ANTHROPOLOGY 4580
The Holocaust: An Anthropological Perspective
How difficult is it for people to kill others? What does it take for an ordinary individual to become a murderer? These questions are frequently asked in homicide cases or in larger tragedies like the killings at Columbine High. But the same questions have recently been asked about the Holocaust. Two important books – Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning and Neighbors by Jan Gross – explore what actually happened on the killing fields of Eastern Europe during the Holocaust. These authors look at "ground zero", the towns in Poland where thousands of Jews were rounded up and killed by the relatively untrained and otherwise unremarkable Order Police, and by civilians as well. Most of these men were not Nazis nor were they trained in combat. They were, nevertheless, remarkably efficient murderers of innocent civilians. But why did they kill? And how difficult was it for them to do so?
To answer these questions, one has to remember that killing in military situations is difficult and traumatic. The conventional wisdom used to be that trained soldiers were killing machines. They did not start out as "natural born killers", but training in combat, strict orders, and life-or-death battle situations supposedly transformed them from peaceful non-combatants into potentionally lethal weapons. Recently, however, this conventional wisdom has been challenged by military historians. Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman summarizes combat data on the simple act of pulling the trigger from the Civil War to the present in his book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (1995). It turns out that even this simple act is very difficult for most trained soldiers. In World War II, only about 20% of combat infantry were actually willing to fire their rifles at the enemy. Grossman argues that the psychological cost of killing is devastating for soldiers and, for this reason, they are reluctant to fire their weapons, let alone kill their military targets on an up close and personal basis. Grossman shows that conditioning of soldiers and desensitization during military training can increase combat effectiveness. Thus, during the Korean War of the early 1950s, firing rates rose to 50% and during the Vietnam War to 90%. But this is a recent trend. The rates for wars before 1950 were much lower.
If killing soldiers in military combat is difficult and traumatic, what about killing innocent civilians? Grossman does not spend much time on this subject but he believes that:
The effect on the killer is intensely traumatic, since the killer has limited internal motivation. The close range of the kill hampers the killer in his attempts to deny the humanity of the victim and severely hampers denial of personal responsibility for the kill. (On Killing, p. 202)
However, if we look at the genocides and mass murders of the 20th century, it seems that the killing of civilians has been fairly easy. Examining data from the Armenian genocide of 1915-16, the rape of Nanking in 1937-38, the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s, and the mass murders in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo in the 1990s suggests that mass killings of civilians in war are different from and much less traumatic than combat killings. Perhaps that is one reason that civilians have become the primary casualties of war since World War II.
In fact, the script for secret wars of annihilation against civilian populations became depressingly familiar during the twentieth century. What was once unprecedented has become a precedent for new atrocities. And what was once shocking and horrifying, almost beyond comprehension, has become just another headline that we can expect to see more of, with the names changed and places updated. Visual images of suffering civilian populations no longer move us as they once did. There are simply too many of them.
The continuation of large-scale, clandestine mass murders of civilian populations is one of the unexplained puzzles of recent history. The 20th century began with promise of modernity; it was to be an era of the upward "march of progress". Yet during the last century, the tragedies of the Armenians, the Cambodians, the Kurds, the Bosnians, the Rwandans, and most recently the Kosovars, were repeated. However, the most systematic slaughter of civilians took place not in some Third World nation or cultural backwater, but at the very heart of Western civilization itself, in Europe, using most advanced technological and organizational methods available at that time in what has become known as the Holocaust. Because the Holocaust occurred in modern Europe and because no one predicted it, it is of special interest. And because the Holocaust is so well documented, from so many different perspectives, it may be possible to find out why the killings happened.
The Nuremberg Trials following the World War II and the trial of SS official Adolf Eichmann in the early 1960s attempted to make legal sense of the killings, but it is clear that a purely legal framework is inadequate for an understanding of what transpired. Thus, high-ranking German officers on trial at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity consistently denied their complicity in the destruction of millions of people. When the horrors of Auschwitz were revealed in court, high-ranking Nazi Hermann Goering was angered -- not by the atrocities which he knew all too well -- but by the fact that his protection under the law had been reduced. He lamented:
"If only there weren't this damned Auschwitz! Himmler got us into that mess. If it weren't for Auschwitz we could put up a proper defense. The way it is, all our chances are blocked" (H. Fein Accounting for Genocide, p. 102).
