Goldhagen and Browning

The debate between Goldhagen and Browning

To listen to this class

Goldhagen vs. Browning

Why do you think the Germans did this?

1.     Christopher Browning – Ordinary Germans- Little info on book

Study of the Reserve Battalion 101 – Who were these people?

30s-40s middle or below in class businessman, dockworkers, truckers, druggists, waiters, teachers, construction workers.

Reserve Police Battalion 101 was a unit of the German Order Police [Ordnungspolizei or Orpo] that during the Nazi occupation of Poland played a central role in the implementation of the Final Solution against the Jewish people and the repression of the Polish population. Members of the battalion participated in the round-up and expulsion of Jews, Poles and Gypsies, the guarding and liquidation of ghettos, the deportation to concentration camps and the mass shooting of tens of thousands of civilians.
Raised in Hamburg, Battalion 101 was one of thirteen police formations that were put at the disposal of the German army during its invasion of Poland in September1939. Members of the battalion crossed into Poland at the border town of Oppeln and then moved through Czestochowa to Kielce, where they rounded-up Polish soldiers and military equipment and guarded a POW camp. On December 13, the police battalion returned to Hamburg where many of its recruits were transferred to other units and replaced by middle-aged reservists.
In May 1940, the battalion was again dispatched to Poland where it was engaged throughout the Wartegau (the districts of western Poland formally annexed by the Third Reich) in the expulsion and resettlement of Poles, Gypsies and Jews. It is estimated that close to 37,000 people were evacuated by Police Battalion 101 alone in a five month period during the spring and summer of 1940. Following the resettlement actions, the battalion was involved in efforts to hunt down Poles who had evaded the evacuation order.
On November 28, 1940 the police battalion was re-deployed to guard the perimeter of the Lodz ghetto, which had been sealed seven months before. These policemenhad a standing order to shoot any Jew who came too close to the fence that enclosed the ghetto.
In May 1941, Police Battalion 101 was sent home to Hamburg, where it was totally reconstituted. After most of its earlier recruits were distributed to other police units, its ranks were filled with drafted reservists. While most of its members still hailed from Hamburg, a group from Luxembourg now joined its ranks. For the next twelve months the new battalion underwent extensive training in and around Hamburg. This period coincided with the deportation to eastern Europe of the Jewish population of Hamburg and its environs in four transports that departed between October 25 and December 4, 1941.
Members of Police Battalion 101 were involved in several aspects of the deportation process, including the guarding of the assembly center (at the Freemason Lodge in Hamburg) and the Sternschanze train station, where the Jews were boarded onto trains, and the escorting of transports to their final destinations: Lodz, Minsk and Riga. In June 1942, Police Battalion 101 was sent back to Poland. Posted to the Lublin district, the battalion arrived during a temporary lull in the mass deportations of Jews to the three Operation Reinhard killing centers of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. For the next four weeks members of the battalion were deployed in rounding-up Jews from smaller settlements and concentrating them in larger ghettos and camps, particularly Izbica and Piaski, the two major assembly camps in the southern Lublin district.
Beginning in mid-July 1942 with the round-up of Jews in the town of Jozefow near Bilgoraj, members of Police Battalion 101 were utilized for the mass shooting of Jewish civilians in towns throughout the Lublin district. These included (in addition to Jozefow) Lomazy (August 1942), Miedzyrzec (August 1942), Serokomla (September 1942), Kock (September 1942), Parczew (October 1942), Konskowola (October 1942), Miedzyrzec (a second action in October 1942) and Lukow (November 1942).
Police Battalion 101's participation in the Final Solution culminated in the Erntefest [Harvest Festival] massacre of November 3-4, 1943. In the course of this killing action, perhaps the largest directed against Jews of the entire war, an estimated 42,000 Jewish prisoners at the Lublin district concentration camps of Majdanek, Trawniki and Poniatowa were wiped out. It is estimated that during the period between July 1942 and November 1943, Police Battalion 101 was alone responsible for the shooting deaths of more than 38,000 Jews and the deportation of 45,000 others.
In the final sixteen months of the war Police Battalion 101 was engaged in actions against partisans and enemy troops. Almost all battalion members survived the collapse of the Third Reich and returned safely to Germany. In the immediate postwar period only four members of the unit suffered legal consequences for their actions in Poland. These policemen, who were arrested for their part in the killing of 78 Poles in the town of Talcyn, were extradited to Poland in 1947 and tried the following year. Two were sentenced to death and two to prison. It was not until 1962, however, that Reserve Police Battalion 101 as a whole came under investigation and legal prosecution by the Office of the State Prosecutor in Hamburg. In 1967 fourteen members of the unit were put on trial. Though most were convicted, only five received prison terms (ranging from five to eight years), which were subsequently reduced in the course of a lengthy appeals process.

Read intro into wolfgang Hoffman

What do you see from intro.

These were fine upstanding people-

Why would this be a good study?

