WEDNESDAY JUNE 13 2001
Killing with no hesitation
BY GITTA SERENY
How can men be brought to murder their neighbours? Christopher R. Browning gives his answer
When, in the autumn of 1990, Christopher Browning read his completed manuscript of Ordinary Men, his examination of 500 middle-aged Germans who, civilians when they were drafted into the 'Order Police' in the spring of 1941, murdered tens of thousands of Jews in Poland, he asked himself why on earth he had written it.   It was too strong, too shocking, he thought: no one would read it. And, sure enough, the first three publishers he offered it to rejected it.
It was one of those rare cases where not only three major publishers but the author, too, were completely wrong about the potential of a book. By now, when, at last, one might say,  Ordinary Men is being published in Britain, it has become a classic of its kind.
The ordinary men Browning is writing about, all working-class Bürger from Hamburg, were entirely ignorant of what they would be asked to do when they were drafted into the 'Reserve Police Battalion 101' in May 1941. Recruitment into the Order Police saved them from conscription into the Army and, so they thought, would keep them near wives and children and home. And indeed, evidence of the Nazis' psychological acuity,  their involvement in murder, would happen gradually, carefully spaced over months.
At a time when countless population groups were moved from one place to another, their first assignment, in October-November 1941, the deportation and escort ' east', to   Lodz, Riga and Minsk, of Hamburg's Jews must have seemed comparatively harmless to them. The middle- class, well-dressed Hamburgers with well-behaved children had been told that they would be ' resettled '  in the   east and they, like their escorts, believed it.
After all, they not only travelled in normal carriages, but two supply cars were attache carrying the agricultural equipment and food they would need to start their new lives. Could anyone dream that this was merely part of the Nazis' cynical scenario of deceit, to be repeated time and again throughout the subsequent two years? If the escort shared the victims'  illusion, it was not for long.   Browning quotes from postwar testimonies for German NS (Nazi crime) trials:   ' On arrival in Minsk,'  said one of the 101 Reserve battalion policemen, ' an SS commando was waiting for our transport . . . From conversations (with other police) we learnt that some weeks ago (they) had already shot Jews   (there . . . on arrival). We concluded from this fact that our Hamburg Jews were to be shot there also.'
In the late spring of 1942, the battalion with two others, was posted to Lublin, the centre of the murder of the ' General Government's' two million Jews, which had already begun in the specially built extermination camps, Chelmno, Belsen and Sobibor. But the Reserve Battalions would never see these secret places, which were operated exclusively by the SS. Their task, they were told, was to clear out the ghettoes and drive the Jews on to the trains.
From June 19 to the end of July, however, a shortage of rolling stock brought all Jewish transports to a halt and Reserve Police Battalion 101 was elected to try out a new method to clear the ghettoes for future arrivals.
It began on July 12, when the battalion commander, Major Trapp, informed his officers that, starting early the next morning, their three platoons were to round up the 1,800 Jews of Josefow, a town about 80km southeast of Lublin, assemble them in the marketplace, select suitable males for work camps, and shoot on the spot the sick and old, infants who couldn't walk, and mothers who wouldn't leave them. The remainder were to be driven into the forest in groups of 40 and shot individually.
One of the officers, a 38-year-old well-established Hamburg businessman in civilian life, was the first to refuse. Without reprimand or threat, he was immediately told he could be in charge of the selected ' workjews '. Eventually he would be transferred back to Hamburg. More extraordinary still, however, Major Trapp himself was  manifestly troubled the next morning. Again, those men who refused to kill  stepped forward and were given other duties. Throughout the following 12 hours, Major Trapp would repeatedly be found crying. Attending no shootings either that day or during the weeks that followed, he approved all applications for relief and defended men for making them.
Already, a considerable number of the men, when clearing the houses, had, as one man would testify later, ' tacitly refrained from killing infants and small children as ordered '. They found it ' disturbing ', he wrote, that none of the mothers would leave their children, thereby forcing them to kill them together, and were ' surprised ', too, at the apparent equanimity with which the encircled Jews in the market square accepted their fate. In the forest, not long afterwards, as the trucks arrived, each of 40 policemen was paired with a victim. They walked them to a selected execution site, made them lie down in a row and, on orders, fired in unison.
There were cigarette breaks every few hours and in the afternoon alcohol was distributed. But within a comparatively short time, men in groups or on their own asked their sergeants to relieve them. The task was ' repugnant ' to them.   They ' couldn't take it '. They admitted to having ' a weak nature '. What several found most troubling, aside from killing children, was that, when talking to their victims, they found that they came from Kassel, from Bremen, from Hamburg. ' They spoke German like me,' said one. ' I suddenly felt   nauseous and ran away farther into the woods and stayed there until it was over, ' said another.
