Part VI

Why Did They Murder? Who Were They?

What motivated the Germans to become mass murderers of Jews and others in the east? Historian Christopher Browning suggests there are at least four groups involved that sometimes overlapped. There is no simple answer, he postulates, since there were a wide variety of accomplices who participated in different ways, thus requiring different answers.

Nazi Germany “was not a monolithic state in which everything was decided at the top and carried out through a chain of absolute obedience running downward to the lowest echelons,” Browning explained. Instead, there were “factions centered around Nazi chieftains, who were in perpetual competition to outperform one another.” Hitler stood above the squabbling fray, allotting “fiefs” to create their own rival domains as they strove to complete projects most important to him. Thus, “the Third Reich was in a state of permanent internal war,” which was concealed by the “façade of totalitarian solidarity,” according to German journalist Heinz Höhne.

Between 1933 and 1939, the Jewish question (Judenfrage) was frequently at the center of this ongoing power struggle. Hitler did not have to propose an agenda or even present a schedule for resolving the Judenfrage, and then demand that it be solved. He simply had to declare that the problem existed. His subordinates would then compete among themselves to find a solution. Based on the nature of the Nazi political structure, the “final solutions” were the only ones suitable to bring to Hitler’s attention. It was “not surprising that the most final of all solutions, extermination, eventually prevailed,” Browning notes. Finding a solution took many twists and turns making it a “twisted road to Auschwitz.”

Einsatzgruppen in Perspective

As has been noted, the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) played a critical role in the destruction of the Jews in the east. Their part has been “magnified in historical perspective,” Browning asserts, because of the series of reports of the Einsatzgruppen by the Security Police and the Security Service, 1941-1943, that documented their ruthless slaughter of European Jewry. “One cannot grasp how such atrocities were performed on such a scale, day after day, let alone recounted with such cold precession,” declared historian Ronald Headland. Yet, their notoriety, Browning said, should not eclipse the fact that the Einsatzgruppen were the smallest contingent deployed.

There were the 21 battalions of Order Police, Browning points out, which did not include Reserve Police Battalion 9, whose men were distributed among the Einsatzgruppen, as well as Police Battalion 69, whose troops were spread out to protect the numerous Todt engineering units in occupied Soviet territory. This amounted to approximately 11,000 men compared to the 3,000 in the Einsatzgruppen. “Of the up to 18 million men who served in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War, 10 million were deployed at one time or another between 1941 and 1944 in the conflict against the Soviet Union.”

True Believers or Die-Hard Nazis

The “true believers,” ideologues or die-hard Nazis who pursued leadership positions, influenced policies and executed the National Socialists’ vision. Frequently they sought to fulfill these goals by actively participating in mass executions. The most typical members in this group were young SS and SD (Sicherheitsdienst) Security Service officers, and particularly the “brain trust” closely involved with Reinhard Heydrich’s Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), Browning notes.

German historian Michael Wildt said that in the main RSHA office in Berlin, there were 3,000 people, including secretaries and low-level officials. Leaders in the RSHA were recruited from Germany’s academic elite. “It was an institution for social climbers.” They were lawyers, and those who had studied German literature, history, theology, journalism or philology (the history of languages). The highest-level positions in the RSHA were occupied by lawyers, historians, philologists or journalists. Those with law degrees were mostly found in the security service (SD).

Though those serving in the RSHA were not old enough to have fought in World War I, they lived through an era of uncertainty, of defeat, revolution and the hyperinflation of 1923, and viewed these events from the vantage point of an ultra-nationalistic, and an antisemitic worldview, as Browning opines. Under the circumstances, the possibility of living in a bourgeois society appeared to be nothing more than a mirage. Focusing on the future, Wildt said, became the hallmark of this generation, which sought “the design of a new world,” a new political order and the disintegration of the old one.

Wildt suggests the fact that they didn’t have the opportunity to prove themselves “as brave warriors” resulted in “an enduring blow to their self-confidence,” and “lacked the image of marital masculinity,” which might explain why “they became such merciless, cruel officers.”

This new “political order was based on race and Volk [community],” he said, so that no one could “define the limits or fix a system of regulation, because race and Volk are fluid terms defined politically, rather than by legal order.” The demise of the bourgeois state meant limits could be ignored and any political action was also no longer bound by restrictions. The RSHA became a “supervisory body,” responsible for creating “total racist order and to exterminate the regimes’ enemies.”

War, which began in Poland, became a turning point, since it made killing easier and “made murder an everyday practice.” Without the legal structure and constraints of the bourgeois society—“insurance, property rights, financial agreements,” all the other rules and regulations” that could impede RSHA actions— disappeared throughout German occupied areas. The RSHA were free from all restrictions and political concerns.

Historian Yaacov Lozowick observed “the bureaucrats’ acquiescence and their willingness to take initiative determines the operational capacity of the bureaucratic system. In analyzing the men of the SD, which was part of RSHA, he said that as a group, they were keenly cognizant of their actions, highly ideologically driven, and their contribution surpassed what was required. There isn’t the slightest question they understood their actions were “not positive except in the value system of the Third Reich.” They despised Jews and believed ridding the country of them would be in Germany’s best interest.

Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem.