Chapter 6:
Examining the Behavior of the Perpetrators of the Holocaust

The dangers of this approach is fairly clear: any of us setting students the task of considering the Holocaust would most likely be appalled if we seemed to be leading students to sympathize and therefore excuse the actions of the perpetrators. A corollary to the slogan "Never again!" is that perpetrators themselves should not be permitted to escape justice after having committed such terrible crimes. Millions of people throughout the world are outraged that Nazi war criminals were able to escape justice after World War II. A handful of Nazi war leaders were tried at Nuremberg, and a few were even executed. In the 1950s and 1960s, a few more notorious criminals were tracked down, brought to trial and punished, the most notorious being Adolf Eichmann, who was abducted by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960, brought to Israel for trial, and then executed in 1962. But thousands of former Nazi officials, including many who participated in the Holocaust, were "de-nazified" in the late 1940s and continued to work in positions of responsibility until their retirements and eventual death. And tribunals that have been convened since Nuremberg have been notoriously ineffective at prosecuting war criminals from the genocides that have taken place in Bosnia and in Rwanda.

Many issues arise as we consider the behavior of the perpetrators of the Holocaust and our responses to that behavior. One set of issues centers around the question of justice—what it is, how is it meted out, what processes can be used to arrive at it. Another set of issues concerns what we might term the locus and nature of evil: is it a force that is somehow loose in the world and that comes to inhabit particular people who then function as a force for evil? Or is it something that arises as the result of human interaction, particularly in the behavior of institutions or organizations? Do all human beings have a capacity for it, or is it something to which only some of us are susceptible? Did the Nazis know they were committing evil but did so anyway? Or did they think that that they were somehow acting for the greater good? This last question points to another related issue—the capacity of a powerful ideology to transform our thinking into something that we would otherwise regard as totally alien.

These are all difficult questions, and I am not suggesting that our students will be able to answer them. But I do think that they can wrestle with them and that this encounter often leads to the sort of writing that we ought to encourage in our students. I can’t say that it is "better" writing than they would otherwise have done—such a claim would be impossible to prove. And I can’t even claim that these issues are better than other issues at putting students in situations that will enrich both their writing and their lives. But these issues can serve to show students that some difficult questions are best discussed in writing. Linda Brodkey makes a similar point in defending the syllabus for the famous English 306 course at University of Texas, which required students to write and argue about issues that have arisen out of the civil rights laws and our recent history regarding discrimination:

If you want students to learn to write . . . , it is probably a good idea to recreate the circumstances under which others have turned to writing. While it is not the only reason, a good many literate people write when speech fails, that is, when something they have decided is worth reflecting on and asking others to contemplate is sufficiently complex that writing about it seems more promising than just talking it over with some else. . . . While nearly everyone has an opinion on discrimination, I have learned, it seems that hardly anyone offers what could be called an informed opinion . . . . Such ignorance and confusion seems made for writing, since the arguments that are at once the hardest and the most worthwhile to make in writing are those that readily acknowledge that the complexity of a situation allows not for one, not for two, but for an indefinite number of arguable positions. (140)

Like the civil rights cases, most people have strong opinions concerning the perpetrators of the Holocaust. And there are many arguable positions to take regarding the issues that arise here. But few people have had much practice in developing their ideas on these issues in a systematic way.

Simply put, most of our students, along with much of the adult population, tend to lay the responsibility for the Holocaust squarely at the feet of Adolf Hitler. It was his fierce antisemitism that infected the rest of the German population. He gave the orders to kill all the Jews, and because of the enormous persuasive grip in which he held the German people, they had little choice but to obey him. He was assisted in this endeavor by a considerable number of equally depraved and evil people, who sadistically carried out his order with the utmost efficiency. These people knew that what they were doing was wrong because they took pains to hide their crimes from other people. It is horrible that so many Jews died from the behavior of this relatively small number of perpetrators, but we can thank our luck stars that these Nazis were defeated and the world returned to normalcy once again.

