The Polish government in exile reported in May 1942:Every day large coaches come to the ghetto; they take soldiers through as if it was a zoo. It is the thing to do to provoke the wild animals. Often soldiers strike out at passers-by with long whips as they drive through. They go to the cemetery where they take pictures. They compel the families of the dead and the rabbis to interrupt the funeral and to pose in front of their lenses. They set up genre pictures (old Jew above the corpse of a young girl).
Pedestrians in the Warsaw Ghetto walk past corpses lying on the pavement on Rynkowa Street, near the ghetto wall, Warsaw, Poland, 1940-1941.
The brutality—whips!—the photographing, the mocking, the joyfulness and obvious approval (already seen and further discussed below), these recurring features of eliminationist assaults were apparent (1) in the tourism itself (common among German bystanders where perpetrators brutalized or slaughtered Jews), (2) in the acts of these coachloads of ordinary Germans, and, of course, (3) for all the perpetrators in Warsaw and other places hosting such tourists to see. The regime, knowledgeable of Germans’ broad solidarity with their eliminationist project, also made films of the ghetto, showing them in Germany. Members of the German press, so that they, the eyes of the people, could be fully knowledgeable of what the regime was doing, toured ghettos. One, named Roßberg, wrote in a manner capturing Germans’ common knowledge of this eliminationist assault’s character, great support for it, and transmutation of ordinary emotional responses into their opposite upon beholding Jews:I had the opportunity to get to know the ghetto in Lublin and the one in Warsaw. The sights are so appalling and probably also so well-known to the editorial staffs that a description is presumably superfluous. If there are any people left who still somehow have sympathy with the Jews then they ought to be recommended to have a look at such a ghetto. Seeing this race en masse, which is decaying, decomposing, and rotten to the core will banish any sentimental humanitarianism.23
Germans seeing people in a state ordinarily evoking compassion and pity are expected, when the people are “this race,” to behold them as a physical embodiment of their true, hateful nature. We have no reason to believe they did otherwise. After the Germans had methodically deported to Treblinka’s gas chambers the Warsaw Ghetto’s inhabitants they had not already starved to death, the surviving Jews decided to go down fighting, rebelling in April 1943, until after a month the overwhelmingly militarily superior Germans crushed them. Many Germans celebrated the ghetto’s utter destruction. Air force sergeant Herbert Habermalz, wanting to make his comrades similarly joyful, wrote his former place of employment, a farm equipment manufacturer, a letter that, as letter writers knew, was likely to circulate among the workers: “We flew several circles above the city. And with great satisfaction we could recognize the complete extermination of the Jewish Ghetto. There our folks did really a fantastic job. There is no house which has not been totally destroyed.” That Habermalz wrote, without thinking he needed to explain to them anything about the “complete extermination” of a Jewish ghetto once containing nearly half a million Jews, merely confirms what a vast array of sources definitively show: The Jews’ systematic annihilation was well known and well supported among Germans, so much so that Habermalz unabashedly termed the job done “fantastic.”24
To develop a systematic and comparative understanding of the perpetrators’ social existences and communal lives, and how their social embeddedness affects or reflects treatment of their victims, we need to examine the perpetrators’ various communities and social relations. We must replace the fictitious general image of the frightened, atomized, isolated killer (said to exist under a regime’s draconian authority, or under group pressure), with a realistic account of the perpetrators’ social, psychological, and moral communal existences. These vary substantially across eliminationist assaults, and even within given eliminationist assaults when a particular eliminationist program covers large territories or long periods.
The framework for the needed extensive empirical inquiry into the perpetrators’ communal lives in individual eliminations and then comparatively distinguishes five principal kinds of communities that form the social context for the perpetrators’ actions. First, the community of the perpetrators themselves, including but not restricted to men serving in the same camp, mobile killing squad, death march, and other eliminationist institutions. Second, the broader nonperpetrator communities in which they are embedded while eliminating their victims. These consist of local cities and towns where the perpetrators are stationed, whether at home or abroad, and the social communities and lives their governments and institutions at times create for them. Third, their home communities, to which most of them will return, of family, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and fellow members of their local national, ethnic, or communal groups. Fourth, related to the third, the more abstract—though given the power of nationalism and ethnic or religious group membership to move people, hardly trivial—larger national, ethnic, religious, or political communities. Fifth, far more distant and less relevant for most perpetrators, the international community, the rest of humanity.
