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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
During the Holocaust, 99 percent of all Jewish killings were carried out by members of state organizations. In this groundbreaking book, Stefan Kuhl 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, Kuhl 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 Kuhl, 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.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Notes
1 Beyond “Ordinary Men” and “Ordinary Germans”
1.1 The failure of easy answers
1.2 From the search for motives to the presentation of motives
1.3 The motivation of organization members
Notes
2 Identification with the Goal
2.1 The formation of an antisemitic fictional consensus
2.2 How ideological indoctrination secured an antisemitic fictional consensus
2.3 From “impassive acceptance” to “active participation”
Notes
3 Coercion
3.1 Forced recruitment and barriers to exit
3.2 Avoiding the membership issue in coercive organizations
3.3 The limits of leeway
3.4 The freedom in coercion
Notes
4 Comradeship
4.1 The pressure of comradeship and the formation of informal norms
4.2 Levels in the formation of comradeship
4.3 How are comradeship norms enforced?
4.4 Mobilizing comradeship by granting leeway
Notes
5 Money
5.1 The function of regular remuneration for the battalion members
5.2 Legalized enrichment through the dispossession of the Jewish population
5.3 Enrichment beyond official forms of remuneration and reward
5.4 The functionality of misappropriation
Notes
6 The Attractiveness of Activities
6.1 Inhibitions against killing and organizational strategies for overcoming them
6.2 The production of motives: dehumanizing the victims
6.3 An organizational culture of brutality
Notes
7 The Generalization of Motives
7.1 The different ways of presenting personal engagement
7.2 Managing one’s self-presentation
7.3 The separation between goals and motives
Notes
8 From Killers to Perpetrators
8.1 The legalization of the state’s use of violence
8.2 Using violence in the gray zones of legality
8.3 The shift in the concept of law under the Nazis
8.4 Facilitating killing by legalizing it
Notes
9 The Normality and Abnormality of Organizations
9.1 Beyond the notion of “abnormal organizations”
9.2 The expansion of zones of indifference in organizations
9.3 Understanding organizations: conclusions
Notes
Appendix: The Sociological Approach and Empirical Basis
Notes
Archives
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Ordinary Organizations
Why Normal Men Carried Out the Holocaust
Stefan Kühl
Translated by Jessica Spengler
polity
First published in German as Ganz normale Organisationen. Zur Soziologie des Holocaust, © Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2014
This English edition © Polity Press, 2016
The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0293-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kühl, Stefan, author.Title: Ordinary organizations : why normal men carried out the Holocaust / Stefan Kühl.Other titles: Ganz normale Organisationen. EnglishDescription: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Introduction
In light of the horror of the Holocaust, it is easy to understand the desire for simple answers. It would be something of a relief to believe that the ghetto liquidations, mass shootings, and gassings in the extermination camps took place because the perpetrators had been seduced by Adolf Hitler, or because they belonged to a particularly brutal breed of people, or because they were all eliminationist antisemites and their hatred of Jews was so deeply rooted in their German culture that it was almost inevitable they would become “Hitler’s willing executioners.”
This type of personalization assigns responsibility to just a few, while absolving the rest. Personalization means that people are identified on the basis of specific biological, medical, or cultural characteristics and branded as being pathological, criminal, or strange. The actions attributed to such people are thus “personalized out of existence” for anyone who believes these characteristics do not apply to them. According to this explanation – which is reassuring at first glance – it was fanatical Nazis, sick sadists, or particularly driven eliminationist antisemites who bore responsibility for the genocide. If you do not consider yourself a member of one of these groups, you can sit back and take comfort in the thought that you would have acted very differently.1
But there are limits to the personalization of responsibility. There is no doubt that National Socialism was embraced by much of the German population, or that some people in the police forces and concentration camps saw their job as an opportunity to act on their deep-seated sadism, or that there were fervent antisemites in Germany who actively promoted the “eradication” of the Jewish population. What is surprising, though, is that many people who took part in the mass killings never displayed any such murderous behavior or inclinations either before or after World War II.
This book revolves around one of the most fiercely debated questions in Holocaust research: why “ordinary men” – and, in many cases, “ordinary women” – were willing to humiliate, torment, and murder hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of men, women, and children.2 I want to propose a decidedly sociological answer to this question by taking existing insights from historical, political, philosophical, and social psychological research and bringing them together in a comprehensive explanatory approach with the help of sociological systems theory.3
The challenge is to present an analysis that is informed by sociology but applicable to the wider discussion of the Holocaust. The explanations found in sociological systems theory in particular are often so abstract that other disciplines – such as history, political science, philosophy, and psychology – understandably no longer even bother with them, much less take inspiration from them. When sociologists attempt to explain the Holocaust by throwing around concepts such as binary encoding, autopoietic reproduction, or self-referential closure, they may distinguish themselves as ambitious theorists among a subsubgroup of fellow sociologists specializing in a particular theory, but scholars in other disciplines will, for good reason, simply ignore what they see as unnecessarily complicated approaches.4
Readers can rest assured that this book not only refrains from presenting the fundamentals of systems theory in a way that might intimidate non-sociologists, it also illustrates its sociological reflections using a concrete example: Hamburg Reserve Police Battalion 101, the most thoroughly researched “killing unit” of the Nazi state.5 Precisely because it seems as though everything has already been said about this police battalion, and because the discussion of the battalion has been so contentious, the strengths of a sociological approach – as a complement to, and often in contrast with, existing explanatory models in Holocaust research – should become clear.
Beyond the controversy between “ordinary men” and “ordinary Germans”
Reserve Police Battalion 101 has attracted so much attention from researchers because its members were remarkably “ordinary.” Most of the policemen conscripted in Hamburg were family men who had held civilian jobs as dockhands, barbers, tradesmen, or sales-men before they were stationed in Poland as police reservists. Only a minority of the just over 500 battalion members had stood out as dedicated Nazis or SS men before their assignment in Poland.6
The controversial debate surrounding this police battalion revolves around the specific sense in which these men were “ordinary.”7 To summarize the debate in a single question: were they “ordinary men” or “ordinary Germans”? Unsuspecting readers may be surprised by this opposition, because it seems obvious that, between 1933 and 1945, most if not all of the police in Hamburg were both “men” and “Germans.” But the emphasis on one word or the other is what makes all the difference in the debate.
