to power. They had known other political dispensations, had lived in other ideological climates. They were not wide-eyed youngsters ready to believe whatever they were told.

Social class, according to occupation, can be determined for 291 (52.9 percent) of the members of Police Battalion 101.9 They were distributed widely among all of the occupational groups in Germany, except for those forming the elite. Following a variant of the standard occupational classification system for Germany of this era, German society is divided according to a tripartite scheme of lower class, lower middle class, and elite. The elite formed a tiny upper crust in the society of less than 3 percent, with the overwhelming bulk of the people being divided between the lower and lower middle classes. Each class is further subdivided into occupational subgroups. The table below gives the occupational breakdown for Germany as a whole and for Police Battalion 101.

Compared to the German population as a whole, the men of Police Battalion 101 came more from the lower middle class and less from the lower class. This imbalance was due mainly to the unit's shortage, on the one hand, of unskilled workers compared to the general population, and its overabundance, on the other, of lower and intermediate employees from business and the government. Within the lower middle strata, the battalion was particularly lacking in farmers, which is not surprising, since the battalion was raised primarily from an urban environment. Its representatives of the elite, all nine of them, were in virtually identical proportion (3.1 percent) to that existing in the general population. All in all, the differences between the occupational profiles of Police Battalion 101 and Germany as a whole were not of great significance. ...

The most important characteristic of the battalion's men for assessing their actions and the degree to which they were, as a group, representative of German society-that is, ordinary Germans-is their degree of Nazification. This can be appraised by looking at their institutional affiliation, which, if imprecise, is the best indicator of Nazification beyond the degree to which most Germans were generally Nazified (particularly on the independent dimension of antisemitism). In short, how many men in Police Battalion 101 were members of the Nazi Party and of the SS? Of the 550 men, 179 were Party members, composing 32.5 percent of the battalion, which was not much greater than the national average. Seventeen of the Party members were also in the SS. An additional 4 were SS men who were not Party members. So, in sum, only 21, but 3.8 percent of the men, mainly reservists, were in the SS - a tiny percentage - which, though higher than the national average, is of no great significance for understanding this battalion's actions.

|Occupational Subgroup |% of Germany |% of PB 101 |

|Lower Class |54.6 |35.1 |

| Unskilled Workers |37.3 |22.0 |

| Skilled Workers |17.3 |13.1 |

|Lower Middle Class |42.6 |61.9 |

| Craftsmen |9.6 |7.6 |

| Nonacademic Professionals |1.8 |3.1 |

| Employees |12.4 |22.7 |

| Civil Servants |5.2 |20.3 |

| Merchants |6.0 |7.6 |

| Farmers |7.7 |0.7 |

|Elite Class |2.8 |3.1 |

| Managers |0.5 |0.3 |

| Higher Civil Servants |0.5 |0.3 |

| Academic Porfessionals |1.0 |0.3 |

| University Students |0.5 |0 |

| Entrepreneurs |0.3 |2.1 |

The major issue here, anyway, is not the percentage of these men who were Nazified according to institutional affiliation in comparison to the national average, and therefore how representative a sample these men form in this respect. It is those who had no Nazi or SS affiliation who are analytically the most significant people, because they (and the thousands like them in other police battalions) provide insight into the likely conduct of other ordinary Germans, had they too been asked to become genocidal killers. In this battalion, 379 men had no affiliation whatsoever with the major Nazi institutions. And it cannot even be concluded that Nazi Party membership meant for each person a higher degree of ideological Nazification than that which existed in the general populace, because many non-ideological reasons induced people to join the Party. ... Moreover, at the time of Police Battalion 101’s major killings, about seven million Germans could boast of membership in the Party, over 20 percent of the adult male German population. Being a meber of the Party was a rather ordinary distinction in Germany. Being a Nazi was "ordinary" in Germany. Thus, the most remarkable and significant fact is that 96 percent of these men were not in the SS, the association of the true believers. As a group, the men of Police Battalion 101 were not an unusually Nazified lot for German society. Overwhelmingly, they consisted of ordinary Germans - of both kinds - those who were in the Party and, especially, those who were not. ...

The men of Police Battalion IOI came predominantly from Hamburg and the surrounding region. ... Since the Hamburg region of Germany was overwhelmingly Evangelical Protestant, so too most of them must have been. ...

The relatively advanced age of these men is of significance. Many of them headed families and had children. Unfortunately, the data on their family status are partial and difficult to interpret. There are data on the marital status of only ninety-six of them. All but one, 99 percent, of them had wives. Almost three-quarters of them, seventy-two of the ninety-eight for whom data exist, had children at the time of the killings. ...

In forming this battalion, the Order Police drew on an ordinary population, distinguished chiefly by its advanced age and its status of not being enrolled in military service. Some of the men had been previously declared unfit for duty because of age or physical infirmities. In so doing, the regime was employing men who were among the least fit able-bodied men that it could find (both physically and by disposition) for staffing its roving police battalion. The men's advanced age brought with it longer histories of personal independence as adults, knowledge of other political orders, and the experience derived from having and heading families. ...

The Order Police filled out Police Battalion 101 with an inauspicious group. It nevertheless made little effort to hone these men, through physical or ideological training, into men bearing a more soldierly and Nazi attitude. In chorus, the men testify to the perfunctory nature of their training. Some men were drafted but weeks or days ahead of the beginning of the battalion's killing life, and were thrown directly into the genocidal fray. ...

The first order to kill Jews was communicated to the battalion's commander, Major Trapp, some short time before the operation's designated day. ...

Trapp's address to his men included general instructions for the conduct of the operation. The assembled Germans-whether they had learned on that morning or the night before about the phase in their lives that they were then initiating-understood that they were embarking on a momentous undertaking, not some routine police operation. They received explicit orders to shoot the most helpless Jews - the old, the young, and the sick, women and children - but not men capable of doing work, who would be spared. Did these ordinary Germans want to do it? Did any of them mutter to themselves, as men, including those in uniform, often do when they receive onerous, disagreeable, or unpalatable orders, that they wished they were elsewhere? If they had, then the continuation of Trapp's address was for them a godsend. Their beloved commander, their "Papa" Trapp, gave them a way out, at least initially to the older battalion men. He made a remarkable offer: "As the conclusion of his address, the major put the question to the older battalion members of whether there were among them those who did not feel up to the task. At first no one had the courage to come forward. I was then the first to step forward and stated that I was one of those who was not fit for the task. Only then did others come forward. We were then about ten to twelve men, who were kept at the major's disposal."

Those who were a party to the scene must have felt some uncertainty. The Germans were at the staging ground for the wholesale slaughter of a community. They were entering a new moral world. Who among them had ever imagined, say, three years before, that he would be standing in eastern Poland with such a charge, to kill all the women and children he would find? Yet the Fuhrer had ordered the killing, the killing of these Jews. And now their commander was giving at least some of them the option not to kill. He was a genuine man who was, by all accounts, solicitous of them. Some of the men stepped forward. If they were hesitant, however, their uncertainty must have been further intensified by Captain Hoffmann's reaction. The man who first took advantage of Trapp's offer continues: "In this connection, I remember that the chief of my company, Hoffmann, became very agitated at my having stepped forward. I remember that he said something to the effect: 'This fellow ought to be shot!' But Major Trapp cut him off. . . .”. Hoffmann, who was to prove himself a zealous, if fainthearted killer, was publicly silenced and put in his place by Trapp. Trapp's way was to be the battalion's way. That was unequivocal. The men who had stepped forward were all excused from the killing operation. Yet it must be noted, as it was undoubtedly noted by the assembled men, that Hoffmann's willingness to object so openly and vociferously to the acceptance of Trapp's offer was publicly to call into question a superior order. It was hardly the picture of obedience.

Another man, Alois Weber, agrees that Trapp made the offer to excuse those who did not want to kill, yet he maintains that the offer was made not just to the older men but to the entire battalion: "Trapp's request was not intended as a trap. It did not require much courage to step forward.” ... Finally, Weber indicts himself by admitting that he did not choose to avoid becoming a genocidal killer of Jews even though he knew that he had that option and saw others who chose not to contribute in this way to genocide. ...

