Why Did 'Ordinary' Germans Kill Jews?

"Browning’s Version" by Adam Shatz, in Lingua Franca (Feb. 1997), 22 W. 38th St., New York, N.Y. 10018.

In 1941 and ’42, the 500 members of Hamburg’s Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of the German "order police" that had been pressed into active service, killed 38,000 Polish Jews and deported 45,000 more to Treblinka, the Nazi death camp in Poland. What prompted these policemen, who were not fervent young Nazis but "ordinary" Germans approaching middle age, to take part in mass murder?

Harvard University historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, in Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), a controversial best seller both in America and in Germany, argues that the policemen killed because, like most Germans of the day, they believed in the justice of exterminating Jews. Goldhagen has touched off a torrid debate in the periodical press. One of his chief antagonists is the historian Christopher Browning, author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution (1992). Browning, a professor at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, argues: "Influenced and conditioned in a general way, imbued in particular with a sense of their own superiority and racial kinship as well as Jewish inferiority and otherness, many of them undoubtedly were; explicitly prepared for the task of killing Jews they most certainly were not." Nor was the brutalizing context of war the explanation, since the men of the battalion had not seen battle. Nor were they forced to kill, since individual policemen could have refused (some did) without facing dire punishment.

"Having pared away these explanations," writes Shatz, a contributing editor of Lingua Franca, "Browning proposed a more disturbing, and universally applicable theory: The men were driven by a fear of breaking ranks in a time of total mobilization. ‘It was easier for them to shoot,’ because refusal was considered an asocial, even unmanly act." Wartime passions, and the Nazi regime’s "manipulation of wartime anxieties and preexisting anti-Semitism," allowed the policemen "to see themselves as defending the fatherland."

In a sense, Shatz observes, the Browning-Goldhagen debate is "the latest reenactment of an old argument between those who see the Holocaust as a crime against the Jewish people and those who see it as a crime against humanity."

Goldhagen’s thesis, profoundly disturbing as it is, reflects a less pessimistic assessment of human nature than Browning’s. This historian’s assessment, says Shatz, suggests "that when a dictatorial regime issues genocidal orders to men with guns amid total war, they will likely obey.... In Christopher Browning’s view, there is nothing particularly nice about ordinary men."