Emphasizing the word “men” implies that, in principle, any male person would have been capable of killing Jews if they had found themselves in the same situation as the members of the police battalion. According to Christopher Browning in particular, a number of conditions had to be met for these “ordinary men” to become “murderers”: “wartime brutalization,” explicit “racism,” “segmentation and routinization of the task,” “careerism” especially among the leadership, “obedience to orders, deference to authority,” as well as “ideological indoctrination, and conformity.” Added to this was “a distinct corps mentality,” “considerable peer pressure,” and “excessive drinking combined with progressive desensitization towards acts of violence in any form.”8 Behind this bundle of mobilizing factors, we ultimately find a moderate structuralist approach which highlights the rather limited scope of action on the part of individuals in the coercive apparatus of the Nazi state.9
Emphasizing the word “German” does not rule out the idea that brutalization, peer pressure, or deference to authority might have played a role. In fact, it has been argued that these factors were especially important to the non-German participants in the Holocaust, such as the non-Jewish Ukrainians, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians who were recruited as auxiliary troops in the occupied territories. These aspects cannot be completely ignored when it comes to the German police, SS members, or Wehrmacht soldiers either, but such factors are thought to have been secondary at best when it came to the actions of the Germans. According to Daniel Goldhagen in particular, “ordinary Germans” had a long history of a type of antisemitism which focused on extermination and ultimately led them to conclude that “the Jews ought to die.” Goldhagen said “the perpetrators” drew on their own deeply culturally rooted “convictions and morality,” which drove them to believe that the mass extermination of the Jews was justified. This explanation is ultimately a radical version of a voluntaristic approach in Holocaust research, which highlights the perpetrators’ own motivations. In brief, the suggestion here is that the Germans “did not want to say ‘no’” to the Holocaust; in fact, many of them actually wanted to say “yes” to the murder of the European Jews.10
From a sociological perspective, both explanatory approaches are unsatisfying. The voluntaristic approach, which explains the Germans’ actions based on their deep-seated eliminationist antisemitism, assumes a simplistic correspondence between the goals of the police (“extermination of the European Jews”) and the motives of the organization’s members (“eliminationist antisemitism”).11 But this explanation falls short as soon as we look at the involvement of non-German auxiliaries, the “foot soldiers of extermination.”12 The advantage of a structuralist approach, which takes a variety of factors into account, is that you can’t go wrong with a whole host of explanations at your disposal. But this is also the disadvantage. In this case, different motives are strung together in a type of staid, factor-based scholarship, but the various aspects are not explained, weighted, or – even more critically – placed in relation to one another.13 This approach assumes that a fundamentally antisemitic attitude, wartime brutalization, careerism, deference to authority, a corps mentality, and peer pressure all played a role in the Holocaust, but how all these aspects relate to each other remains unclear.14
The general opinion among historical scholars is that the controversy between “ordinary men” and “ordinary Germans” did not have the makings of a major debate. Goldhagen’s monocausal explanation of “eliminationist antisemitism” was thought to have been too theoretically and empirically feeble to mobilize sufficient support from other researchers.15 What the “Goldhagen phenomenon” – or perhaps the “Goldhagen tragedy” – amounted to was that very few historians thought it was worth discussing his theory in detail, but they were forced into just such a discussion by the “fantastic popular success” of the book and its “favorable reception by some noted intellectuals” such as Jürgen Habermas.16 Ultimately, however, the historians who predicted that Holocaust researchers would not gear themselves toward Goldhagen’s book appear to have been right.17 The scholarly debate was over before it had even really begun – but the basic question of why hundreds of thousands of men and women willingly participated in the Holocaust has still not been answered.
Attempts at a sociological explanation of the Holocaust
When analyzing the Holocaust, a distinction has to be made between two fundamental questions. The first is how the decision (or decisions, to be more precise) came about to systematically kill the European Jews. Was there one central decision, a master plan by the Nazi leadership that was gradually implemented when the war started, or can the Holocaust be traced back to the competing initiatives of Nazi authorities in Berlin and especially in the occupied territories of Eastern Europe?18 The second question is how the “ordinary Germans” or “ordinary men” were persuaded to carry out ghetto clearances, mass shootings, and deportations to the extermination camps once the Holocaust was under way. In the words of Herbert A. Simon, the first question concerns the programming decision that was made to commit genocide, while the second concerns the programmed decision-making through which the genocide was carried out in a series of individual decisions.19 These two questions are related, of course: program decisions made at the top of an organization are only efficacious if they are operatively implemented, and the very act of making program decisions encompasses the possibility of implementing them. Analytically, however, the two questions can be separated.20
This book is concerned with the second question, namely, how “ordinary men” or “ordinary Germans” came to murder tens of thousands of Jews.21 A sociological analysis inspired by systems theory cannot claim to offer a fundamentally new explanation for the actions of “ordinary men” or “ordinary Germans.” On the contrary: historical, political, philosophical, and social psychological research has already produced a number of convincing approaches to explain individual aspects, such as the role of antisemitism, peer pressure, opportunities for enrichment, mechanisms of coercion, or brutalization. But by taking a sociological perspective, these approaches can be systematically placed in relation to one another and particularized in terms of their relevance to the actions of ordinary men in the Holocaust.
