by Dan McMillan
Planning the experiment to last two weeks, Zimbardo had to halt it after only six days because the guards had become so abusive toward the prisoners. Quickly assuming their assigned roles, many of the guards engaged in escalating brutality toward the prisoners, subjecting them to increasingly severe humiliation, although stopping short of physical violence. Zimbardo observed that “most dramatic and distressing to us was the observation of the ease with which sadistic behavior could be elicited in individuals who were not ‘sadistic types.’”22
Just like the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, the guards in Zimbardo’s experiment did not all behave in exactly the same way, but rather fell into three different groups. A minority (fewer than 20 percent) resisted treating the prisoners harshly and sought to do small favors for them. The majority were “tough but fair,” adhering to the prescribed rules, but not becoming abusive. Roughly one-third, however, became actively sadistic, eagerly humiliating the prisoners. This range of behavior, in roughly the same percentages, also characterized the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101. A small minority, between 10 and 20 percent, sought ways to avoid shooting. The majority of the men complied with the order to shoot, but grudgingly and without enthusiasm, often finding themselves depressed and abusing alcohol. About one-third, however, shot their victims willingly and enthusiastically; they became the battalion’s specialists in shooting whenever the unit perpetrated a massacre and often went out of their way to torment their victims before killing them. Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz commandant, found a similar three-part division among concentration camp guards, although he did not specify what percentages corresponded to each group.23
The acts of Zimbardo’s guards seem all the more remarkable when one remembers that they knew their situation was not real and that it was supposed to last only two weeks. If only six days in a mock prison playing make-believe could profoundly change men’s behavior, the changes wrought among the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, as they made their way to their ghastly assignment in Poland, must have been enormous. They underwent months of training together, reinforcing their adhesion to the group and their identification with their role as agents of Germany’s racial policies. They donned a uniform, took gun in hand, and received at least some indoctrination that explained their role in Hitler’s demonic plan. The same is true of Charlie Company as it approached its rendezvous with destiny at My Lai. Their role was clearly defined, steeped in tradition, and anchored in training. They were American soldiers, defending the free world against communism. Whatever sense of morality these men may have had at home, whether in Hamburg or in America, it no longer applied in their changed circumstances. Very quickly, and often without reflection, they re-wrote their moral codes to fit the new reality. In both groups of men, some measure of racism, the violent wartime context, and the basic human lack of a moral compass combined to produce horrifying results.24
CHAPTER 12
WHAT THEY KNEW
We swear, we will not give up the struggle until the last Jew in Europe is annihilated and is dead.
—Prominent Nazi Party leader Robert Ley, in a widely broadcast radio speech, May 19431
Psychological mechanisms, combined with the violent wartime context and widespread anti-Semitism, can explain the behavior of the many killers who were not fanatical Nazis. But to explain the Holocaust, we also need to understand a much larger group of participants: the tens of millions of Germans who belonged neither to the Nazi Party nor to the country’s ruling elite, who did not kill anyone, but whose silence during the Holocaust made the killers’ task easier. The following pages address three closely related questions. First, what did most Germans know about the Holocaust while it was happening, that is, from the summer of 1941 until the end of the war? Second, how did they react to this terrible knowledge? Finally, if they knew of the killings—and very many did—what responsibility did they bear for this unprecedented crime?2
Any German who chose to think about it could know that the German government was murdering Jews in massive numbers. Wartime Germany was positively awash in information about the Holocaust; the only way to avoid absorbing this information was to repress it. In the first place, over 18 million German men served in the military during World War II, the majority of them in Poland or the Soviet Union. Many of these soldiers, especially those who filled support roles behind the lines, could easily have seen for themselves or heard from comrades how the regime’s death squads rounded up Jews and shot them by the tens of thousands; regular army units also murdered large numbers of Jews in this manner. The killers did their grisly work in the open, and shootings regularly drew large crowds of spectators, both German soldiers and civilian contractors. Many of these voyeurs took photographs of the murders, a practice that has been called “execution tourism,” and which the army forbade in vain. In at least one case, spectators made home movies of a shooting and showed them to friends at home in Germany.3
Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers participated in the mass shootings, whether as killers, spectators, or both. The evidence shows that virtually every German soldier knew about these shootings and understood that they were being carried out on a massive scale. Not only could they learn of shootings either firsthand or from comrades, but the German Army High Command acknowledged to its troops that mass murder was in full swing. The military newspaper Die Front made this abundantly clear, with the issue of January 21, 1942, for example, declaring that “at the end of this war stands the extermination of the Jews.”4
Sooner or later, soldiers conveyed this knowledge to their friends and families back home. Few did so by mail, which was subject to review by military censors, but many clearly told of the shootings when home on leave. However, there is some reason to think that many other soldiers did not talk about the murders, since they did not seem to consider the topic very important. British and American intelligence officers secretly recorded conversations among captured German soldiers, producing more than 88,000 pages of word-for-word transcripts. Only in 0.2 percent of these conversations was the mass murder of Jews mentioned, although in those instances the killing was discussed in ways that show it was common knowledge within the military.5
