Different types of perpetrators
Lengthy (in comparison) notes on those that actually carried out the killings during the holocaust. Focusing most on the Einzatsgruppen who were in effect the death squads that would follow hot on the heels of the conquering German army into Russia and murder all Jews and other 'undesirables' such as Communist sympathisers. The notes also include thoughts on the possible motivations for the others involved, such as the police detachments, the German army (the Wehrmacht) and local groups of anti-Semites.
posted by Benjamin Nakizo at 6:34 PM
1 Comments:
Bureaucrats:
A certain amount of ‘function creep’ can perhaps be seen in the efforts of the former T4 team, on completion of their ‘euthanasia’ program, in encouraging the use of gas chambers to deal with the slaughter of the Jews. They wanted to keep their jobs.
A large bureaucracy was employed in the execution of the Holocaust. It has been argued that each individual actor within the system was able to justify their actions in the wider scheme through the segmentation of chores, the effects of ‘routinization’ and the depersonalised nature of the work made it easier for people to participate. Organising train schedules, confiscating property, sending telegrams etc could all be done with a great deal of personal detachment from the end product. Only those men, like those of police battalion 101, were actually at the sharp end of this bureaucratic process and had to be literally covered in the blood of the victims. Yet even there, on the ground and face to face with the Jews the process was divided up into ‘easier to deal with chunks’ such as driving lorries, packing trains, escorting to burial sites, overseeing pit digging etc. And during the larger shootings ‘outsiders’ were often brought in to do the actual shooting, such as local militia units and anti-Semites etc.
The German army:
To what extent
Reports indicate that sometimes the Wehrmacht proved to be an obstacle to the efforts of the Einzatsgruppen by not allowing their personal to extract Jewish prisoners under military jurisdiction, to what degree this came as a genuine expression of unease at the scale of the atrocities or whether it was simply a matter of officials and officers protecting their spheres of influence is surely hard to judge. Yet the problem seemed sufficient to warrant a number of decrees from the OKW which ordered the Wehrmacht to cooperate fully at all levels.
What kinds of genocide
The euthanasia program had seen the introduction of the gas vans and chambers and the Einzatsgruppen had perfected the art of mass murder via shootings. For the killing of those in the USSR the death squad tactic won out. For those Jews and other ‘undesirables’ within Europe it was the gas chambers that would become the method of choice. Staffing these facilities came an experienced workforce who had organised the T4 euthanasia program and were since redundant. The Jews would become their next customers.
Indeed it seems almost as if the nazi regime learnt from the pogroms and exterminations in the USSR since when it came to annihilating the European Jews they deemed that they needed something more efficient, less public and less psychologically harrowing on the troops than the mass shootings that had previously been used. This may indicate a learning curve and is also obviously a statement on the political implications of mass public killings in Europe whose population, it was deemed, would be either more offended or were more important and therefore not worth risking possible offence.
Division of labour was also a key element in gaining consent from the executioners. After severe psychological conditions were noted in units on execution duty the work load was broken up. The majority of the killing was moved to specialised concentration camps, laving the German units to focus on rounding up Jews and loading them onto trains. In instances where this itself was particularly harrowing it was ensured that the units formed from Soviet POWs were used so as to minimise the risk of damage to Germans. When conducting mass shootings the Soviet manned units were used to do the actual shootings. To be covered in the blood, bones and brains of the victims.
Motivation
It appears from the documents as if the commanders of the Wehrmacht were sold on the idea of exterminating Jews on the basis of the security benefits it might bring. Under the pretence that it was Jews that led the majority of the uprisings behind the lines in newly occupied areas it seemed only prudent to have them and all others deemed a security threat exterminated. To this end many Wehrmacht commanders requested that the Einzatsgruppen units work along side the regular army units right at the front in order to pacify newly conquered territories as quickly as possible.
One report states that the executioners were treated to a banquet the night before and made to get very drunk before being fed anti-Semitic speeches to put them into a sort of frenzy. The next morning during the shootings the men were given yet more liquor.
Often occupation authorities far from looking to protect their Jews for economic reasons wanted to be rid of them for the exact same reason. Unproductive Jews were simply more mouths to feed and many statements express the occupation officials delight in being “rid of unnecessary mouths to feed”.
Many men carried out the atrocities because they believed the rhetoric about the Jews being to blame for the nations decline after World War I. Others stated that they simply obeyed orders because they came from a higher authority and as such didn’t think to do anything but execute those orders.
