# **Nestar Russell** VOL. I I

**Milgram's Obedience Experiments and the Holocaust** 

# Understanding Willing Participants, Volume 2

Nestar Russell

# Understanding Willing Participants, Volume 2

Milgram's Obedience Experiments and the Holocaust

Nestar Russell University of Calgary Calgary, AB, Canada

#### ISBN 978-3-319-97998-4 ISBN 978-3-319-97999-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97999-1

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*For Mum and Dad.*

# Contents



# List of Tables


# Introduction to Volume 2—The "Twisted Road" to Auschwitz

*Answers are always anywhere anyone asks.* —Tony B. Anderson (Anderson 2007, p. 6)

What, in terms of a brief synopsis, were Volume 1's key arguments and conclusions? At the expense of repeating what I said at the end of Volume 1, this book set out by presenting a resilient conundrum in Holocaust studies. That is, considering that many specialist historians agree that during the Nazi era most Germans were only moderately antisemitic,1 how during the Holocaust did they so quickly prove capable of slaughtering millions of Jews? I argued that social psychologist Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiments may hold key insights into answering this perplexing question. Milgram's main discovery was that 65% of ordinary people in his laboratory willingly, if hesitantly, followed an experimenter's commands to infict seemingly intense perhaps even lethal—electrical shocks on a "likable" person.2 When participants were asked why they completed this experiment, much like the Nazi war criminals, they typically said they were just following higher orders.3 There is no shortage of scholars who, like Milgram, sensed similarities between the Obedience studies and the Holocaust.4 These parallels have so frequently been drawn that Arthur G. Miller collectively

Schleunes (1970). Small sections of Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 5 were previously published in the *Canadian Journal of Sociology* (see Russell 2017).

termed them the Milgram-Holocaust linkage.5 An increasing number of scholars, however, have challenged the validity of these similarities by demonstrating how the Obedience studies differ to, or confict with, the Holocaust's fner historical details. One of many possible examples is that unlike during the Holocaust, Milgram's participants were clearly concerned about the well-being of their "victim." Despite this trend, Miller notes one behavioral similarity that I believe merits further attention: "Milgram's results could be likened to the Holocaust itself. Both scenarios revealed ordinary people willing to treat other people with unimaginable cruelty…"6 Extrapolating from this observation, I suggest that if it was possible to delineate Milgram's start-to-fnish inventive journey in transforming most of his participants into compliant infictors of harm *on a likeable person*, perhaps the insights gained might shed new light into how *only moderately antisemitic* Germans so quickly became willing executioners.

So how then was Milgram able to quickly transform most ordinary people into torturers of a likeable person? I argue he did so by deploying formally rational techniques of discovery and organization. To be clear, what exactly did I mean by the term formal rationality?

# Formal Rationality

Max Weber conceives formal rationality as the search for the optimum means to a given end—the "one best way" to goal achievement. Weber's model of a formally rationalized strategy was bureaucracy, an organizational process designed to fnd the one best way to goal achievement. To construct the "one best" bureaucratic process, managers break an organizational goal into a variety of discrete tasks, the achievement of which they allocate to different specialist functionaries or bureaucrats. Using a predetermined sequence, each bureaucrat performs their specialist task by following certain rules and regulations, after which the next bureaucrat in the organizational chain performs their specialist task until the goal is achieved.

The specifc rules and regulations each bureaucrat follows are determined by what "past history" has suggested to managers is probably the one best way to goal achievement.7 That is, as bureaucrats perform particular tasks, over time a manager's intuitive feel, previous experiences, and observations of the process in action lead them to the incremental discovery of even better strategies, generating new and even more effcient rules and regulations for their bureaucrats to follow. Weber's characteristics of bureaucracy (as an ideal type) include specialized labor, a well-defned hierarchy, clearly defned responsibilities, a system of rules and procedures, impersonality of relations, promotion based on qualifcations, the centralization of authority, and written records.8

Building on Weber's legacy, George Ritzer argues that organizational strategies like bureaucracy have four main components: effciency, predictability, control, and calculability (E.P.C.C.).9 Effciency is the pursuit of a shorter or faster route to goal achievement—the optimal means to a desired end. Predictability is the preference that all variables operate in a standardized and thus foreseeable way, thereby enabling managers to steer an organization toward future benefcial outcomes. Control is greater manipulative command over all factors and therefore the elimination of as many uncertainties as possible. Greater control enables greater predictability (especially as human labor is, over time, replaced by more controllable, predictable, and effcient non-human technologies). Finally, calculability involves the quantifcation of as many factors as possible. Advances in calculability enable greater measurement, which extends control over more variables and in turn improves the predictability of future outcomes. The greater the degree of formal rationality (advances in E.P.C.C), the greater the chance of discovering the "one best way" of arriving at organizational goal achievement, whatever it might be.

The one best way of producing motor cars over the past century or so provides an excellent example of advancing E.P.C.C. The production of the frst-ever motor cars involved a few skilled engineers and tradespeople laboriously constructing and then attaching handcrafted parts to a stationary vehicle frame. This technique was not only slow (ineffcient) but also unpredictable as the variable, non-standardized car parts ensured an equally variable end-product. Furthermore, because the engineers and tradespeople's skills were rare, they could resist management's coercive attempts to make them work faster by, for example, threatening to quit or go on strike (uncontrollable). Because control and predictability were low, management struggled to calculate daily, monthly, and annual production outputs. Thus, E.P.C.C. in relation to the one best way of manufacturing motor vehicles was low.

Henry Ford then invented the inherently bureaucratic motor car assembly-line production process. In Ford's factory, a line of vehicle frames moved along a conveyor belt. The frames moved past many specialist assembly workers, each of whom sequentially attached a standardized car part. At the end of the moving line, a constant fow of assembled vehicles emerged. Ford's moving line caused production effciency to greatly increase. The standardized car parts meant identical end products, and thus predictability also increased. The set speed of the moving line enabled Ford to quantify daily, monthly, and annual output, thus increasing calculability. But it was control perhaps that advanced the most. If one worker failed to keep up with the speed of the moving line, to the frustration of other workers and management alike, a bottleneck might form. Therefore, the set speed of the moving line in conjunction with a fear of falling behind pushed workers to perform their tasks faster than they probably would have on their own accord. The assembly line is therefore an early example of a more effcient non-human technology capable of imposing greater workforce control—all felt pushed by an unsympathetic machine into working quickly.10 And if workers resisted the set speed of Ford's moving line (by quitting or going on strike), because they were unskilled, he could more easily replace them. Ford's "one best way" of producing motor vehicles increased all four components of a formally rational system. It transpires Ford developed this revolutionary system by relying on his intuitive feel of what might work best, his previous life experiences, and his real-time observations of the emerging production process. Thus, it was *past history* that supplied him with new and potentially more effective "one best ways" of ensuring goal achievement—improved rules and regulations for his workers to follow. Ford was repeatedly supplied with new ways of producing motor cars, and eventually, he settled on what he believed to be the one best way.

But rationalization did not stop there. Because workers' tasks were purposefully simple, advances in technology eventually rendered their labor susceptible to replacement. By the end of the twentieth century, the automation of the motor vehicle industry had taken Fordism to new heights, substituting (where possible) human labor with computer-guided, high-tech robots. These robots could be programmed (greater calculability) to perform the same tasks without variation (greater predictability), with no risk of labor disputes (greater control), and without a break at higher speeds (greater effciency).

As the history of motor vehicle production illustrates, formally rational organizational processes have gained greater and greater control over employees. These organizational processes modifed human behavior in Ford's factories to the point that workers' movements started to resemble machine-like actions. And the closer human actions resembled those of machines, the easier it became to eventually replace them with actual machines—what Ritzer terms "the ultimate stage in control over people…"11 Ritzer implies here that perhaps the greatest threat to a desired end is human labor—that is, people. Humans are notoriously unpredictable, because, unlike non-human technology, they have proven very diffcult for goal-directed managers to control.12

So how, then, did Milgram deploy formally rational techniques of discovery and organization to convert (ostensibly) most of his ordinary participants into torturers of a likeable person? Documents obtained from Milgram's personal archive held at Yale University reveals this transformative journey.

# The Invention of the Obedience Studies

Volume 1 illustrated that throughout and beyond his formative years, Milgram took an uneasy yet keen interest in the Holocaust. Around the time Milgram was completing his Ph.D. in social psychology, Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann was captured, put on trial, and executed. Like many Nazis before him, Eichmann justifed his actions by arguing that he had only followed higher orders to send millions of Jews to the Nazi death camps. The Nazi perpetrators' favorite justifcation caused Milgram to wonder if most ordinary (albeit American) people in a social science experiment would also follow orders to infict harm. For such an experiment to garner scholarly attention, Milgram knew it would have to obtain eye-catching results (nobody would be surprised by a low rate of obedience to hurt an innocent person). So Milgram's research was founded on a preconceived goal: to run an experiment that would "maximize obedience."13 Because Milgram did not have an experimental procedure capable of generating such a result, in the role of project manager, he had to invent a means capable of achieving his preconceived end. At some level, he obviously sensed that inventing such a procedure might be possible.

His frst attempt at developing a basic procedure was—as frst attempts usually are—rudimentary. Drawing on his previous experience as an observer of Nazi war crimes trials and what he thought had caused the Holocaust—small steps toward a radical outcome, pledges of allegiance, group pressure, and strict obedience to harmful orders—he envisioned a procedure where participants pledged to obey orders to "Tap" and eventually "Slug" an innocent person. During this experiment, Milgram planned to insert a participant among a group of actors who all happened to be in favor of inficting harm on an innocent person. He also envisioned a control condition: A higher authority fgure was to instruct a singular participant to infict harm on an innocent person. By inserting into his experimental program what he then thought were the Nazis' most effective techniques of coercion, Milgram aimed to simulate the Holocaust in a laboratory setting. Despite his ambitions, however, he soon sensed his initial idea would fail to maximize obedience. With one eye on his end goal, Milgram developed a new idea drawing on his previous experience as a psychologist and an intuitive feel of what he thought was more likely to work. He sensed participants would be more likely to infict harm using a shock machine than by engaging in direct physical violence. Effectively, he substituted human labor with a more predictable, controllable, calculable, and effcient source of non-human technology. Rather than relying on a pledge to obey, Milgram furthermore sensed participants would more likely infict harm on an innocent person if doing so was morally inverted into a social good. More specifcally, participants were told that the purpose of the experiment was to "scientifcally" determine if their infiction of "punishment" on a learner would affect this person's ability to learn (Milgram's so-called persuasion phase). Although his emerging procedure aimed to ensure that most ordinary people inficted harm, the basic idea also started to look a little less like the Holocaust captured in the laboratory setting. Nonetheless, to determine if the procedure was indeed capable of generating the results he desired, Milgram tasked his students at Yale with running the frst series of Obedience study pilots.

By late November 1960, the class was ready to run variations on both the participant among a "group" condition and participant "alone" (control) condition. Throughout the student-run pilots, participants could see the "shocked" learner through a translucent screen. The "group" experiment confrmed Milgram's prediction that some people would follow along with the crowd. It was the results from the "alone" (control) condition, however, that caught Milgram by complete surprise: About 60% of the participants willingly administered the most intense shocks when an actor dressed as an experimenter instructed them to do so.

During this frst series of pilots, Milgram also observed an unexpected behavior: Some participants refused to look at the learner through the translucent screen, yet they continued to infict every shock asked of them. Similarly, in subsequent variations, other participants attempted to anticipate when exactly the learner was likely to react in pain to the "shocks," and then, they would try to neutralize these stressed verbal reactions by talking over the top of them.14 Milgram termed all such behavior "avoidance," whereby "the subject screens himself from the sensory consequences of his actions."15 In doing so, participants did "not permit the stimuli associated with the victim's suffering to impinge on them […] In this way, the victim is psychologically eliminated as a source of discomfort."16 Thus, for participants, avoidance seemed to make it psychologically easier for them to do as they were told and deliver more shocks. Avoidance behavior intrigued Milgram because it raised an interesting question: What would happen if, during future pilots, he substituted the translucent screen with the non-human technology of a solid wall? Would doing so make it even easier for participants to infict every shock? Would introducing a partition perhaps increase the completion rate above the frst pilot's 60% fgure, thus edging Milgram ever closer to his preconceived goal "to create the strongest obedience situation"?17 Milgram intended to fnd out.

What becomes apparent is that during the invention of the Obedience studies, Milgram's basic strategy to improve his emerging offcial baseline procedure was to retain those innovative ideas that helped "maximize obedience" and abandon those that didn't. For example, he replaced his idea that participants physically assault the victim with one where they use a shock generator. And he dropped the pledge to obey in favor of an experiment where the infiction of harm was morally inverted into a social good. Finally, although before running the frst pilots Milgram intended for the single-participant variation to serve as the control experiment for what he thought would be the more coercive (and successful) group variation, after running the frst pilots, the single-participant experiment's auspiciously high completion rate led him to make it the central concern of the entire experimental venture.

Milgram ended up terming his more effective manipulative techniques either strain resolving mechanisms or binding factors. Strain resolving mechanisms are techniques designed to reduce the tensions normally experienced by a person inficting harm. Examples of strain resolving mechanisms include the emotionally distancing shock generator and the participants' comforting belief that their infiction of harm would (apparently) contribute to a greater (scientifc) good. Binding factors are powerful bonds that can entrap a person into doing something they might otherwise prefer not to do. Examples of binding factors include the experimenter's \$4.50 payment to participants (which likely promoted feelings of being contractually obligated to do as they were asked); the experimenter's coercive prods that it was "absolutely essential" participants "continue"; and the shock machine's gradual escalation in shock intensity that drew many participants into "harming" an innocent person. It seems the more strain resolving mechanisms and binding factors Milgram added to his emerging procedure, the cumulatively stronger his so-called "web of obligation" became.18

On completing the frst pilots, Milgram did "not believe that the students could fully appreciate the signifcance of what they were viewing…"19 He knew, however, that the frst pilots tested a variety of situational forces he suspected may have played some role in producing the Holocaust. In other words, what the students regarded as a fascinating spectacle, Milgram suspected, might provide insight into the perpetration of the Holocaust. It was probably then that Milgram sensed the enormous potential of his research idea.

