Ordinary Organisations

Why Normal Men Carried Out the Holocaust

Stefan Kühl

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781509502936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire moderne

During the Holocaust, 99 percent of all Jewish killings were carried out by members of state organizations. In this groundbreaking book, Stefan Kühl offers a new analysis of the integral role that membership in organizations played in facilitating the annihilation of European Jews under the Nazis. Drawing on the well-researched case of the mass killings of Jews by a Hamburg reserve police battalion, Kühl shows how ordinary men from ordinary professions were induced to carry out massacres. It may have been that coercion, money, identification with the end goal, the enjoyment of brutality, or the expectations of their comrades impelled the members of the police battalion to join the police units and participate in ghetto liquidations, deportations, and mass shootings. But ultimately, argues Kühl, the question of immediate motives, or indeed whether members carried out tasks with enthusiasm or reluctance, is of secondary importance. The crucial factor in explaining what they did was the integration of individuals into an organizational framework that prompted them to perform their roles. This book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust by demonstrating the fundamental role played by organizations in persuading ordinary Germans to participate in the annihilation of the Jews. It will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of organizations, violence, and modern German history, as well as for anyone interested in genocide and the Holocaust.

1
Beyond “Ordinary Men” and “Ordinary Germans”

I doubt whether even in a thousand years people will understand Hitler, Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka better than we do now. Will they have a better historical perspective? On the contrary, posterity may understand it even less than we do. Who can analyse the motives and the interests behind the enormities of Auschwitz? . . . We are confronted here by a huge and ominous mystery of the degeneration of the human character that will forever baffle and terrify mankind.

Isaac Deutscher¹

The village of Józefów in the southern part of the Polish district of Lublin has become a symbol of the Holocaust in recent years. Unlike the extermination camps of Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, Józefów is significant not so much on account of the scale of the extermination or the perfidiousness of a genocide planned and carried out on the basis of a division of labor. Instead, Józefów has come to symbolize how easily “ordinary men” – in this case, older reserve policemen who had been transferred from Hamburg to the German-occupied General Government – could be deployed to shoot Jewish men, women, and children at close range.

The victims of the massacre in Józefów included Jews who were long-term residents of the village who had been unable to escape across the border into the Soviet Union when Poland was occupied by German troops in 1939, as well as Jews who had been deported from the so-called Warthegau territory to Józefów in March 1941 as part of the Nazis’ resettlement plans. The Nazi regime had decided to incorporate a large part of occupied Poland – including the annexed Warthegau in the north – into the German Reich and force the Jewish and non-Jewish Poles living there to resettle in the General Government, which was under German administration. Before the massacre that was carried out by members of the Hamburg police battalion, there were around 2,000 Jews living in Józefów, including those who had been deported from Konin in the Warthegau. Even after some of them managed to flee across the Polish-Soviet border in 1939, Jewish Poles still made up a good half of the village’s population.²

When Heinrich Himmler ordered Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader in the district of Lublin, to initiate measures to kill the Jews in occupied Poland, the Jewish Poles in Józefów became a target for the German occupying forces. As early as May 1942 there were numerous arrests and shootings in Józefów involving the German police, Gestapo officers, and railway police who had been stationed in the district.³ In July 1942, Globocnik issued instructions through his staff to Police Battalion 101 that the Jews of Józefów were either to be shot immediately or – if they could be put to work for the Nazi administration – concentrated in labor camps.

Although the written orders and official reports pertaining to the massacre were destroyed at the end of the war, the course of the massacre itself is largely clear thanks to investigative work carried out by the Hamburg state prosecutor’s office in the 1960s.⁴ On the evening of July 12, 1942, battalion commander Major Wilhelm Trapp summoned his officers and explained to them that the battalion had been ordered to “cleanse” Józefów of Jews. During the “operation,” the male and female Jews who were “able to work” were to be “separated out and taken to a labor camp,” while the “rest of the Jews” – the sick, the elderly, and children – were to be “shot on the spot.” The policemen were awoken shortly after midnight, and every available unit of the battalion – 500 men – advanced on Józefów. They arrived between 4 and 5 a.m. in personnel carriers.

At the rendezvous point outside the village, the battalion commander assembled the squads and explained their mission: they were to surround the village, drive the Jews out of their homes at gunpoint, and take them to an assembly point on the market square. After the able-bodied men had been separated out, everyone else was to be taken to a nearby forest and shot. If the search teams who were clearing the houses came across people who could not be transported (such as the elderly, the sick, toddlers, or infants) or if they encountered people who resisted “resettlement,” these people were to be killed on the spot.

