by Dan McMillan
7. Ibid., 2, 55–56.
8. Ibid., 2, 57.
9. Ibid., 121–132, 138–142.
10. Browning, Ordinary Men, 2, 170–171. Goldhagen has identified seven other police battalions and another armed unit in which officers informed men that they would not be punished for refusing to kill. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 278. Edward Westermann challenges the applicability of Milgram’s results to the police battalions, but his objections do not apply as well to the middle-aged conscripts as they do to the larger number of volunteers, and deference to authority figures need not supply a complete explanation for the killers’ actions, since several other factors—anti-Semitism, the polarizing wartime context, conformity to a peer group, and adaptation to a role—were also at work. Westermann, Hitler’s Police Battalions, 234–235.
11. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
12. Browning, Ordinary Men, 171–176.
13. Bilton and Sim, Four Hours, 74–85, 92–93. On the American combat experience in Vietnam: see Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 145–190.
14. Bilton and Sim, Four Hours, 92.
15. The US military’s indiscriminate use of artillery strikes and aerial bombardment is believed to have cost the lives of between 400,000 and 550,000 Vietnamese civilians during the years 1965 to 1974. Appy, Working-Class War, 202–204; Bilton and Sim, Four Hours, 98–101.
16. Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 169–173.
17. Kelman and Hamilton formulate their conclusions somewhat more cautiously: “a large proportion of the U.S. population at the time viewed the killing of civilians under orders to be an appropriate and normatively expected response.” Ibid., 174. A full 90 percent of respondents had heard of Calley’s trial. Ibid., 172.
18. Rüdiger Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1999).
19. Kelman and Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience, 91, 104–107; Browning, Ordinary Men, 66, 72, 185, 215–216. Browning also found that a group of Silesian policemen, who could live at home during the time in which they were rounding up Jews and deporting them to Auschwitz, became brutalized much more slowly than men in units that operated far from home. Christopher R. Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 149–150.
On men’s motivation in combat: James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), esp. 77–89; Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II,” Public Opinion Quarterly 12 (1948): 280–315.
20. Bilton and Sim, Four Hours, 18–19.
21. For a full-length discussion, see Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007); Browning, Ordinary Men, 167; Craig Haney, Curtis Banks, and Philip Zimbardo, “Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison,” International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1 (1983): 69–97.
22. Zimbardo, quoted in Browning, Ordinary Men, 168.
23. Browning, Ordinary Men, 168, 215–216. Other examples of Germans who were troubled by the murder of Jews in which they participated are presented in Browning, “Ordinary Germans or Ordinary Men? A Reply to the Critics,” in Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck, eds., The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 260–261. Browning found a similar tripartite division, in roughly the same percentages, in two other small groups of perpetrators he has studied. Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers, 166–167. On Höss: Rudolph [Rudolf] Höss, Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant in Auschwitz, ed. Steven Paskuly, fwd. Primo Levi, trans. Andrew Pollinger (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 88–89.
24. Browning, Ordinary Men, 176–184.
CHAPTER 12
1. Quoted in Peter Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung, 1933–1945 (Munich: Siedler, 2006), 269.
2. The most thorough treatment of the Germans’ knowledge is Bernward Dörner, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust: Was niemand wissen wollte, aber jeder wissen konnte (Berlin: Propyläen, 2007). At 608 he summarizes his claim for the extent of Germans’ knowledge: “No later than the summer of 1943, the murder of the Jews had become a fact for almost all Germans.” In contrast, Peter Fritzsche offers the interesting thesis that news of the shootings in the East “contained” knowledge of the Holocaust, leading Germans to see the persecution of the Jews as a set of isolated pogroms, rather than as a program of systematic extermination. However, he does not take the postwar surveys (see below) into account, nor does he cite Dörner, which may have appeared only after Fritzsche’s work was in press. In particular, Fritzsche does not consider the effect of the regime’s frequent declarations (discussed below) that it was “annihilating” or “exterminating” the Jewish people. Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 264.
3. Bernward Dörner, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust, 93–94, 99–100, 102–103. Rüdiger Overmans puts the total number of men in all branches of service at 18.2 million, in his Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1999).
In early October 1941 the commander of the 707th Infantry Division decided on his own initiative to murder Jews in the division’s area of operations in Belorussia. In short order his men shot 19,000 people. Saul Friedländer, “The Wehrmacht, German Society, and the Knowledge of the Mass Extermination of the Jews,” in Omer Bartov, Atina Grossmann, and Mary Nolan, eds., Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (New York: New Press, 2002), 20.
On “execution tourism”: Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, eds., “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders, trans. Deborah Burnstone (Old Saybrook, CT: Konecky and Konecky, 1991), 126; order of September 24, 1941, by General von Rundstedt, Army Group South, in Yitzhak Arad, Israel Gutman, and Abraham Margaliot, eds., Documents on the Holocaust, 8th ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 388; Ulrich Herbert, “Extermination Policy: New Answers and Questions About the History of the ‘Holocaust’ in German Historiography,” in National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 36.