More than half a year later, in late July and early August 1961, Milgram, in an attempt to iron out the kinks of his research idea,20 completed a second and more professional series of pilot studies. In the fnal variation of these trials, Milgram ran the "Truly Remote Pilot study," wherein having introduced a solid wall into the basic procedure, participants could neither see nor hear the learner's reactions to being "shocked." Milgram's hypothesis about the effect of a wall proved correct, because in this pilot "virtually all" participants inficted every shock.21 The leap from a 60% completion rate in the student-run pilots to something approaching 100% in the Truly Remote Pilot saw Milgram achieve his preconceived goal of maximizing obedience.

So, as shown, *before* running both pilot series, Milgram relied exclusively on his past experiences and intuitive feel of what strain resolving mechanisms and binding factors he imagined might aid his quest to maximize the emerging basic procedure's completion rate. But *during* the pilots Milgram clearly relied on his skills of observation. For example, Milgram's suspicion (correct, as it turned out) that substituting the translucent screen with a wall might increase the emerging procedure's completion rate beyond 60% was stimulated by the participants in the frst pilot series who turned away from their victim but inficted every shock. Thus, Milgram's real-time observations of the pilots led him to a very powerful strain resolving idea—one that was clearly beyond his undeniably impressive powers of imagination.

After completing the second pilot series, the Truly Remote Pilot study's maximized completion rate signaled to Milgram that he had likely developed a basic procedure that, should he use it as his frst offcial baseline, nearly all participants would complete. That is, his latest procedure was very likely to generate the high rate of obedience he had all along desired. Using Ritzer's terminology, over time Milgram had gained so much "control" over his participants' likely behavior that should he make his next trial the offcial baseline, he was able to roughly "predict" that it would obtain a high ("calculable") completion rate. Thus, he had found the most "effcient" means of arriving at his preconceived end.22 A new one best means to his end had emerged. And it was *past history*—Milgram's intuitive feel, past experiences, and real-time observations of the pilot studies—that had, through a process of trial and error, gradually led him to the Truly Remote Pilot study's new and more effective "rules and regulations." If Milgram wanted to achieve his preconceived goal in the frst offcial trial, all his helpers—his research assistants (Alan Elms and Taketo Murata), actors (John Williams and James McDonough), *and* participants—just needed to follow the latest and most effective "rules and regulations."23

However, running an offcial baseline experiment that nearly every participant completed raised an unanticipated problem: Such a result would deprive Milgram of any way of identifying individual differences between them.24 Consequently, Milgram deemed it necessary to introduce a strain *inducing* force to the offcial baseline procedure an alteration that he anticipated would slightly increase the proportion of disobedient participants. With the intention of reducing (slightly) the basic procedure's probable completion rate by increasing participant stress, Milgram decided that the frst offcial baseline experiment would include some auditory perceptual feedback. That is, after the participant inficted the 300- and 315-volt shocks, Milgram instructed the learner McDonough to kick the wall and then fall silent. In contrast to Milgram's repeated approach across the pilots to reduce participant tension (and increase their probability of inficting every shock), the intention behind this procedural addition was obviously to increase slightly their stress levels. Having increased participants' stress levels, he presumed a small proportion would refuse to complete the experiment. Clearly, Milgram had gained so much "control" over his participants' likely reaction to being in the experiment that he was able to guess ("predictability") that this latest procedural alteration would likely send his otherwise rising completion rate into a sudden (albeit sight) reverse.

Indeed, on 7 August 1961, Milgram ran his frst offcial baseline experiment, producing a 65% completion rate. Milgram was probably expecting a slightly higher completion rate considering he made only subtle changes (infrequent wall-banging) to the Truly Remote Pilot. Nevertheless, the still surprisingly high completion rate, which garnered much media attention, became his "best-known result" and thus had its intended effect.25 This was the rationally driven and somewhat circuitous learning process that guided Milgram during the invention of his "one best way" to preconceived goal achievement.

In an attempt to develop a theory capable of explaining this baseline result, Milgram then undertook twenty-two slight variations, the ffth of which he made his "New Baseline." Unlike its predecessor, in the New Baseline, the learner's intensifying verbal reactions to being "shocked" could be heard by the participant up until the 330-volt switch (thereafter becoming silent). The more disturbing (eye-catching) New Baseline (or cardiac condition) also obtained a surprisingly high 65% completion rate and went on to serve as the basic model for all subsequent variations. One of the most interesting of these many variations was, in my view, the Peer Administers Shock condition where the experimenter only required the participant to perform the subsidiary (although necessary) task of posing the word pair questions, while another participant (actually an actor) administered shocks for any incorrect answers. In comparison with the New Baseline, this variation ended in a much higher completion rate— 92.5% continued to perform their subsidiary role until the three consecutive 450-volt "shocks" had been inficted. Participants who completed this variation revealed in post-experimental interviews that they did not believe their involvement made them in any way responsible for the learner being shocked—they asserted that only the shock-inficting peer was at fault (although, of course, if the participant refused to ask any questions, the peer would have been deprived of their rationale for "shocking" the learner). Interestingly, as the results of the other offcial variations demonstrated, even when participants had to shock the learner themselves, those who completed the protocol were more inclined than those who refused to shift the blame to either the experimenter or learner.26

Another particularly interesting variation was the Relationship condition where the participant was earlier told to bring to the laboratory someone who was at least an acquaintance. One of this pair became the teacher, the other the learner. Once the learner was strapped into the shock chair and the teacher and experimenter left the learner's room, Milgram appeared and informed the learner that the experiment was actually trying to determine if their friend would obey commands to shock them. Then, Milgram trained the learner how to react to the "intensifying shocks" (so that their reactions were similar to those of the usual New Baseline learner). This incomparably unethical condition obtained a 15% completion rate.

Milgram also ran a New Baseline variation where all the participants were women and it too obtained a 65% completion rate. With both male and female participants, something selfsh seemed to lie behind the individual decision to fulfll their specialist role in the experiment, as the pseudonymous participant Elinor Rosenblum perhaps best illustrated. That is, after completing the experiment, Rosenblum met her actually unharmed learner and explained to him: "You're an actor, boy. You're marvelous! Oh, my God, what he [the experimenter] did to me. I'm exhausted. I didn't want to go on with it. You don't know what I went through here."27 Upon it being revealed that the experiment was a ruse, she interpreted this new reality to mean that she was in fact the only victim of the experiment. And since she was now the victim, Rosenblum felt the learner should be informed about her painful experience—one which it should not be forgotten ended in her deciding at some point to perhaps electrocute an innocent person.