Of course I am exaggerating this viewpoint, but it still maintains a considerable hold on many people. The view that Hitler himself personally set the Final Solution in motion is generally held to be the "intentionalist" view of the Holocaust. As Omer Bartov explains, the intentionalist model emphasizes "a direct and causal link" between antisemitism, the Holocaust, and Nazism. The main purpose of the Nazi state was to annihilate the Jews, and Hitler is the main link between antisemitism and the Holocaust itself. In contrast, the functionalist model claims that the Holocaust was not planned much in advance: rather, it is "the result of a specific juncture of circumstances and conditions during the war, combined with the structure of the state and the regime as they evolved throughout the postwar years" (65). In the later view, Hitler is seen to be less of a direct influence on events; he certainly was aware of what was going on and heartily approved of it, but his attention was more focussed on the war itself.

My general sympathies are with the functionalist arguments, but this is mostly because I have come to adopt a more complex view of the perpetrators. Of course they were influenced by Hitler, but they also lived in a society that was profoundly antisemitic to begin with. They needed little encouragement from their leaders to carry out mass murder. The perpetrators themselves were not inherently evil. Their actions were the results of choices that they made, which could of course have been different. The evil that they committed was under human control, and it resided not so much in the minds of the perpetrators, but in the entire system that the Nazi state constructed with thousands of willing participants. A few of them were primarily interested in carrying out acts of sadistic cruelty, but the entire system worked because of large numbers of people carrying out duties that they considered disagreeable and even repellant. Yet they thought these duties to be necessary because their served a greater good, which in some cases was to implement Nazi ideology, while in others it was simply a response to the powerful lure of nationalism. Individual perpetrators were often conflicted about their actions: an ardent Nazi in the 1930s could become a resistor later in the war. This resistance could take many forms and could very from nothing more than a refusal to cooperate in the mechanism of mass murder to courageous self-sacrifice. The tragedy of the Holocaust is that the vast majority of perpetrators did not consider any serious resistance to what they were asked to do. None of this means that the perpetrators should be excused from their actions, even though it is possible in many cases for us to understand their behavior. Understanding the actions of a perpetrator should not mean sympathizing with or excusing them. But attempts to understand perpetrators are also attempts to understand other human beings, and refusing to attempt to understand the perpetrators’ actions is at bottom a denial of their and even our own humanity.

I lay out my own views early in this chapter because I think it is impossible to approach these questions objectively. But I do not expect my own students to agree with me on all points. In fact, like most observers of the Holocaust, there is much that I do not understand and much that can be changed, by my own reading, of course, but also by my interactions of with my own students. In this, studying the Holocaust is simply a more dramatic version of almost anything that we ask our students to explore: as Sharon Crowley writes, "An experienced teacher of writing knows that what she knows will be modified by the experience of teaching a composition class, and she must admit as well that the conduct of any class is affected by her desires as well as her health and well-being" (215). To take one example of my own thinking: I am less sure than I once was that most of the perpetrators were just like any other group of humans. To reverse the idea, I am not positive that any group of people conscripted into, say, the Order Police and sent to central Poland would have behaved the same way that Germans did. To make this claim seems to require one to posit at an essential attribute of human beings—that they are capable of evil acts—at the expense of any consideration of the historical circumstances in which these humans must be placed.

Another way of stating this problem is to say that I am less sure about the rightness of the thesis of Christopher Browning’s book, Ordinary Men, than I was when I first read this book. Like many others, my reading of Browning is affected by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s interpretation of the same historical material in Hitler’s Willing Executioners. It is not so important what my own views on this issue are; I offer them only as an example of how any writing teacher must deal with what he or she believes and what that teacher’s students come to believe and argue about. Because I am not sure of these questions, because they are in fact issues in Holocaust scholarship, they make good situations in which students can immerse themselves. Not only are the issues of profound importance to how we respond to more recent events (the genocide in Rwanda, for example) or current events (the "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo), but they provide an excellent starting point for students to use writing to determine what they think of difficult questions as well as what they are unsure about. Important as these historical, psychological, or philosophical questions about the Holocaust are, our primary goal in raising them in a writing class is to involve students in complex rhetorical situations that they truly care about.

There have been many famous accounts by and about perpetrators. One of the most controversial was Hannah Arendt’s portrait of Adolf Eichmann, first published as three-part for The New Yorker in 1963; it later appeared that same year in book form as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. In addition, there is the autobiography of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, which he wrote just before his execution in 1946. One of the most in-depth portrayals of a perpetrator is Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (1974), based on a series of interviews she had with Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka and Sobibor, during the months preceding Stangl’s death from a heart attack on June 28, 1971 (the day after the last interview with Sereny). Sereny also uses material from interviews she conducted with Franz Suchomel, who worked with Stangl at Treblinka, and Dieter Allers, chief administrative officer of T4 (the euthanasia program), as well as several survivors from Treblinka and Stangl’s wife.

