This weeks reading was definitely extremely hard to read. I couldn’t get over the sheer numbers of people that were being meaninglessly killed by the Nazis by the German police battalions. One of the hardest pages for me to comprehend in the reading was page 17, the collection of reports on the killing of the Jews. In less than two months the amount of people that were killed is completely unfathomable. It was also hard to understand how someone could just write those numbers as if it meant nothing. The people who were killed were just numbers. The pride in the number of people that were killed was also hard to read. I was surprised when I came across the section that talked about how Himmler’s doctor noticed that he had side effects psychologically and emotionally from ordering the mass killings of the Jews. I don’t know how to understand this or the hesitation of the soldiers and their commanders. It almost makes it more difficult to understand the holocaust. Why if the people who commanded and then carried out the orders opposed to the killings were they carried out? Could German nationalism really have been that powerful? Once again I think back to Triumph of the Will and the mass hysteria that surrounded Hitler and Nazism. Was it really that powerful that people could kill innocent people with the knowledge that what they were doing was wrong? I also thought it was interesting that the commanders giving the orders were aware of the psychological effects the killings may have on the German soldiers. They informed the people in charge to keep reminding the German police of the War and the crimes of the Jews. It just furthers the point that at a level most people knew that what was going on was wrong, but they still carried out the killings. The men of the Police Battalion 101 were family men with children and they were able to carry out the killings of children and other innocent people. It is completely scary and unbelievable what nationalism can do to people. Ordinary Men shows that it can change a person to do something that for most is out of the realm of possibilities.
An aspect of the Massacre at Jozefow that might shed some light on this killing “as if it meant nothing” on the part of the Police Battalion 101, and one that I had never occurred to me before, was that the men involved in the killing had, to a large degree, separated the Jews from “their circle of human obligation and responsibility” (73), as Browning puts it. I think it is helpful in understanding the mentality of these men to realize that they were (at least in their minds) fighting a war, and to them Jews were simply “the enemy,” and a constant and daily bombardment of propaganda and psychological conditioning from their superiors had made this dehumanization of the Jews possible. I found Browning’s quote on p73 enlightening: “Such a polarization between ‘us’ an ‘them,’ between one’s comrades and the enemy, is of course standard in war.”
ReplyDeleteI think Mason’s post is really on point. Although polarization between two sides is as Browning notes, evident in any war, to a certain extent, the policemen internalized the enemy. As much as Nazi propaganda conditioned the battalion, I think the response to Major Trapp’s offer illustrates how mechanized the men were when “there was no forewarning or time to think,” let alone a moment for ethics (Browning 71). While time isn’t at fault for the policemen’s’ actions by any means, the fact that only twelve out of five-hundred men excused themselves attests to the notion that the laymen had been trained to think with such a narrow scope, seeing no “human ties with their victims” (73). Competition to not be seen as a coward, or simple rationalizations surrounding the inevitability of the Jews’ fate all are motivations that stem from an allegiance to Nazism and Hitler, and from being in a war in general. Yet, as Browning notes, the lack of anti-Semitism from the interrogations suggests that the policemen weren’t really naïve to the underlying conflicts that had put them in this position.
ReplyDelete