By 9pm that night, when the killing ended, about 20 per cent of those assigned to the killings had asked to be relieved or avoided shooting. Back at their billets, Major Trapp ordered large quantities of alcohol to be distributed and asked the men never to talk about Josefow. ' If this Jewish business is ever avenged on earth, then have mercy on us Germans,'  he is reported to have said to his   driver. And the authorities appeared to acknowledge the psychological burden on the men: until early September (when, considered hardened, they would again be assigned to kill), while continuing the clearing of ghettoes, the actual killings ' on the spot ' (of babies, the sick and the old) would be done by Baltic SS auxiliaries. Nonetheless, by the time they were returned to Germany, the battalion of less than 500 men had killed or participated in the murder of at least 83,000 Jews.
What is admirable in this book is how Browning evaluates the testimony of each man and then leaves it to the reader to judge the value of their statements. The quotes throughout the book of the men as witnesses at German trials, and a brilliant final chapter of analysis of the minds of the men, show us more clearly than anyone else has ever done how individual and perfectly ' ordinary '  men, if conditioned by environment, peer pressure and repeated exposure to experience, can, though often only reluctantly and gradually, become, perhaps not monsters, but monstrous. What can give us hope is that there were those who overcame fear of retribution and refused to take part.
Browning's involvement with the history of the Nazis and the Jews evolved out of his feelings about the disaster of Vietnam. He was working toward his PhD in French diplomatic history at the University of Wisconsin in 1967 when Lyndon Johnson cancelled graduate school deferment. ' I was damned if I was going to let them pull me into that awful Vietnam adventure of theirs,' he told me when we talked a few weeks ago. He had started reading up on German history when a high school offered him a job which would renew his deferment. ' And that brought me to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem '. Arendt often referred to The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg, and after catching hepatitis in 1968, Browning had the time to read its 800 pages. ' I was staggered,' he said. ' It changed my life.'
Almost 20 years later, in 1987 (by then the only gentile in the United States to hold a chair in Holocaust studies), he spent the summer at West Germany's Central Agency for the Investigation into Nazi Crime at Ludwigsburg, where prosecutors had by then investigated more than 60,000 suspects, mostly former members of Himmler's police empire. Browning's confrontation in Ludwigsburg with the   indictments of Reserve Police Battalion 101 was, as he writes ' singularly disturbing. Never before had I encountered the issue of choice so dramatically framed... and so openly discussed by....perpetrators. Never before had I seen the monstrous deeds of the Holocaust so starkly juxtaposed with the human faces of the killers.'
A book like Ordinary   Men requires not only thorough knowledge both of past and contemporary   history, but a very special neutrality of mind, which enables the writer on the one hand to control his emotional bias for the victims and on the other to discover in himself a capacity for empathy with individuals who are hard to empathise with.
Daniel Goldhagen, in his controversial book Hitler's Willing Executioners, which is based on identical research in Ludwigsburg, accuses Browning repeatedly of having gone easy on the Germans. In an essentially objective 31-page afterword, Browning takes issue with Goldhagen's criticisms and his thesis that all Germans were ' eliminationist anti-Semites ' since the middle of the 19th century, and that Hitler's extermination of the Jews was therefore an inevitable consequence accepted by most of Hitler's 60 million   Germans.
A comparison of how the two men used the same archival sources to arrive at such different conclusions is revealing. To cite only one example, we read in both books that 29-year-old Captain Julius Wohluf, a convinced anti-Semite, brought his pregnant young wife to watch a deportation ' Aktion ' in a small Polish town.   His company ferociously marched 11,000 Jews, shooting those too young or too old to walk, to the trains for Treblinka. The first question that springs to our minds is how that young German could do such a thing, and how his wife could agree to be there and allegedly enjoy the horrible spectacle. Goldhagen, in no doubt at all about the answer to these questions, uses the incident time and again throughout his book to emphasise the uniqueness of the Germans' evil. Browning merely reports the incident but,  to my mind more  valuable to us, demonstrates with quotations from men who were doing the killing that they were able to commit these acts and yet feel dismay at the actions of this couple.
Goldhagen says such testimonies are irrelevant: that these men were virtually all anti-Semitic monsters. The difference between them is not one of judgment, but of approach. Both men feel passionate about the horrors they describe.   But Browning has the advantage of detachment: for him these men's actions are not an emotional but a psycho-historical problem.
Ordinary Men is a very special book, not because of the meticulous research in German archives and the author's restraint in his treatment of terrible acts, but because it is a book about individual morality, and thus, essentially, about all of us.
These questions are illustrated in this book by the events in 1940 to 1944 in Nazi-occupied Poland, but they have haunted us far beyond them. The 20th century saw the killing of the Armenians by the Turks, of the Kulaks by Stalin, of the Jews by the Nazis, of Vietnamese civilians by Americans, of the Tutsis by the Hutus, Cambodians by Pol Pot, and finally, back in Europe, where ethnic   cleansing, as it is so disgustingly called, is still going on, in the former Yugoslavia.
In every single case, one most basic question has begged for an answer: how can individual men, all of whom have the capacity and, under almost universal laws (valid in Nazi Germany too) the right to say ' no ', be brought to murder their neighbours? Browning goes far toward providing an answer.
Click on the picture for a larger image.
Men of the Reserve Police Battalion 101 searching Jews for valuables.