Several similarities arise in considering high-level Nazis, such as Eichmann, Höss, and Stangl. Far from being terribly sadistic and cruel monsters, these men were apparently ambitious bureaucrats who were extraordinarily capable of compartmentalizing their lives. Two (Höss and Stangl) were happy married with children to whom they were good fathers. Stangl and Eichmann both managed to escape capture as war criminals at the end of the war and made their way to South America where they were tracked down (although Stangl had been living in Brasil under his own name for more than 20 years) and brought back to be tried. Eichmann and Höss were both executed for their crimes. All of these men claimed to be repulsed by the prospect of doing any killing themselves.

Eichmann insisted at his trial that he had no particular animosity for Jews (Arendt 30) and that he never actually killed anyone or even gave an order for them to be killed. As Eichmann himself expressed it, "I never gave an order to kill either a Jew or a non-Jew; I just did not do it." He later qualified this to say "It so happened . . . that I had not once to do it" (quoted in Arendt 22). Arendt points out that he "left no doubt that he would have killed his own father if he had received an order to that effect" (22). Gitta Sereny relates that Franz Stangl was quite upset at the accusation of once using a pistol to fire into a crowd of newly arriving prisoners; his accuser, Stanisalw Szmajzner who was only 14 at the time, did not even claim that Stangl shot directly into the crowd—just that he was one of many who were shooting in an attempt to get the prisoner to all run on in one direction. Stangl "appeared to be more indignant about this accusation than about anything else" (124). This is an extraordinarily skewed perception of his role, for Stangl was the commandant of a camp which murdered at least 750,000 people. Both Arendt and Sereny believe that it is almost certainly the case that the perpetrator that they write about is telling the truth on this narrow matter. Both writers are horrified at the moral blindness of their principle subject. Out of this and similar accusations, Arendt claimed that Eichmann was "banal"—her phrase "banality of evil" has often been misinterpreted. Sereny is deeply disturbed by Stangl’s refusal "to find irrelevant the fact that, whether he shot into the group or not, these very same people died anyway, less than two hours later, through actions ultimately under his control." She claims that this "profoundly mistake emphasis" results in responsibility being "limited to momentary and often isolated actions and to a few individuals." This "false concept of responsibility" has been accepted not only by the perpetrator, but also by the courts and the public: it is wrong, she feels, to claim "that what is decisive in law, and therefore in the whole conduct of human affairs, is what a man does on isolated occasions rather than what he is" (124, emphasis in original).

Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem provoked considerable controversy when it was first published. Some of this was due to the status of the Holocaust in American culture. Well-educated Americans were of course aware of the deaths of millions of Jews, but this event went by the phrase "the Final Solution" (Arendt does not use the term Holocaust in her book, for it had not yet come into common usage). The famous movies and big TV specials were still in the future. Indeed, the very reason for the trial was to educate the new generation of Israelis who were too young to have experienced the Holocaust themselves. Arendt was not afraid to call the shots as she saw them: she viewed the proceedings in Jerusalem as a show trial; she regarded the Nuremberg Trials as a failure; and she doubted whether the term "war crimes" had much validity, given the extent to which the Allies themselves were implicated in similar actions. Arendt’s outspokenness seem less shocking today than it was in 1963, and her ironic tone prevented many early readers from seeing that far from excusing Eichmann, she found him pathetic and even silly. A sampling of her remarks: "Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown" (54). What many of her critics failed to grasp was that for Arendt, the fact that Eichmann was not a monster, but rather a prime example of the "totalitarian personality" was in fact more disturbing, for it suggests that he could be easily replicated.

