Introduction
Hitler created anti-Semitic laws and policies in 1933-45 because his entire career in politics from 1919 until his suicide in 1945 was based on a racist and anti-Semitic worldview (Weltanschauung) as well as 19th Century Social Darwinism and the belief that some individuals and races were supermen and others subhuman or Untermenschen. Certainly he never made any secret of his ideology, which could be found in Mein Kampf and his other writings. He ordered the extermination of the handicapped and mentally ill in Germany in 1939, which continued up to the end of the war and many of the personnel involved with that T-4 program were later moved to Poland to organize the first death camps for the Jews, including Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka death camp. All of the main death camps established during the Third Reich were located in Poland, including Auschwitz, although mobile killing squads like the Einsatzgruppen also murdered two million Jews in Poland and Russia. Most of the Germans, with relatively few exceptions, tactility or actively supported the regime and its ideology, and this included the personnel assigned to the killing squads and extermination camps in the East. Some simply obeyed orders like bureaucratic robots while others went about the work of genocide with genuine pleasure and gusto, but either way, Hitler’s orders were implemented to a degree that most people before World War II would have found beyond belief.
Hitler’s Ideology and the Holocaust
Hitler’s hatred of the Jews and other ‘non-Aryans’ was clearly pathological and he frequently expressed the desire to kill them all with his own hands. As early as 1922, he was on record stating that he would hand all the Jews in Germany and leave their bodies on the public gallows “as long as hygienically possible”.1 In 1929 Hitler had said that 70-80% of German infants should be exterminated every year to “strengthen the bloodline”. 2 He had long planned to exterminate the handicapped, mentally ill and senile persons, and this T-4 euthanasia program began in 1939. Two years later, many of its personnel were transferred to Poland to organize the first death camps for the Jews, and his last will and testament in April 1945 still blamed them for the war and “all the evils of mankind”.3 Hitler had often threatened to kill himself in difficult or stressful situations, and finally did so on April 30, 1945 when the Soviet armies were only a few hundred yards from his Bunker.
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Historians have spent decades examining the history and culture of Germany, searching for clues about how the society took such a radical and destructive turn in 1933-45. Of course they found anti-Semitism dating back to the feudal period and the Reformation, most notoriously in the writings of Martin Luther or the massacres of Jews during the Crusades and bubonic plague. In addition, Germany always had its share of racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism and militarism, although none of this was unique to the Germans by any means. In this respect, the rise and fall of the Nazi state “also causes us to examine the veneer of civilization that exists in all societies.”4 Nazism was a conscious and open rejection of Western liberalism and democracy, as well as Enlightenment rationalism and the belief in human rights and equal citizenship. They also intended to abolish individualism and replace it with a mass consciousness shaped by intense propaganda and obedient only to the Fuehrer’s will. Indeed, the historical record demonstrates that during the Third Reich, the German people, the old conservative elites, industrialists and ‘apolitical’ bureaucrats and experts all formed an effective team for wars of aggression and genocide, and that they also profited personally from the plunder and looting of Jews and occupied countries.
Bureaucratic Functionalism in the Third Reich and Nazi Ideology
Nazi Germany was a totalitarian police state which at the same time had many chaotic and anarchic features as a function of Hitler’s Social Darwinist ideology. He believed in violent competition and conflict and survival of the fittest, which is why he encouraged the creation of numerous competing agencies run by ‘little Fuehrers”, and parallel Nazi Party organizations overlapping with those of the state. These ideas were all expressed openly in Mein Kampf, with its fascist ideology “based on struggle as a way of life, the right of the strong leader to dominate, and the missionary need to create the Aryan racial state”.5 Lower level bureaucrats and officials were always “working towards the Fuehrer” and developing “radical initiatives from below” in attempting to anticipate his wishes based on their interpretation of his intentions and orders.6 Hitler tolerated a wide variety of initiatives and variations on Nazi ideology as long as he perceived no threat to his own power and position.