It may come as a surprise to hear that a sociological approach – and, moreover, a systems theory approach – could help clarify one of the key questions in Holocaust research. After all, in the debate about Reserve Police Battalion 101, the word “sociologist” was used primarily as an insult by each side to discredit the other. The representatives of a voluntaristic approach à la Goldhagen complained that their critics were using “sociologistic accounts” to obfuscate the police officers’ responsibility for the mass shootings.22 And vice versa: Goldhagen’s critics alleged that he was blinded by sociologisms. For instance, Mariam Niroumand accused Goldhagen of producing a kind of “pulp fiction in sociological camouflage,” and Paul Johnson decried Goldhagen’s use of “sociobabble” in place of serious analysis.23 The irony is that none of the scholars who were criticized in this way were actually sociologists, none of them worked systematically with sociological theories, and none of them used even a rudimentary sociological conceptual framework.24
Admittedly, sociologists themselves played a part in turning “sociological” into an insult in Holocaust research, because, with very few exceptions, they made no contributions of their own to debates about the Holocaust.25 They were notably absent from the controversy about the “banality of evil” sparked by Hannah Arendt’s report on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. In the historians’ debate in Germany about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, a sociologist played a key role in the form of Jürgen Habermas, but his comments revealed that he had participated in the debate more as an intellectual interested in the future of the Federal Republic of Germany than as a sociologist.26 And the discussion of how ordinary German men could become mass murderers took place between historians, political scientists, philosophers, anthropologists, theologians, and social psychologists, but, again, hardly any sociologists.27 For decades, sociologists – to summarize Zygmunt Bauman – gave the impression of collectively closing their eyes to debates about the Holocaust.28
As an academic discipline, sociology certainly needs to systematically determine why National Socialism was largely ignored in sociological analyses after World War II.29 But such sociological self-reflection is not as critical, in my opinion, as engaging with other academic disciplines and exploring specific research questions to see which new insights can be gained from a sociological perspective. By proposing a theory of “ordinary organizations” in this book, I hope to show how the actions of “ordinary men” and “ordinary Germans” during the Holocaust can be explained sociologically.
The perpetration of the Holocaust by means of state organizations of force
The point of departure for my theory of “ordinary organizations” is the observation that more than 99 percent of all killings of Jews were carried out by members of state organizations of force.30 State organizations of force include, for example, armies, militias, or police, which use the threat of force, or force itself, in order to implement state decisions. They differ from non-state organizations of force, such as groups of thugs, terrorist organizations, or marauding bands of mercenaries, in that they can justify their actions by claiming to enforce demands that have been legitimized by the state.31
There is no doubt that many forms of violence against Jews during the Nazi era were not organized by the state. We need look no further than the acts of violence during the boycotts of Jewish businesses shortly after the Nazis took power in 1933, the public shaming of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens for supposed “race defilement,” and the destruction of synagogues, businesses, and homes during the pogroms of November 1938. There was a line of continuity here – one that has been insufficiently researched and must not be underestimated – running from attacks by antisemitic groups against Jews in the Weimar Republic, to violent acts by nongovernmental Nazi organizations during the Nazi era which were frequently tolerated, and sometimes even supported, by the state.32
However, the mass executions of Jews and deportations to the extermination camps were not – and this is the key difference – private initiatives on the part of antisemitic interest groups. Instead, they were part of a state program to annihilate the Jews of Europe.33 “Ordinary men” and “ordinary women” began to participate in the killing of Jews as soon as they became members of state organizations and were ordered to play their part in the annihilation program – and nearly all of them stopped again as soon as they left these killing organizations. In any case, as far as we know, very few former members of the Ordnungspolizei (Order Police, the regular uniformed police), employees of the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service, or SD), or Wehrmacht soldiers continued to take part in the shooting of religious or ethnic minorities in the context of private initiatives after they had left their respective organizations.
The simple realization that the Holocaust was a killing campaign based largely on state organizations is hardly an original insight. After all, even at first glance it is clear that the majority of Jews were killed not in the context of wild, “unorganized” antisemitic pogroms, but rather by members of state organizations of force who were implementing the policies of the Nazi regime.34 Raul Hilberg, whose comprehensive overview of the destruction of the European Jews is still considered a key reference in Holocaust research, has explained in great detail how Jews were registered by state registration offices in the German Reich and occupied territories, transported to the East by the Reich railway, tormented in the ghettos by police battalions, and killed in mass shootings or extermination camps by SS and police units or non-German auxiliaries.35
Beyond the view of organizations as machines
When it comes to analyzing the organizational framework for these activities, however, researchers – particularly the few sociologists who have chimed in on the discussion of the Holocaust – have worked with a nearly caricatural view of organizations that can ultimately be traced back to Max Weber.36 Under the influence of Weber’s description of the machine-like “bureaucratic mechanism,” with its “precision,” “speed,” “unambiguity,” “knowledge of the files,” “continuity,” “discretion,” “unity,” “strict subordination,” and “reduction of friction,” the Holocaust has been construed as a product of the use of “bureaucratic mechanisms” that were suited to killing people on a massive scale. According to this interpretation, the Holocaust involved the implementation of concepts such as the “optimal use of resources” and a “diligent and professional approach.” As a result of the division of labor, the Schreibtischtäter (literally, “desk perpetrators”) would have perceived the victims solely as a “depersonalized” entity, a “column of numbers.”37
This machine-like understanding of organizations is embedded in an explanation that interprets the Holocaust as a phenomenon of modernity.38 As this interpretation has it, the Enlightenment was the source of the “deadly combination” of cold calculation and bureaucratic machinery that gave rise to the “monster of modernity.” In its efforts to achieve perfection through organizations, the Holocaust, according to Zygmunt Bauman, was a “code of modernity,” a “legitimate resident in the house of modernity.” Bauman said the goal of modernity was a “better,” “more efficient,” “more beautiful” world, and the mass murder of the Jews was an attempt to realize this ideal.39