Gitta Sereny based her book on very personal and sensitive interviews that she conducted with Stangl in prison. She described what she wanted from him on the first day of their talks:

I wanted him really to talk to me; to tell me about himself as a child, a boy, a youth, a man; to tell me about his father, his mother, his friends, his wife and his children; tell me not what he did or did not do but what he loved and what he hated and what he felt about the things in his life which had eventually brought him to where he was sitting now. (23)

She said that she did not "wish to argue the right or wrong" of his personal guilt, for to do so was "pointless." By this method, she hoped to win Stangl’s trust. At the same time, though, she would challenge factual statements of his if she had direct evidence to the contrary, and she took considerable efforts to interview survivors and associates of Stangl’s in an effort to build a picture of what really happened. She did not misrepresent her main purpose: "I told him, too, that he had to know from the start that I abhorred everything the Nazis had stood for and done, but that I would promise him to write down exactly what he said, whatever it would be, and that I would try—my own feelings notwithstanding—to understand without prejudice" (23-24). The interviews took place from April 2 to June 27, 1971, the day before his death. In the last interview, Stangl finally admitted that he was guilty. In her description of that last interview and his subsequent death, Sereny makes a compelling case for the reason for his death: "His heart was weak and he would no doubt have died quite soon anyway. But I think he died when he did because he had finally, however briefly, faced himself and told the truth; it was a monumental effort to reach that fleeting moment when he became the man he should have been" (366).

Because of the compassionate tone that she displayed not just toward Stangl, but especially toward the survivors whom she interviewed and Stangl’s wife, Sereny’s book was much better received. Another important reason for the praise Sereny received was that it was no longer so shocking for an author to attempt to understand the thinking of these perpetrators. Arendt and Sereny point the way to a common way of thinking about the perpetrators: it is possible to understand them as human beings, rather than as something alien from our experience. In so doing, we are forced to consider the possibility that there is some connection with the moral reasoning of these mass murderers and our own. These in-depth studies of particular perpetrators can provide good starting points for some of our students to investigate the perpetrators, for they provide manageable case studies of these complex moral questions. And students must develop a sophisticated and complex moral framework in order to understand the final positions that writers such as Arendt and Sereny take toward their subjects.

This will require considerable growth, especially after students have been exposed to the accounts of victims, who naturally do not view the perpetrators with the same sort of moral complexity. To take just one example of many in Martin Gilbert’s general history of the Holocaust, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, we can examine his use of Salmen Lewenthal’s secret journal, kept when he was a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, buried, and not discovered until 1962. Gilbert relies almost exclusively on survivor and victim accounts to write his history, and the resulting viewpoint is a valuable counterpoint to histories like Hilberg’s that depend almost entirely on German sources. But the perpetrators are almost always one-dimensional monsters. Lewental recorded the brutal methods by which 600 teenaged Jewish boys were forced to undress in the square and were then driven into the gas chamber. This account concludes as follows and with it so does Gilbert’s chapter 37:

With a smile of satisfaction, without a trace of compassion, looking like proud victors, the SS men stood and, dealing terrible blows, drove them into the bunker. Their sergeant stood on the steps and should anyone run too slowly to meet death he would deal a murderous blow with the rubber truncheon. Some boys, in spite of everything, still continued to scurry confusedly hither and thither in the square, seeking salvation. The SS men followed them, beat and belaboured them, until they had mastered the situation and at least drove them [into the bunker]. Their joy was indescribable. Did they not [have] any children ever? (quoted in Gilbert 750, square brackets are in original).

I do not intend to criticize Lewantal’s account, which is written under the most difficult circumstances. We can hardly expect the victims to portray their killers and torturers is any other light. So it is natural for our own students to resist the portrayals provided by studies that look exclusively at the perpetrators.

Indeed, it is natural for us as teachers to resist such portrayals. I myself was shocked when I first read Arendt’s book, and I am much intrigued by Sereny’s account of Stangl. It is hard for me to imagine how she could carry on extended conversations with both him and later his victims. The fact that such benign looking men were responsible for such enormities seems almost incredible and causes me to meditate on the role that such people play in large-scale systems of death and oppression. It seems very important to me that not only our students, but we as a society understand the role that loyalty to large state organizations can lead to. In interrogating my own interest, though, I find that part of the attraction is that these men were middle-level mangers in large organizations. They took orders but they also dispensed them to others, and they showed no regard for the larger moral situation in which they were placed and in which they placed others. It is important that our students consider the bureaucratic aspect of the Holocaust because they themselves are quite likely to be working for a large institution or organization in the future and their consequences will have actions for others. But isn’t it also true that the situations in which these middle-level managers of the Holocaust were placed is much more similar to my own situation than it is to my students’?