Milgram anticipated (incorrectly as Volume 1 shows) that his many variations would eventually isolate what caused most participants to complete the New Baseline condition, and thus lead him to a comprehensive theory of obedience to authority. What Milgram overlooked, however, was not only the omnipotent strain resolving power of his shock generator, but also the formally rational and inherently bureaucratic organizational machine that unobtrusively lay behind it.

# Milgram's Reliance on Formally Rational Techniques of Organization

In conjunction with the above learning process, Volume 1 also revealed how Milgram, again in the role of project manager, recruited his many specialist helpers. To achieve his preconceived goal and collect a full set of data, he required institutional and fnancial sponsors, along with the aid of several research assistants, actors, and technicians. All, it will be noted, agreed to become complicit in the unethical infiction of potentially dangerous levels of stress on innocent people. Milgram obtained their consent much as the experimenter did with the participants: He convinced them that despite any ethical reservations they might hold, in order to "conquer the disease" of "destructive obedience…"28 it was necessary they fulfll their specialist roles. That is, by contributing to the infiction of harm, they would help bring about a greater good. On top of morally inverting harm into a social good, Milgram further tempted all his helpers into performing their specialist roles by appealing to their sometimes different self-interested needs or desires: the provision of fnancial reimbursement, the prospect of organizational prestige, the offer of article co-authorship, and other material benefts. Eventually, a cognitive thread of personal beneft connected every link in the emerging Obedience studies' organizational chain. Thus, as Milgram anticipated and then applied the most effective motivational formula for each of his helpers, the non-human technology of bureaucracy started to take shape. In turn, the division of labor inherent in this organizational system inadvertently ensured that every functionary helper could, if they so chose, plead ignorance to, displace elsewhere ("pass the buck"), or diffuse (dilute) responsibility for their contributions to a harmful outcome. As Milgram and his helpers made their fractional contributions to organizational goal achievement, a physical disjuncture arose between individual roles and any negative effects. And this disjuncture could stimulate responsibility ambiguity among functionaries. Responsibility ambiguity is, as outlined in Volume 1, a general state of confusion within and beyond the bureaucratic process over who is totally, mostly, partially, or not at all responsible for a injurious outcome.29 When the issue of personal responsibility becomes debatable, some functionaries may genuinely believe they are not responsible for the harmful end result. Responsibility ambiguity, however, can also encourage other functionaries to sense opportunity amid the confusion: They realize they can continue contributing to and personally benefting from harm infiction safe in the knowledge they can probably do so with impunity. In this case, the responsibility ambiguity across the bureaucratic process likely provided potent strain resolving conditions that made it possible, even attractive, for every link in the Obedience studies' organizational chain to plead ignorance to, displace, or diffuse responsibility for their harmful contributions. Because Milgram and his helpers either genuinely didn't feel responsible for their eventually harmful contributions or (more likely) realized that even if they did they at least probably didn't appear so, individual levels of strain subsided, clearing the ethical way to remain involved in the personally benefcial study.

At the end of the organizational chain, however, where voluntary participants were burdened with the specialist task of (ostensibly) inficting harm on the learner, Milgram's frst idea that they engage in a direct physical assault ensured for an undeniable connection between cause and effect. For the participants in such an experiment, the compartmentalization inherent in the division of labor could not protect them from knowing—in both concept and perceptual reality—about their harmful actions. For participants who might infict this assault, responsibility clarity, not ambiguity, awaited them. Achievement of Milgram's preconceived goal therefore necessitated the inclusion of something suffciently capable of separating cause from effect. The solution came when Milgram, as he frequently did, from the *top*-*down* of his (loosely) hierarchical organizational process (*frst link Milgram instructed second link experimenter to pressure the fnal link participant into harming the learner*) introduced the emotionally distancing and inherently strain resolving "shock" machine (along with his subsequent idea to separate participants from the learner with a translucent screen, or even better, a solid wall). It is important to note that the idea to introduce a wall was, as just mentioned, actually initiated by *bottom*-*up* forces within the Obedience study's wider organizational process: Some participants during the student-run pilots looked away from the person they were "harming." Interestingly, on their own accord, these participants were effectively inventing and then applying their own strain resolving means of better ensuring they could do as they were told. Participants, however, were not the only low-ranking innovators: As Volume 1 shows, the experimenter quickly sensed what his boss Milgram likely desired and, in the hope of maximizing the completion rate, he (Williams) started inventing his own highly coercive binding prods.

Nonetheless, once Milgram introduced the combination of the strain resolving, non-human technologies of the shock machine *and* wall into the Truly Remote Pilot, the participant became physically and emotionally disconnected from their victim, and suddenly, a strong dose of responsibility ambiguity became available to participants (a suddenly more ambiguous situation that would not have been possible in the absence of these non-human technologies). In fact, as I argued in Volume 1, no other combination of variables could stimulate responsibility ambiguity like the shock generator when combined with the wall—they were the most powerful strain resolving elements in the entire experimental paradigm.30 And when participants, as they did during the Truly Remote Pilot, could no longer hear, see, or feel the implications of their actions, their specialist contributions to the wider process now more closely resembled the unemotional, technocratic, seemingly innocent, and somewhat banal contributions of all the other functionary helpers further up the organizational chain. The combination of these two strain resolving mechanisms effectively injected the indifference into Chester Barnard's *Zone of Indifference*, which is where a functionary's higher "orders for actions" are suffciently inoffensive to the point that they become "unquestionably acceptable."31 With responsibility ambiguity thereby available to every link in the chain—where all functionary helpers felt or appeared to be *mere* middle-men—it suddenly became much easier to persuade, tempt, and, if necessary, coerce "virtually" everybody involved into performing their specialist harm-contributing roles.

