Implications of Disease in Holocaust Activity

Browning mentions that initially there was an attempt to capture escaped Jews in the city and give them a trial before executing them in order to discourage Jews from attempting to escape the ghettos and spread typhus into the surrounding population. It made me consider how Nazi ideology claims that Jews are practically synonymous with disease and even someone who perhaps did not buy into that ideology could now have an idea of Jews as spreaders of typhus and dysentery due to the circumstances they had been forced into by the Nazi regime. Not only this, but it's terrible to think that the plan went from capture and trial into search and destroy. This is not to argue that tried executions would have been any more humane, but just trying to wrap my head around the logic of shooting escaped Jews on sight because there were not enough resources to remove them otherwise is absolutely terrifying. And what is more the follow-through on this action devolved even further into the "Jew hunt". How does it happen that people are able to reach a point when they can come face to face with a fellow human being; men, women, children, the elderly, and end their lives... Because they were ordered to do it?... Because psychologically it made sense due to their limited circumstances?... Because there was no better/cheaper/more effective way to remove a specific, unwanted population?

Browning's focus on individual experiences helps to remind that we cannot examine the events carried out by this battalion with blanket reasons in mind. Each man's experience and reasoning was undeniably different in response to these imposed conditions. And even those imposing the conditions underwent their own physical and psychological phases (Hoffman's case particularly comes to mind). And yet we attempt to understand how all of them ended up participating in the brutal horrors of the Holocaust. I have been guilty of the assumption that those responsible and who perpetrated this event were anti-Semitic, hardcore Nazis. Just going to the Museum of Tolerance emphasizes that the Nazi ideology was the spark in the tinder box, and makes it seem as though all those who participated in the extermination of the Jews embraced that. And I absolutely do not deny that, that kind of intolerance and ideology is extremely dangerous and responsible for much, if not most of what happened.

Yet the fact remains that, after reading Ordinary Men, I had a more deep realization that the Holocaust wasn't just carried out in the name of Nazi ideals, though perhaps it was initiated by it. But for these everyday men, once the ball got rolling; once Jews were separated and starved and did become diseased it was perhaps easier to view them that way; once routine shootings commenced in the deportation of the ghettos it was perhaps easier to move on to the 'Jew hunt'. Whether the men in the battalion enjoyed killing or not, they knew a life that would put them in line with bloody, notorious name of Nazi. It is terrifying to think that someone who is seemingly without racist inclination and violent hate could eventually come to participate in an extremely racist and hateful event. Though we may consider individual experiences, and not everyone actually invested in what was happening, there was still a lack of major resistance, which implies that there had to be at least limited participation among those involved in what was happening. I just think it is still rather unsettling to examine how conditions of Nazism (at least the violent anti-semitic essence we associate it with) seemed to actually infect, or at least affect, those who might be understood as healthy people. And perhaps I shouldn't allow that to sit in such simple terms. But that is as much as I can articulate at the moment.

~Cat Crowley