Foreign radio broadcasts also informed Germans about the fate of the Jews, often in considerable detail. Listening to “enemy radio” was a punishable offense, but Germans knew they could get more accurate information from foreign radio than from their own government. Millions of Germans listened to the British Broadcasting Corporation’s German-language programming from time to time, knowing that it provided accurate news of the military situation. At many points throughout the war, but beginning already in 1941, the BBC reported explicitly on mass shootings, deportations, death through slave labor, and murder by poison gas, identifying several death camps by name, including Auschwitz. In a December 30, 1942, broadcast, entitled “The War Against the Jews,” the BBC explained to Germans that their government was systematically murdering every Jew in Europe. The newsreader stated how many Jews from Germany, Austria, Holland, Belgium, and France had already been murdered, and how few remained alive in these countries. The BBC also broadcast the December 17, 1942, declaration by the Allied powers that they would punish guilty Germans for the extermination of the Jews.6
Although the BBC was clearly the most popular “enemy radio” in Germany, both the Soviets and the Americans had their own German-language radio programs with large audiences, and both broadcast information about the murder of the Jewish people. Questioning of German POWs in Italy revealed that about 10 percent of them had listened to the American programs. On July 9, 1944, an American radio program, quoting the New York Times, announced that “since April 1942, the German government has murdered nearly one and a half million Jews in two [Polish] camps. . . . Millions of Jews have already met their deaths in gas chambers, through hanging, and poisonous injections.”7
The British and the Americans reinforced their broadcasts about the Holocaust by dropping leaflets from b
omber planes over Germany. The Allies scattered literally billions of leaflets across Germany during the course of the war. Most of these gave the Germans information on the military situation, but many millions directly addressed the destruction of the Jewish people. In December 1942, the BBC devoted an entire week to broadcasts about the systematic murder of the Jews of Europe. Then, in January 1943, Allied planes dropped a leaflet that again summarized the extermination process. It said, in part: “One has to assume that far more than a million European Jews have already been exterminated. . . . From all German-occupied countries, the Jews are deported to Eastern Europe under the most brutal and ghastly conditions. In Poland, which the Nazis have turned into their greatest slaughterhouse, the Jews are pulled out of the ghettos established by the invaders, with the exception of the few skilled workers useful to the arms industry. The deportees were never heard from again.”8
Another flyer from 1943 announced that the Nazi leadership was “now going yet a step further. They are now in the act of killing an entire people: the Jews.” It explicitly underscored the unprecedented character of the Holocaust: “At this moment the world looks in suspense, as never before, at the entire German nation. Is there among these 80 millions no one who will stand up and call halt, when in the name of his people the most terrible crime in world history is being committed?” Though no one can know how many Germans picked up such leaflets and read them, some clearly did, since doing so was a crime and quite a few got caught. Germans also gained information from the “deportation” of German Jews to their deaths in the East.9
At the beginning of October 1941, some 164,000 Jews still lived in Germany. On the fifteenth of that month, the German government began rounding up German Jews and “deporting” them to “the East,” initially to ghettos, but later, in 1942, directly to death camps. Officials typically selected part of a town’s Jewish population for a specific transport and gave the victims one week’s notice. The government told them that they were being “resettled” and would find paid work in their new homes. At the appointed date and hour, these unfortunates would gather at some central location, permitted only one suitcase for a few belongings, and be herded onto the trains that took them to their fatal destination. The deportations continued until late June 1943, leaving roughly 30,000 Jews in Germany who enjoyed a temporary reprieve because they were married to Gentiles.10
The deportations gave Germans many opportunities to think about the fate of their Jewish neighbors—and in many cases to act in ways that were shockingly brutal and opportunistic. Although the government maintained silence in the press about the deportations, word quickly got out, setting off an unseemly scramble for the Jews’ apartments and possessions, often before they had even left. Germans sometimes placed requests with the authorities, in advance of a deportation, for this or that prized piece of furniture or other possession belonging to some unfortunate Jewish acquaintance. Others had the gall to approach the doomed Jews directly and ask for their belongings. Regional Nazi Party leaders often promised that the Jews’ confiscated apartments would ease the local housing shortage, further calling attention to the deportations. After a deportation, the authorities would sell the victims’ possessions at public auction; in some cities, such goods also appeared for sale in special “Jew markets.” Roughly 100,000 Germans from the Hamburg region are believed to have purchased the possessions of deported Jews.11
