Police Battalion 101: The Motivation for the Holocaust - Literature review Example

Police Battalion 101: The Motivation for the Holocaust 2006 The recent studies on Fascism and Holocaust have shifted their focus to the broad-based investigation of the events that led to the catastrophe to the examination of the motivation and activities of particular forces of the perpetrators. It is a matter of controversy whether it was Adolf Hitler’s political maneuvering that resulted the killing of the six million people or the German people harbored anti-Semitic feelings since generations and were waiting for a chance to give vent to their anger. Browning (1992) and Goldhagen (1996) both study the composition of the Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the behavior of the members to arrive at contradictory views about the motivation of the “ordinary” people who were recruited by the Nazi forces. While Goldhagen (1996) opined that the Germans had always been anti-Semitic, which was why the members of the battalion went ahead and shot seventy eight Jews in the Polish village of Josefow even when given the chance of evading the killing with no major consequence, Browning (1992) uses the same evidence for establishing that it was peer pressure, rather than any inherent urge to kill Jews, that prompted the behavior. Browning notes that the German soldiers could have killed many more Jews in Josefow but limited to shot only seventy-eight of the probable three hundred, the only killings for which the members of Battalion 101 were charged. Reserve Police Battalion 101 was a unit of the German Order Police formed in Hamburg. The Battalion, composed of 500 soldiers between the age of 30 and 40 – hence too old to be conscripted in the army - was sent in 1939 to Poland for the purpose of invasion of that country. The members of the battalion, mostly lower class people from Hamburg, crossed over to Poland in September, rounded up Polish soldiers and military equipment and guarded a POW camp, before returning to Germany by the end of the year. The battalion was sent once more to Poland, this time in a bid to deliberately expunge Poles, Jews and Gypsies. Although not much was known about the activities of Battalion 101, evidence that began to be unearthed from the 1960s showed that the members, after being sent again to Poland in 1941, after intensive training in Hamburg and being involved in the deportation of Jews to eastern Europe, for the purpose of roundup of Jews in the Polish district of Lublin. In mid-1942, the battalion was utilized in the mass shooting of Jewish civilians, known as the Final Solution. In Poland, the Battalion killed 38,000 Jews and deported 45,000 others. The main argument that Goldhagen presents is that the chief trait of the German character during the Second World War was that of nationality. It was the German people’s hatred of the Jews that resulted in the cruelty of the Holocaust and Hitler’s SS was simply instrumental in mobilizing the people’s feelings. Goldhagen (1996) writes, "The most appropriate, indeed the only appropriate general proper name for the Germans who perpetrated the Holocaust is 'Germans.' They were Germans acting in the name of Germany and its highly popular leader, Adolf Hitler" (1996, page 6). Disregarding the effects of economic depression and the fallout of the Versailles treaty, Goldhagen (1996) maintains that “antisemitism moved many thousands of 'ordinary' Germans--and would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positioned--to slaughter Jews. Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity" (1996). This makes Goldhagen (1996) conclude that "Virtually no evidence exists to contradict the notion that the intense and ubiquitous public declaration of antisemitism [in Nazi propaganda] was mirrored in people's private beliefs".   This does not explain why fascism spread to other European countries like Italy and Spain as well. Besides, Browning, in the foreword of the 1998 edition of the book, refutes Goldhagens’ thesis by stating that a large number of Nazi recruits had non-Germanic roots. Also, the nationality angle also does not show explain why Hitler and his SS targeting other minorities, like the Gypsies, apart from the Jews. Goldhagen (1996), however, does not define who the ‘ordinary’ German is. Typically, the recruits of the Nazi forces, as that of the Reserve Police Battalion 101, are lower class people – the petty-bourgeoisie - who were earlier mobilized by the socialist labor movement but by the early twentieth century, was left leaderless in the face of acute economic downturn. The bourgeoisie – the bankers, most prominently - incidentally, was composed of mostly Jews, whom the ‘ordinary’ Germans resented. Hitler maneuvered this hatred successfully, thereby assuming power without exerting violent force, as Golhagen (1996) acknowledges (North, 1997). In Goldhagen’s (1996), thesis, he argues that 80-90 percent of Germans would have partook in the killing of the Jews, disagreeing Browning’s (1992) view that 10-20 percent of German battalions refused to kill. Goldhagen (1996) uses the Battalion 101 as a case study to show “the men’s incessant volunteering to kill and, on the other, the failure of the men to avail themselves of the opportunities to avoid