For this reason, I have turned to other studies of the perpetrators, which examine people who are in situations that are a little those to that of my students—the men in the police battalions that were used in ghetto clearing operations, the loading of the death trains, and open-air mass executions. The most well-known of these battalions is Police Battalion 101 because they are the subjects of Christopher Browning’s 1992 book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland as well as a long chapter in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996). Both books examine perpetrators at the lowest level of the Nazi hierarchy, but they have radically different theses. Browning describes the horrible actions of the 500 men of Battalion 101 in 19742 and 1943 in unflinching terms, but he ascribes their actions to a multitude of causes besides antisemitism. Apart from their actions, the men in this battalion are represented as similar to any population of people, including, presumably, any group of 500 men from the United States. Goldhagen puts much more emphasis on a special form of antisemitism—"eliminationist antisemitism"—that he claims developed in Germany over a long period of time and spewed over under the Nazi regime. He finds Browning to be gullible in his uncritical assessment of the men’s own account of their feelings. The general effect of Goldhagen’s book is to downplay connections between these perpetrators and other people. Although his subtitle mentions "ordinary Germans," Goldhagen means this to be profoundly different from Browning’s "ordinary men."

I have used Browning’s book as the basis of assignments in writing courses at three levels, introductory, intermediate, and advanced courses, as well as in an honors course exploring "legacies of the Holocaust." In each of these classes some students have resisted the idea that one can seek to understand the perpetrators and at the same time avoid excusing them. Other students have been willing to accept this idea, but their response is to excuse the perpetrators and then even end by defending them. The assignment is clearly a difficult one. Yet some students have been quite successful in writing papers that complicated their notions of how immoral behavior develops.

First, I will offer a summary of the Browning’s significant points and some of Goldhagen’s criticisms. I will then offer some examples of how some of my students responded. I will also describe some methods that I have attempted in order to create alternative viewpoints for the students to work with. Finally, I’ll offer some other examples of failures and successes.

During July 1942 and May 1943, the approximately 500 men of Battalion 101 of the Order Police were responsible for shooting at least 38,000 victims and deporting an additional 45,200 to death camps. What distinguished this battalion from other killing units, however, was the record of its actions. Its entire roster was available to investigators in the 1960s, who were able to interrogate 210 of them. Browning explains that 125 of these testimonies "were sufficiently substantive to permit both detailed narrative reconstruction and analysis of the internal dynamics of this killing unit" (xvii). Four members of the battalion, including Major Trapp, the unit’s commander, were extradited to Poland in 1947, where they were tried for the reprisal shootings of 78 Poles (144). Trapp and one other policeman were sentenced to death and executed in 1948, while the other two received prison sentences. The investigations in the 1960s resulted 14 indictments, and five policemen, including both of the captains, received sentences from five to eight years. Six others were convicted but were given no sentences, and the charges against the others were dropped. Browning notes in spite of the inadequate sentences, this was one of the few investigations of the Order Police that lead to any indictments, much less convictions: "comparatively speaking, the investigation and trial of Reserve Police Battalion 101 was a rare success for German judicial authorities attempting to deal with the police battalions" (146).

Because of this rather complete judicial record, the general actions of the battalion are not in doubt. But Goldhagen and Browning interpret these facts quite differently. Both are agreed that far from being a crack SS unit composed of young, impressionable men molded by Nazi ideology, the battalion consisted of men whose average age was in the late 30s; less than a third were members of the Nazi party. A mere 3.8 percent were in the SS (Goldhagen 207-08). Goldhagen uses these facts to argue that they were fairly representative of German population as a whole, drawn mostly from the lower middle class; Goldhagen shows that it was the German population as a whole that participated in the killing. Browning uses the same information to emphasize that this group of men was not much different from other men; his book puts very little emphasis on that fact that they were German. The general conclusions that the two historians develop, though, set them at opposite ends of the spectrum of historical interpretation. Browning wishes to emphasize the similarities that the perpetrators had with other men in similar circumstances.

Browning’s approach leads him to emphasize the similarities between these killers and other people. In his preface, he argues against demonizing the perpetrators:

The policemen in the battalion who carried out the massacres and deportations, like the much smaller number who refused or evaded, were human beings. I must recognize that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader—both were human—if I want to understand and explain the behavior of both as best I can. (xx)

There must be an explanation for why apparently normal people could engage in such obviously immoral behavior. By casting the reason for his investigation in these personal terms, Browning shows that he does not regard the perpetrators as essentially any different from himself. In his last chapter, "Ordinary Men," he examines various reasons for their behavior: "wartime brutalization, racism, segmentation and routinization of the task, special selection of the perpetrators, careerism, obedience to orders, deference to authority, ideological indoctrination, and conformity" (159). All of these factors played some role, but Browning clearly favors some over others.