The perpetrators live in all or most of these communities while they kill and eliminate their victims. Their physical and social existences are continuous in some, episodic in others, and nonexistent or almost so in others. But in them all, though obviously varying substantially, the perpetrators are situated socially, psychologically, or morally, and even in those they do not physically inhabit while acting as perpetrators, they know they eventually will have some relationship of moral accountability, psychological influence, or social or political consequence. This knowledge is relevant, can be powerful, and should not continue to be discounted. Still, whatever is generally true about the perpetrators’ various communities, including their general supportiveness, more can be said about each of them, and their interconnectedness.
The perpetrators’ community: SS female auxiliaries and Karl Höcker, the adjutant to Auschwitz’s camp commander, eat bowls of blueberries to accordion music, Solahütte retreat near Auschwitz, Poland, 1944.
Working in eliminationist institutions can be utterly normal (or at least can become utterly normal after a perpetrator’s initial participation in an eliminationist operation) when the need to carry out the eliminationist assault seems unquestionable. Even among perpetrators viewing the victims as sufficiently noxious or threatening to warrant or necessitate their elimination, including lethally, some may doubt such actions’ wisdom or morality. In such circumstances, a perpetrator’s comrades’ validation of the violence, or the knowledge that he operates under the state’s aegis, or as the nation’s or the perpetrators’ ethnic or religious group’s representative and guardian, can help quell a perpetrator’s lingering doubts. The eliminationist regime’s character, and the specific eliminationist institution’s character, can affect the perpetrators’ understanding of their deeds and their lives’ quality while killing, expelling, torturing, and immiserating their victims. Some regimes and killing institutions, such as the Germans’, were organized and hierarchical, and relatively lax and understanding toward the perpetrators. They were also characterized by considerable off-duty comradeship and conviviality.
Some, also organized and hierarchical, are harsher, as the Guatemalan mobile killing squads could be. Others have more variable, fluid, and intermittent qualities, such as that of the far less formally organized and hierarchical Hutu. The Hutu’s killing operations’ character depended on whether the villagers were left on their own for a given day’s killing expeditions—villagers not feeling up to joining that day’s hunt staying behind—or they were under the supervision of the Interahamwe, which sometimes forbade a day off. But for the reasons already established and more addressed below, the various eliminationist institutions’ other features—from their hierarchical structures, the actual or implied coercion that might exist, the normative world of support for killing and elimination—have not been the perpetrators’ prime movers, and could not
have been given their actual conduct. Sometimes when killers speak frankly, they, in a jumble, adduce a host of factors and circumstances that composed the mass-murderous complex of their actions. But when doing so, there is an assumption, explicit or clearly implicit, of underlying consent to the deed, born of their shared conception of the targeted peoples as noxious or threatening, of deserving their fate. Some Rwandan perpetrators speak in such a logically incoherent but psychologically plausible muddle. At one moment they discuss how they got drunk on their greed for looting. At another moment they mention that the Interahamwe—dedicated executioners—would not permit them to take a day off or would reproach them for not killing an acquaintance, or would fine them for not going into the bush to kill (hardly a plausible burden as it was easily paid from their looting’s proceeds), or would threaten them with death for not killing. At yet another moment the same perpetrators openly state that they and their comrades and all Hutu hated the Tutsi, thought the Tutsi were not human beings but snakes, cockroaches, and vermin who wanted to enslave all Hutu, so they believed it imperative to free their country of the Tutsi scourge, so they “cut them.” Elie Ngarambe, in a work camp prison when I interviewed him, also speaks in such a vein, asserting among other things that he was coerced, as were other Hutu, but then, when trying to convey to me the character of the genocide and the various facets of what really happened, says and indicates in many ways that he and ordinary Hutu, perpetrators and bystanders alike, hated the Tutsi, thought them not to be human beings, wanted to destroy them, and pursued or supported these goals with amazing and cruel vigor. When asked, “Were most Hutu happy to get rid of the Tutsi in one way or another, even if they themselves didn’t want to do the killing?” he replies, “They felt like they should be eliminated and wiped out,” explaining that Hutu shared the government’s “bad ideology,” which told them to “start from a small child, continue with a pregnant woman, kill her with her husband, her in-laws, and all her families, eliminate them all, eat their things, after you finish everything take their land, take their cars. Think of how long they have been fighting against us.” Ngarambe is emphatic. “They [the Hutu] wanted to eliminate all of them [the Tutsi]. They did not want to see anyone surviving.” Ngarambe has confessed to participating in the killing of only two people, but similarly in the course of his own testimony (some quoted here) betrays himself, repeatedly making it clear that he was daily in the thick of the mass murder, participating in the butchery of many more.k25
The complex interactive effects of various influences upon some perpetrators, and yet their willingness and conviction in the rightness of the principle of eliminating the targeted people and of the killing itself that are the foundation of the perpetrators’ deeds and the members of their enormously supportive societies or groups’ views about what ought to be done, are captured also by others. Pancrace Hakizamungili discourses in a jumble about having no choice, having hesitations including those born of what will happen should they fail (which a “good organizer” can quell), and about his and the other Hutu’s hatred for the Tutsi, their enthusiasm in going on the hunt, and their relief at finally ridding themselves of the Tutsi. And so, from Pancrace’s mouth come words that could serve as a motto for our age’s willing executioners, whether ordinary Germans, ordinary Serbs, or ordinary Hutu, “you obey freely.”26
The local community: A group of German soldiers and civilians looks on as a Jewish man is forced to cut the beard of another in Tomaszow Mazowiecki, Poland, September-October 1939.
