Review: Harald Welzer's Täter. Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden

  Harald Welzer's 2006 study  Täter. Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden ("Perpetrators: How Perfectly Normal People Become Mass Murderers") is both sad and shocking to read.  Welzer looks back at the Holocaust and its origins and explores the question: who were the men involved in carrying out this greatest crime in the modern age and what allowed them them murder on such a vast scale?

In the aftermath of the war, after the extent of the crimes had come to light, it was assumed that the senior officers in charge of the death camps or who presided over mass killing actions such as the 1941 Babi Yar massacre when 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation, were psychopaths.  For only a severe psychological disorder could explain these atrocities.  But many of the officers were subjected to a battery of psychological assessments and examinations and were found to be completely "normal". 

These officers were at least one step removed from the actual act of killing.  What about the men who actually rounded up the women and children and killed them at close range - for hours at a time?  Surely they must have been psychopathic sadists to murder like this day after day.  It was Daniel Goldhagen who put forward the thesis in his 1996 book Hitler's Willing Executioners that the "perpetrators" of the Holocaust - all along the chain of command - were driven by an eliminationist hatred of Jews to carry out their murders.  Welzer points out in his study that, while there were some sadists and fanatical Judenhasser among the men carrying out the killing operations, most of the participants felt little or no personal animosity towards their victims.  They simply had a job to do, and they performed their "work" as efficiently and "humanely" as possible.

Much of Täter is a study of the Hamburg Police Battalion, which, under the command of the SS, carried out the round-up of Jews and mass executions in the early days of the war as the German Wehrmacht moved east through Poland and into the Ukraine.  Welzer chose this group to study, since the battalion was comprised of a very diverse group of men, most of whom were not Nazi Party members.  They were all over 30 years of age, so they came of age before 1933 and were socialized during the Weimar Republic. Finally, many of these men were interviewed during the 1960s about their "work" and we have the protocols of these as well as the court testimony of the very few who stood trial for their crimes. 

Welzer traces the evolution of the battalion's work.  The threshold for killing civilians was crossed initially by smaller firing squads executing groups of Jewish men.  This did not pose much of a problem since killing men fit the military model of warfare.  Even killing women was not much of a problem, since the Einsatz group were told that the women were "partisan" collaborators with their male partners.  Killing children, however, posed a number of problems.  The battalion men could identify their young Jewish victims with their own children. Secondly, children were apt to resist and struggle during the killing process, in contrast to their parents, who generally went quietly to their deaths.  The children were more difficult to kill.  One battalion member told the court that he had acted "honorably" - unlike some of his comrades - since he had refused to kill infants. But he had killed an number of toddlers - this was an act of mercy, for who would take care of these children after their mothers had been killed? 

Welzer makes the observation that while the killing kept escalating in terms of numbers - culminating in the 33,771 at Babi Yar - , this did not lead to a higher level of brutalization among the battalion.  On the contrary, it led to a higher level of rationalization.  Killing so many people created a number of logistical problems: how to process all the clothing and possessions; how to dispose of so many bodies.  The men implemented a number of technical solutions, such as swapping out German rifles for Russian weapons, since the Russian gun barrels didn't heat up as much from the constant shooting.  Also, they experimented with the various body positions for their victims to make it easier to kill them and also to optimize the space in the mass graves. 

Back in the 1960s and 1970s much was written about Germans "inability to mourn" (see  Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern  by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich 1967).  In the post-war period, the Germans’ way of dealing with the crimes of National Socialism and to the issues of guilt and responsibility was largely characterized by denial, repression and projection. But suppression of guilt (Verdrängung) implies an initial admission of guilt which then has to be repressed.  Welzer points out that the perpetrators (Täter) of these atrocities, from the commanders down to the actual shooters, had no guilt concerning their actions. "I'm not the monster I'm made out to be," Adolf Eichmann said at his sentencing in Jerusalem. "I'm the victim of an error in judgment."