And as responsibility ambiguity structurally *pulled* every functionary into performing their specialist roles, simultaneously the coercive force of bureaucratic momentum—where to avoid criticism for not doing one's job and/or to receive whatever personal benefts happened to be associated with goal achievement—structurally *pushed* all into following their "rules and regulations." An excellent example of bureaucratic momentum was initiated when, to sign up to partake in one of the Obedience research program's many variations, prospective participants had to select from Milgram's preconceived research schedule, one of the 78032 available 60-minute slots. And when they arrived at the laboratory to fll their particular slot, participants were then—much like a car frame in Ford's factory—moved briskly along Milgram's data extraction assembly-line process. That is, within the tight one-hour timeframe, various members of Milgram's team sequentially engaged in specialist tasks that, among others, included training participants, running the experiment, collecting data, and undertaking debriefngs. And much like on Ford's assembly line, because time was limited—another unsuspecting person was due at the top of the hour—all helpers felt the push of the non-human technology of Milgram's participant-processing schedule to quickly fulfll their specialist roles. Participants, located at the last link in this organizational assembly line, were also pushed into performing their specialist task by the force of bureaucratic momentum, more specifcally in the form of the experimenter's seemingly unrelenting prods—"Please continue" and "It is absolutely essential that you continue." On top of the participant-processing schedule imposing greater "control" over all involved, the schedule's inherent characteristic of "calculability" also meant, somewhat like with Ford, the young psychologist was able to "predict" when data collection would likely end (correctly as it turned out, at the end of the 1962 spring term).33

As Milgram drove his organizational machine toward collecting a full set of data, any links in the organizational chain who may have experienced second thoughts about continuing to make their eventually harmful contributions likely found themselves trapped—both pushed and pulled—into fulflling their specialist roles. This organizational machine rather effectively attempted to subvert all helpers' basic humanity, their personal agency, in favor of Milgram's preconceived and overarching policy objective: maximization of "obedience." Thus, Milgram's inadvertent construction of and reliance on an inherently problem-solving and formally rational bureaucratic organization was, I believe, an essential structural contributor to his high baseline completion rate. More generally speaking, in my view, some admixture of Weberian formal rationality, Ritzer's McDonaldization, Luhmann's sociological systems theory,34 Russell and Gregory's responsibility ambiguity, and Bandura's moral disengagement are all likely to lead one to a stronger comprehension of the undeniably complex Obedience studies (see Volume 1).

The key, it would seem, to Milgram's "success" in achieving his preconceived goal of maximizing obedience was that every functionary link' contribution across and especially at the harm-infiction end of the chain felt (personally) or appeared (to others present) suffciently banal and innocent, when in reality they were neither. In fact, as the Truly Remote Pilot best illustrated, the more pedestrian and colorless every helper' piecemeal contributions felt or appeared, the greater all his helpers' (and his own) violent capabilities became, and thus the higher the completion rate. To optimally maximize participation across the organizational chain, every functionary helper' contributions needed to be, as was the case during the Truly Remote Pilot, reduced to the "mere" shuffing of paper or pressing of switches—an Arendtian-like banality of evil.

So at the end of this formally rational journey, what Milgram seems to have discovered was how best to socially engineer his preconceived goal from that of mere concept to disturbing reality. The Obedience studies are therefore a frightening "demonstration of power itself…"35—"the inexorable subordination of the less powerful by the powerful." Edward E. Jones, it would seem, was right all along: The baseline condition was at best a "triumph of social engineering."36 As a powerful person with all the social, prestige, and fnancial capital of a fully funded Yale professor, Milgram's preconceived desires were achieved by him imposing on the less powerful "a calculated restructuring of the informational and social feld." His organizational process proved more than capable of shunting, among most of those involved, all "moral factors…aside…"37

# Moving to <sup>a</sup> New Milgram-Holocaust Linkage

In my quest to develop a new and stronger Milgram-Holocaust linkage, the remainder of Volume 2 argues that certain Nazi project managers deployed similar Milgram-like formally rational *techniques of discovery and organization to reach their same preconceived goal of converting most ordinary people into willing infictors of harm*. As I will show, the project managers that came closest to overarching goal achievement were those that most rationally utilized bureaucratic organizational techniques and, after running numerous pilot studies, went on to discover and then attach to the last link in their organizational chains, the most remote non-human harm-inficting technologies. And the physically and emotionally more remote these harm-inficting technologies the less touching, seeing, and hearing experienced by those at the last of the perpetrator links in the wider organizational chain—the easier it became for the Nazi leadership to persuade, tempt, or, if needed, coerce their subordinates into exterminating other human beings. My justifcation for undertaking this journey is, as Alex Alvarez notes about the Holocaust, although "We know the history…our understanding of the means by which participants overcame normative obstacles to genocide is lacking."38

As the reader will discover, Volume 2 centers mostly on the evolution of the omnipotent strain resolving means of inficting harm. In my view, when one pays close attention to the Nazi's various and eventually preferred means of inficting harm, the insights gained are, much like with Milgram's own research, revelatory. This destructive and depressing journey of discovery demonstrates what I believe to be the most important Milgram-Holocaust linkage of all: formal rationality. I thus conclude that the means of inficting harm at the last link of the Nazi's inherently problem-solving malevolent bureaucratic process played a central role in quickly transforming many only moderately antisemitic Germans into willing infictors of harm.

In terms of what follows, Chapter 2 explains how the Nazi party rose to power and how their destructive ideology spread among the German masses. This chapter delineates the Nazi regime's "calculated restructuring of the informational and social feld"—their promulgation of an "institutional justifcation" among ordinary and, for the most part, only moderately antisemitic Germans that eventually led to the widespread infiction of harm on Jews and others. Both just before and soon after the start of World War Two, Chapter 3 details the Nazi regime's frst forays into the killing of civilian populations. Then, during the Soviet invasion, Chapter 4 presents what, in my view, were the SS leadership's most salient *top*-*down* strain resolving and binding forces used to encourage their ordinary and only moderately antisemitic underlings to participate in the so-called Holocaust by bullets.39 Also in relation to the killing felds of the Soviet Union, Chapter 5 details what I suspect were the ordinary German's most important *bottom*-*up* strain resolving and binding forces. With a particular focus on Operation Reinhard, Chapter 6 explores the rise of what evolved into the large-scale industrial gassing programs in the East. Chapter 7, then, delves into the Nazi regime's fnal solution to the Jewish Question: the rise and domination of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Chapter 8 clarifes what the Nazis meant by what I show was, before and during World War Two, their ongoing pursuit for a "humane" means of exterminating the Jews and other so-called sub-humans. The concluding chapter provides a brief summary of my thesis along with some thoughts on its potentially wider applicability beyond the Holocaust.

In the following chapters, I regularly make behavioral comparisons between those involved in the Obedience studies and those who perpetrated the Holocaust. This seems incredibly unfair considering the former was a fake experiment and the latter involved the murder of millions of innocent people. It is important to note that although I think these analogies demonstrate a similarity in kind, I also believe they differ *enormously* in terms of degree.40 Some readers may deem these comparisons completely odious, and if so, they will be on frm ground: The industrialized aims of the Holocaust remain unprecedented in human history. However, this does not mean that analogies cannot be drawn between Milgram's project and the Nazis' "Final Solution." As the Welsh writer Dannie Abse put it when refecting on the Obedience studies, "in order to demonstrate that subjects may behave like so many Eichmanns the experimenter had to act the part, to some extent, of a Himmler."41

# Notes


# References


#### 22 N. RUSSELL

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# The Nazi Regime—Ideology, Ascendancy, and Consensus

This chapter delineates the Nazi regime's construction and promulgation of an ideology that saw many ordinary and mildly antisemitic Germans condone or feel indifferent about the infiction of harm on Jews and other "sub-humans." Much like the Obedience study's persuasion phase (see Volume 1), I argue that, mostly at the hands of the Nazi regime, Germany's "informational and social feld" underwent a "calculated restructuring,"1 the consequence of which saw the harming of others morally inverted into a social good.