killing.” According to Goldhagen, most of the members of Battalion 101 were over the age of 30 and hence mature enough to understand the implications of the killing and also harboring hatred for the Jews because of the own tortuous economic experience back home. The soldiers are described as “not the wide-eyed youngsters ready to believe what they were told…..These were mature men who had life experience, who had families and children. The overwhelming majority of them had reached adulthood before the Nazis ascended to power. They had known other political dispensation, had lived in other ideological climates” (1996). Goldhagen (1996) studies the photographic evidence from the Battalion 101. Many of the members took photographs of the killings they committed to keep as souvenirs. The soldiers’ glee at the killing, which the photographs, are supposed to be proof of, is taken as sufficient evidence of their involvement. Goldhagen describes the “openness about their genocidal slaughtering-making it available to the view of so many other German men and women who happened to be stationed in Poland…. These Germans’ willingness to make an extensive photographic record of their deeds, including their killing operations, in which they appear with cheerful and proud demeanors as men entirely comfortable with their environment” (1996) Browning (1992) interprets the composition of the battalion in a different way. For him, the members of the battalion, eager to overcome their economic status and succumbing to peer pressure, obeyed orders. The Battalion 101 killed Polish Jews not by themselves but with active help from the Poles, “who collaborated in the Final Solution and helped them track down Jews… Often unwilling to make accusatory statements about their comrades or to be truthful about themselves, these men must have found considerable psychological relief in sharing blame with the Poles” (1992). The Poles showed the battalion the Jewish hideouts. Browning uses the soldiers’ testimonies to show that they did not know what they were doing. As one soldier said later, “I made the effort, and it was possible for me, to shoot only children. It so happened that the mothers led the children by the hand. My neighbor then shot the mother and I shot the child that belonged to her, because I reasoned with myself that after all without its mother the child could not live any longer. It was supposed to be, so to speak, soothing to my conscience to release children unable to live without their mothers.” (Browning, 1992) Another testimony said, “The shooting of the men was so repugnant to me that I missed the fourth man. It was simply no longer possible for me to aim accurately. I suddenly felt nauseous and ran away from the shooting site....I then ran into the woods, vomited and sat down against a tree...my nerves were totally finished.” (Browning, 1992) The members of Battalion 101, as Browning finds, were policemen, traders, dock or construction workers, truck drivers, machine operators and so on before the war. Only a handful of them were members of the Nazi party. The eagerness to conform to rules as a means of taking advantage in the careers was reinforced by the leaders’ anti-rhetoric rhetoric. The Jews were portrayed as evil men, responsible for the killing of German women and children. It was not battlefield frenzy that is usually whipped up during times of war that made the Battalion 101 kill hundreds of people. The process of dehumanization, that the Nazi leaders were able to indoctrinate the soldiers into, made them pull the trigger against all Jews in Poland. They considered the killings not as ‘killings’ but as ‘actions’ and ‘resettlements’ on the orders of the commanders – in this case that of Major Trapp, who himself suffered pangs of guilt later, as Browning (1992) shows from his testimonies recorded later (Reich, 1992). Although Goldhagen (1996) and Browning (1992) interpreted the testimonies of the soldiers of the Batallion 101, the motivations for the killings that led to the Final Solution in Poland was perhaps a combination of both theories. Anti-Semitic feelings had been developing in Germany since a long time before the Second World War but it may be a little simplistic to theorize that such feelings were the inherent nature of all Germans. Rather, political and economic developments in Germany since the late nineteenth century had provoked the anti-Semitic hysteria. This feeling of victimization was effectively used by Hitler and the Nazi Party, who rekindled urge in Germans to snatch back their won rights. The killings that the soldiers – that of Battalion 101 not the least of them – were a result of such herd mentality, reinforced by peer pressure. Work Cited Browning, Christopher R., Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Harper Perennial. 1992. Reissue edition Harper Collins, 1998 Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996 North, David, A Critical View of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, lecture at the national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States, at Michigan State University in East Lansing, 1997, retrieved on March 13, 2006 from http://www.wsws.org/history/1997/apr1997/fascism.shtml Reich, Walter, The Men Who Pulled the Triggers, New York Times, April 12, 1992 Read More