In accordance with these instructions, all the Jewish inhabitants of Józefów who could be caught were rounded up in the market square. Of this group, around 100 laborers – mostly men – were singled out and taken to Lublin by a platoon of the battalion. The remaining Jews in the market square were driven to the forest in groups of 30 or 40 in the battalion’s personnel carriers. Then a policeman would lead each of them deeper into the forest, force them to lie face down on the ground, and execute them with a shot to the back of the neck. According to a note from the Hamburg state prosecutor, noncommissioned officers and medics “went down the rows of victims” and gave any Jews who were still alive “so-called mercy shots.” The execution of the 1,300–1,500 Jews took more than 12 hours and stretched into the late afternoon.⁵

This first mass shooting in Józefów, in which almost the entire battalion participated, was followed by a number of other shootings in places such as Łomazy, Serokomla, Talczyn, and Łuków. These were usually carried out not by the whole battalion but by individual companies or platoons.⁶ Because the Nazi regime felt that such mass executions were a burden on the policemen, the command staff of the SS and Police Leader in Lublin ultimately decreed that the Jewish inhabitants of the district should instead be deported to the Treblinka, Sobibór, or Bełżec extermination camps if possible and gassed there.⁷

As reconstructed by the Hamburg state prosecutor’s office, the deportations that were carried out by the police battalion with the help of local police units nearly always followed the same pattern:

First, the Jewish settlement was surrounded by members of the Protection Police, the gendarmerie, or foreign auxiliary units. Then the Jews were ordered to leave their houses and make their way to certain assembly points. Detachments of the Security Police or Protection Police then searched the houses for anyone left behind. All those who were found, particularly those who were unable to walk – namely, old men, babies, and sick people – were shot on the spot.

After the able-bodied people had been singled out, everyone else was forced to walk to a train station. Anyone who collapsed from exhaustion during what was usually a kilometers-long march to the station was shot by members of the police battalion and left on the side of the road. The German Order Police often crammed so many Jews into the freight cars “that the doors could hardly be closed, and they were transported on what were often days-long journeys, without water or food, to be gassed in one of the extermination camps.” “Because the transports were overcrowded,” according to the state prosecutor’s reconstruction of the events, many of the occupants of the freight cars died on their journey to the extermination camps.⁸

For two years, Police Battalion 101 was repeatedly involved in ghetto clearances, deportations, and mass shootings. In some of these killing operations, the unit was directly responsible for the shootings. In others, such as Operation Harvest Festival in the Majdanek and Poniatowa camps, during which more than 30,000 Jews were killed in November 1943, the police battalion’s main task was to cordon off the site (at least according to statements made by battalion members).⁹ Sometimes hundreds of Jews were shot, and often thousands, but in many cases – such as during what the police themselves referred to as “Jew hunts” – the killings involved only small groups of Jewish men, women, and children who had either been captured by chance or denounced by Polish civilians.¹⁰

After World War II, the Hamburg state prosecutor’s office was able to prove that between June 1942 and November 1943 – the period in which the reserve police battalion was stationed in the district of Lublin in the General Government – members of the battalion were directly involved in the killing of 38,000 Jews and the deportation of 45,000 Jews to extermination camps.¹¹ In January 1942, before Police Battalion 101 arrived in the district, there were an estimated 320,000 Jews living in Lublin. In January 1946, four years later, there were fewer than 5,000 Jews in Lublin Voivodeship, formerly the district of Lublin.¹² The battalion was instrumental in the near total obliteration of the Polish Jews in the district of Lublin.

What drove policemen, SS men, Wehrmacht soldiers, and civil servants to participate in the ghetto liquidations, deportations to extermination camps, and mass shootings that took the lives of six million European Jews within just a few years?¹³ Why did people who seemed to be entirely normal at first (and often second) glance take part in the atrocities?¹⁴

1.1 The failure of easy answers

For decades, Holocaust researchers have been occupied by the question of what prompted policemen, SS men, and Wehrmacht soldiers, but also members of the German civil service, firemen, and the managers of local savings banks, to participate in the ghetto liquidations and mass shootings.¹⁵ Hamburg Reserve Police Battalion 101 is of particular interest to researchers because attempts to explain the battalion members’ actions seem to push the usual explanatory approaches to their limits.

Division of labor

“Human extermination facility”: this phrase from Rudolf Höss, former commandant of Auschwitz, shaped our understanding of the Holocaust for a long time. Like “death factory,” the term suggests that a principle of modern organizations was brought to bear in the perpetration of the Holocaust – namely, the division of labor. This implies that those who worked on the “conveyor belt of extermination” frequently did not know exactly what they were involved in. From this perspective, the railway officials who arranged for the smooth transportation of Jews to Bełżec, Sobibór, or Treblinka, or the police officers who took part in the clearance of the ghettos in Warsaw, Łódź, or Lublin, were often not capable of recognizing the actual purpose of these activities: the extermination of all European Jews. While this “machinery of extermination” did have a few designers and operators, the majority of the participants, according to this view, were merely “small cogs” in the machine.

The accounts of the activities of Hamburg Reserve Police Battalion 101 that have come down to us from Jewish survivors, representatives of the Polish government, and even the policemen themselves reveal the absurdity of the notion of “machine-like extermination.”¹⁶ There are reports of point-blank shots to the back of the neck, o...