When dawn arrived, the Germans began rounding up the Jews from the ghetto of Jozefow. They combed through the ghetto in small groups, generally of two or three, driving Jews from their homes. The men of Third Company had received, directly from their company commander, the same instructions as the others, "that during the evacuation, the old and the sick as well as infants and small children and Jews, who put up resistance, are to be shot on the spot." The Germans were incredibly brutal, carrying out with abandon their orders not to bother transporting the non-ambulatory to the roundup point and instead to kill them on the spot. ... When the Germans' work was completed, Jewish corpses lay strewn throughout the ghetto, as one of the Germans put it, in the "front yards, doorways, and streets all the way to the market square." A member of Third Company describes the handiwork: ". . . as I walked through the Jewish district during the evacuation, I saw dead old people and infants. I also know that during the evacuation all patients of a Jewish hospital were shot by the troops combing the district."

It is easy to read these two sentences, shudder for a moment, and continue on. But consider how intense the psychological pressure not to slaughter such people would have been had these men indeed been opposed to the slaughter, had they indeed not seen the Jews as deserving this fate. They had just heard from their commander that he was willing to excuse those who wanted to demur. Instead of accepting his offer, they chose to walk into a hospital, a house of healing, and to shoot the sick, who must have been cowering, begging, and screaming for mercy. They killed babies. None of the Germans has seen fit to recount details of such killings. In all probability, a killer either shot a baby in its mother's arms, and perhaps the mother for good measure, or, as was sometimes the habit during these years, held it at arm's length by the leg, shooting it with a pistol. Perhaps the mother looked on in horror. The tiny corpse was then dropped like so much trash and left to rot. A life extinguished. The horror of killing just one baby, or of taking part in the massacre of the Jewish hospital patients, let alone all of the other killing that was then or later that day to occur, ought to have induced those who saw Jews as part of the human family to investigate whether Trapp's offer might yet be taken up by them as well. As far as it is known, none did. ...

New assignments were given to the men, and so they were set to begin the systematic slaughter. ...

The men of First Company, who were initially assigned to shoot the Jews, were joined around noon by members of Second Company because Major Trapp anticipated that they would not otherwise finish the slaughter before nightfall. The actual killing duties ended up being shared by more of the battalion than Trapp had originally planned. The exact manner of transport and procedure of execution differed a bit from unit to unit and also evolved during the course of the day. The platoons of First Company, to focus on it, had broken down into killing squads of about eight. The initial procedure was some variation on the following. A squad would approach the group of Jews who had just arrived, from which each member would choose his victim - a man, a woman, or a child. The Jews and Germans would then walk in parallel single file so that each killer moved in step with his victim, until they reached a clearing for the killing where they would position themselves and await the firing order from their squad leader.

The walk into the woods afforded each perpetrator an opportunity for reflection. Walking side by side with his victim, he was able to imbue the human form beside him with the projections of his mind. Some of the Germans, of course, had children walking beside them. It is highly likely that, back in Germany, these men had previously walked through woods with their own children by their sides, marching gaily and inquisitively along. With what thoughts and emotions did each of these men march, gazing sidelong at the form of, say, an eight- or twelve-year-old girl, who to the unideologized mind would have looked like any other girl? In these moments, each killer had a personalized, face-to-face relationship to his victim, to his little girl. Did he see a little girl, and ask himself why he was about to kill this little, delicate human being who, if seen as a little girl by him, would normally have received his compassion, protection, and nurturance? Or did he see a Jew, a young one, but a Jew nonetheless? Did he wonder incredulously what could possibly justify his blowing a vulnerable little girl's brains out? Or did he understand the reasonableness of the order, the necessity of nipping the believed-in Jewish blight in the bud? The "Jew-child," after all, was mother to the Jew.

The killing itself was a gruesome affair. After the walk through the woods, each of the Germans had to raise his gun to the back of the head, now face down on the ground, that had bobbed along beside him, pull the trigger, and watch the person, sometimes a little girl, twitch and then move no more. The Germans had to remain hardened to the crying of the victims, to the crying of women, to the whimpering of children. At such close range, the Germans often became spattered with human gore. In the words of one man, "the

supplementary shot struck the skull with such force that the entire back of the skull was torn off and blood, bone splinters, and brain matter soiled the marksmen." Sergeant Anton Bentheim indicates that this was not an isolated episode, but rather the general condition: “The executioners were gruesomely soiled with blood, brain matter, and bone splinters. It stuck to their clothes." ...

In this personalized, individual manner, each of the men who took part in the shooting generally killed between five and ten Jews, most of whom were elderly, women, and children. ... In total, between the wild slaughter in the ghetto itself and the methodical executions in the woods, the Germans killed that day somewhere over 1,200 Jews, perhaps a few hundred more. ...

One killer describes a vivid memory from that day: “I would like to mention now that only women and children were there. They were largely women and children around twelve years old. . . . Next to me was the Policeman Koch. . . . He had to shoot a small boy of perhaps twelve years. We had been expressly told that we should hold the gun's barrel eight inches from the head. Koch had apparently not done this, because while leaving the execution site, the other comrades laughed at me, because pieces of the child's brains had spattered onto my sidearm and had stuck there. I first asked, why are you laughing, whereupon Koch, pointing to the brains on my sidearm, said: That's from mine, he has stopped twitching. He said this in an obviously boastful tone.” ...

Not surprisingly, a,few of the killers felt the need to excuse themselves from the killing or take a breather during its course. One squad Sergeant Ernst Hergert, reports that within his platoon two to five men asked to be exempted from the killing after these men had already begun, because they found it too burdensome to shoot women and children. The men were excused by him or by their lieutenant and given either guard or transport duties for the duration of the killing. Two other sergeants, Bentheim and Arthur Kammer, also excused a few men under their command. A third sergeant, Heinrich Steinmetz, explicitly told his men before the killings that they did not have to kill. “I would like also to mention that before the beginning of the execution, Sergeant Steinmetz said to the members of the platoon that those who did not feel up to the upcoming task could come forward. No one, to be sure, exempted himself.” Significantly, these men had already participated in the brutal ghetto clearing, so by the time of his offer they had had the opportunity to confront the gruesome reality of the genocidal enterprise. Yet not even one of them took up the ready offer to avoid further killing at the time.

Browning, “Ordinary Men” (HarperCollins, 1992)

In mid-March 1942 some 75 to 80 percent of all victims of the Holocaust were still alive, while 20 to 25 percent had perished. A mere eleven months later, in mid-February 1943, the percentages were exactly the reverse. …

Ultimately, the Holocaust took place because at the most basic level individual human beings killed other human beings in large numbers over an extended period of time. …

In 1938 and 1939, the Order Police expanded rapidly as the increasing threat of war gave prospective recruits a further inducement. If they enlisted in the Order Police, the new young policemen were exempted from conscription into the army. Moreover, because the police battalions - like U.S. National Guard units - were organized regionally, they seemed to offer the guarantee of completing one's alternative to regular military service not only more safely but closer to home. …

The Order Police had scarcely been taken into account in prewar mobilization plans, and little thought had been given to its possible wartime use, but Germany's military success and rapid expansion quickly created the need for more occupation forces behind the lines. …

Unlike so many of the Nazi killing units, whose membership can only be partially reconstructed, Reserve Police Battalion 101’s roster was available to the investigators. As most of the men came from Hamburg and many still lived there at the time of the investigation, I was able to study the interrogations of 210 men from a unit consisting of slightly less than 500 when it was sent at full strength to Poland in June 1942. This collection of interrogations provided a representative sample for statistical answers to questions about age, Party and 55 membership, and social background. …

Reserve Police Battalion 101 was now composed of men without any experience of German occupation methods in eastern Europe, or for that matter - with the exception of the very oldest who were World War I veterans - any kind of military service. The battalion consisted of 11 officers, 5 administrative officials, and 486 noncommissioned officers and men. …

[Ages] ranged from thirty-three to forty-eight. Five were Party members, but none belonged to the SS. … Of the thirty-two noncommissioned officers on whom we have information, twenty-two were party members and seven were in the SS. They ranged in age from twenty-seven to forty years old; their average age was thirty-three and a half. They were not reservists but rather prewar recruits to the police.