When Jews gathered to board the fatal trains, large crowds often came together to watch. Germans surely connected these deportations with the reports from many soldiers of mass shootings in the East; very many must have known early on that deportation was a death sentence. Reports by two foreign observers suggest that such knowledge was widespread. Howard K. Smith, an American journalist who worked in Germany until the end of 1941, described the first deportations. He correctly stated that the unfortunate Jews were shipped to Poland and occupied Soviet territory, where they would die of hunger and other deprivations. Edwin van d’Elden, former secretary of the US Chamber of Commerce in Frankfurt, spent some months in Germany even after Hitler declared war on the United States (December 11, 1941). Interned at the end of that year, he was released because of poor health in February 1942, and he could move freely about Frankfurt until he was expelled in May. Van d’Elden later accurately reported that five trains of deportees had left Frankfurt during his time there. One had arrived in the Lodz ghetto in Poland; the Jews on three of the other trains were shot beside the train tracks en route. This last bit of information was not strictly accurate, but it was close enough to the truth: the Germans shot thousands of Jews upon their arrival at the eastern ghettos (as at Kovno), or shortly thereafter (as at Riga).12
An especially poignant kind of evidence helped to confirm this terrible knowledge. When the authorities selected German Jews for their impending deportation, a wave of suicides would often sweep through the Jewish community. Between October 1941 and the summer of 1943, an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 of the Jews slated for deportation took their own lives. At the middle range of this estimate, this amounted to over 2 percent of the remaining Jewish population, more than 1,000 times the rate of suicide among American males in today’s statistics.13
Especially during the latter part of the deportation process, after German Jews had received more information about the Holocaust, suicide claimed up to 10 percent of the Berlin Jews who were slated for some transports. In one boardinghouse where forty Jews lived, fifteen took their own lives during a six-week period at the beginning of 1942. Walter Schindler, who later went into hiding to escape deportation, described their passing in a letter: “They said their goodbyes after dinner, as if they were going on a trip, went back to their rooms, and in the early morning we would hear the ambulance drive up.” Although suicides may have become more frequent during the latter part of the deportation period, they began in large numbers already with the first deportations in the fall of 1941. According to police records, 243 Berlin Jews killed themselves during the last three months of that year.14
The waves of Jewish suicides provide two kinds of evidence. First, many Germans must have heard this grim news and drawn the most terrible conclusion about the fate of the deportees. Second, the suicides demonstrate—as does much other documentary evidence—that many German Jews, although forbidden to own radios and cut off from many other sources of information, nonetheless came to know that deportation meant death.15
Germans thus received information about the Holocaust from many sources: foreign radio; leaflets dropped by Allied planes; the deportations and the Jewish suicides that accompanied them; and, above all, soldiers home on leave, who knew of the mass shootings behind the front lines. But could not this information be rationalized, minimized, explained away? Enemy radio and leaflets might lie or exaggerate. After all, the British had made grossly exaggerated claims about German atrocities in Belgium during World War I. A reported shooting might have been an isolated incident, its scale overstated. Countless Germans doubtless used such rationalizations to avert their eyes from an unpleasant truth, but millions could not, because their own government treated the Holocaust as an open secret.16
Although the German government struggled to conceal the precise details of the killing, Nazi leaders very frequently told the public, in general terms, that they were “exterminating” or “annihilating” the Jews of Europe. Hitler anticipated this remarkable practice, two years before the killing began, in his speech of January 30, 1939, commemorating the sixth anniversary of his becoming prime minister: “I want today to be a prophet . . . : if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” All across Germany, every movie theater featured Hitler’s “prophecy” in the weekly newsreel. In eight radio broadcasts during the war, Hitler declared his intention to “exterminate” or “annihilate” the Jews, o
ften explicitly referring back to his prophecy of January 1939. The German press announced every Hitler speech prominently in advance, and government radio often broadcast each speech more than once, to give every German the chance to hear the Leader. The newspapers printed his speeches the next day. Other Nazi leaders—notably Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and Robert Ley—broadcast similar death threats against the Jewish people. Still other prominent Nazis made countless speeches of this kind across Germany, their remarks quoted in the press. The press itself called on numerous occasions for the “extermination” or “annihilation” of the Jewish people.17
It seems strange that the regime would advertise its crimes to the German people, and indeed to the world, but several explanations seem plausible. Hitler may have wished to reaffirm his quasi-religious status as a prophet, which was part of the myth of his personal connection with Providence. Since he had “prophesied” the extermination of the Jews, he needed to tell his people that his prophecy was being fulfilled. The regime also recognized that news of the killing would leak out, and therefore felt the need to justify its murderous policy. Finally, as Germany’s defeat in the war seemed increasingly likely, the government may have hoped to bind its citizens to it through shared guilt: having committed terrible crimes, the German people must give their utmost to the military effort, if only to avoid the punishment that would follow a defeat.18
Although these death threats never identified the means by which the Jews were to be murdered, they left no doubt as to the victims’ fate. There was nothing ambiguous in the language the German authorities used. As early as the summer of 1941, as the shooting squads began their deadly work, the Nazi Party newspaper Der Angriff printed a statement by German Labor Front leader Robert Ley, who declared that “This war is the Jew’s war. . . . It is a struggle for life and death, to be or not to be. There is no more compromise, no way back. We have crossed the Rubicon. . . . The God of the Jews is the God of revenge. Jehova never forgives, never forgets, he makes no peace, he annihilates and exterminates.”19