The second kind of community, the communities physically encompassing or abutting the perpetrators while at their eliminationist tasks, forms the perpetrators’ immediate social context. These communities vary enormously. If the perpetrators are killing in their own country but not near home, they live as visitors or temporary residents. If in a conquered or colonial area, their government or they and their compatriots construct a local perpetrator community (the nearby victim peoples usually being communally irrelevant). These can vary from settler communities, as the British had in Kenya, the Japanese founded in Korea, the Germans created in Poland, and the Chinese established in Tibet, to imperial garrison communities with impromptu human and institutional infrastructural support, as the Japanese and the Germans had in some of their conquered areas. Everyone in such communities knows about the perpetrators’ deeds. They see them. They mingle with the perpetrators. They work with them. They often revel in the perpetrators’ deeds. They service and supply them, and collaborate with them in noneliminationist activities. Such people are not formally perpetrators (some do cross the line), yet they implicate themselves in the deeds, or they so intimately rub shoulders with the perpetrators that they belong to the perpetrator community. Everything suggests they are consensual communities.
The third community, consisting of the perpetrators’ families, neighborhoods, and towns, powerfully exists for all mass annihilations and eliminations’ perpetrators, though differently depending on where the perpetrators work their violence. Perpetrators, usually sooner than later, visit or return to their families and home communities, to loved ones, friends, and others, who often, probably usually, know at least the basics of the perpetrators’ deeds. The perpetrators must inevitably consider how these people will judge their deeds. In many mass eliminations perpetrators operate in their home environs. As they brutalize, expel, and kill people, they, embedded in those communities day and night, do not have to wonder what their families and communities will someday say. This was true of those in Turkey attacking Armenian death marches as they trudged by impromptu perpetrators’ towns, of the enormous number of Germans guarding or servicing camps in their own cities, towns, and neighborhoods, of Indonesians slaughtering communists, of Serbs in Bosnia, Tutsi in Burundi, Hutu in Rwanda, and more.
Beyond their local communities is the larger reference group of the nation, the people, the political movement, the tribe, or the religious group, in whose name perpetrators act. Perpetrators kill, expel, and incarcerate their victims to secure the future for themselves and their families by reconstituting society. As we repeatedly see, they also understand themselves to be acting for their larger communities. What will be their personal legacies to their people? How do they expect their people to see and judge them, to thank and celebrate or to shun and punish them? Such considerations unquestioningly affect many perpetrators, potentially all of them.
Finally, there is the international community or humanity—the real human beings, not the abstraction of humanity moving many communists, or the Germans’ and the Japanese’s restricted racist conceptions of humanity, consigning peoples to subhumanity. Perpetrators facing their victims likely do not think much about the international community. Yet, as much testimony indicates, the perpetrators are aware of a larger world, which they usually understand will condemn their actual and prospective eliminationist violence. In the past several decades, the spread of telecommunications has made perpetrators increasingly aware their acts will receive international scrutiny. Nevertheless, most perpetrators appear but tenuously connected psychologically to these distant and rather abstract community considerations. After all, when perpetrators face the “work of demons who wage their battle against us” or other putatively threatening or problematic subhumans, people across an ocean, or over a border or two, must seem irrelevant. Political leaders initiating and overseeing eliminationist assaults, however, are acutely conscious (if often ultimately dismissive) of the international community. The critical issue, taken up in Chapter 11, is how to vastly increase the international community’s psychological and moral centrality, and relative weight among the perpetrators’ various more immediate communities, for actual or prospective perpetrators—from the man on the ground, gun or machete in his hand, to his immediate commanders, to those running eliminationist institutions, and especially to the political leaders unleashing and orchestrating the eliminationist assaults.