Welzer has brief sections on the My Lai Massacre carried out by American troops in Vietnam, on the Rwanda genocide, and ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, to demonstrate that any society can produce mass murderers.  He also analyzes the findings ot Milgram experiment at Yale University which demonstrated how students could be persuaded to perform harmful acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. But these atrocities pale in comparison to the scale of mass murder carried out by "completely normal" German citizens. How could that have come about?

Welzer sees the origins in the Nazi regime's success in convincing a broad spectrum of German society that there was in fact a Judenfrage - a Jewish problem that needed to be "solved".  Once one was convinced of a Judenfrage, it was a small step to buy into what Welzer calls the "nationalsozialistischer Moral", the first tenet of which was:

dass es gut und sinnvoll war, zur "Lösung der Judenfrage" beigetragen zu haben.

(that it was meaningful and good to have contributed to "solving the Jewish question")

Still, what was possible in 1941 was not possible in 1933.  Peter Longerich describes the escalation of violence in his book Davon haben wir nichts gewusst! (see my review) It was a process that started with breaking social taboos.  First, it was acceptable to insult Jews on the street. Then one could vandalize Jewish property with impunity.  Then it was okay to steal their property. Then it was necessary to physically remove them.  Only then was it sanctioned to sexually abuse and then kill them.  Finally, it was necessary to perform the hard work of eliminating them altogether from the planet.  At each stage there was something of a collective catharsis, as deeply-felt social taboos were broken. 

But Welzer never really explores the root causes within German society.  What made Germans more susceptible to accepting a Judenfrage than, say, Americans for accepting a Negerfrage? (I write about this a bit: The genocide that never happened). He cites briefly the work of Norbert Elias (Studien über die Deutschen) where the problem dates back to the fact that Germany became unified through the military victories of 1871 rather than through a popular citizen-led movement.Clearly more work needs to be done to build on what Norbert Elias began.  But Haral Welzer's book is a sober reminder of what "perfectly normal people" are capable of. 

 

Comments

[Harvey Morrell]

You might also be interested in Bloodlands; Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder.

[Zyme]

very well written Dave, interesting read.

This reinforces my perception why they could live on perfectly afterwards and not be tempted to become violent again - in strong contrast to murderers who are aware of wrong-doing.

However I do believe there is a fundamental difference between Germanic people and other civilized peoples: As Germans take most pride in efficiency, it overlaps and suppresses awareness of wrong-doing. By focusing on perfection it becomes more easy to neglect the moral side of things.

And this I say as a person who fully neglects the moral side :-)

[Hattie]

I would like to mention Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning. Chilling.

[Steve]

"Welzer has brief sections on the My Lai Massacre carried out by American troops in Vietnam (total toll in the millions), on the Rwanda genocide, and ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, to demonstrate that any society can produce mass murderers. He also analyzes the findings ot Milgram experiment at Yale University which demonstrated how students could be persuaded to perform harmful acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. But these atrocities pale in comparison to the scale of mass murder carried out by "completely normal" German citizens."

No.Rwanda was a massive slaughter, an estimated 800,000 in a few months, comparable to the worst phase of the Holocaust. Nick Turse has recently documented (some of) the scale of US atrocities in Vietnam, along with earlier books by Jonathan Schell, Bertrand Russel and others. And even in Yugoslavia the scale of mass murder during ww2 (on the part of Yugoslavs of various nationalities) and even before ww1 (the Serbs against the Albanians) were quite considerable for their day. And of course the Soviets killed many millions, especially under Stalin. And genocide was advocated and sometimes carried out against the native Americans and others. The Romanians also killed many Jews themselves, as had the Whites especially in the Russian Civil War, and many Poles collaborated or turned a blind eye to the Nazis, and even praised them for the Holocaust.

As for German unification by arms, France provoked and declared the war of 1870, and many nations including the US have won independence (and further territory) through war. Nothing much distinguished the Germans (or more particularly Nazis) in ww2 from many other episodes in history other than better organisation and efficiency, but mass killing of one sort or another is so common in history as to be almost routine. The racial criterion is not always foremost, but the result is much the same for the victims.