Of the rank and file, the vast majority were from the Hamburg area. About 63 percent were of working-class background, but few were skilled laborers. The majority of them held typical Hamburg working-class jobs: dock workers and truck drivers were most numerous, but there were also many warehouse and construction workers, machine operators, seamen, and waiters. About 35 percent were lower-middle-class, virtually all of them white-collar workers. Three-quarters were in sales of some sort; the other one-quarter performed various office jobs, in both the government and private sector. … The average age of the men was thirty-nine; over half were between thirty-seven and forty-two, a group considered too old for the army but most heavily conscripted for reserve police duty after September 1939. … By virtue of their age, of course, all went through their formative period in the pre-Nazi era. These were men who had known political standards and moral norms other than those of the Nazis. Most came from Hamburg, by reputation one of the least nazified cities in Germany, and the majority came from a social class that had been anti-Nazi in its political culture. These men would not seem to have been a very promising group from which to recruit mass murderers on behalf of the Nazi vision of a racial utopia free of Jews. …

In the very early hours of July 13, 1942, the men Reserve Police Battalion 101 were roused from their bunks in the large brick school building that served as their barracks in the Polish town of Bilgoraj. They were middle-aged family men of working- and lower-middle-class background from the city of Hamburg. Considered too old to be of use to the German army, they had been drafted instead into the Order Police. Most were raw recruits with no previous experience in German occupied territory. They had arrived in Poland less than three weeks earlier. … They were headed for their first major action, though the men had not yet been told what to expect. … The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 climbed down from their trucks and assembled in a half-circle around their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, a fifty-three-year-old career policeman affectionately known by his men as "Papa Trapp." The time had come for Trapp to address the men and inform them of the assignment the battalion had received.

Pale and nervous, with choking voice and tears in his eyes, Trapp visibly fought to control himself as he spoke. The battalion, he said plaintively, had to perform a frightfully unpleasant task. This assignment was not to his liking, indeed it was highly regrettable, but the orders came from the highest authorities. If it would make their task any easier, the men should remember that in Germany the bombs were falling on women and children. …

There were Jews village of Jozefow who were involved with the partisans, he explained according to two others. The battalion had now been ordered to round up these Jews. The male Jews of working age were to be separated and taken to a work camp. The remaining Jews - the women, children, and elderly - were to be shot on the spot by the battalion. Having explained what awaited his men, Trapp then made an extraordinary offer: if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step out. …

[Lieutenant] Buchmann, then thirty-eight years old, … learning of the imminent massacre, made clear to [First Lieutenant[ Hagen that as a Hamburg businessman and reserve lieutenant, he “would in no case participate in such an action, in which defenseless women and children are shot.” He asked for another assignment. Hagen arranged for Buchmann to be in charge of the escort for the male "work Jews" who were to be selected out and taken to Lublin. …

After explaining the battalion's murderous assignment, [Trapp] made his extraordinary offer: any of the older men who did not feel up to the task that lay before them could step out. Trapp paused, and after some moments one man from Third Company,Otto-Luius Schimke, stepped forward. Captain Hoffmann, who had arrived in Jozefow directly from Zakrzow with the Third Platoon of Third Company and had not been part of the officers' meetings in Bilgoraj the day before, was furious that one of his men had been the first to break ranks. Hoffmann began to berate Schimke, but Trapp cut him off. After he had taken Schimke under his protection, some ten or twelve other men stepped forward as well. They turned in their rifles and were told to await a further assignment from the major. …

Two platoons of Third Company were to surround the village. The men were explicitly ordered to shoot anyone trying to escape. The remaining men were to round up the Jews and take them to the marketplace. Those too sick or frail to walk to the marketplace, as well as infants and anyone offering resistance or attempting to hide, were to be shot on the spot. …

As one policeman bitterly commented, “Major Trapp was never there. Instead he remained in Jozefow because he allegedly could not bear the sight. We men were upset about that and said we couldn't bear it either."

Indeed, Trapp's distress as a secret to no one. At the marketplace one policeman remembered hearing Trapp say, "Oh, God, why did I have to be given these orders," as he put his hand on his heart. Another policeman witnessed him at the schoolhouse. "Today I can still see exactly before my eyes Major Trapp there in the room pacing back and forth with his hands behind his back. He made a downcast impression and spoke to me. He said something like, 'Man, … such jobs don't suit me. But orders are orders.'" Another man remembered vividly "how Trapp, finally alone in our room, sat on a stool and wept bitterly. The tears really flowed." …

One policeman was emphatic "that among the Jews shot in our section of town there were no infants or small children. I would like to say that almost tacitly everyone refrained from shooting infants and small children." … Another policeman likewise noted "that tacitly the shooting of infants and small children was avoided by almost all the men involved…”

One … policeman … recalled: “I believe that at this point all officers of the battalion were present, especially our battalion physician, Dr. Schoenfelder. He n had to explain to us precisely how we had to shoot in order to induce the immediate death of the victim. I remember exactly that for this demonstration he drew or outlined the contour of a human body, at least from the shoulders upward, and then indicated precisely the point on which the fixed bayonet was to be placed as an aiming guide. …

When the first truckload of thirty-five to forty Jews arrived, an equal number of policemen came forward and, face to face, were paired off with their victims. Led by Kammer, the policemen and Jews marched down the forest path. They turned off into the woods at a point indicated by Captain Wohlauf, who busied himself throughout the day selecting the execution sites. Kammer then ordered the Jews to lie down in a row. The policemen stepped up behind them. placed their bayonets on the backbone above the shoulder blades as earlier instructed, and on Kammer's orders fired in unison. …

Except for a midday break, the shooting proceeded without interruption until nightfall. At some point in the afternoon, someone "organized" a supply of alcohol for the shooters.”

But when the men of First Company were summoned to the marketplace, instructed in giving a "neck shot," and sent to the woods to kill Jews, some of them tried to make up for the opportunity they had missed earlier. One policeman approached First Sergeant Kammer, whom he knew well. He confessed that the task was "repugnant" to him and asked for a different assignment. Kammer obliged, assigning him to guard duty on the edge of the forest, where he remained throughout the day. Several other policemen who knew Kammer well were given guard duty along the truck route. After shooting for some time, another group of policemen approached Kammer and said they could not continue. He released them from the firing squad and reassigned them to accompany the trucks. Two policemen made the mistake of approaching Captain (and SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer) Wohlauf instead of Kammer. They pleaded that they too were fathers with children and could not continue. Wohlauf curtly refused them, indicating that they could lie down alongside the victims. At the midday pause, however, Kammer relieved not only these two men but a number of other older men as well. They were sent back to the marketplace, accompanied by a noncommissioned officer who reported to Trapp. Trapp dismissed them from further duty and permitted them to return early to the barracks in Bilgoraj.

Some policemen who did not request to be released from the firing squads sought other ways to evade. Noncommissioned officers armed with submachine guns had to be assigned to give so-called mercy shots “because both from the excitement as well as intentionally” [Browning’s italics] individual policemen "shot past" their victims. …

“During the execution word spread that anyone who could not take it any longer could report." He went on to note, "I myself took part in some ten shootings, in which I had to shoot men and women. I simply could not shoot at people anymore, which became apparent to my sergeant, Hergert, because at the end I repeatedly shot past. For this reason he relieved me. Other comrades were also relieved sooner or later, because they simply could no longer continue.” …

“It was in no way the case that those who did not want to or could not carry out the shooting of human beings with their own hands could not keep themselves out of this task. No strict control was being carried out here. I therefore remained by the arriving trucks and kept myself busy at the arrival point. In any case I gave my activity such an appearance. It could not be avoided that one or another of my comrades noticed that I was not going to the executions to fire away at the victims. They showered me with remarks such as "shithead" and "weakling" to express their disgust. But I suffered no consequences for my actions. I must mention here that I was not the only one who kept himself out of participating in the executions.” …

Walter Niehaus, a former Reemtsma cigarette sales representative, was paired with an elderly woman for the first round. “After I had shot the elderly woman, I went to Toni [Anton] Bentheim [his sergeant] and told him that I was not able to carry out further executions. I did not have to participate in the shooting anymore. … my nerves were totally finished from this one shooting."