The national community: Austrian Nazis and local residents look on a
s Jews are forced on hands and knees to scrub the pavement, Vienna, Austria, March-April 1938.
Few, if any, perpetrators likely self-consciously disaggregate their embeddedness in various communities, or regularly assess how each community and its many members (even leaving aside the distant international community) judge or will judge their deeds and ultimately them. For many, especially those working at home, no difference exists among some of their communities. For some, such as the Indonesians slaughtering communists and, even more so, Serbs in Bosnia and Hutu in Rwanda, the communities of killers, of immediate locale, of home, and even of the nation collapse into an integrated mass-murderous and eliminationist consensual community. In addition to these instances, the judgment of communities, except the international one, is obviously generally a nonissue for killers, expellers, and guards. The perpetrators move in overlapping or intersecting communities approving their deeds, so acute moral doubt and existential discomfort do not arise.
In addition to the expressed approval and acceptance various relevant communities give them, the perpetrators know that those belonging to their country, people, ethnic group, political movement, or religion, having been party to their society’s conversation about the dehumanized or demonized victims, widely share their views. The perpetrators know they similarly believe the perpetrators’ deeds are right and necessary, support them, are even thankful the perpetrators are eliminating the people they commonly hate or fear. Because the eliminationist logic of the perpetrators’ beliefs applies equally to the many others sharing those beliefs who have not been asked to act upon them, it is abundantly clear that many other people in the perpetrators’ communities and societies would also have brutalized, incarcerated, expelled, and killed the victim groups had they been asked or put in the position to do so. This, that the vast majority of ordinary Germans would have also been Hitler’s willing executioners, I demonstrated for Germans during the Nazi period .27 Though for other eliminationist assaults the data do not lend themselves to the same methodologically inescapable, surefire generalization to the perpetrators’ societies and communities (exceptions notwithstanding), we can still say, for various reasons, that so many others from those communities would have willingly acted as the perpetrators did. The perpetrators know this very well. The perpetrators do not necessarily ponder how the members of their various communities work through the logic of their beliefs and what they therefore think about the perpetrators’ deeds, or what they would do if mobilized for the eliminationist assault. Neither do soldiers in war. Absent demonstrable opposition at home, soldiers do not wonder about their countrymen’s support or readiness to join them. They naturally assume both. So too the eliminationist perpetrators, conceiving of themselves, like soldiers, to be conducting a war against their people’s dangerous enemies. The public discourse—more intensified, explicit, and public immediately preceding and during eliminationist assaults—about the need to exterminate-the-brute or to eliminate-the-plague, merely confirms to the perpetrators what the same discourse had already prepared them and their communities for. When governmental organs, civil leaders, media, intellectuals, and religious leaders repeatedly publicly proclaim—as they have so often done—people’s noxiousness and threat, and even call for their elimination, they further affirm what the perpetrators already know, having watched family, friends, and others nod in agreement or approvingly repeat what is in the air. “The Jews are our misfortune” was one of the German public sphere’s most oft-repeated phrases in the 1930s and 1940s. British colonial officials and ordinary settlers alike casually and reflexively spoke of the putatively savage, bloodthirsty, murderous Mau Mau. Ladino Guatemalans called Maya “animals.” Serbs as a matter of course referred to Bosnian Muslims as “Turks,” constructing them as the Serbs’ historic and eternal enemy, and as Bosnia’s rightless alien invaders. The Rwandan airwaves coursed with, and Hutu newspapers and popular publications printed, hate-filled accounts of the Tutsi “cockroaches” and calls to exterminate them. These and other commonplaces solidify the sense of a community of like-minded thought, values, hatreds, and actions among the perpetrators and those around them. As Pancrace, echoing so many others, explained: “The radios were yammering at us since 1992 to kill all the Tutsi,” which found echoes in an activated and intensified Hutu conversation, as Christine reports: “In the cabarets, men had begun talking about massacres in 1992” with the president of their commune visiting their houses “to see that the tools behind sacks of beans were well sharpened.”28
B002QX43GQ EBOK Page 47