The Origins of Nazi Ideology and Their Rise to Power

In the sixteenth century, the German Protestant reformer Martin Luther refected on how Christians in Europe should deal with the small Jewish communities living in their midst. After vilifying the "rejected race of Jews" as liars and blasphemes, he recommended a "merciful severity": burn down their synagogues, destroy their homes, appropriate their valuables, and stamp out their proselytizing—so "we may all be free of this insufferable devilish burden – the Jews."2 To this point, terrifying violence of the sort Luther recommended had not been a major threat to the survival of European Jews. Attacks on Jews (pogroms) were more typically fueled by emotion and were, by nature, too disorganized to systematically wipe out entire and multiple Jewish communities.

Indeed, from the seventeenth century onward, the Enlightenment the spread of humanist rationalism and secularism across Western

© The Author(s) 2019 N. Russell, *Understanding Willing Participants, Volume 2*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97999-1\_2

Europe—coincided with a sharp decline in pogrom violence.3 Beginning in the late eighteenth century, and especially throughout the nineteenth century, the most progressive European nations including Germany, Holland, Denmark, France, and Great Britain all granted their Jewish communities equal rights. Many Jewish communities thrived socially, culturally, and economically. But many Christians also continued to harbor animosity toward their Jewish neighbors. The German composer Richard Wagner said in 1881:

I hold the Jewish race to be the born enemy of pure humanity and everything noble in it. It is certain that it is running us Germans into the ground, and I am perhaps the last German who knows how to hold himself upright in the face of Judaism, which already rules everything.4

In 1899, Englishman Stewart Chamberlain expressed similar views in his best seller *The Foundations of the 19th Century*, which had run into its tenth edition by the early twentieth century.5

A few decades earlier in 1859, Charles Darwin published his seminal work *On the Origin of Species*. Darwin's book had a profound effect on his cousin Francis Galton, who applied the basic tenets of Darwin's new theory to human beings. Galton's efforts led to a new feld of academic inquiry—eugenics, defned by the twentieth-century Harvard biologist Charles B. Davenport as, "the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding."6 Eugenics, as a feld of study, split into two main schools: positive and negative. Positive eugenics calls for adding so-called desirable human characteristics to what then becomes a stronger gene pool. For example, a government might allow certain immigrants to enter their country because they believe them to have certain desirable genetic characteristics. Negative eugenics, however, aims to remove "undesirable" genetic characteristics from the gene pool, for example by sterilizing citizens with apparent genetic predispositions toward, say, alcoholism or drug addiction. Infuential supporters of negative eugenics included prominent German scholars like Ernst Haeckel who in the early twentieth century argued in favor of the ancient Spartan strategy of eliminating any weak or sickly babies from their communities in order to strengthen the wider gene pool.7 Around the same time, Karl Pearson, an early twentieth-century English mathematician, argued that nations should be "kept up to a high pitch of external effciency by contest, chiefy by way of war with inferior races, and with equal races by the struggle for trade routes and the sources of raw materials and food supply."8 It was easy for those from the upper class like Pearson to espouse such destructive beliefs because when nations went to war as they did during World War One (1914–1918)—their lives were rarely put in harm's way. It was the proverbial working-class "cannon fodder," structurally excluded from the distant safety of the offcer ranks, who almost exclusively paid the price for the decisions by elites to go to war and expend, as it turned out, millions of genetically healthy lives in the trenches. This class bias extended to Germany's home front. For example, during the British Naval blockade (1915–1919), more than 400,000 mostly working-class German civilians starved to death.9 Such class iniquities before and leading up to Germany's eventual World War One defeat ensured the Reich's brief experiment with democratic governance—the ill-fated Weimar Republic (1919–1932)—was marred by political instability frequently fueled by lower-class demands for a fairer and more egalitarian German society.10

Soon after the Weimar Republic came to power, in 1920 the publication of Binding and Hoche's *The Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life* saw the popularity of negative eugenics grow.11 This book claimed that during World War One, as the strongest Germans were dying in droves on the frontlines, the lives of the apparently weakest genetic stock (those ineligible for military service) were safely preserved back in Germany. This preservation of the inferior over the superior was, they argued, weakening Germany's wider gene pool. A year later, Baur, Fischer, and Lenz published what became the leading German text on negative eugenics, *Outline of Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene*. 12 Those convinced by this increasingly popular literature started appealing to the country's political elite. For example, in 1923 the director of a Saxony health institute tried (unsuccessfully) to convince a minister in the Weimar government that, "what we radical hygienists promote is not at all new or unheard of. In a cultured nation of the frst order, in the United States of America, that which we strive toward was introduced and tested long ago."13 Indeed, Germany trailed behind the USA, the world's leader in negative eugenics, which, frst in Indiana in 1907, and then in half of all the states by the 1930s,14 became "*the frst country to pass laws calling for compulsory sterilization in the name of racial purifcation*" [italics original].15 Having said this, the sterilization of Americans was, relative to the country's population, a seldom applied policy.16 Elsewhere, Switzerland and several Scandinavian countries introduced laws in the 1920s aimed at the sterilization of certain institutionalized peoples.17 Although across the early twentieth century the German medical profession tended to favor the far less radical feld of positive eugenics, the tide was starting to change. For example, in 1932, just before the Nazi Party took power, the Weimar government drafted a voluntary sterilization law aimed at those with disabilities.18 The law introduced on 1 January 1934 prompted Joseph S. DeJarnette, the superintendent of a hospital in Virginia, to claim in frustration, "The Germans are beating us at our own game."19

For the wider German public, awareness of negative eugenics came through sources more mainstream than medical treatises, including Adolf Hitler's 1925 autobiography, *Mein Kampf* (My Battle or My Struggle).20 Hitler, a decorated World War One veteran and disgruntled leader of the right-wing Nazi Party, wrote this book while serving a prison sentence for a failed attempt in 1923 to overthrow the Weimar government. As early as 1920, the Nazi Party capitalized on the widespread postwar class tensions by advocating for "the uniting of all Germans within the one greater Germany…" They added, however, one caveat: Only "persons of German blood" could be nationals.21 Hitler was basically advocating in favor of a race-based welfare state where greater class equality would be offered to all genetically healthy true-blooded Germans.22 All outsiders, however, were to be excluded from receiving any Nazi welfare particularly Germany's Jews, a group Hitler frequently dehumanized using terms like "bacilli," "spongers," "parasites," "poisonous mushrooms," and "rats…"23 As Götz Aly notes, here "Nazi ideology conceived of racial confict as an antidote to class confict"—a predictably popular political strategy because it propagated "two age-old dreams of the German people: national and class unity."24

Then again, not everybody across early twentieth-century Germany felt as Hitler and the Nazi Party did toward the Jews. For example, Jewish political candidates during Germany's 1912 election won one-seventh of the seats in the Reichstag. This was an impressive feat since Germany's Jews made up only 1% of the national population. Success at the polls saw some in conservative political parties bitterly dub this election the "Jewish elections."25 Putting the pockets of dissent aside, this electoral success clearly indicates that many non-Jewish Germans must have felt quite positively toward their Jewish political representatives.