Ultimately, this view of organizations is what led Hannah Arendt to fail so spectacularly in her character study of Adolf Eichmann. With Max Weber’s understanding of organizations, the Holocaust can only be explained as a “bureaucratically planned” and “industrially executed” “administrative mass murder.”40 As Martin Heidegger said shortly after World War II, the Holocaust is regarded primarily as the “fabrication of corpses,” as “hundreds of thousands” being “unobtrusively liquidated.”41 The Holocaust has thus come to be seen as an instance of an “entire people” being “obliterated without a trace” in “death factories,” in the words of Wolfgang Sofsky. The “death factory” is presented as an “apparatus that functioned smoothly,” where people were murdered “at a high capacity and speed” – even though we know from sociological studies of car and aircraft factories that a “smoothly functioning apparatus” is pure management fiction.42 From this perspective, the only possible synonym for the Holocaust is “Auschwitz” – not the frequently improvised mass shootings, the sometimes chaotic ghetto liquidations, or the first mass killings in the Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka extermination camps, which were plagued by planning problems.43
By basing their explanations on a simplified understanding of organizations, Holocaust researchers inherited all the problems that were characteristic of Weberian organizational research: overemphasizing the goal-oriented rationality of organizations, disregarding the fact that organizations frequently have conflicting goals, underestimating the contradictions in the orientation of people’s actions, ignoring “bottom-up” initiative, and neglecting the importance of the “sousveillance of superiors” which gives subordinates significant influence over the decisions made by top-level personnel.44
This insufficiently complex view of the organizations involved in the Holocaust – in which every single member, almost to the top of the organization, seems to be merely a cog in the machine – has made it easy to reject explanations that focus on organizations. Such a simplified view has been justifiably criticized for portraying people as nothing more than “puppet-like actors,” “pawns,” or “soulless technocrats.” It leaves the impression that we are dealing solely with “obedient and submissive executors of an ideology,” “unfeeling command automatons,” or “dispassionate desk murderers.” Critics say this “denies the moral agency and assent of the perpetrators,” leading us to assume that “they were compelled to act by forces external to them.”45
Though most of the rival parties neither mentioned nor even noticed it, Holocaust research became the arena for a debate about organizations that had already taken place in a more general form decades earlier. When psychologists, business economists, and sociologists began to take an interest in the phenomenon of the organization in the late nineteenth century, the dominant image was one in which people were of interest solely in terms of how they fit into a machine-like structure. According to the structuralist assumption prevalent at the time, you merely had to establish an efficient network of rules and chains of command, then identify the people best suited to each position in the network and lure them in with attractive compensation.46
As a critical response to this reduction of personnel to a pure “fulfillment function” in a more or less rational organization, another concept emerged, one that was shaped by a voluntaristic view of humanity and considered the human factor to be crucial in understanding organizations. The sociologically naive belief here was that organizations are made up of people, so their success or failure must depend exclusively on the composition of their personnel.47 The result was a fairly unproductive confrontation between researchers who, on account of their view of organizations as machines, paid little heed to the importance of personnel, and researchers who tried to explain organizational phenomena solely through the motivations of an organization’s personnel. Representatives of the former position – as Niklas Luhmann argued – tended to underestimate the importance of the people in an organization, while representatives of the latter tended to overestimate it.48
Neither structuralism nor voluntarism
The sociological theory of “ordinary organizations” presented here – and I cannot emphasize this point enough – has nothing to do with the oversimplified image of organizations as machines, nor does it fall back on a purely voluntaristic explanation for the actions of people in organizations. One of the strengths of sociological systems theory is that it does not pit an approach geared toward structures against an approach geared toward people, as is frequently assumed. Instead – and this is the key point – it views people as structural features of social systems such as organizations, small groups, protest movements, or families. Even non-sociologists can immediately grasp the fact that the certainty of expectations in small groups, protest movements, and families – as well as organizations – is based not only on roles but also on an understanding of the different ways in which people act.49
By adopting this perspective, organizational sociology that is informed by systems theory can help overcome the opposition between the “structuralist approach” and the “voluntaristic approach” in Holocaust research.50 We can then view the actions of the members of the Order Police and Security Police as more than merely actions in the context of a very precisely defined formal membership role (as Hannah Arendt saw it), and we can also explain why these people took the initiative in killing Jews, actively contributed to refining the processes for deportation and killing, frequently carried out shootings at the limits of what was tolerated by the organization, and often committed atrocities enthusiastically.51
As I will show, it was their membership in organizations that made ordinary German men willing to follow up on what was, for many, a latent antisemitism by actively taking part in deportations, ghetto clearances, and mass shootings (chapter 1). This does not mean, however, that the members of organizations functioned like cogs in a machine – and this is what sets my explanatory approach apart from those in the tradition of Hannah Arendt. On the contrary: not all the deployed policemen necessarily identified with the goal of annihilating Europe’s Jews, but even those who simply let the antisemitic indoctrination wash over them played a part in making the killing of Jews appear to be a police duty that had to be carried out (chapter 2). Even the policemen who declared that they could not take part in killing Jews, and thus evaded the demands of their coercive organization, blamed their noncompliance on their own weakness, illness, or conscience – meaning that the killing program could continue unimpeded (chapter 3). In many cases, the expectation that someone would participate in ghetto clearances, deportations, or shootings was not enforced by the hierarchy; it was just what the men expected of each other (chapter 4). These comradeship expectations were strengthened by the fact that the operations offered opportunities for personal enrichment at the expense of the Jews, something that went against the rules of the organizations (chapter 5). The high degree of brutality, which often exceeded what was officially permitted or functionally necessary for the task, made it easier for the battalion members to kill their victims (chapter 6). It was, therefore, the deviations, reinterpretations, and personal initiative of the organization members that made it possible for the Holocaust to be carried out.52
A sociologically informed study must do more than merely recount the possible motives of the police battalion members, however. This alone would not offer any obvious value over existing studies. Instead, such a study must illuminate the mechanism that prompted people with different motives to participate in mass killings. The political convictions, frequently changing motives, and behavioral nuances of the organization members were certainly not irrelevant – something that was overlooked by Hannah Arendt. However – and this is where Daniel Goldhagen got it wrong – the Holocaust was not carried out solely, or even largely, by people whose convictions aligned with one of their organization’s goals, in this case: the destruction of the European Jews. In fact, the participants differed greatly in their motives, their willingness to kill, and their reaction to the killing operations. The fact that they ultimately acted uniformly and effectively nonetheless can only be understood – as Christopher Browning failed to see – by viewing their actions from a central perspective: the generalization of motives for membership in organizations (chapter 7).