4. On numbers of soldiers participating: Friedländer, “Wehrmacht, German Society, and Knowledge,” 26. Bernward Dörner argues persuasively that “no later than the summer of 1943, it was clear to every soldier that hundreds of thousands of Jews must already have been murdered.” Dörner, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust, 112 (emphasis added). Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer reach a similar conclusion in Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying. The Secret Transcripts of German POWs, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Knopf, 2012), 99–119. On the High Command acknowledging the killing: Dörner, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust, 106–107, 108–109, using the term Ausrottung.
5. On letters: Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” 224–225. On soldiers who talked of the killings while on leave: Dörner, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust, 93–114; Neitzel and Welzer, Soldaten, 101, 346–347.
6. Estimates of how many Germans listened to the BBC range between 1 million and 10 million, although, as Dörner points out, the latter figure is surely too high, given that there were only about 15 million radio sets in Germany. Dörner settles on an estimate of 3 million. Dörner, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust, 197, n. 414. Postwar surveys indicated that about half the population listened to enemy broadcasts at least once during the war, but the number who listened regularly must have been much smaller. Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” 240 n. 152.
The BBC enjoyed a reputation for “especial reliability” among Germans. Dörner, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust, 194. On specificity of information in the broadcasts: ibid., 202–209; Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 441–450.
7. Dörner, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust, 235–242; Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” 303.
8. Dörner, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust, 242, 244.
9. Ibid., 243–244.
10. Wolf Gruner, “Von der Kollektivausweisung zur Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland (1938–1945): Neue Perspektiven und Dokumente,” in Birthe Kundrus and Beate Meyer, eds., Die Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland: Pläne, Praxis, Reaktionen, 1938–1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004), 21–62, esp. 51, 57–58. On January 15, 1945, Himmler decreed that all Jews in mixed marriages should be deported, but many, including the celebrated diarist Victor Klemperer, escaped amid the chaotic conditions in the last months of the war.
11. Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” 184–185, 202–204. David Bankier reports that some newspapers, in late 1941, announced that the Jews would be gone from Germany by April 1942. However, he does not name the newspapers, citing only the Jewish Telegraph Agency and a file in the British Public Records Office. David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion Under Nazism (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 131.
On the scramble for Jews’ possessions and apartments: Frank Bajohr, “Über die Entwicklung eines schlechten Gewissens: Die deutsche Bevölkerung und die Deportationen, 1941–1945,” in Birthe Kundrus and Beate Meyer, eds., Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland: Pläne, Praxis, Reaktionen, 1938–1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004), 183, 189; Herbert, “Extermination Policy,” 28; Friedländer, “Wehrmacht, German Society, and Knowledge,” 27–28; Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” 199, citing Frank Bajohr, Die “Arisierung” in Hamburg: Die Verdrängung der jüdischen Unternehmer, 1933–1945 (Hamburg: Christians, 1997), 334.
12. Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” 177, 199–200; Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933–1945, vol. 2, The Years of Extermination (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 261–262, 267. One thousand Berlin Jews who arrived at Riga on November 30, 1941, were also shot that day.
13. Christian Goeschel, “Suicides of Jews in the Third Reich,” German History 25, no. 1 (2007): 34, citing Konrad Kwiet and Helmut Eschwege, Selbstbehauptung und Widerstand: Deutsche Juden im Kampf um Existenz und Menschenwürde, 1933–1945 (Hamburg: Christians, 1984), 199; Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader, vol. 2, State, Economy and Society, 1933–1939 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1984), 549; World Health Organization, “Suicide Rates (per 100,000), by Gender, USA, 1950–2005,” “Suicide Rates (per 100,000), by Gender and Age, USA, 2005,” and “Number of Suicides by Age Group and Gender, United States of America, 2005,” www.who.int/mental_health/media/unitstates.pdf, accessed October 21, 2013. The rate for American males in 2005 was 17.7 per year per 100,000 males. The rate for American females, keeping with a pattern consistent across many cultures, was much lower, 4.5 per 100,000.
14. Beate Kosmala, “Zwischen Ahnen und Wissen: Flucht vor der Deportation (1941–1943),” in Birthe Kundrus and Beate Meyer, eds., Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland: Pläne, Praxis, Reaktionen, 1938–1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004), 141–142; Friedländer, Years of Extermination, 308.
15. For example, Inge Deutschkron, cited in Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 224. Especially notable is Victor Klemperer’s diary, published as I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, trans. Martin Chalmers, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1998–1999).
16. Fritzsche, Life and Death in Nazi Germany, 264. “Open secret” is a formulation I take from Frank Bajohr and Dieter Pohl, Der Holocaust als offenes Geheimnis: Die Deutschen, die NS-Führung und die Allierten (Munich: Beck, 2006), and Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!,” esp. 201–262.
17. Dörner, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust, 135–193, esp. 137–141; Ian Kershaw, Hitler, vol. 2, 1936–1945: Nemesis (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 153. “Exterminating” and “annihilating” translate ausrotten and vernichten, respectively. The apt characterization of these statements as “death threats” is Dörner’s.