Georg Kageler, a thirty-seven-year-old tailor, made it through the first round before encountering difficulty. "After I had carried out the first shooting and at the unloading point was allotted a mother with daughter as victims for the next shooting, I began a conversation with them and learned that they were Germans from Kassel, and I took the decision not to participate further in the executions. The entire business was now so repugnant to me that I returned to my platoon leader and told him that I was still sick and asked for my release." Kageler was sent to guard the marketplace. …

Franz Kastenbaum … suddenly appeared uninvited at the office of the Hamburg state prosecutor investigating Reserve Police Battalion 101. He told how he had been a member of a firing squad of seven or eight men that had taken its victims into the woods and shot them in the neck at point-blank range. This procedure had been repeated until the fourth victim. “The shooting of the men was so repugnant to me that I missed the fourth man. It was simply no longer possible for me to aim accurately. I suddenly felt nauseous and ran away from the shooting site. I have expressed myself incorrectly just now. It was not that I could no longer aim accurately, rather that the fourth time I intentionally missed. I then ran into the woods, vomited, and sat down against a tree. To make sure that no one was nearby, I called loudly into the woods, because I wanted to be alone. Today I can say that my nerves were totally finished. I think that I remained alone in the woods for some two to three hours.”…

Before the policemen climbed into their trucks and left Jozefow, a ten-year-old girl appeared, bleeding from the head. She was brought to Trapp, who took her in his arms and said, "You shall remain alive."

When the men arrived at the barracks in Bilgoraj, they were depressed, angered, embittered, and shaken. They ate little but drank heavily. Generous quantities of alcohol were provided, and many of the policemen got quite drunk. Major Trapp made the rounds, trying to console and reassure them, and again placing the responsibility on higher authorities. … By silent consensus within Reserve Police Battalion 101, the Jozefow massacre was simply not discussed. "The entire matter was a taboo." But repression during waking hours could not stop the nightmares. During the first night back from Jozefow, one policeman awoke firing his gun into the ceiling of the barracks. …

While the number of those who evaded or dropped out was thus not insignificant, it must not obscure the corollary that at least 80 percent of those called upon to shoot continued to do so until 1,500 Jews from Jozefow had been killed. …

The two men who explained their refusal to take part in the greatest detail both emphasized the fact that they were freer to act as they did because they had no careerist ambitions. One policeman accepted the possible disadvantages of his course of action "because I was not a career policeman and also did not want to become one, but rather an independent skilled craftsman, and I had my business back home. … thus it was of no consequence that my police career would not prosper." …

“In no case can I remember that anyone was forced to continue participating in the executions when he declared that he was no longer able to. As far as group and platoon actions were concerned, here I must honestly admit that with these smaller executions there were always some comrades who found it easier to shoot Jews than did others, so that the respective commando leaders never had difficulty finding suitable shooters.”

“I must emphasize that from the first days I left no doubt among my comrades that I disapproved of these measures and never volunteered for them. Thus, on one of the first searches for Jews, one of my comrades clubbed a Jewish woman in my presence, and I hit him in the face. A report was made, and in that way my attitude became known to my superiors. I was never officially punished. But anyone who knows how the system works knows that outside official punishment there h the possibility for chicanery that more than makes up for punishment. Thus I was assigned Sunday duties and special watches.”

Mayer, “They thought they were free: The Germans” (Univ. Chicago Press, 1955)

Foreword to the 1966 reprint:

… As "things" changed, on the whole for the worse, and the postwar world became the prewar world, and disarmament became rearmament, there arose a modestly circumscribed sentiment that it might be profitable to find out what it was that had made "the Germans" act as badly as they did.

Dreadful deeds like Auschwitz had been done before in human history, though never on so hideously handsome a scale. But they had not been done before in an advanced Christian society like-well, like ours. If we would keep such deeds from ever being done again, at least in advanced Christian societies, it might be worth digging a little deeper than the shallow grave so hurriedly dug at Nuremberg. After the heat of the long moment had gone down, it was equally difficult to cling to the pleasurable doctrine that the Germans were by nature the enemies of mankind and to cling to the still more pleasurable doctrine that it was possible for one ( or two or three) madmen to make and unmake the history of the world. …

The "German problem" moves in and out of focus as the twentieth century continues to produce - at an always accelerating tempo - more history than it can consume. Korea is forgotten, and Hungary, Cyprus, and Suez are the new sensations; Hungary, Cyprus, and Suez slide into sudden oblivion, and we are all agog at Tibet and the Congo; Tibet and the Congo vanish before we have time to find them on the map (or to find a map that has them) and Cuba explodes; Cuba subsides to something combining a simmer and a snarl, and Vietnam and Rhodesia (or is it Southern Rhodesia?) seize us. Ghana, Guiana, Guinea. Crisis is our diet, served up as exotic dishes, and dishes ever. more exotic, before we are able to swallow (let alone digest) those that were just before us. Remember the "Lebanon crisis" of 1958, in which the United States was deeply involved? Of course not. Who would, these days? Who could? And why? …

Foreword to the 1955 edition:

As an American, I was repelled by the rise of National Socialism in Germany. As an American of German descent, I was ashamed. As a Jew, I was stricken. As a newspaperman, I was fascinated.

It was the newspaperman's fascination that prevailed-or at least predominated-and left me dissatisfied with every analysis of Nazism. I wanted to see this monstrous man, the Nazi. I wanted to talk to him and to listen to him. I wanted to try to understand him. We were both men, he and I. In rejecting the Nazi doctrine of racial superiority, I had to concede that what he had been I might be; what led him along the course he took might lead me. …

In 1935 I spent a month in Berlin trying to obtain a series of meetings with Adolf Hitler. My friend and teacher, William E. Dodd, then American Ambassador to Germany, did what he could to help me, but without success. Then I traveled in Nazi Germany for an American magazine. I saw the German people, people I had known when I visited Germany as a boy, and for the first time realized that Nazism was a mass movement and not the tyranny of a diabolical few over helpless millions. Then I wondered if Adolf Hitler was, after all, the Nazi I wanted to see. By the time the war was over I had identified my man: the average German.

I wanted to go to Germany again and get to know this literate, bourgeois, "Western" man like myself to whom something had happened that had not (or at least not yet) happened to me and my fellow-countrymen. It was seven years after the war before I went. Enough time had passed so that an American non-Nazi might talk with a German Nazi, and not so much time that the events of 1933-45, and especially the inner feeling that attended those events, would have been forgotten by the man I sought.

I never found the average German, because there is no average German. But I found ten Germans sufficiently different from one another in background, character, intellect, and temperament to represent, among them, some millions or tens of millions of Germans and sufficiently like unto one another to have been Nazis. It wasn't easy to find them, still less to know them. I brought with me one asset: I really wanted to know them. And another, acquired in my long association with the American Friends Service Committee: I really believed that there was "that of God" in every one of them.

My faith found that of God in my ten Nazi friends. My newspaper training found that of something else in them, too. They were each of them a most marvelous mixture of good and bad impulses, their lives a marvelous mixture of good and bad acts. I liked them. I couldn't help it. Again and again, as I sat or walked with one or another of my ten friends, I was overcome by the same sensation that had got in the way of my newspaper reporting in Chicago years before. I liked Al Capone. I liked the way he treated his mother. He treated her better than I treated mine.

I found - and find - it hard to judge my Nazi friends. But I confess that I would rather judge them than myself. In my own case I am always aware of the provocations and handicaps that excuse, or at least explain, my own bad acts. I am always aware of my good intentions, my good reasons for doing bad things. I should not like to die tonight, because some of the things that I had to do today, things that look very bad for me, I had to do in order to do something very good tomorrow that would more than compensate for today's bad behavior. But my Nazi friends did die tonight; the book of their Nazi lives is closed, without their having been able to do the good they mayor may not have meant to do, the good that might have wiped out the bad they did.

By easy extension, I would rather judge Germans than Americans. Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany-not by attack from without or by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler. … I felt - and feel - that it was not German Man that I had met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might be here, under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I. …

Kronenberg

November 9, 1938 [The date of Kristalnacht - “the night of broken glass” – the night when Jewish synagogues and businesses were vandalized and burned throughout Germany]

In 1930, when Party uniforms were forbidden, the Party paraded quietly in white shirts, and, when the Fuhrer spoke in Kronenberg in 1932, forty thousand people crowded quietly into a super-circus tent on the Town Meadow to hear him. (Nazi open-air meetings were forbidden.) That was the day that a Swastika Bag was run up on the Castle; in England or France it might have been taken for a college-boy prank, but in Kronenberg the culprit, who proudly admitted his guilt, was heavily fined.