The use of violence can only be formally expected by state organizations of force if it takes place within a legal framework. The policemen who were instructed by the organizations active in World War II to participate in the mass shooting of women, men, and children, or to kill sick people, the elderly, and infants during ghetto clearances, or to immediately kill anyone captured during a “Jew hunt,” could not be sure whether these orders fell within the bounds of legality at the time. During the ghetto clearances, deportations, and shootings, the men acted in a way that aligned with the horizon of expectations typical of the police. As a result, their understanding of what was considered legal was continually validated through their actions (chapter 8).
It is crucial to stress that the Holocaust cannot be explained solely in terms of behavior within organizations. But without a solid understanding of organizations, any explanation of why “ordinary men” or “ordinary Germans” took part in the Holocaust will remain incomplete. Holocaust researchers have come to the distressing realization that it was not necessary to develop special programs for the killing operations, or to create special communication channels, or to recruit special personnel for the killings in order to persuade organization members to participate in the genocide. Just as the members of the state organizations were ordinary people, the organizations through which the mass killings were planned and carried out had the hallmarks of ordinary organizations (chapter 9).
The challenges of a sociology of the Holocaust
This book is challenging for sociologists in that it takes an unconventional approach to its topic. The question of how “ordinary men” or “ordinary Germans” came to murder tens of thousands of Jews is a pressing one in Holocaust research. But for sociologists interested in social structures in the tradition of Émile Durkheim, it is unusual to approach this question by looking at the motivations of individuals.53 Whenever sociologists have chimed in on the discussion of the Holocaust, they have rooted their explanatory approaches in abstract social theory (as did Theodor W. Adorno and Norbert Elias), or they have used the Holocaust as a basis for exploring different national response patterns to National Socialism, or they have compared the Holocaust to other genocides.54 It may therefore come as a surprise to see the focus shifted to the creation of a willingness to kill and thus to the day-to-day implementation of the killing programs.55
The challenge is all the greater because this book does not opt for the level of abstraction usually employed by theory-oriented sociologists. “No names of places or people” – this was Niklas Luhmann’s famous requirement for sociological analyses claiming to take a generalized approach. In principle, sociologists are not interested in a single war, and certainly not in a single battle, but rather in the social theory of violent conflicts.56 It is not the individual genocide that is interesting to sociologists but rather the generalized theory of the mass killing of civilians based on the ethnic or religious characteristics attributed to them. This book goes against this basic sociological principle, and names names: of places where massacres took place, of the Nazi organizations that were involved in them, and of the people who participated in these massacres as the members of such organizations.57
Even though I do not claim to present a comprehensive history of the Hamburg police battalion, each chapter in this book opens with an account of this organizational unit (based on new sources, in some cases), and the theses of the individual chapters are illustrated with references to these accounts, which are contrasted or supplemented with references to other Nazi organizations where applicable. Using the well-researched example of Police Battalion 101 to illustrate my deliberations should make it possible for readers to grasp and verify the plausibility of my arguments and view my theories in relation to approaches from other disciplines. This does not mean that I have relinquished any claim to sociological generalization. On the contrary, my book uses this specific case study to reveal general insights into how “ordinary men” and “ordinary women” were integrated into organizations.
For non-sociologists, the book probably poses even greater challenges, however. As a scientific discipline, sociology does not approach the Holocaust from a moral perspective. It seems self-evident to us today that the execution of thousands of Jewish Poles constituted mass murder, meaning that the “killers” were automatically “perpetrators” in both a moral and legal sense who should have been, or should be, prosecuted as mass murderers.58 But this self-evident categorization of violent acts from a modern perspective makes it more difficult to reconstruct the prevailing rules of legitimacy and, more precisely, of legality of the relevant organizations at the time. In a sociological analysis, it is necessary to strive for the most neutralizing choice of words possible. For example, only by first referring to “mass killings” instead of “mass murders” is it possible to imagine how, depending on the perspective and point in time, mass killings can obviously appear to be mass murders – or not.59
What makes the challenge even greater is that sociologists typically reconstruct the rationalities that underlie events.60 Some Holocaust researchers take the view that the deportations, mass shootings, and killings in the extermination camps simply cannot be explained.61 This touches on a sociologically relevant aspect as well, namely, that many acts of violence cannot be fully understood from the perspective of rationalities, or even motives, due to the dynamics of conflict inherent in them.62 But even when we pay more heed to the internal dynamics of processes of violence, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the participants in such processes often persistently attribute rationalities to themselves and others.63 From a sociological standpoint, however – and this is what makes sociology as a scientific discipline so suspect for many non-sociologists – there is no systematic reason why the Holocaust cannot be reconstructed in exactly the same way as the development of atomic energy, the emergence of new regimes of factory work, or the genesis of universal human rights.
This challenge is further intensified by the fact that the question of how “ordinary men” or “ordinary Germans” could be persuaded to participate in the Holocaust shifts the focus away from the victims. This conflicts with a growing demand for the Holocaust not to be explained or recounted from a perspective that focuses on the perpetrators (much less from the perspective of the perpetrators) but rather from a perspective that focuses on (or, better yet, from the perspective of) the Jewish victims.64 This may be compatible with the demand occasionally heard in the field of the sociology of violence that “thick descriptions” be used to make the “torment of the victims” visible.65 But when it comes to a sociological approach, the moralistic debate as to whether a “perpetrator perspective” should be replaced by a “victim perspective,” or whether we need a “theory of suffering” instead of a “theory of the deed,” is irrelevant.