Goods and wealth. The Jews property and homes were valuable and offered rich pickings for anyone that sought to take advantage of the situation.
Comradeship, men would have not wanted to ‘break ranks’ by objecting to their orders, at least – not until they were underway and the truly horrific nature of their task had become evident.
Others may have had careerist ambitions that they did not wish to sacrifice by disobeying an order or being humiliated by accepting any offers of exemption from the work.
Out of sight out of mind was a key element in organising the holocaust. Men involved in rounding up Jews or those involved in packing them on to the trains, while aware that the Jews were more than likely going to their death, it was not their concern. Was not their job to know. They could now switch off.
Einzatsgruppen:
The Einzatsgruppen were paramilitary groups formed from units from various German organisations, including the Gestapo and the Waffen SS (as well as designated members of the Wehrmacht) they followed in the rear of the German eastward advance into Russia and conducted atrocities on a massive scale against the local populations. They are believed to have been responsible for over a million deaths.
Their primary method of killing was execution by shooting. They typically dug shallow graves on the outskirts of cities and ordered the target demographic to assemble there, upon which they were executed and buried. Occasionally they were assisted by local anti-Semites.
Four units were established for the operations in Russia. One for the Baltic states, one for ‘white Russia’, one for ‘north and central Ukraine’ and a last one for ‘southern Ukraine, the Crimea and the Caucasus. “Each Einsatzgruppe contained between 600 and 1000 men and was fully motorised. The lower ranks were made up of Gestapo, criminal police, order police, Waffen SS and a number of specialists (for example interpreters, communications experts etc). Most had hurriedly seconded from the various police departments. The leaders, however, were carefully selected, came largely for the SD, and most had middle class professional backgrounds and included many law graduates.
From the reports it is also clear that the extent of the Einzatsgruppen’s activities was often deliberately hidden from the Wehrmacht for fear of their response. Secondly the attempts to exterminate all Jews often conflicted with the interests of the new German occupation authorities who wished to keep those Jews with specialised skills and professions safe in order to continue their trade for the benefit of the local economy that they had now been entrusted with. This only extended however to keeping them alive in detention, not in granting them their ordinary rights and freedoms.
The Einzatsgruppen units conducted two ‘sweeps’ of the conquered territories. The first from June 1941 to April 1942 claimed around 700 – 750,000 lives. The second ‘sweep’ was conducted 1942 to 1943 and it claimed an estimated 1.5 million lives. 2.2 million people in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union lost their lives to the nazi extermination squads.
The actions of these squads were in effect the crossing of a Rubicon, while initially targeting Jews in the USSR the policy was then extended to all Jews throughout occupied Europe who had up till then merely been subject to detention, ghettoization and deportation.
Anti-Semites
The Einzatsgruppen were under orders to ‘secretly encourage’ and ‘purges that may be initiated by anti-Communist or anti-Jewish elements in the newly occupied territories’. In another report on the operations of the Einzatsgruppen in the Baltic’s it was expressly stated that the police units should not introduce themselves to the occupied towns immediately but rather sit back and wait for signs of anti-Communist or anti-Semite actions – “It had to be shown to the world that the inhabitants themselves took the first measures”.
Border police:
Were they ordinary men?
Christopher Browning makes the case that those involved in the Holocaust, or at least those from his case study, Reserve Police Battalion 101, were in fact ordinary men who participated in the atrocities primarily from a sense of collective behaviour. Many had severe doubts and anxieties over their actions and a few refused to participate outright. After a study of the circumstances in which various people did or did not carry out their orders to exterminate to the full he concludes that it was when faced with ‘peer pressures’ with the desire to conform, that people were most likely to carry out their evil orders. He does not place much credence on the level to which these men were institutionalised or ‘brain washed’ by the nazi regime but rather sees it as the natural inclination to conform that made them pull the trigger. As he puts it: “Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behaviour and sets moral norms. If the [ordinary] men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?”
Anti-Semitic partisans:
Evidence suggests that locals in almost all areas assisted to some degree with the killings of Jews and Communists.
What is also clear, according to Browning, is that faced with a manpower shortage for the logistical troubles in getting over two million Polish Jews to the concentration camps the German authorities called on the men held in POW camps in occupied Russia. Ethnic Latvians, Lithuanians and Ukrainians were offered an escape from probably starvation and given a promise they would not be used against forces from the USSR in exchange for their cooperation in joining special units to help carry out the genocide.
Post a Comment
<< Home