The Holocaust deniers claim: “The Holocaust, to the extent that it happened at all, was the work of a small fanatical group within the SS. The wider German population, the regular military, the civil service, and even most of the SS itself had nothing to do with it. Responsibility lies with a small clique, not with German society.”
The numerical scale of participation contradicts the claim. The killing of European Jewry required the active and informed participation of approximately 100,000 to 200,000 individual perpetrators, drawn from the SS, the Order Police, the Wehrmacht, the Reich Security Main Office, the railways, the civil service, the medical profession, the legal profession, the engineering firms that built the killing facilities, and the local auxiliary police forces in the occupied territories (Trawniki men, Ukrainian and Lithuanian auxiliaries, Latvian and Estonian formations). The “small fanatical group” framing requires the listener to be unaware of the scale of the human apparatus that the operation actually used.
The Order Police
The largest single category of direct shooting perpetrators in the East was not the SS or the Einsatzgruppen but the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei), the regular German uniformed police. The Order Police were not Nazi Party formations; they were the German civilian police force, mobilised for occupation duty and reorganised under the SS umbrella. The Order Police battalions deployed to the occupied Soviet territories from 1941 onwards were drawn from middle-aged men who had been ordinary policemen in German cities, ineligible for Wehrmacht service because of age or health. Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992), based on the post-war testimony of approximately 200 members of one such battalion, established the social profile in detail: ordinary working-class and lower-middle-class Germans, mostly not Nazi Party members, who participated in mass shootings of Jewish civilians from summer 1942 onwards.
Reserve Police Battalion 101 alone killed approximately 38,000 Jews in direct shooting operations between July 1942 and November 1943, and deported approximately 45,000 more to Treblinka. The battalion was one of approximately twenty Order Police battalions involved in equivalent operations. The total Order Police participation in the Eastern killing operations is estimated at approximately 30,000 men. None of these was a “fanatical SS”; they were policemen.
The Wehrmacht
The Wehrmacht’s involvement in the killing operations is one of the most extensively documented findings of the post-1991 archive opening and the corresponding wave of German military-history research. The Wehrmacht command had issued the Commissar Order of June 1941 (instructing the immediate killing of captured Soviet political officers), the Barbarossa Decree of May 1941 (suspending the laws of war for operations against Soviet civilians), and the Severity Order of October 1941 (Reichenau’s order requiring “harsh and just retribution” against Jewish civilians). Wehrmacht units across the Eastern Front participated in mass shootings, in transport-route security for Einsatzgruppen operations, and in the supply and logistics of the killing programme. The exhibition Crimes of the Wehrmacht: Dimensions of a War of Annihilation 1941 to 1944, organised by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and shown across Germany from 1995 to 2004, presented the documentary record in detail; the catalogue was published as Verbrechen der Wehrmacht (2002).
The Wehrmacht was the largest single German institution of the war, with approximately 18 million men passing through its ranks. Estimates of the proportion who participated directly in war crimes against civilians vary; the lower-bound figures suggest at least 200,000 individuals were involved in operations that would qualify as war crimes under any plausible legal standard. This is a substantial fraction of the army and a substantial fraction of German adult male population.
The civil service and the professions
The deportations could not have been organised without the active cooperation of the German civil service. The Reichsbahn (German railways) ran the transports under contract with the SS, charging the standard third-class fare per prisoner per kilometre. The Foreign Office negotiated the deportation of Jewish citizens of allied and neutral countries. The Justice Ministry drafted the legal underpinning. The Interior Ministry maintained the racial registration. The Economics Ministry coordinated the seizure and disposal of Jewish property. The Reich Finance Ministry collected the taxes on the property transfers. The number of civil servants directly involved is estimated at several tens of thousands. Götz Aly’s work, particularly Hitler’s Beneficiaries (2005), and Ulrich Herbert’s work on Werner Best and the SS administrative state, set out the bureaucratic apparatus in detail.
The professions participated as professions. German doctors operated the Aktion T4 disabled-killing programme and provided the medical personnel at Auschwitz, Mauthausen and the other camps. Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors (1986) documented the medical profession’s involvement. German lawyers drafted the racial legislation, prosecuted the cases, and judged in the courts that applied the laws. Ingo Müller’s Hitler’s Justice (1991) documented the legal profession’s involvement. German engineers designed the gas chambers and the cremation ovens. The IG Farben directors, the Topf und Söhne engineers, and the Krupp managers of forced-labour factories all participated. The professions, taken together, account for a substantial further category of participants beyond the security forces.
The auxiliary forces
The local auxiliary forces in the occupied territories provided substantial additional manpower. The Trawniki men were Ukrainian and Polish prisoners of war who had volunteered for SS auxiliary service after capture; approximately 5,000 served as guards at the Operation Reinhard camps, the Lublin SS-Sonderkommando, and the Warsaw Ghetto operations. The Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian Schutzmannschaft battalions participated in mass shootings across the Baltic and Belarus. The Ukrainian Hilfspolizei units participated in operations across Ukraine and southern Russia. The Romanian, Hungarian, Croatian and Slovak forces conducted their own parallel operations under their own command structures. The total auxiliary participation runs to several tens of thousands of additional individuals.
Why the claim is harmful
The claim is harmful because it relocates moral and legal responsibility from a wide and identifiable apparatus of perpetrators to an artificially small “fanatical” minority. The relocation is the basis of the post-war German strategy of denazification’s selective inadequacy: only top-ranking SS officers were tried, while the Order Police, the Wehrmacht, the civil service and the professions were largely allowed to resume their pre-war careers in the Federal Republic. The deniers extend this strategy further by reducing the perpetrator group still smaller, to a clique that bears no relation to the actual scale of the operation. The numerical reality is that the killing required hundreds of thousands of perpetrators across multiple institutions, professions and nationalities. The framing of a small fanatical group is inconsistent with the scale of the crime.
How many men were in Reserve Police Battalion 101 alone? How many German doctors participated? How many civil servants? Which professions were involved?
See also
- Ordinary People Who Became Killers, Reserve Police Battalion 101
- The Einsatzgruppen
- Adolf Hitler
- IG Farben
- People with Disabilities and the T4 Programme
Sources
- Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins, 1992; revised edition 2017
- Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Knopf, 1996, with parallel material on the Order Police
- Edward B. Westermann, Hitler’s Police Battalions: Enforcing Racial War in the East, University Press of Kansas, 2005
- Hamburg Institute for Social Research, Verbrechen der Wehrmacht: Dimensionen des Vernichtungskrieges 1941 bis 1944, Hamburger Edition, 2002, the catalogue of the Wehrmacht exhibition
- Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (eds.), War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II 1941 to 1944, Berghahn, 2000
- Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Basic Books, 1986
- Ingo Müller, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich, Harvard University Press, 1991
- Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, Metropolitan Books, 2007
- Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933 to 1945, HarperCollins, 1992
- Peter Black, “Foot Soldiers of the Final Solution: The Trawniki Training Camp and Operation Reinhard”, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 25:1, 2011, on the Trawniki men
- Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine 1941 to 1944, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “The Holocaust: Perpetrators” and “Order Police”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org