Whether or to what extent forms of violence must be analyzed with a view to the perpetrators or the victims depends on the subject being analyzed. For a sociological analysis of ghettos, concentration camps, or extermination camps, the perspective of the victims has to be taken into account because – as suggested by sociological studies of prisons and psychiatric hospitals – this type of analysis requires that we look at the interaction between the members of the state organizations of force and the inhabitants of the ghettos or the prisoners in the concentration and extermination camps.66 By contrast, a perspective that focuses on the victims – or, indeed, the perspective of the victims – plays a subordinate role when it comes to understanding the actions of the men of Police Battalion 101. This is not because we want to close our eyes to the suffering of the victims – who could do that, after all? – but because, in this case, the victims’ perspective does little to help us explain what happened.67 It is certainly important to precisely reconstruct the acts of violence, particularly during the deportations and shootings, as mutually observed processes of “suffering” and the “infliction of suffering,” but these processes were generally so shortlived that the battalion members only had to take the suffering of their actual victims into account to a limited extent.
On the terminology of a sociology of the Holocaust
Part of taking a sociological approach involves choosing one’s own terminology and dealing carefully with terms used during and after the Nazi period. Nazi language was often full of euphemisms.68 With the term “Volksgemeinschaft” (“people’s community”), Nazi propagandists wanted to suggest that their racial policy was approved by the vast majority of the population. The plan to kill well over ten million Jews in Europe was downplayed as the “final solution” to the “Jewish question.” Transports to the extermination camps were called “evacuations,” “cleansing,” or “resettlements,” while on-the-spot shootings – which sometimes took place because rail transport to an extermination camp was not possible – were referred to as “local resettlement,” “pacification operations,” or “executive measures.” “Aktionen” (“operations”) were time-limited programs such as the killing of mentally handicapped and mentally ill individuals (“Aktion T4”), or the killing of all Jews in the German-administered Polish territory known as the General Government (“Aktion Reinhard”).69 In a scholarly analysis, it is not possible to entirely avoid using the terminology cultivated by the Nazis. However, whenever such terms are used in this book, they always appear in quotation marks to indicate that they are Nazi jargon.
Second, it is important to be aware that when individuals were referred to as Jews or non-Jews, this was not always the way such individuals would have described themselves; in many cases, they were descriptions imposed on others by the Nazis. In the Nuremberg Race Laws, the Nazis declared that having “three grandparents of Jewish descent” made a person a “full Jew,” even if that person did not practice the Jewish faith. If someone was a member of a Jewish religious community, however, it was enough to have just two Jewish grandparents to be declared a “full Jew.” The Nazis developed their own version of arithmetic, according to which people could be identified not only as “full Jews” but also as “half Jews,” “three-quarter Jews,” “five-eighth Jews,” or even “thirty-secondth Jews.”70 Since the extermination policies of the Nazi state were based on the Nazis’ own definition of Jews, this book adopts their designation. It must be noted, however, that many of the people whom the Nazis ghettoized, deported, and killed as Jews would not have described themselves as Jews.71
Third, a distinction was made by the Nazis (and can sometimes even be found in the research literature) between groups of “Germans,” “Ukrainians,” or “Poles” who were defined nationally and groups of Jews who were defined on a religious (and frequently ethnic) basis. The contrast between what was “German,” “Polish,” or “Ukrainian” and what was “Jewish” was just one component of a fundamentally antisemitic attitude that had become entrenched as far back as the nineteenth century and was subsequently declared to be a state ideology by the Nazis. For members of the Jewish faith who had fought on the side of the German Empire in World War I, it was a slap in the face when the Nazis made a distinction between a national identity and a religious one. Through continuous repetition, this distinction gained such a degree of plausibility that it characterized the use of language even after 1945.72 But ever since the emergence of nation-states, “Jews” – just like the members of other religious communities – had always also been Poles, Romanians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, or Germans. Though there had been repeated attempts to loosen this connection through the way in which people referred to themselves or were referred to by others, Jews were first systematically robbed of their national identities through the policies of the Nazis. In contrast to the use of language by the Nazis, we should actually always speak of Jewish Poles or Jewish Germans and non-Jewish Poles or non-Jewish Germans. This more analytically precise usage works well when we refer to the “non-Jewish Germans” who were responsible for ghettoizing, deporting, and killing Jews, but it gets more complicated when it comes to the specification of “Jewish Germans,” “Jewish Hungarians,” or ”Jewish Poles.” It is true that the victims of Police Battalion 101 were primarily Jewish Poles, but on account of the population displacement initiated by the Nazis after the start of World War II, the ghettos of the General Government held Jews from all over Europe. Therefore, for the sake of linguistic simplification, I will occasionally refer to “Jews” as distinct from “Poles” or “Germans” despite the imprecision – but as often as possible I will make a more precise distinction between “non-Jewish Germans” and “Jewish Germans” or “non-Jewish Poles” and “Jewish Poles.”73
Notes
1
See Hilberg (1980, p. 101f.). Regarding the function of scapegoats, see Girard (1982).
2
The role of women in the implementation of the Nazis’ extermination policy has attracted growing attention since the late 1990s. For an early analysis, see Bock (1998).
3
Readers may notice that I have refrained from referencing certain studies that have become popular in Holocaust research, namely, social psychological obedience experiments such as those by Frank (1944), Haney et al. (1973), or Milgram (1963). In my opinion, the Stanford prison experiment and Milgram’s obedience experiment in particular are referenced too haphazardly; see, e.g., Browning (1992, pp. 171ff.), Bauman (1989, pp. 151ff.). Regarding the applicability problem, see Sandkühler and Schmuhl (1998). My detailed treatment of these social psychological experiments will be published soon as a book: Kühl (forthcoming).
4
Their wariness is especially justified if this sociological systems theory comes out of Bielefeld, Germany, because Bielefeld is suspected of being, above all, a “sound” – as so charmingly described by Valentin Groebner – which “follows the beat of conditional and relative clauses at the start of sentences, of verbs used as nouns, of thickets of gerunds and gerundives à la ‘that which is to be clarified,’ all operating instructions without a speaking subject.” Groebner (2009, p. 182) depicts the “grammatical conditions” at the “theory-saturated” Bielefeld history department in the 1990s, which was heavily influenced by this sociological “sound.” The sociologists of Bielefeld were (and are) at least on a par with the historians when it comes to this sound, sometimes even surpassing them. It is not uncommon for systems theorists to try to distinguish themselves by presenting their theories in a way that minimizes their connection with other theoretical debates.