Kronenberg went quietly Nazi, and so it was. In the March, 1933, elections, the NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers Party, had a two-thirds majority, and the Social Democrats went out of office. Only the university - and not the whole university - and the hard-core Social Democrats held out until the end, and in nonindustrial Kronenberg there were no trade-unions to hold the mass base of the Social Democrats. The town was as safely Nazi now, in 1938, as any town in Germany. … And Kronenberg, so old and changeless, off the main line and the Autobahn, is conservative even for Hesse. But its very conservatism is a better guaranty of the Party's stability than the radicalism of the cities, where yesterday's howling Communists are to day's howling Nazis and nobody knows just how they will howl tomorrow. A quiet town is best. …

The Lives Men Lead

… Only one of my ten Nazi friends saw Nazism as we - you and I - saw it in any respect. This was Hildebrandt, the teacher. And even he then believed, and still believes, in part of its program and practice, "the democratic part." The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it.

As we know Nazism, it was a naked, total tyranny which degraded its adherents and enslaved its opponents and adherents alike; terrorism and terror in daily life, private and public; brute personal and mob injustice at every level of association; a flank attack upon God and a frontal attack upon the worth of the human person and the rights which that worth implies. These nine ordinary Germans knew it absolutely otherwise, and they still know it otherwise. If our view of National Socialism is a little simple, so is theirs. An autocracy? Yes, of course, an autocracy, as in the fabled days of "the golden time" our parents knew. But a tyranny, as you Americans use the term? Nonsense.

When I asked Herr Wedekind, the baker, why he had believed in National Socialism, he said, "Because it promised to solve the unemployment problem. And it did. But I never imagined what it would lead to. Nobody did."

I thought I had struck pay dirt, and I said, "What do you mean, 'what it would lead to,' Herr Wedekind?"

"War," he said. "Nobody ever imagined it would lead to war."

The evil of National Socialism began on September 1, 1939; and that was my friend the baker.

Remember - none of these nine Germans had ever traveled abroad (except in war); none had ever known or talked with a foreigner or read the foreign press; none ever wanted to listen to the foreign radio when it was legal to do so, and none (except, oddly enough, the policeman) listened to it when it was illegal. They were as uninterested in the outside world as their contemporaries in France - or America. None of them ever heard anything bad about the Nazi regime except, as they believed, from Germany's enemies, and Germany's enemies were theirs. "Everything the Russians and the Americans said about us," said Cabinetmaker Klingelhofer, "they now say about each other."

Men think first of the lives they lead and the things they see; and not, among the things they see, of the extraordinary sights, but of the sights which meet them in their daily rounds. The lives of my nine friends - and even of the tenth, the teacher - were lightened and brightened by National Socialism as they knew it. And they look back at it now - nine of them, certainly - as the best time of their lives; for what are men's lives? There were jobs and job security, summer camps for the children and the Hitler Jugend to keep them off the streets. What does a mother want to know? She wants to know where her children are, and with whom, and what they are doing. In those days she knew or thought she did; what difference does it make? So things went better at home, and when things go better at home, and on the job, what more does a husband and father want to know?

The best time of their lives.

There were wonderful ten dollar holiday trips for the family in the "Strength through Joy" program, to Norway in the summer and Spain in the winter, for people who had never dreamed of a real holiday trip at home or abroad. And in Kronenberg "nobody" (nobody my friends knew) went cold, nobody went hungry, nobody went ill and uncared for. For whom do men know? They know people of their own neighborhood, of their own station and occupation, of their own political (or nonpolitical) views, of their own religion and race. All the blessings of the New Order, advertised everywhere, reached "everybody."

There were horrors, too, but these were advertised nowhere, reached "nobody." Once in a while (and only once in a while) a single crusading or sensation-mongering newspaper in America exposes the inhuman conditions of the local county jail; but none of my friends had ever read such a newspaper when there were such in Germany (far fewer there than here), and now there were none. None of the horrors impinged upon the day-to-day lives of my ten friends or was ever called to their attention. There was "some sort of trouble" on the streets of Kronenberg as one or another of my friends was passing by on a couple of occasions, but the police dispersed the crowd and there was nothing in the local paper. You and I leave "some sort of trouble on the streets" to the police; so did my friends in Kronenberg. …

In what you and I call the blessings of life - including uncritical acceptance by the whole of the undifferentiated community - every one of my ten friends, excepting Tailor Schwenke, who had once had his own shop and was now a school janitor, was better off than he had ever been before; and not just they and their families, but all their friends, the "whole" community, the widows and orphans, the aged, the sick, and the poor. Germany had been what many Americans would call a welfare state ever since Bismarck, the reactionary Junker, introduced social legislation to stave off social democracy. In the collapse after the first World War, and again in the collapse at the end of the 1920's, the Weimar Republic could not maintain its social services. Nazism not only restored but extended them; they were much more comprehensive than they had ever been before or, of course, than they have been since. Nor were they restricted to Party members; only "enemies" of the regime were excluded from them. … The best time of their lives.

"Yes," said Herr Klingelhofer, the cabinetmaker, "it was the best time. After the first war, German families began to have only two children. That was bad, bad for the family, the marriage, the home, the nation. There is where Germany was dying, and that was the kind of strength we believed that Hitler was talking about. And he was talking about it. After ‘33 we had more children. A man saw a future. The difference between rich and poor grew smaller, one saw it everywhere. A man had a chance. In 1935 I took over my father's shop and got a two-thousand-dollar government loan. Ungeheuer! Unheard of!

"The good development had nothing to do with whether we had a democracy, or a dictatorship, or what. The form of government had nothing to do with it. A man had a little money, a chance, and he didn't pay any attention to any system. Inside the system, you see the benefits. Outside it, when you are not benefited by it, you see the faults, I suppose. I suppose that's the way it is in Russia now. That's the way it is everywhere, always…”

Hitler and I

…said Tailor Schwenke… “Himmler I detested. Goebbels, too. If Hitler had been told the truth, things would have been different." For "Hitler" read "I."

"The killing of the Jews?" said the "democratic" bill-collector, der alte Kampfer, Simon. "Yes, that was wrong, unless they committed treason in wartime. And of course they did. If I had been a Jew, I would have myself. Still, it was wrong, but some say it happened and some say it didn't. You can show me pictures of skulls or shoes, but that doesn't prove it. But I'll tell you this - it was Himmler. Hitler had nothing to do with it."

"Do you think he knew about it?"

"I don't know. We'll never know now."

Hitler died to save my friend's best self. …

“What Would You Have Done?”

None of my ten friends ever encountered anybody connected with the operation of the deportation system or the concentration camps. None of them ever knew, on a personal basis, anybody connected with the Gestapo, the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service), or the Einsatzgruppen (the Occupation Detachments, which followed the German armies eastward to conduct the mass killing of Jews). None of them ever knew anybody who knew anybody connected with these agencies of atrocity. Even Policeman Hofmeister, who had to arrest Jews for "protective custody" or "resettlement" and who saw nothing wrong in "giving the Jews land, where they could learn to work with their hands instead of with money," never knew anyone whose shame or shamelessness might have reproached him had they stood face to face. The fact that the Police Chief of Kronenberg made him sign the orders to arrest Jews told him only that the Chief himself was afraid of getting into trouble "higher up."

Sixty days before the end of the war, Teacher Hildebrandt, as a first lieutenant in command of a disintegrating Army subpost, was informed by the post doctor that an SS man attached to the post was going crazy because of his memories of shooting down Jews "in the East"; this was the closest any of my friends came to knowing of the systematic butchery of National Socialism. …

Anti-Nazis no less than Nazis let the rumors pass - if not rejecting them, certainly not accepting them; either they were enemy propaganda or they sounded like enemy propaganda, and, with one's country fighting for its life and one's sons and brothers dying in war, who wants to hear, still less repeat, even what sounds like enemy propaganda? …

What if one came to know? What then?