What is title of book- Most ordinary – nothing noticeable random

So Why – Most common answer

Authority  Orders are Orders

The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the question: "Was it that Eichmann and his accomplices in the Holocaust had mutual intent, in at least with regard to the goals of the Holocaust?" In other words, "Was there a mutual sense of morality among those involved?" Milgram's testing suggested that it could have been that the millions of accomplices were merely following orders, despite violating their deepest moral beliefs. The experiments have been repeated many times, with consistent results within societies, but different percentages across the globe.^[3] The experiments were also controversial, and considered by some scientists to be unethical and physically or psychologically abusive. Psychologist Diana Baumrind considered the experiment, "harmful because it may cause permanent psychological damage and cause people to be less trusting in the future." ^[4] Such criticism motivated more thorough review boards and committee reviews for working with human subjects.

Read and show milgram experiment Video

Picture - The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the experiment, to give what the latter believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L), who is actually an actor andconfederate. The subject believes that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual electric shocks, though in reality there were no such punishments. Being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level.^[1]

Was this an accurate comparison

How many actually walked out

After Milgram reads this piece and see – Can it be just authority for the ordinary german

Read first piece

Just as daylight was breaking, the men arrived at the village [of Jozefow] and assembled in a half-circle around Major Trapp, who proceeded to give a short speech. With choking voice and tears in his eyes, he visibly fought to control himself as he informed his men that they had received orders to perform a very unpleasant task. These orders were not to his liking, but they came from above. It might perhaps make their task easier, he told the men, if they remembered that in Germany bombs were falling on the women and children. Two witnesses claimed that Trapp also mentioned that the Jews of this village had supported the partisans. Another witness recalled Trapp’s mentioning that the Jews had instigated the boycott against Germany. Trapp then explained to the men that the Jews in Jozefow would have to be rounded up, whereupon the young males were to be selected out for labor and the others shot.

Trapp then made an extraordinary offer to his battalion: if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step out. Trapp paused, and after some moments, one man stepped forward. The captain of 3^rd company, enraged that one of his men had broken ranks, began to berate the man. The major told the captain to hold his tongue. Then 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.

Trapp then summoned the company commanders and gave them their respective assignments. Two platoons of 3rd 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 market place. Those too sick or frail to walk to the market place, as well as infants and anyone offering resistance or attempting to hide, were to be shot on the spot. Thereafter, a few men of 1st company were to accompany the work Jews selected at the market place, while the rest were to proceed to the forest to form the firing squads. The Jews were to be loaded onto battalion trucks by 2nd company and shuttled from the market place to the forest.

Having given the company commanders their respective assignments, Trapp spent the rest of the day in town, mostly in a schoolroom converted into his headquarters but also at the homes of the Polish mayor and the local priest. Witnesses who saw him at various times during the day described him as bitterly complaining about the orders he had been given and “weeping like a child.” He nevertheless affirmed that “orders were orders” and had to be carried out. Not a single witness recalled seeing him at the shooting site, a fact that was not lost on the men, who felt some anger about it. Trapp’s driver remembers him saying later, “If this Jewish business is ever avenged on earth, then have mercy on us Germans.”¹

¹ Christopher R. Browning, “One Day in Jozefow: Initiation to Mass Murder” in The Path to Genocide:Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 174-175.

As a side note what actually occurred in Jozefow:

The largest single massacre, but not the final liquidation of the entire Jewish population, happened on 13 July 1942. On that day men of the 101st Reserve Police Battalion, commanded by Major Trapp, executed 1,300 - 1,500 Jews in Jozefow.  These people were taken from their homes and gathered at the market square. There a selection was held - about 300 young men were taken to the railway station and deported by train to Lublin, probably to the Airfield Camp.

The other people, after a short journey in trucks, were shot in the forest about 2 km from the village. The execution took place on both sides of the road to Bilgoraj, at a site which the local inhabitants called Winiarczykowa Gora (Winiarczykowa Hill).  Many people were already killed in Jozefow itself - in their homes or on the streets. Some policemen stated after the war during their trial: 

"The bodies of the shot Jews were everywhere - on the streets, in the houses and at the marketplace." 

After the first volley of shots was heard in the marketplace, the Jews gathered there started to scream, but in a few moments they became completely silent. The people went to their death in silence, and only in the forest, at the last moment, did some of them cry and some children screamed. An eyewitness to the massacre:

“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.”

By the evening the massacre was finished. The policemen went back to Bilgoraj, but not all the Jews had been killed. Some of them still hid in cellars or in the forest. Some, who were only wounded, came back from the execution site - no mass graves had been dug, but after the execution the local Polish population was given the task of burying the bodies. 
 

Based on this reading  - Why did Ordinary Germans commit genocide?

Browning says that certainly not just authority – because not just no order, could actually leave if they wanted to

Did they want to do it?

Why did they do it?

Option two:

Conformity-

Another factor, as pointed out by Browning, that motivated the men in Police Battalion 101, was conformity of the group. First, Stanley Milgram (1969) points out that legitimate authority influences obedience and under group circumstances, the members obey more as a group than as individuals. This can lead to the most serious type of peer and psychological pressure and ultimate conformity within a group. Second, Irving Janis (1982) points out that when in a group, the members may exhibit �groupthink,� which occurs when a group makes a bad decision because the group does not assess the decision critically as well as other alternatives. Browning states that the pressure for conformity was so strong that the basic identification of men in uniform with their comrades and the strong urge not to separate themselves from the group prevented policemen from refusing orders. A driver assigned to take Jews into the forest made only one trip before he asked to be relieved, and the man who took over the truck disdainfully commented that �presumably his nerves were not strong enough� (63). Men in Police Battalion 101 did not want to appear too weak or cowardly and they certainly did not want to be an outsider, so they did not dare lose face in front of their comrades.