5
The two key reference points here are the books about Police Battalion 101 by Browning (1992; published in German in 1993 with a new afterword by the author) and by Goldhagen (1997b; published in German in 1996 with some radically modified passages). Researchers have, to date, largely neglected the third book about Police Battalion 101, by Kiepe (2007), which, in my opinion, is the most scrupulous work in terms of historical methodology. To supplement this, my analysis occasionally looks at other police battalions that have been covered in the secondary literature, especially Police Battalion 61 from Dortmund and Police Battalion 322 from Vienna-Kagran. The growing body of research into different police battalions shows that, despite differences in the details, statements about the police battalions can largely be generalized.
6
The ordinariness of these men had been noted long before Browning and Goldhagen; see, e.g., Katz (1982a, p. 275; 1982b, p. 511); however, see also Lohmann (1984, p. 263), Jäger (1989, p. 52). Of the roughly 100 police battalions that were deployed in the occupied territories, only 20 – including Reserve Police Battalion 101 – consisted primarily of older reservists; see Longerich (2010, p. 186), Westermann (2005, p. 15).
7
In the USA, the debate that erupted after the publication of Goldhagen’s book was immediately framed as a dispute between Browning’s “ordinary men” explanation and Goldhagen’s “ordinary Germans” explanation – thanks not least to a symposium at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in April 1996 (USHMM, 1996). However, it took somewhat longer in Germany for people to realize that Goldhagen’s book can be read primarily as a reaction to Browning; see Reemtsma (1996; as far as I know, Reemtsma was one of the first in Germany to point this out), Rürup (1996, p. 361; in which Goldhagen’s book is referred to as “anti-Browning”).
8
See Browning (1992, p. 159), Herbert (1998, p. 30); see also Curilla (2011, pp. 882ff.), who presents a similar list consisting of brutalization, careerism, preparation, practice and habituation, a tradition of obedience, group pressure, and the exclusion of minorities.
9
This structuralist approach seems logical when we look at the Nazi state as a dictatorship; see, e.g., Broszat (2013, pp. 57ff.), Evans (2005, pp. 20ff.), and, tendentially, Frei (1993, pp. 29ff.).
10
Goldhagen (1997b, p. 14; emphasis in original). The “yes” does not come from Goldhagen himself, but it is the logical conclusion to his argument. His relativization of other factors reads as follows: “The perpetrators’ beliefs, their particular brand of antisemitism, though obviously not the sole source, was, I maintain, a most significant and indispensable source of the perpetrators’ actions.” Goldhagen argues that the actions of the German perpetrators cannot be explained by “structural factors” but only by “cultural cognitive” ones. Even the terms used here bring up fundamental questions. What exactly is meant by “cultural cognitive”? Aren’t “cultures” actually “structures” that influence people’s actions? Which “structural factors” is he talking about if he does not count “cultures” among them? Pesch (1997) makes a worthwhile attempt to reconstruct Goldhagen’s theoretical framework.
11
Historians needed no more than a cursory glance at the sources relating to Police Battalion 101 to see that Goldhagen used these sources in a way that supported his monocausal theory. Goldhagen’s handling of sources has been analyzed in detail by a number of scholars. For an early example, see Scheffler (1996), Stern (1999, p. 275f.). For an especially detailed analysis, see Birn (1998), Birn and Riess (1998).
12
Goldhagen offers a pragmatic explanation for disregarding non-German participants in the Holocaust. He says his book was already so “ambitious in scope” that the topic “had to be restricted so as to be manageable” (1997b, p. 476). However, he overlooks the fact that the involvement of non-German auxiliaries fundamentally calls his argument into question, and he could only address this in the book by falling back on seemingly improvisational multicausal explanatory models. There is no doubt that the “decisive impetus for the Holocaust” came from Germany and thus from “the Germans,” but we still need to explain how “ordinary Germans” and “ordinary non-Germans” could be impelled to play an active role in the death squads.
13
The accusation of “staid factor-based scholarship” or “staid factor-based sociology” is normally directed at traditional postwar violence research focusing on domestic violence, juvenile delinquency, and politically motivated crimes in the context of protest movements, but it can also be applied to Holocaust research; see Trotha (1997, p. 18).
14
This multicausal approach with its list-like nature has become the mainstream in research on the Holocaust and genocides in general; see, e.g., Bloxham (2009, p. 288), Jensen (2013, p. 2). Following this approach, the most that can be said is that, in the material dimension, National Socialist indoctrination may have played a more important role in the treatment of Jewish Poles than in the treatment of non-Jewish Poles; in the social dimension, a distinction has to be made between SS units and police battalions, because antisemitism tended to play a larger role among the former; and in the temporal dimension, the focus on authority was critical at the beginning, while desensitization became more significant later on; see Browning (1992, p. 128). But in the end, it is still not clear how all this relates to each other. Even though Goldhagen himself takes a multicausality approach when it comes to non-German perpetrators, he refers to a “laundry line principle” where all possible motives are strung up next to each other.
15
The debate surrounding Goldhagen’s theories about Police Battalion 101 was initially compared with the great contemporary history debates of the twentieth century: the controversy surrounding Fritz Fischer’s book about German responsibility for the outbreak of World War I, the heated controversy surrounding Hannah Arendt’s
Eichmann in Jerusalem
(1964), and the theory of historians concerning the uniqueness of the Holocaust; see Rosenfeld (1999, pp. 250f.), though Rosenfeld also points out key differences between the debates. Goldhagen’s deliberations have ultimately had remarkably little influence on subsequent scholarly discussions, however. The contrast between his tremendous commercial success and the muted scholarly reception of his book was pointed out early on by Herbert (1999, p. 33) and Weingart and Pansegrau (1999, pp. 5ff.). It is almost tragic that the simplicity of Goldhagen’s approach turned the debate into a one-sided affair inasmuch as there was never any critical examination of Browning’s book. In the wake of Goldhagen’s harsh criticism of Browning, some historians apparently felt they had no choice but to stand by Browning. Compared with Goldhagen, Browning’s book – to quote Jacques Sémelin (2007, p. 2) – appeared to be a “major work.”