Although some believe the origins of Hitler's intense antisemitism can be traced back to his more formative years,26 others suspect it was largely stimulated by his post-1919 belief that Germany's Jews were to blame for the Reich's loss of World War One, along with the great loss of German lives and land this defeat entailed.27 Hitler believed Germany had not been defeated militarily (which in fact it had),28 but instead lost the war and, as part of the Treaty of Versailles, almost oneeighth of its territory because Jewish leaders had treasonously stabbed their own nation in the back by submitting to the Allies. Germany's Jews did so, according to Hitler, with the sole intention of advancing their own social and economic position, pursuits that only highlighted their moral inferiority. Much like Wagner, Hitler also believed there existed a cunning group of international Jewish fnanciers whose machinations involved aspirations of worldwide economic domination. His developing ideology amalgamated ideas from Baur, Fischer, and Lenz on negative eugenics with his own on German nationalism.29 This theoretical synthesis cemented the structural foundations of what would become Nazism, which according to Müller-Hill:

claimed that there is a biological basis for the diversity of Mankind. What makes a Jew a Jew, a Gypsy a Gypsy, an asocial individual asocial, and the mentally abnormal mentally abnormal is in their blood, that is to say in their genes. All…are inferior. There can be no question of equal rights for inferior and superior individuals, so, as it is possible that inferior individuals breed more quickly than the superior, the inferior must be isolated, sterilized, rejected, and removed, a euphemism for killed. If we do not do this, we make ourselves responsible for the ruin of our culture.30

Clearly, Nazi ideology was not singularly concerned with Jews something would also have to be done about other threatening and "inferior" groups. Having said that, there is no doubt Hitler had an incomparable and singular hatred of Jews, a group he believed posed a great moral and genetic threat to the Western world. In fact, not long after the formation of the Nazi Party, Hitler threatened:

As soon as I have power [he said in 1922] I shall have gallows erected, for example in Munich in the Marienplatz. Jews will be hanged one after another and they will stay hanging until they stink … then the next group will follow … until the last Jew in Munich is exterminated. Exactly the same procedure will be followed in other cities until Germany is cleansed of the last Jew.31

Whether rich or poor, powerful or powerless, inferior or cunning, capitalist or communist, German or otherwise, if they were Jews then they were to blame. As Browning put it, for Hitler "the 'Jewish question' was the key to all other problems and hence the ultimate problem."32 Much of the disdain traced back to plan old jealousy. That is, because within Jewish culture there has long been a deeply rooted dedication to studious habits and the pursuit of higher learning, in a modern meritocracy like Germany where opportunity (relatively speaking) abound, German Jews punched well above their weight. In terms of conventional measures of success, across the frst third of the twentieth century, German Jews were disproportionately represented in the legal and medical professions. But perhaps most impressively, although German Jews only made up 1% of the population, between 1905 and 1937 nearly 37% of all German Nobel Laureates had Jewish ancestry.33 Particularly among the many disaffected non-Jewish Germans who, like Hitler, failed to measure up, the scapegoat of blaming a visibly successful minority for all their own personal failures proved all too tempting. Importantly, Hitler's views conficted with Christianity's traditional solution to the apparent threat of Judaism: religious conversion and assimilation. As far as Hitler was concerned, converting Jews into Christians would not eliminate the risk they posed to the "superior" Germanic bloodline. Assimilation, for Hitler, was tantamount to collective Germanic suicide.

On the other side of Nazi ideology's application of negative eugenics lay *Lebensraum*, the imperial quest to obtain more land or "living space…"34 This notion drew on the tenets of positive eugenics. According to Hitler, if the "Germanic race" were indeed to thrive, then the ten million or so "high grade"35 ethnic Germans living abroad in Eastern Europe needed to be repatriated. Together, Germany and Germans from near and far would become stronger. To accommodate this infux, however, Germany (apparently) required more land. It was this need for more living space that the Nazi regime used to bolster the necessity of going to war.36 As far as Hitler was concerned, this land would best come from beyond the Reich's eastern national border— Poland and the Soviet interior. Annexing other nations' sovereign lands and unavoidably decimating large numbers of the native populations of those countries hardly bothered Hitler who saw Lebensraum as just another chapter in Western European colonialism.37 Western nations like France, Holland, Britain, Italy, and indeed nineteenth-century Germany had all colonized other lands—why shouldn't modern Germany do so too. Hitler himself referenced Britain's empire when he said, "The Russian space is our India."38 With a tip of his hat to formal rationality, why bother ineffciently traveling halfway across the world when a colonial empire so conveniently lay next door? While colonization awaited victory in war, removal of Germany's Jews offered a more immediate solution to freeing up living space in Germany itself. If the Nazis ever came to power, removing Germany's Jews would be a priority.

From 1924 onward, the popularity of the Nazi Party increased, particularly among young, unemployed working-class men who, for reasons just mentioned, reveled in Hitler's uncouth tirades against the Jews. Appealing only to this demographic, however, was no road to political power. The Nazi Party won only 12 of 608 electoral seats in the 1928 election.39 For subsequent elections, most obviously from 1930 onward,40 the Party adopted a new strategy. It tailored its nationalistic message to appeal to all Germans, only emphasizing their hatred of the Jews in the presence of antisemitic audiences. Increasingly, a new, subtle, seemingly less radical, and more presidential Hitler emerged.41 As a fearless crusader in pursuit of righting widely shared nationalistic wrongs like the unpopular Treaty of Versailles—a new Hitler spoke largely of "honor, struggle, glory, and morality."42 The Nazi Party's new and more appealing nationalistic campaign strategy also focused on "[e]motionally powerful but programmatically vague slogans such as 'Freedom and Bread!' and 'Order at Home and Expansion Abroad…'"43 During his now broadly alluring feel-good speeches, Hitler reinforced this political ambiguity, advocating in favor of "*Volk* and fatherland … the eternal foundation of our morality and our faith" along with "the preservation of our *Volk*."44 While other politicians talked of tax reform and economic policy, Hitler's affective, yet pragmatically empty, orations saw his popularity among many German patriots soar. Much has been made of Hitler's spellbinding hypnotic charisma. Although he was undoubtedly a gifted public speaker, the success behind his rising appeal was less mysterious. In terms of his ability to bring many within the crowd to his side, like the consummate salesperson, Hitler:

would begin by acquainting himself with his audience and studying their reactions to several topics. When he had identifed their desires, he would explain confdently why only his Nazi movement could fulfll them. Listeners would say to themselves, 'Of course, that's just what I have always believed.'45