On the question of wartime brutalization, Browning describes how the men of the battalion clearly became hardened to their task, but he distinguishes their experience from that of troops who committed atrocities when they were fresh from the battlefield, especially in cases where some of their own members had been killed. Examples of such instances include the My Lai massacre and the behavior of American troops toward the Japanese during World War II. Battalion 101 was never in a combat situation with an enemy, which Browning claims is a significant difference. But the war was not far away, and Browning notes how the all wars require the participants to dehumanize the enemy and, if possible, develop negative racial stereotypes of them. Browning is perhaps too influenced by Dower’s book at this point in his analysis, for he speaks only generally about this issue. This would be the logical time to introduce the role played by antisemitism, but Browning barely lets slip the opportunity. Nazi antisemitism was essentially a racist idea feeling, not a religious one, and it clearly played a much more significant role in the behavior of the perpetrators than Browning admits. He does discuss the curious lack of reference to antisemitism by any of the policemen in the judicial interrogations by noting that the policemen could not have mentioned antisemitism during the 1960s without implicating themselves and their former comrades in a murder charge: "According to German law, among the criteria for defining homicide as murder is the presence of a ‘base motive,’ such as racial hatred" (150).

Browning also rejects "segmentation and routinization of the task" and "special selection of the perpetrators" as important causes of these particular killers. Although the battalion became more efficient and divided up its work effort, even employing recycled Soviet prisoners as the shooters (the Hilfswillige or "Hiwis" (volunteers), so called because they had "volunteered" to avoid probable starvation in POW camps), the men of the battalion were very close to the killing and in most cases pulled the triggers themselves. And unlike the officers for Einsatzgruppen (the first killing squads deployed in the wake of the German advance through eastern Poland and the Soviet Union), who were selected for their ideological purity, that men of the Order Police were "least likely to be considered apt material out of which to mold future mass murders" (164).

The only other cause that Browning downplays is "ideological indoctrination." There was a program of ideological training, to which the officers of the battalion subscribed; the two captains even won an award for their zeal in this area (178). But after subjecting the ideological materials to greater scrutiny, Browning concludes that this indoctrination lacked specific exhortations to kill unarmed Jews, particularly women and children. The materials were only part of the general political culture under which the policemen had lived since 1933: the denigration of Jews and the proclamation of Germanic racial superiority was so constant, so pervasive, so relentless, that it must have shaped the general attitudes of masses of people in German, including the average reserve policeman" (182). This is the closest that Browning comes to mentioning the pervasive antisemitism of the time, but he clearly feels that it lacks the "eliminationist" edge that Goldhagen claims was its most salient feature.

One minor cause for the behavior of the some of the men and officers appeared to be career considerations. Browning devotes an entire chapter to the case of Captain Wolfgang Hoffman, who suffered from bouts of stomach pains. Eventually, his condition was diagnosed as vegetative colitis. But it always seems to appear whenever his company was ordered to carry out an action that involved large-scale killing. His men bitterly resented Hoffman’s absence, which they felt was caused by cowardice. They also resented the way he attempted to command them from his bed. In fact, he concealed his illness from his superiors and was eventually transferred to the Russian front where he commanded troops in combat with some distinction, even earning the Iron Cross Second Class (117-19). Browning concludes that it is possible that it was the prospect of mass murder that gave Hoffman stomach pains, but if so, "it was a fact he was deeply ashamed of and sought to overcome to the best of his ability" (120). It may have been that career considerations were the main thing that drove Hoffman to carry out his orders, in spite of his awareness that they were wrong. But other officers, particularly Lieutenant Buchmann, who stands as the best example of someone who refused to commit mass murder of Jews, cited as one of their reasons for refusing orders the fact that, unlike the others, they could afford to refuse because they were not career policemen. In short, there was some evidence that some policemen evidently hoped to retain their position as policemen after the war, and in fact a number of them did.