16
See Habermas (1997 – original German; 1998 – English translation) for his encomium for Goldhagen. LaCapra says historians are in a “double bind”: “They think that, at least for the most part, Goldhagen’s book is not worth serious scholarly attention, and yet they cannot avoid devoting attention to it, because of its fantastic popular success and its favorable reception by some noted intellectuals and scholars, who for the most part are not professional historians, or at least not experts on the Nazi genocide, but are opinion makers” (2001, p. 116).
17
Such as Rürup (1996, p. 361). For a similar view, see, e.g., Kershaw (2000b, pp. 258ff.).
18
The literature on this debate – which was long referred to as a debate of “intentionalists versus functionalists” – cannot be reviewed here. A good starting point for a sociological study would be Hans Mommsen’s (1991) as yet unsurpassed work on the realization of the unthinkable; see also Mommsen’s more detailed recent work (2014).
19
See Simon (1955). Simon (1965) loosened this distinction – as Luhmann (1981b, pp. 134f.) points out – in favor of a continuum between more or less programmed decisions. In Holocaust research, the difference between the two questions is marked not by different decision types but by perpetrator types. See Sémelin’s distinction between “le décideur,” “le organisateur,” “le propagandiste,” and “l’exécutant” (2003a, p. 154); or Browning’s between “ideologues,” “managers,” and “ordinary men” (2005b, pp. 66f).
20
The connection between the two questions is particularly emphasized in studies highlighting the decentralized initiative for carrying out the Holocaust in both the German Reich and the occupied territories. In the case of the civilian administration in the occupied territories, the Secret Field Police of the Wehrmacht, and the Todt Organization, there was a fluid transition from decisions, to the genocidal premises of the decisions, to the execution of these decisions; see Gerlach (2006, p. 456).
21
From the perspective of organizational sociology alone, a whole range of other topics could be researched here: the role of the Reich railway in transporting Jews to the extermination camps in the East – see Hilberg (1981); the “underlife” of the camps – for an enlightening sociological introduction, see Kirstein (1992), Suderland (2004, 2013), Hauffe (2013); the role of the Jewish councils – see the seminal work by Trunk (1996), and, for an initial sociological attempt at classification, see Bauman (1989, pp. 117ff.); the deployment of non-German death squads in the context of operations by the Order Police or Security Police – see the overview in Hilberg (1993, pp. 87ff.).
22
See Brennan (2001, p. 93). One did not even have to be a sociologist to be accused of “sociologistic accounts”; in the context of the debate, it was enough for a historian merely to use the term “peer pressure” – a concept employed primarily by social psychologists and one that, from a sociological perspective, is not adequate for describing the informal processes within the police battalion.
23
See Niroumand (1996), Johnson (1996). The “sociologist” label appeared in numerous newspaper and magazine articles. The journalists Matthias Arning and Rolf Paasch (1996) wrote about the “American sociologist” Goldhagen who was encountering harsh criticism. Rudolf Augstein (1996a) summarily titled his dispute with Goldhagen “Der Soziologe als Scharfrichter” (“The Sociologist as Executioner”) and argued that Goldhagen ignored “any prior research that didn’t suit him” – implying that this was typical of the work of a sociologist.
24
Goldhagen was also promptly identified in the mass media as a “professor of sociology at Harvard University”; see, e.g., Augstein (1996b). Following Augstein, see Blum and Storz (1998).
25
Sociology’s ignorance of Holocaust research is surprising inasmuch as early works by Adler (2016/1955), Kogon (2006/1946), and Pawełczyńska (1979) were at least somewhat “sociologized” on account of their background.
26
This was the point made by Brennan in (2001) – an observation that seems plausible in light of Habermas’s publications relating to the
histo-rians' debate
; see Habermas (1987).
27
See, e.g., the collected volumes by Schoeps (1996), Shandley (1998), Heil and Erb (1998), Elsässer and Markovits (1999), Eley (2000). One exception is Bergmann (1998), though Bergmann takes a metaperspective on the debate that is informed by differentiation theory.
28
See Bauman (1989, pp. 9f.). Prior to Bauman, see, e.g., Dank (1979), Katz (1982b, pp. 511f.). The noninvolvement of sociologists in Holocaust research has also become something of a monotonous complaint within sociology itself. For fairly recent versions of this complaint, see, e.g., Sofsky (1994, p. 58), Imbusch (2001, pp. 123ff.), Katz (2007), Christ (2011b, pp. 407ff.), Friedrich (2012, pp. 5, 21), Shaw (2010, pp. 144f.).
29
As a starting point, sociologists could look to the seminal studies of German sociology under the Nazis; see Rammstedt (1986), Klingemann (2009).
30
In a certain respect, this book runs counter to the current tendency to explain mass violence through the absence rather than the presence of state organizations; see, e.g., Sémelin (2007), Gerlach (2010, pp. 1ff.). I believe such an explanation is plausible for the mass killings in Indonesia in 1965–6, Bangladesh in 1971–7, and even – with some qualifications – in Rwanda in 1994 or the former Yugoslavia in 1991–5. But when it comes to the Holocaust, this explanation only applies to the phase from late 1944 to early May 1945. The difference between the Holocaust and many other mass killings of political, ethnic, or religious minorities is precisely that the Holocaust had the strong support of the state system.
31
It is interesting to note that despite all of the effort to statistically process data from the Holocaust, we do not know precisely how many Jews were killed by people who were not members of state organizations. Since such killings could have been prosecuted as murder after World War II, and since we know of very few investigations carried out against nonmembers of state organizations, I assume that the number was relatively small. More detailed historical research has yet to be carried out here. It would also be interesting to reinterpret individual cases from this perspective – such as that of Ilse Koch, the “Bitch of Buchenwald,” who had no official function in the organization of the concentration camp. Regarding the assessment that Koch stood “outside of all hierarchies,” see Finger (2009, p.103); see also Smith (1983), Przyrembel (2004).
32