During the war years, the Nazi state became increasingly radicalized and genocidal, which reflected not only the ideology of its leaders but the momentum of the machinery of Party and state. At first the concentration camps existed to terrorize and destroy the political opposition to the Nazi state, as well as Gypsies, German Jews, homosexuals and others targeted for elimination. Once the war began, their numbers and size expanded greatly, and their inmates consisted of political opponents, slave laborers and POWs from all over occupied Europe. Under the pressure of wartime labor shortages, the camps “became more like transit stations, processing constant arrivals of new labor en route to the expanding network of satellite camps.”7 Death camps in Poland and other areas were also an innovation of the wartime period, and began as an extension of the ‘euthanasia’ program, with doctors overseeing the extermination of sick and debilitated inmates under the code name 14f13. Up to 1942, most Jews were held in ghettos and forced labor camps, being gradually worked and started to death and also sent to extermination facilities like Treblinka and Sobibor. After that time, those Jews still alive were sent mainly to Auschwitz, where most were gassed on arrival. At the end of the war, again under Hitler’s orders, the final phase of destruction took the form of death marches. Since these camps were ubiquitous, most Germans were well aware of them and they were “entangled in their local communities”, although after the war they generally denied all knowledge of them.8
Dutiful Robots or Enthusiastic Killers: Christopher Browning versus Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Christopher Browning examined the records of Reserve Police Battalion 101 and its mass killings in Poland in Ordinary Men, which led him to conclude that most of its men were like the human automatons in one of Stanley Milgram’s experiments, simply carrying out the orders of ‘legitimate authorities’ and conforming to the peer group. He pointed out that, at least according to their own testimony, many of the men of Battalion 101 were sickened and repulsed by their orders, at least at first, and “many policemen did not comply with orders when not directly supervised.”9 Only a few openly refused to obey, however, or attempted to obtain transfers to other duties, while some did become very enthusiastic for the work of mass murder, but most simply complied at a minimal level because of the pressures of their superiors and peer group. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen explicitly countered this view in Hitler’s Willing Executioners by pointing out numerous examples in which ‘ordinary’ Germans, including the men of this same battalion, set about the work of annihilation with genuine enthusiasm and zeal, often exceeding their orders and going out of their way to inflict extreme pain and suffering on their victims before killing them. Certainly it is not difficult to find examples of enthusiastic Nazis in the Third Reich or of war criminals after 1945 lying, attempting to minimize their responsibility, and exculpating themselves by claiming to have simply been small cogs in the machinery. After all, as Goldhagen points out, these S.S. police reservists were being forced to give testimony long after the war as part of a criminal investigation of their activities in Poland, so they had every incentive not to provide a complete picture of what really occurred, just as ordinary criminals do every day when under police questioning. Most were hardly willing to implicate themselves and their former comrades unless they could avoid it, and this was normal in all the postwar proceedings against war criminals.