There was nichts dagegen zu machen, "nothing to do about it." Again and again my discussions with each of my friends reached this point, one way or another, and this very expression; again and again this question, put to me with the wide-eyed innocence that always characterizes the guilty when they ask it of the inexperienced: "What would you have done?" …what did we expect the good citizen of Minneapolis or Charlotte to do when, in the midst of war, he was told, openly and officially, that 112,000 of his fellow-Americans, those of Japanese ancestry on the American West Coast, had been seized without warrant and sent without due process of law to relocation centers? There was nichts dagegen zu machen - not even by the United States Supreme Court, which found that the action was within the Army's power - and, anyway, the good citizen of Minneapolis or Charlotte had his own troubles. …

A good man - even a good American - running to catch a train on an important assignment has to pass by the beating of a dog on the street and concentrate on catching the train; and, once on the train, he has to consider the assignment about which he must do something, rather than the dog-beating about which he can do nothing. If he is running fast enough and his assignment is mortally important, he will not even notice the dog-beating when he passes it by. …

And the decent bourgeois teacher was to teach "Nazi literature" from Nazi textbooks provided by the Nazi school board. Teachers teach what they are told to teach or quit, and to quit a public post meant, in the early years of the Third Reich, unemployment…

The "democratic," that is, argumentative, bill-collector, Herr Simon, was greatly interested in the mass deportation of Americans of Japanese ancestry from our West Coast in 1942. … He asked me whether I had known anybody connected with the West Coast deportation. When I said "No," he asked me what I had done about it. When I said "Nothing," he said, triumphantly, "There. You learned about all these things openly, through your government and your press. We did not learn through ours. As in your case, nothing was required of us - in our case, not even knowledge. You knew about things you thought were wrong - you did think it was wrong, didn't you, Herr Professor?" "Yes." "So. You did nothing. We heard, or guessed, and we did nothing. So it is everywhere." When I protested that the Japanese-descended Americans had not been treated like the Jews, he said, "And if they had been - what then? Do you not see that the idea of doing something or doing nothing is in either case the same?" …

The Joiners

Men joined the Party to get a job or to hold a job or to get a better job or to save themselves from getting a worse job, or to get a contract or to hold a contract, a customer, a client, a patient. Every third man, in time, worked for the State. … It would not be reckless to estimate that half the civil servants had to join the Party or lose their jobs. …

There are many lawyers in the United States who disagree vehemently with the policies and program of the American Bar Association; but, if they want to practice law, they had better belong to the constituent societies of the ABA. There are even more physicians in the United States who disagree even more vehemently with the policies of the American Medical Association, but, if they want to practice medicine, they had better belong to the constituent societies of the AMA. They may only pay dues, and that grudgingly; but the record shows that they belong. They are officially "guilty" of the policies of the organization which speaks in their name. …

“We Think with Our Blood”

“There were good things, great things, in the system - and the system itself was evil."

"For instance?"

"You mean about the evils?"

"No, I know about those. About 'the good things, the great things.' "

"Perhaps I should make it singular instead of plural, the good thing. For the first time in my life I was really the peer of men who, in the Kaiser time and in the Weimar time, had always belonged to classes lower or higher than my own, men whom one had always looked down on or up to, but never at. In the Labor Front - I represented the teachers' association - I came to know such people at first hand, to know their lives and to have them know mine. Even in America-perhaps; I have never been there - I suspect that the teacher who talks about “the common people' has never known one, really known one, not even if he himself came from among them, as I, with an Army officer as a father, did not. National Socialism broke down that separation, that class distinction. Democracy - such democracy as we had had - didn't do it and is not doing it now."

"Wedekind, the baker," I said, "told me how 'we simple working-class men stood side by side with learned men, in the Labor Front.' "

"I remember Wedekind," said the teacher. "I didn't know him before I joined the Party, and I don't know him now. Why? Because he was my inferior. A baker is nothing, a teacher is something; in the Labor Front we belonged to something together, we had something in common. We could know each other in those days. Do you understand that, Herr Professor?"

"I understand it because you call me 'Herr Professor,'" I said, smiling.

"Yes. The baker calls me 'Herr Studienrat' - that was my rank - and I call you 'Herr Professor.' It is for me to accept the baker and for you to accept me."

"Neither the baker nor the teacher would call a professor 'Professor' in America," I said.

"Never?"

"Rarely. I can't remember ever having been called 'Professor,' except by friends, who in an argument might say ironically, 'Professor, you're crazy.'"

"It was never like that in Germany," he said, "or anywhere else in Europe - not even, from what I know, in England. Always in Germany, before Nazism, and again now, the title is a genuine reflection of class distinction."

"I understand," he said. "This is your American feeling of absolute equality. That we have never had here. But there was a democracy in Nazism, and it was real. My - how shall I say it? - my inferiors accepted me."

My inferiors accepted me. …

Expertness in thinking, exemplified by the professor, by the high school teacher, and even by the grammar-school teacher in the village, had to deny the Nazi views of history, economics, literature, art, philosophy, politics, biology, and education itself.

Thus Nazism, as it proceeded from practice to theory, had to deny expertness in thinking and then (this second process was never completed), in order to fill the vacuum, had to establish expert thinking of its own-that is, to find men of inferior or irresponsible caliber whose views conformed dishonestly or, worse yet, honestly to the Party line. The nonpolitical pastor satisfied Nazi requirements by being nonpolitical. But the nonpolitical schoolmaster was, by the very virtue of being nonpolitical, a dangerous man from the first. He himself would not rebel, nor would he, if he could help it, teach rebellion; but he could not help being dangerous - not if he went on teaching what was true. In order to be a theory and not just a practice, National Socialism required the destruction of academic independence.

In the years of its rise the movement little by little brought the community's attitude toward the teacher around from respect and envy to resentment, from trust and fear to suspicion. The development seems to have been inherent; it needed no planning and had none. As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, "blood," "folkishness") seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the "little man," the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society. Germany was preparing to cut its own head off. By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon "intellectuals" as unreliable and, among these unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated. …

In 1931, when Tailor Schwenke rejoined the Party, his Nazi indoctrination plus his personal experience had awakened his hostility toward professors in general, many of whom in Kronenberg, he told me, were Communists. (None was.) … Tailor Schwenke would not, after 1933, any more than before, have failed to tip his hat to the Herr Professor; all the more joyously he received the revelation that half the academics were traitors and the other half dupes and boobies who might be tolerated - under close surveillance - by the New Germany which Tailor Schwenke, at your service, Sir, represented. …

The Anti-Semitic Swindle

What Gustav Schwenke wanted, and the only thing he wanted, was security. The job he wanted, and the only job he ever wanted, was a job with the State, any job with the State, with its tenure, its insurance, and its pension. Gustav was not, I imagine, the only boy born in Germany in 1912 who wanted security and thought, until 1933, that he would never have it. When he got it, when the Party Police were incorporated into the Military Police in 1935, his dream was come true. At last he belonged. He was a man at last. …

After all their centuries of exclusion from all the honorable pursuits, the Jews had turned, as their liberation began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the "free professions," those which were not 'Organized as guilds or associations excluding them: medicine, law, journalism, teaching, research, and, of course, for the greater part, retail merchandise. (The poorer among them had turned, when they were driven out of the towns in past centuries, to the only possible occupation, the ancestor of retail trade: peddling). …

“Everybody Knew.” “Nobody Knew.”

When people you don't know, people in whom you have no interest, people whose affairs you have never discussed, move away from your community, you don't notice that they are going or that they are gone. When, in addition, public opinion (and the government itself) has depreciated them, it is still likelier that you won't notice their departure or, if you do, that you will forget about it. How many of us whites, in a white neighborhood, are interested in the destination of a Negro neighbor whom we know only by sight and who has moved away? …

The fact is, I think, that my friends really didn't know. They didn't know because they didn't want to know; but they didn't know. They could have found out, at the time, only if they had wanted to very badly. Who wanted to? We whites - when the Negro moves away - do we want to find out why or where or with what he moved? …

Shortly after the war began, a group of Jews were seen working on the street, laying blocks in the trolley-car track (Jews were now forbidden any but common labor). Hofmeister waved a greeting to some he knew but didn't talk to them. Cabinetmaker Klingelhofer spoke to one he knew, a lawyer, who had been a customer of his. "Did you ask him how he happened to be there?" I said.

