Ordinary Men

Why does it matter which of our portrayals of and conclusions about Reserve Police Battalion 101 are closer to the truth? It would be very comforting if Goldhagen were correct, that very few societies have the long-term, cultural-cognitive prerequisites to commit genocide, and that regimes can only do so when the population is overwhelmingly of one mind about its priority, justice, and necessity. We would live in a safer world if he were right, but I am not so optimistic. I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce “ordinary men” to become their “willing executioners.”

The Germans presided over the death of some 2 million Soviet POWs in the first nine months of the war—far more than the number of Jewish victims up to that point. The death rate in these POW camps far exceeded the death rates in the Polish ghettos prior to the Final Solution. The fact that the Nazi regime changed its policy to murder all Jews and changed its policy not to starve all Soviet POWs is more a measure of the ideology, priorities, and obsessions of Hitler and the Nazi leadership than of the attitudes of German society. The staggering fatality rate of Soviet POWs in the first months suggests above all the regime’s capacity to harness ordinary Germans to murder limitless numbers of Soviet POWs if that had remained its goal. The continuing mass death of Soviet POWs into the spring of 1942 demonstrates that killing institutions are not turned off and the attitudes and behavior of their personnel are not altered instantly, even when policy changes.

Many scholars of the Holocaust, especially Raul Hilberg, have emphasized the bureaucratic and administrative aspects of the destruction process.5 This approach emphasizes the degree to which modern bureaucratic life fosters a functional and physical distancing in the same way that war and negative racial stereotyping promote a psychological distancing between perpetrator and victim. Indeed, many of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were so-called desk murderers whose role in the mass extermination was greatly facilitated by the bureaucratic nature of their participation. Their jobs frequently consisted of tiny steps in the overall killing process, and they performed them in a routine manner, never seeing the victims their actions affected. Segmented, routinized, and depersonalized, the job of the bureaucrat or specialist—whether it involved confiscating property, scheduling trains, drafting legislation, sending telegrams, or compiling lists—could be performed without confronting the reality of mass murder. Such a luxury, of course, was not enjoyed by the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, who were quite literally saturated in the blood of victims shot at point-blank range. No one confronted the reality of mass murder more directly than the men in the woods at Józefów. Segmentation and routinization, the depersonalizing aspects of bureaucratized killing, cannot explain the battalion’s initial behavior there.

WHY DID MOST MEN IN RESERVE POLICE BATTALION 101 become killers, while only a minority of perhaps 10 percent—and certainly no more than 20 percent—did not? A number of explanations have been invoked in the past to explain such behavior: wartime brutalization, racism, segmentation and routinization of the task, special selection of the perpetrators, careerism, obedience to orders, deference to authority, ideological indoctrination, and conformity. These factors are applicable in varying degrees, but none without qualification.

The German portrayals of Polish complicity are not false. Tragically, the kind of behavior they attributed to Poles is confirmed in other accounts and occurred all too often. The Holocaust, after all, is a story with far too few heroes and all too many perpetrators and victims. What is wrong with the German portrayals is a multifaceted distortion in perspective. The policemen were all but silent about Polish help to Jews and German punishment for such help. Almost nothing was said of the German role in inciting the Polish “betrayals” the policemen so hypocritically condemned. Nor was any note made of the fact that large units of murderous auxiliaries—the notorious Hiwis—were not recruited from the Polish population, in stark contrast to other nationalities in pervasively anti-Semitic eastern Europe. In some ways, therefore, the German policemen’s comments about Poles reveal as much about the former as the latter.

The German policemen described other examples of Polish complicity. At Końskowola, one policeman in the cordon was approached by a woman dressed as a Polish peasant. The nearby Poles said that she was a Jew in disguise, but the policeman let her pass anyhow.

Probst also related another story. On one occasion Lieutenant Hoppner was leading a patrol that uncovered a bunker with ten Jews. A young man stepped forward and said that he was a Pole who had hidden there in order to be with his bride. Hoppner gave him the choice of leaving or being shot with his Jewish wife. The Pole stayed and was shot. Probst concluded that Hoppner never meant the offer seriously. The Pole would “certainly” have been shot “trying to escape” if he had decided to leave.

Once again it was the ruthlessly honest Bruno Probst who put the matter in more balanced perspective. Often the “Jew hunts” were instigated by tips from Polish informants, he noted. But he added, “I further remember that at that time we also gradually began, more systematically than before, to shoot Poles who provided lodging to Jews. Almost always we burned down their farms at the same time.”

Virtually no account of the “Jew hunts” omitted the fact that hideouts and bunkers were for the most part revealed by Polish “agents,” “informants,” “forest runners,” and angry peasants. But the policemen’s word choice revealed more than just information about Polish behavior. Time and again they used the word “betrayed,” with its unquestionable connotation of strong moral condemnation.29 Most explicit in this regard was Gustav Michaelson. “I found it very disturbing at the time that the Polish population betrayed these Jews who had hidden themselves. The Jews had camouflaged themselves very well in the forest, in underground bunkers or in other hiding places, and would never have been found if they had not been betrayed by the Polish civilian population.”

In Komarówka Drucker’s Second Platoon of Second Company had two Jewish kitchen workers known as Jutta and Harry. One day Drucker said they could not stay any longer and there was nothing left to do but shoot them. Some of the policemen took Jutta to the woods and engaged her in conversation before she was shot from behind. Shortly thereafter, Harry was shot in the back of the head with a pistol while he was picking berries.