Goldhagen argued that even the ordinary Germans, like the lower class killers in the Police Battalions, had been sufficiently indoctrinated by years of Nazi propaganda, to regard Jews, Slavs and other ‘inferior’ races as subhuman objects fit only for slavery and extermination. Police Battalion 309, for example, was another group of ‘ordinary men’ who were sent to Russia in 1941, and went on an all-day shooting spree in the Jewish section of Bialystok. According to the survivors, if not their own testimony, these men seemed to enjoy their work greatly, since they could “finally unleash themselves without restraint upon the Jews”, and neither the civil nor the military authorities made the slightest effort to restrain them.10 In addition to shooting large numbers of Jews on the spot, they beat, tortured and humiliated them, before finally locking a group of 700 in the main synagogue and burning them alive. In reality, the members of Police Battalion and all these other S.S. units carried out the same kinds of atrocities routinely in Poland and Russia, all on Hitler’s orders. Contrary to Milgram’s more general views about the power of authority figures and peer pressure, all acts of genocide like these are carried out not in a laboratory but in “a propitious social and political context.”11
Robert J. Lifton and the ‘Auschwitz Self’
As Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz put it, those who worked there had to become cruel, heartless and indifferent to suffering and death or they did not remain there long. Most made the adjustment quickly, although not all were willing or able to do so, like Robert Lifton’s important witness, the former S.S. doctor ‘Ernest B.’, who never took part in the gassings and selections. On the other hand, some like Josef Mengele embraced the Auschwitz environment enthusiastically and with very little difficulty at all. Almost everyone who did the extermination work at Auschwitz had to undergo a certain degree of ‘doubling’ and develop a ‘killing self’ that was somewhat disconnected and dissociated from their normal personality, and this also happened with the Einsatzgruppen, Police Battalions and similar units that carried out mass shootings in the East. One Wehrmacht psychiatrist estimated that at least 20% of the men in these organizations displayed the symptoms of what would later be called Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), including nightmares, tremors and anxiety, which “led the Nazis to seek a more ‘surgical’ method of killing”, including the use of gas chambers.12
All the Nazis involved in mass murder, including the doctors, had already been taught to dehumanize their victims and regard them as subhuman, or as infectious diseases that were a threat to Germany. Hans Frank, the boss of the Government General in Poland, was quite explicit in the use of such medical metaphors, and the Nazis frequently used the terminology of genetics, eugenics and Darwinian “selection” to justify genocide.13 Doctors at Auschwitz carried out these selections, supervised the killing process and the disposal of bodies, and also conducted medical experiments on prisoners. They developed their killing selves’ based on Nazi propaganda and ideology, and “were given much of the responsibility for the murderous ecology of Auschwitz.”14 Many of them had already participated in sterilizations and the extermination of the handicapped and mentally ill in Germany, and were well-aware of the concentration camps, if not the newer death camps like Auschwitz. As Nazis, they arrived at Auschwitz with their personalities doubled to some degree, and their killing selves “depended on radically diminished feeling, upon one not experiencing psychologically what one was doing.”15
Conclusion
No history of the racism and anti-Semitism of the Nazi state would ever make sense without the ideology and personality of Hitler, who was the leading force in guiding and shaping the Third Reich. Beyond question, the wars of aggression, the extermination of the Jews and the plunder of occupied Europe all occurred on his direct orders, even though he often left the details to be worked out by competing groups of subordinates. I think that he was quite effective in his policies of divide and rule, as well as keeping the German masses bribed and contented with the loot from the rest of Europe. He also promised them better days to come if they proved themselves worthy in the Social Darwinist struggle about became the lords and masters of Europe. In carrying out all these crimes and atrocities, he had considerable assistance from the old conservative elites, industrialists and bureaucrats, who were not simply mindless robots following orders but frequently took the initiative to better fulfill the wishes of the Fuehrer—and not coincidentally to line their own pockets along the way. So did the ordinary soldiers and civilians whenever the opportunities presented themselves, although in the aftermath of defeat and occupation they naturally found it more comfortable to regard themselves as victims of the Nazis rather than complicit in their crimes. Apart from a minority of genuinely heroic resisters, most were not victims at all except in losing a war of their own making. Their main regret was that they had lost the war rather than for the tens of millions of deaths caused by the regime, and they comforted themselves with the thought that they too with the victims of both the Nazis and the Allies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Browning, Christopher, “Ordinary Men” in Donald L. Niewyk. The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th Edition. Cengage Learning, 2010, pp. 76-90.
Caplan, J. and N. Waschmann (eds). Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories. Routledge, 2010.
Collier, M. and P. Pedley (eds). Hitler and the Nazi State. Heinemann Educational Publishers, 2005.
Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” in Nieyk, pp. 91-103.
Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: A Biography. NY: Norton, 2008.
Liften, Robert Jay, “The Nazi Doctors” in Niewyk, pp. 57-71.
Sax, B. and D. Kuntz. Inside Hitler’s Germany: A Documentary History. D.C. Health Publishing, 1991.
Spielvogel, J. T. and D. Redles. Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History, 6th Edition. Prentice Hal, 2009.
Waite, Ralph G.L. The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. De Capo Press, 1993.