"No. I knew."

"How?"

"Everybody knew."

"How?"

'Oh - we just new.” …

"We Christians Had the Duty"

... "Do you know any Jews over there, Herr Professor?" he said.

"Oh, yes," I said, "many, quite well. They live among us over there, you know, just like other people."

"Not like Negroes," said the "Old Fighter." "But," he went on, "I want to ask you about the Jews. Can you always tell a Jew when you see one, over there? We can, here. Always. They're not like you and me."

"How can you tell?" I said. "They sometimes look like you and me.”

"Certainly," he said, "sometimes. It isn't by looks, though. A German can tell. Always.”

"Well," I said, like a man who is saying to himself, "You learn something new every day."

"Yes," he said.

Then I said, "Could you tell, if you saw Jesus, that he was a Jew, Herr Simon?"

"I think so," he said, "if he was a Jew. But was he a Jew? If he was, why did the Jews kill him? Can you tell me that?" - He went right on - "I've never heard a pastor say that Jesus was a Jew. Many scientists say he wasn't. I have heard that Hitler himself said that he was the son of a Greek soldier in the Roman Army." …

"Yes," said Herr Simon, "and do you know, Herr Professor, the Jews have a secret Bible, called the Talmud. Maybe you never heard that, either, but it's true. They deny it, of course. You just ask a Jew about it, and watch him when he says it doesn't exist. But every German knows about it; I've seen it myself. It has their ritual murder in it, and everything else. It tells them - mind you, it was written I don't know how many centuries ago - that they must marry German women and weaken the German race. What do you think of that?" …

"How do you know that they all worked together, Herr Damm?"

"They always do. They held us in the palm of their hand. Do you know what one of them once did? He bought a calf from my father and took it to town and sold it to my father's cousin, at a profit."

"Yes," I said, "but that is just the profit system. You believe in the profit system, don't you? You're certainly no Communist!"

"Of course," he said, "but only think - to my father's own cousin! If my father had known his cousin wanted the calf, he could have sold it to him himself, without the Jew."

… "Now," I said, as we were lighting up after dinner, "what many Christians in America cannot understand is how you Christians in Germany could accept the persecution of the Jews, no matter how bad they were. How could you accept it as Christians?"

It was the first time I had taken the initiative on the subject. "The Jews?" - he said - "but the Jews were the enemies of the Christian religion. Others might have other reasons for destroying them, but we Christians had the Christian duty to. Surely, Herr Professor, you know how the Jews betrayed our Lord?" …

Nobody has proved to my friends that the Nazis were wrong about the Jews. Nobody can. The truth or falsity of what the Nazis said, and of what my extremist friends believed, was immaterial, marvelously so. There simply was no way to reach it, no way, at least, that employed the procedures of logic and evidence. The bill-collector told me that Jews were filthy, that the home of a Jewish woman in his boyhood town was a pigsty; and the baker told me that the Jews' fanaticism about cleanliness was a standing affront to the "Germans," who were clean enough. What difference did the truth, if there were truth, make?

I suggested from time to time, and always in hesitant fashion, that perhaps the medieval exclusion of Jews from citizenship and landholding, their subsequent exclusion, after 1648, from guild apprenticeship, and their confinement for a thousand years to the practice of moneylending, with the attendant risk of the despicable creditor against the knightly debtor, might have required cunning of most of the Jews in most of early Europe as the condition of survival itself; that the consequent sharpening of the intellect under such circumstances would have produced a disproportionate number of unusually noble and unusually ignoble dispositions among any people, their unusualness, in the marginal occupations to which they were driven, disappearing as the great community removed the disadvantagements which produced it. I reminded the bank clerk, Kessler, that the ancestors of the Christians who now forbade Jews to be bank presidents once compelled them to be. …

But there are some things that everybody knows and nobody learns. Didn't everybody know, in America, on December 8, 1941, that the Japanese, or Japs, were a treacherous people?

The Crimes of the Losers

An American Occupation judge was trying to get transferred. "It's got so," he said, "that the minute a German starts whining, I know I'm going to find him guilty. And they all whine. They all have a hard-luck story. Well, they have had hard luck. But they gave other people lots harder luck first. Of course, they've forgotten that."

The judge was equating inequivalents. The hard luck the Germans have had they have had, while the hard luck they gave, somebody else had, somebody they don't know; and they don't even believe that it was they who gave it. Herr Damm, after losing his career and his home and possessions, was now earning $47 a month as a "black," that is, unauthorized worker; he did not see the equivalence between his boycott of Jews in the past and his own children's undernourishment now. He hadn't seen the Jews who, as the ultimate consequence of his legal acts were slain; and, besides, like everyone else except Hitler, who had a mandate from the German people, Herr Damm had a mandate from Hitler, the head of the government, to boycott Jews.

I am sure that the tailor, Schwenke, had a hand, and a ready one, in burning the Kronenberg synagogue. See the way he may see the crime (which he denies): He was a man provoked to fury by extreme misfortune, in which "the Jews" played the central role; and. he was one of many; and he was a follower, not a leader; and he was being a patriot in Nazi Germany; and the victim was a building; and so on. …

But there was the woman who told me, "It was my own fault. 1 should have been more courageous"; and the man who said, "I should have been man enough to say 'No' at the very beginning" …

In October, 1945, the Confessional church of Germany, the "church within the Church" which had defied Hitler's "German Christians," issued the "Stuttgart Confession": "We know ourselves to be with our people in a great company of suffering, but also in a great solidarity of guilt. With great pain do we say that through us has endless suffering been brought to many peoples and countries. That to which we have often borne witness before our congregations, we declare in the name of the whole church. True, we have struggled for many years in the name of Jesus Christ against a spirit which has found its terrible expression in the National Socialist regime of violence, but we accuse ourselves for not witnessing more courageously. . . ." Those, too, were German words. …

“That’s the Way We Are”

… The German press devotes much more of its space than ours to politics and more of its political discussion to issues than to personalities. In our first conversations, when I found that my friends preferred talking about Versailles or the Polish Corridor to talking about themselves, I thought that they were running away from their guilt. I was wrong. They did not regard what they themselves did as important, and they were interested in important things like Versailles and the Polish Corridor.

To say that my German friends were nonpolitical, and to say no more, is to libel them. As in nearly all European countries, a very much larger proportion of Germans than Americans turns out for political meetings, political discussions, and local and general elections. Where the German was (in contrast with the American) nonpolitical was at a deeper level. … He saw the State in such majesty and magnificence, and himself in such insignificance, that he could not relate himself to the actual operation of the State.

… Arguing with an American, you may ask him, with propriety, "All right - what would you have done if you had been President?" You don't ask one of my Nazi friends what he would have done if he had been Fuhrer - or Emperor. The concept that the citizen might become the actual Head of the State has no reality for my friends. … My friends, like all people to whom the present is unpalatable and the future unpromising, always look back. Looking back, they see themselves ruled, and well ruled, by an independent Sovereign. Their experience with even the outward forms of self-government does not, as yet, incline them to it.

The concept that the citizen actually is, as such, the Head of the State is, in their view, nothing but self-contradiction. I read to three of my friends a lecture I had prepared, in which I was going to say that I was the highest official of the United States, holding the office of citizen. I had used the word Staatsburger. "But that," said all three, in identical words, "is no office at all." There we were. "But it really is the highest office in America," I said; "the citizen is the Sovereign. If I say 'souveraner Staatsburger,' will that be clearer?"