The principle reason for the perpetrators behavior, though, was the policemen’s propensity to obey orders, defer to authority, and conform to other members of the their unit. In this we can see most clearly the influence of psychologist Stanley Milgram. It is also one of the factors that attracted me to this book as a topic for writing about the perpetrators. Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority are quite well known; in fact, for several years descriptions of them formed part of the curriculum of the Psychology 101 course that many of my students had already taken. (At the same time, Milgram’s experiments were used in an advanced sociology class as an example of how not to conduct research.) In the 1960’s Milgram and his colleagues at Yale University conducted a series of clever experiments that purported to test the efficacy of electric shock as a motivator in teaching people to memorize meaningless strings of words. Subjects were asked to assume the role of a teacher who would read lists of words, ask the learner in the next room to repeat them, and then apply electric shocks at increasing levels of severity when the learner gave wrong answers. In reality, the "learner" was an actor, who claimed to have a heart condition. If the "teacher" persisted and gave shocks at the highest levels, the "learner" would beg him or her to stop and eventually stop replying, leading any reasonable person to believe that the learner had suffered a heart attack. The "teacher" operated under the general supervision of the "experimenter," a man in a white lab coat who set the experiment up, explained the rules, and calmly insisted that the "experiment must continue" if the "teacher" or "learner" wished to stop. To his horror, Milgram and his colleagues learned that an alarmingly large percentage of almost any population was willing to obey the "experimenter" even when it was clear that the experiment was not producing the results that the "teacher" had been led to expect.

Browning summarizes these experiments in some detail and also describes their variations, which produced quite different results. When the "teacher" was matched up with other collaborators who urged that naïve subject to escalate the shocks in a graduated series of steps, the "teacher" would submit much greater shocks than if they acted by themselves. Similarly, the stronger the authority figure of the "experimenter," the more likely the subject was to obey and administer stronger shocks. If, however, the "learner" was in close proximity to the teacher of or if the teacher had to touch the learner in order to administer the shocks, the level of shocks dropped considerably. "Was the masacre at Jozefow a kind of radical Milgram experiment that took place in a Polish forest with real killers and victims rather than in a social psychology laboratory with naïve subjects and actor/victims?" Browning asks (173-74). The short answer is yes, provided that we take into account the various factors that made the situations different, such as the weak (rather than strong) authority figure of Major Trapp, the battalion’s commander, and the relationships among the policemen in the Poland was that of comrades sharing a terrible military experience far from home, rather than the general friendliness that two people who happened to meet by chance in a psychology experiment might feel (174-75).

Milgram conceived of these experiments as a direct response to the behavior of the perpetrators in the Holocaust. Like many American intellectuals in the 1960s, he was shocked by behavior of the American troops in Vietnam, and he enlarged on the experiments and wrote a book (Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, 1974) summarizing the results as a means of alerting Americans to the claim that obedience to authority was far too pervasive in American society and, by extension, to modern societies in general. Milgram toured college campuses in the 1960s and early 1970s to promote his research and in hopes of changing people’s behavior.

Browning relies heavily on Milgram’s experiments, but he also cites the work of other psychologists and sociologists, who sought an explanation of the perpetrators’ behavior in individual psychological characteristics. These include Zygmunt Bauman’s criticism of Theodore Adorno’s idea of the "authoritarian personality, Ervin Staub’s critique of John Steiner’s "sleeper theory," and Bauman’s criticism of that same theory (165-68). He also summarizes the Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiments, which resulted in "an uncanny resemblance" to Battalion 101: approximately the same percentages of subjects in Zimbardo’s experiments began to develop sadistic behavior as policeman in Battalion 101 who became enthusiastic and sadistic killers. These studies cause Browning to emphasize the similarities between the perpetrators he studied and other populations of people, situated in different times and places, including our own. For Browning, it appears that the lesson we are to derive from the story of Battalion 101 is a warning: in similar circumstances, perhaps even we ourselves—or at least some people whom we know quite well and are like us in many ways—could become perpetrators. In the last paragraph of his book, Browning applies the "deeply disturbing implications" (188) of his study to other societies:

Everywhere society conditions people to respect and defer to authority, and indeed could scarcely function otherwise. Everywhere people seek career advancement. In every modern society, the complexity of life and the resulting bureaucratization and specialization attenuate the sense of personal responsibility of those implementing official policy. Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot? (189)

The implicit answer is that there is no group that is immune to these tendencies. But Browning also implies that by being aware of these dangers, we are better prepared to protect ourselves against lapses into such barbarity.