The single most studied case in the historical literature on perpetrator psychology is that of Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of around 500 middle-aged German police reservists from Hamburg who conducted mass shootings of Polish Jews in 1942 and 1943. The unit killed around 38,000 Jews and deported around 45,000 more to Treblinka over the course of around eighteen months. The men were mostly working-class Hamburg police reservists in their thirties and forties, married, with families. They had not been Nazi Party activists in the pre-war years. They were ordinary men who became, in the course of the war, mass killers. Christopher Browning’s 1992 book Ordinary Men is the definitive study.
Józefów, 13 July 1942
The unit’s first major killing took place at the Polish village of Józefów on 13 July 1942. Battalion commander Wilhelm Trapp gave the order in the early morning. Around 1,500 Jewish men, women and children from the village were to be shot. Trapp made an unusual offer to his men: any older man who did not feel up to the task could step out of the formation and would be assigned other duties. Around twelve men of the 500 took up the offer. The rest, around 488 men, conducted the killing.
The shootings took most of the day. The men worked in pairs. One pair would lead a group of Jewish villagers into the forest while another pair finished the killing of the previous group. The procedure was that each German policeman placed his rifle against the back of his victim’s neck and fired. The day produced around 1,500 individual face-to-face killings of women, children, infants and elderly people by the German policemen. The men returned to their barracks in the evening drunk and visibly disturbed. Several were so affected that they were given alternative duties subsequently. The unit conducted dozens of similar operations over the next eighteen months, gradually becoming more efficient and less visibly disturbed.
The Browning interpretation
Browning, working from the post-war West German prosecutorial interrogations of around 200 of the surviving battalion members in the 1960s, argued that the men of Battalion 101 had not been ideological Nazis, had not been particular antisemites, had not been personally violent men, had not been operating under direct threat of punishment for refusal, and had not been formed in any unusual way for the work. They were, by background and disposition, ordinary middle-aged Germans of working-class Hamburg origin. What had turned them into mass killers, in Browning’s argument, was a combination of social pressure within their unit, the desire not to appear weak in front of their comrades, the general dehumanisation of the Jewish victims through Nazi propaganda, and the simple fact that, having killed once, the men had crossed a line they could not uncross.
Around 80 to 90 per cent of the men, on Browning’s analysis, conformed to the killing role. The remainder either declined the work, requested transfers, or developed psychological symptoms that took them off the killing roster. The pattern is not one of universal enthusiasm for the killing. It is one of majority conformity to the institutional role, with a significant minority who refused. The most-cited single observation from the post-war interrogations is that none of the men who refused was punished. The Trapp offer at Józefów was repeated, in various forms, throughout the unit’s operations. Refusing was possible. Most men did not refuse.
The Goldhagen counter-argument
The historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen produced a sharply different interpretation of the same source material in his 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Goldhagen argued that the men of Battalion 101 were not ordinary in Browning’s sense. They were Germans, and Germans of the period had been formed by what Goldhagen called eliminationist antisemitism, a pre-existing cultural disposition specific to German society that had made the killing programme not just possible but, for many participants, satisfying. The Goldhagen argument was the subject of extensive academic disagreement through the late 1990s. Browning’s position remained the more widely accepted in subsequent literature, but the Goldhagen argument forced the question of pre-war German antisemitism back into the historiography in a way that has been productive.
The wider implications
The case of Battalion 101 has been widely used in the post-war perpetrator literature because it shows clearly that mass killing of civilians can be conducted by men with no particular pre-disposition for violence under the operational conditions the Nazi regime created. The men were not selected for the work. They were not threatened. They were not particularly committed Nazis. They were given the work and they did it. The implication is uncomfortable. Most populations contain enough men who, under the right institutional conditions, will kill their neighbours. The Holocaust was conducted, at the operational level, by men of this kind in their tens of thousands.
The Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Croatian and Romanian auxiliary units involved in the killing operations behaved similarly. The Wehrmacht units that participated in the Einsatzgruppen operations behaved similarly. The post-war prosecutions of these units produced consistent patterns of testimony: the men described conformity to the unit’s expectations, the social pressure not to seem weak, the gradual hardening of the men against the work, and the absence of any direct threat for refusal. The pattern is one of the central findings of Holocaust historiography.
What it means
Battalion 101 is the case that establishes that the Holocaust did not require monsters. It required ordinary men placed in institutional conditions in which mass killing was the assigned task. Most of the men did the task. The Nazi regime’s achievement was not that it produced unusually murderous individuals; it was that it built the institutional conditions in which ordinary individuals would conduct mass murder. The implication for the post-war world is that the same institutional conditions could, in principle, produce the same outcome elsewhere. The post-war academic and policy literature on genocide prevention has taken this implication seriously.
See also
Sources
- Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins, 1992
- Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Knopf, 1996
- West German prosecutorial interrogations of Battalion 101 members, 1962-1972, Hamburg State Archive
- Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Viking, 1963
- Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority, Harper, 1974
- USHMM: The Perpetrators