Option 3:

Habitual and Routine

 Another factor, perhaps as scary as the idea of participating merely to "fit in," was the idea that the men transform into brutal monsters merely because killing became habitual and routine. [12] The men did not begin at Jozefow with bloodlust or brutal intentions, but instead progressed into a frenzied mind after Jozefow. [13]

Right after Josefow – now all too common

 In fact, after Jozefow the shootings became, for many, routine -- even, for some, fun. And for a few, the initial horror was replaced by a gory sadism, in which Jews, totally naked, preferably old and with beards, were forced to crawl in front of their intended graves and to sustain beatings with clubs before being shot. One officer even brought his new and pregnant wife from Germany to show off his mastery over the fate of the Jews.

Option 4 _Career Advancement

Browning -  

There are many societies afflicted by traditions of racism  and caught in the siege mentality of war or threat of war. Everywhere society conditions people to respect and defer to             authority. . . Everywhere people seek career advancement.             In every modern society. . .the peer group exerts tremendous             pressures on behavior and sets moral norms.  If the men of             Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such          circumstances, what group of men cannot

Option 5 - Apathy

The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic – Stalin

Quote from Wiesel PPT

2.     Daniel Goldhagen  - Hitler’s Willing Executioners

Everyone should quickly reread - Operation in Talcyn – Pg 239-242

Based on this reading – Why did Ordinary Germans commit genocide?

Show on board New York Times Op-ed

Proofs for Browning:

Non Germans – Lithuanians – just as vicious , Luxebmourg unit – no noticeable defection,

Ukranians particulary vicious and a lot of murder

Poles themselves did so much

Kielce progroms

Proofs for Goldhagen

Helmbrechts death march

In the waning days of World War II, Heinrich Himmler issued an order to commander Alois Dorr of the Helmbrechts labor camp in eastern Germany. The camp's 600 prisoners had just embarked on a forced march, ostensibly in flight from the advancing Red Army.

Himmler was trying to open peace talks with the Americans, who he hoped might accept something less than unconditional surrender. He didn't want his efforts spoiled by revelations of last- minute atrocities.

So he ordered Dorr and his guards to treat the prisoners ``humanely.'' Above all, Himmmler said, do not shoot any of them.

Twenty-two days later, half the Jews were dead. The guards shot 50 in two massacres. They shot or bludgeoned to death numerous others in separate incidents. And many prisoners died of exposure, starvation or disease, denied food, shelter and clothing, even though all were available.

Why did the guards disobey Himmler's orders?

They wanted to kill Jews. They had been killing Jews for months at the camp, and they were not about to stop. They enjoyed it. And they knew, no matter what Himmler said, that the true enemy of Germany was not the Soviet Union or United States but ``world Jewry.''

Identifying Features of Unique German Anti-Semitism

a)     Initiative

One job. Maybe jozefow, so many volunteers some had to be left behind

They lookd for every jew even hiding to kill

b)    Zeal

Even bring their wives to see

c)     Cruelty –

Goldhagen - Eliminationist anti-Semitism in Germany

a)     Ubiquitous -  it’s common sense

b)    Obsessive

That s all they could think of. Disproportionate amount of material degrading us

c)     Symbolic of all that was awry

Medieval Christian view was that Jews were a source of evil, not the source of evil.

d)    Principal not peripheral

Do great harm peripherally not ultimate source of all that is wrong in the world. Not so, now – NO peace until every last jew is destroyed

e)     Racial, unalterable

Unalterable,

f)      Violent, 19/28 pamphlets called for extermination

This is even following World War 1 already saw devastation of death, still called for mass murder.

g)     Official public ideology

Even previous friends to the Jews were calling for their death – wipe tehm off

h)    Permeated every aspect of society – judiciary, educational, churches, children fairy tales

See fairy tale

We grew up believing in it, even of not believe in fairy tale, like world was round took adults word for it

Even one churchman said One will want to be just towards the Jews only when there are no more

Not help that majority of Gemrnay was protestant. Their paper called the jews the natural enemies of the Christian state

When hitler gave a speech in 1920 entiled why are we a.s and proposed the death penalty to all jews, as no bolt was secure enough to hold thegm in, they are parasites that need to be killed. No one questioned this

i)       No supporting group anywhere

100 willing to fight for antis Semitism none willing to fight against anti-Semitism.

j)       Systematic legal assault – lose citizenship, legal rights, property rights

If the govt supported these measures what was the ordinary german to think

Great quote from 1 policeman

It did not at all occur to me that these orders could be unjust. I was then of the conviction that the jews were not innocent but guitly

Who is Right  - Goldhagen or Browning???

When we ask why they did not refuse is the asnswer:

They could not refuse or

They did not want to refuse