18. Saul Friedländer even argues that once the United States entered the war in December 1941, making it truly a world war, Hitler needed to fulfill his prophecy by ordering the murder of all Jews in Europe. Friedländer, Years of Extermination, 287; Dörner, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust, 159–160. The BBC’s German Service actually claimed that the Nazi regime had murdered the Jews in order to create this shared fear of retribution. Johnson, Nazi Terror, 447. In November 1943, Goebbels wrote, in Das Reich (circulation 1.4 million): “As for us, we’ve burned our bridges behind us. We can’t go back, and we don’t want to anymore. We will either go down in history as the greatest statesmen or the greatest criminals.” Fritzsche, Life and Death in Nazi Germany, 286. The regime’s propaganda, especially after Stalingrad, frequently stoked fears of the “Jewish revenge” that would follow a defeat. Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” 263–296, 326.
19. Dörner, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust, 423–424.
20. Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” 160–161. The most thorough treatment of this topic is Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
21. Herf, Jewish Enemy, 8–15, 267, 274.
22. Ibid., 113; Dörner, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust, 426–427; Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” 168–169, 267–281.
23. Herf, Jewish Enemy, 143–144. It is unclear whether the emphasis is Herf’s or was present in the written text of Hitler’s speech. Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” 267–281.
24. Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, 142–144, 224–225.
25. See the interesting discussion of repression in Dörner, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust, 458. On Kardorff: Bankier, Germans and the Final Solution, 103; Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” 229.
26. Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” 230–232; David Bankier concludes that few Germans could imagine the magnitude of the murder program, which was “inconceivable.” Bankier, Germans and the Final Solution, 115.
27. Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” 325.
28. The 1961 and 1988 surveys were conducted in West Germany, and the 1991 survey only of people living on the territory of the former West Germany (East and West Germany were united in 1990). The 1995 and 1996 surveys, telephone polls of a sample taken from all parts of united Germany, suffer from some problems of representativeness, since many inhabitants of the former East Germany did not have telephones. Karl-Heinz Reuband, “Gerüchte und Kenntnisse vom Holocaust in der deutschen Gesellschaft vor Ende des Krieges: Eine Bestandsaufnahme auf der Basis von Bevölkerungsumfragen,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 9 (2000): 196–233, esp. 222.
29. The original questions in German were as follows: “Wann haben Sie zum allerersten Mal etwas von der Massenvernichtung gehört? Ich meine nicht Einzelheiten, sondern ganz allgemein: daß es überhaupt vorkam?” “Wann haben Sie von den Verbrechen der Nazis erfahren?” “Haben Sie selbst etwas mitbekommen, haben Sie damals von anderen etwas darüber gehört oder haben Sie erst nach dem Krieg davon erfahren?” Ibid., 205.
30. Ibid., 222; Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany. An Oral History (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 328, 369–372.
Only the 1991 poll gave a result outside of this narrow range—40 percent—but this may only reflect an error in the way the poll was conducted. Reuband, “Gerüchte und Kenntnisse vom Holocaust,” 207. This remarkable consistency across six polls between 1961 and 2000 provides c
onsiderable assurance that the Germans who were surveyed did not project their postwar knowledge of the Holocaust back into the wartime years. If they had a tendency to do so, the percentage of those who answered yes would surely have risen from one poll to the next. Ibid.
Because the survey questions were broadly formulated, some respondents might have been thinking of the prewar persecution of German Jews, or of the confinement of political prisoners in concentration camps, when they admitted to knowing about mass murder, which could indicate that the percentage who actually knew was somewhat less than one-third of the population. Ibid., 220. However, this fraction (of a bit less than a third) must stand as only a minimum estimate of the percentage of Germans who knew, because many survey respondents surely lied when they said they had not known, while others may have forgotten, since the first survey was taken sixteen years after the war ended.
Various studies show mixed results on the quality of long-term memory. Roger Tourangeau, Lance J. Rips, and Kenneth Rasinski, eds., The Psychology of Survey Response (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), shows a clear deterioration in memory over time, but surprisingly good memory in some categories (for example, for names of school classmates, at 83–85). A longitudinal study of political studies among women who had attended Bennington College found a high degree of agreement between earlier political attitudes and the way they were recalled, but with notable exceptions, especially that 45 percent of the women who had described themselves as Republicans in 1960 recalled having been Democrats at that time, when questioned in 1984. Duane F. Alwin, Ronald L. Cohen, and Theodore Newcomb, Political Attitudes Over the Life Span: The Bennington Women After Fifty Years (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 128–131.
31. On lying: Tourangeau et al., eds., Psychology of Survey Response, 269–275. On honesty about Nazi affiliation or sympathies: Reuband, “Gerüchte und Kenntnisse vom Holocaust,” 203, based on surveys conducted by the US Strategic Bombing Survey in 1945, as cited in Helen Peck, Psychological Monographs 6 (1945), 37ff. Reuband aptly comments that past membership in the Nazi Party was “very much taboo” (stark tabuisiert) in Germany at that time. Karl-Heinz Reuband, “Das NS-Regime zwischen Akzeptanz und Ablehnung: Eine retrospektive Analyse von Bevölkerungseinstellungen im Dritten Reich auf der Basis von Umfragedaten,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 32, no. 3 (2006): 315–343.