"Clearer, certainly," said Herr Kessler, the bank clerk, "but wronger, if I may, Herr Professor. Those two words do not go together. The idea is not a German idea. It says that the citizen is the ruler, but there are millions of citizens, so that would be anarchy. There could be no rule. A State must have a Head, not a million or fifty million or a hundred million Heads. If one of your 'sovereign citizens' does not like a law, do you allow him to break it? If not, your 'sovereign citizen' is only a myth, and you are, like us, ruled by real rulers. But your theory does not admit it." …

"We have heard of your American cities ruled by gangsters working with dishonest politicians who steal the people's money and give them poor service, bad roads, and such, charging them always for good roads or good sewers. That we have never known here in Germany, not under the Kaiser, not under Hitler. That is a kind of Anarchie, maybe not mob rule but something like it." …

Each new generation's leadership was somewhere in Pennsylvania or the Argentine or Wisconsin or China. But millions of liberty-loving Germans remained, and all men, in whatever form they love it, love liberty. Thus throughout Germany, as everywhere where there is oppression among literate peoples, one encountered, and still encounters, more diversity, more individuality, than there is among, say, Americans, who are unoppressed; more variety in entertainment and in the arts, in political partisanship and in the political complexion of the press; all this, more individuality, more independence, stubborn or sublimated, in the land of the goose step than one finds in the land of the free. Free Americans all read the same papers, wear the same clothes, and vote for the same two transposable parties; Germans dress freely, freely read different papers, and vote a dozen different ways, but they are, in their submissiveness, the same. …

But Then It Was Too Late

… "You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was 'expected to' participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time." …

"Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your 'little men,' your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. … Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about - we were decent people - and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures' that no 'patriotic German' could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head. …

"Your 'little men,' your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemoller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something - but then it was too late." …

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not? Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty. …

"You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.'

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. … But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked - if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in '43 had come immediately after the 'German Firm' stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in '33. But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D. …

Collective Shame

… "I was employed in a defense plant (a war plant, of course, but they were always caned defense plants). That was the year of the National Defense Law, the law of 'total conscription.' Under the law I was required to take the oath of fidelity. I said I would not; I opposed it in conscience. I was given twenty-four hours to 'think it over.' In those twenty-four hours I lost the world."

"Yes?" I said.

"You see, refusal would have meant the loss of my job, of course, not prison or anything like that. (Later on, the penalty was worse, but this was only 1935.) But losing my job would have meant that I could not get another. …

"There, then, is my point. If I had refused to take the oath of fidelity, I would have saved all three million." "You are joking," I said.

"No."

"You don't mean to tell me that your refusal would have overthrown the regime in 1935?"

"No."

"Or that others would have followed your example?"

"No."

"I don't understand."

"You are an American," he said again, smiling. "I will explain. There I was, in 1935, a perfect example of the kind of person who, with all his advantages in birth, in education, and in position, rules (or might easily rule) in any country. If I had refused to take the oath in 1935, it would have meant that thousands and thousands like me, all over Germany, were refusing to take it. Their refusal would have heartened millions. Thus the regime would have been overthrown, or, indeed, would never have come to power in the first place. The fact that I was not prepared to resist, in 1935, meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands, like me in Germany were also unprepared, and each one of these hundreds of thousands was, like me, a man of great influence or of great potential influence. Thus the world was lost." …

"My education did not help me," he said, "and I had a broader and better education than most men have had or ever will have. All it did, in the end, was to enable me to rationalize my failure of faith more easily than I might have done if I had been ignorant. And so it was, I think, among educated men generally, in that time in Germany. Their resistance was no greater than other men's." …

I want my friends not just to feel bad and confess it, but to have been bad and to be bad now and confess it. … But I am not God. I myself am a national, myself guilty of many national hypocrisies whose only justification is that the Germans’ were so much worse. My being less bestial, in my laws and practices, than they were does not make me more Godly than they, for difference in degree is not difference in kind. My own country's racist legislation and practices, against both foreigners and citizens, is a whole web of hypocrisies. …

The Furies: Heinrich Hildebrandt

… "What did you do that was wrong, as you understand right and wrong, and what didn't you do that was right?" The instinct that throws instant ramparts around the self-love of all of us came into immediate operation; my friends, in response, I spoke of what was legal or illegal, or what was popular or unpopular, or what others did or didn't do, or what was provoked or unprovoked. … Fear and advantage, Hildebrandt had said, were his reasons for becoming a National Socialist in 1937… For eight years I held the rank of Studienassessor. It carries no tenure with it. After 1933 my name was not even included in the list of candidates for Studienrat, the rank which is usually given after five years of high-school teaching. The spring the Nazis took power, I was dismissed from my radio program and from my adult-school lectureship. Then I was transferred from the city to one small school after another. … I waited two years, and then I joined the Party. I was promoted to Studienrat and got married."…

"When were you really disillusioned with National Socialism?" I said in a later conversation.

The blush again; deeper, this time. "Only after the war - really."

"That discourages me," I said, "because you are so much more sensitive than most people, and this makes me realize how hard it must be, under such conditions, for people, even sensitive people, to see what is going on around them." He continued to blush, but my blush-detector told me that this was not it.

"It's all so well masqueraded," he said, "the bad always mixed up with the good and the harmless, and you tell yourself that you are making up for the bad by doing a few little things like speaking of Mendelssohn in class." …

"I fooled myself. I had to. Everybody has to. If the good had been twice as good and the bad only half as bad, I still ought to have seen it, all through as I did in the beginning, because I am, as you say, sensitive. But I didn't want to see it because I would then have had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent. I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the community. I wanted to be able to sleep nights-" …

The Furies: Johann Kessler

… “It was because people called the Party in all difficulties arising from the reconstruction of the country, and the Party always helped. This pattern was established from the first, long before the war. It was what made the Party so strong - it would always help. In religious matters, in domestic problems, in everything. It really watched over the lives of the people, not spying on them, but caring about them.

"You know, Herr Professor, we are told that not a sparrow falls without God's care; I am not being light when I say this - that not a person 'fell,' fell ill or in need, lost his job or his house, without the Party's caring. No organization had ever done this before in Germany, maybe nowhere else. Believe me, such an organization is irresistible to men. No one in Germany was alone in his troubles - "

"Except," I said, "'inferior races' and opponents of the regime."

"Of course," he said, "that is understood, but they were few, they were outside society, 'over the fence,' and nobody thought about them."

"But these, too, were 'sparrows.'"

"Yes," he said.

"Could these," I said, "have been 'the least of them,' of whom Jesus spoke?"

"Herr Professor, we didn't see it that way. We were wrong, sinful, but we didn't see it that way. We saw 'the least of them' among our own people, everywhere, among ordinary people who obeyed the laws and were not Jews, or gypsies, and so on. Among ordinary people, 'Aryans,' there were 'the least of them,' too. Millions; six million unemployed at the beginning. These 'least,' not all who were 'least' but most of them, had somewhere to turn, at last…”

New Boy in the Neighborhood

… Ethnical heterogeneity is greater among the Germans (taking the Austrians as Germans) than it is among any other of the world's peoples except the Russians and the Americans.

True, my ten friends, not one of whom met or even approached the Nordic standard, rejected their own "Aryanism." But they did accept a kind of racist “Germanism," a biologized mystique which, I was surprised to discover, they were not alone in accepting. …

My friend Simon, he of the secret Talmud, when he told me that, yes, the Jew Springer was a decent man, and I asked him how there could be a decent Jew when the "Jewish spirit" was a matter of blood, replied: "Of course it's a matter of blood. It might skip a generation" - he had certainly not read Mendel - "but it would show up in the next. Only when the proportion of Jewish blood is small enough will it no longer be a danger to Deutschtum." "How small," I said, "would it have to be?" "The scientists have that worked out," he said. …

“Like God in France”

… In such exquisitely fabricated towers a man may live (or even a whole society), but he must not look over the edge or he will see that there is no foundation. The fabrication is magnificent; the German is matchless in little things, reckless only in big ones, in the fundamental, fateful matters which, in his preoccupation, he has overlooked. …

Who is this Einstein, who was "only a scientist" when he conceived the atomic bomb and now, in his old age, sees what he has done and weeps? He is the German specialist, who had always "minded his" - high- "business" and was no more proof against romanticism than his tailor, who had always minded his low business. He is the finished product of pressure, the uneducated expert, like the postal clerk in Kronenberg whose method of moistening stamps on the back of his hand is infallible. The German mind, encircled and, under pressure of encirclement, stratified, devours itself in the production of lifeless theories of man and society, deathless methods of licking postage stamps, and murderous machinery. For the rest - which is living - the German has to depend upon his ideals. …

"The German revolutionaries," said Lenin, "could not seize the railways because they did not have a Bahnsteigkarte" - the ten pfennig ticket admitting visitors to the train shed. …

-----------------------

1

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download