What is a "proper defense" when mass murder is involved? Who was really responsible for the concentration camps and the killings? Hitler? Himmler? The SS officers who gave the orders? Their subordinates who obeyed them and who did the actual killing? The prisoners who obeyed them? The Germans and other civilian populations that collaborated or looked the other way? The Allied Powers, including the United States, who knew of the camps but did nothing to disrupt their functioning between 1942 and the end of the war? Clearly this is not simply a legal problem, but a moral and political problem.
President Reagan recognized this moral quandary in preparing for his visit to the Bitburg cemetery in Germany, where SS officers were buried, in the spring of 1985. He concluded that the SS members were just as much victims as the people who died in the concentration camps. But if everyone was a victim, how did the mass exterminations take place? And does this mean that Nazis tried and convicted of crimes against humanity were not really responsible for their actions?
Among the theories used to explain what happened on the killing fields and in the concentration camps are those related to the motivation, personality or "national character" of the Germans. The Germans have been described as "authoritarian," "obedient," and "compulsive." Ordinary Germans were also thought to be particularly anti-semitic, and this made them willing executioners, according to Daniel Goldhagen's book, Hitler's Willing Executioners. Moreover, Nazi personnel who planned and executed the policies of the Third Reich were thought to be the worst of the Germans -- "monsters" or "evil men." But do these ideas about Germans really explain why large numbers of Germans and non-Germans became murderers during the Holocaust? Why then and only then?
A very different theory is proposed in Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men. Using historical records, Browning reconstructed murders by Police Battalion 101, a group of men unfit for regular combat who nevertheless shot and killed 38,000 Jews in Poland between July of 1942 and November of 1943. Browning found that these Germans were ordinary men, that they were not rabid anti-semites, that they obeyed orders, conformed to peer pressure, and hoped to advance themselves. Yes, they were men behaving badly, but they were reluctant, not eager murderers. For Browning, the explanation of participation in genocide is generic; these men could be found anywhere in the world.
Browning's theory sounds reasonable. Yet his ideas about reluctance, obedience to orders, and low degree of anti-semitism in these killings during the Holocaust are difficult to reconcile with Jan Gross’s Neighbors. Gross describes how Polish Catholics in a single small town killed almost all of their Jewish neighbors, who comprised half the town's population. The murderers were civilians, not military personnel or Germans. They were not under any orders to kill. So what led them to annihilate people that they knew personally?
Both authors focus on the actual killers rather than remote bureaucrats or bystanders. But their theories about why these men killed are very different. Were the killers willing or were they reluctant? Were they more anti-semitic or less anti-semitic? Were they traumatized by the murders or not? Your assignment is to carefully compare the arguments of Browning and Gross, analyze the evidence, and decide for yourself. To help guide you, here is a set of questions you must consider:
This assignment asks you to weave together material from the books that you have read and material from class in an attempt to explain why genocide took place at the level of the actual murderers. It's a historical version of CSI. Answer the questions clearly and thoroughly using available evidence. Use specific examples to support your argument. This assignment is a difficult one because the material may overwhelm you. Give yourself enough time to deal with the emotional challenge of the material as well as the academic challenge. The first and second parts of the exam are equally weighted in the grading. The third part can be answered in less space. So spend most of your paper on the first two sets of questions.
NOTE ON THE READINGS:
Review The World Must Know; it will provide you with a framework for understanding the Holocaust and some material on the questions. Then read Ordinary Men and Neighbors preferably in that order. As optional reading, you may wish to look at Daniel Goldhagen's treatment of Police Batallion 101 from Hitler's Willing Executioners (p.179-280) on Reserve in Norlin.
DUE DATE:
This take-home exam can be between 8 to 9 pages in length, typewritten and double-spaced please. It may be longer or shorter, depending on how much space you need to do your best work. It is due in my office (Hale 466) by 2:30 on April 7th. Please re-read the guidelines on 'How to Earn a Good Grade …’. Good luck.