The Nazi Party's strategic move away from mere Jew-baiting and toward their more upbeat formula of populist patriotism may have been timely because by the late 1920s one indicator at least suggests that for the frst time since the defeat of 1918, German nationalism was undergoing a revival. More specifcally, by the late 1920s German war memorials had changed from typically conveying grief over the enormous loss of (working-class) lives to instead emphasizing Germany's World War One battle victories, glorifying individual acts of bravery, and promoting awareness of wars that advanced German unifcation.46 Those critical of the jingoistic folly of this shift were, as they usually are, criticized and then dismissed as unpatriotic.47 Perhaps the Weimar Republic supported this stylistic change in war commemorations because, as the start of World War One showed, when class relations were tense nothing united all Germans quite like militant Prussian nationalism.48 Obviously, the Nazi Party also sensed this cultural shift, but unlike other political parties, none were led by a fercely passionate war veteran with oratorical skills so perfectly suited to capitalizing on a rising wave of nationalistic fervor. Then, in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash, Hitler moved on to politically exploiting the miseries of the Great Depression: Weimar democracy, he argued, was clearly failing poor Germans; however, his Nazi welfare state promised to provide for *all* [healthy Aryan] citizens. During the 1930 election, rising nationalism and the Great Depression saw the Nazis experience a phenomenal ninefold improvement at the ballot box. However, even this success only translated into 107 parliamentary seats, leaving the Nazis a minority political party.49

As the Nazi Party's star rose, Hitler asked fellow World War One veteran Ernst Röhm in 1930 to increase the dwindling ranks of the Nazi SA (the Nazi Party's paramilitary arm—the so-called Stormtroopers). The SA formed in 1921 and consisted mostly of disaffected working-class war veterans. Hitler promised that for his services, if the Nazi regime came to power, Röhm would be granted the authority to pursue a revolution against wealthy Jews. This deal made sense to Hitler because if the Nazis ever governed Germany, he intended to fund his Aryan welfare state by exploiting the Jews and other "subhumans…"50

Meanwhile, the Nazis continued to pursue their winning political strategy of appealing to the widest possible audience.51 Finally, the election of 1932 bore real fruit: The Nazi Party won 230 parliamentary seats or 37.3% of the national vote.52 The political might that came with obtaining just over a third of the national vote was accentuated by the emergence of cracks within the left-wing parties, whose otherwise greater collective power was diminished due to internal squabbling.53 The Nazi Party, therefore, emerged from the election as the single largest party in the Reichstag.

President Paul von Hindenburg, however, refused to support Hitler's bid for the chancellor's seat, but the Reichstag rejected von Hindenburg's preferred candidate, Franz von Papen, the leader of the conservative Catholic Center Party. New elections were set for the end of the year, the result of which saw support for the Nazi Party slip to around 33%. Paul von Hindenburg again overlooked Hitler as chancellor, this time favoring Kurt von Schleicher, but he too proved unpopular with the Reichstag. After some political wrangling, von Papen suggested a compromise: make Hitler chancellor but only on the condition that the Nazi Party obtain just two of the remaining eleven cabinet seats. Furthermore, Röhm was to be estranged from the Nazi Party, and Hitler would cede to the dictates of those who would become his new friends conservatives in big business. Von Papen added that should Hitler fail to abide by these conditions, von Hindenburg could instruct the Wehrmacht (the Germany army) to remove the entire Nazi Party.54 Von Papen's underlying intention, it transpires, was to provide Hitler with the image of political power while his fellow members of the Catholic Center Party dominated the cabinet, structurally retaining all power for themselves (and their arch-conservative party colleagues). With the Nazi Party's recent slip in the polls, a more desperate Hitler accepted von Papen's conditions, thus obtaining the coveted chancellor's seat. This is not, of course, how the sanctimonious Hitler publicly presented his accent—morally transcending politicians' usual desperation for power, his acceptance of the chancellorship had apparently "been the most diffcult decision of my life."55 With Vice Chancellor von Papen by his side, these conditions, at least in the short term, largely moderated Hitler's more covert political agenda: purging Germany's Jews, rampant military conquest, and pan-European Lebensraum.56 Indeed, many around this point in time thought that Hitler—once renowned for his antisemitic tirades—had mellowed.57

Then in February 1933, the Reichstag was struck by arson—perhaps a Nazi orchestration58—and subsequent events took an even more favorable turn in Hitler's direction. The Nazi Party blamed the fre on the revolutionary communists, a political group that just so happened to be in direct competition with the Nazis because they too promised to address Germany's long-standing class inequalities. Many Germans, Hitler among them, believed something had to be done to restore political stability and relieve the state from the threat of communist revolution. Whatever Hitler and the cabinet decided to do, von Hindenburg, the Wehrmacht, and Hitler's new friends in big business were unlikely to interfere—they too despised the communists. On 24 March 1933, the increasingly senile von Hindenburg supported the cabinet's introduction of the Enabling Act, an emergency law designed to protect the state against future communist threats. This act enabled the new chancellor to rule by decree for four years, thus setting the legal foundations of what would become a Nazi dictatorship.59 Having helped draft the decree, von Papen was not concerned by the Enabling Act's long-term implications, probably because his party dominated the all-powerful cabinet. However, as Saul Friedländer notes, although the Enabling Act required that all new legislative and executive decisions be discussed with the cabinet, real power fell increasingly to Hitler alone.60 For so-called protective reasons, Hitler's henchmen began rounding up, detaining, and occasionally killing suspected communists in hastily constructed concentration camps. The mistreatment of these "terrorists" was widely supported61 only those within communist circles seemed concerned.

Not everything, however, went the Nazi's way. Although across the early 1930s Röhm successfully increased the SA membership to around four million,62 because von Papen pushed Hitler to estrange Röhm, the SA leader soon discovered he had been denied his revolution against rich Jews. An impatient Röhm and his SA leadership started initiating their own actions—the so-called second revolution—in the form of random acts of violence against wealthy Jews.63 These attacks, and Röhm's unwillingness to stop them, signaled to others that Hitler perhaps lacked control over factions within his own party. Before long, the increasingly rogue SA started to pose a threat to Hitler's tenuous hold on the chancellor's seat. Hitler, who believed the SA were acting like "fools and destroying everything…"64, needed to demonstrate to his new, yet wary, conservative friends that he retained total control. But to achieve this, Hitler also needed to show at least some support for the disgruntled Röhm. Hitler's fne balancing to resolve this problem involved his support for an SA-led nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses. The plan for this initiative was that the SA rank and fle would inform prospective customers that the stores they were about to enter were owned by rich Jews. This information, the SA assumed, would discourage patronage and, starved of income, these businesses would be forced to close. Although Hitler's conservative coalition partners were not as radically opposed as he was to the Jews, they were still antisemitic.65 Thus, Hitler anticipated that von Papen and his powerful friends were unlikely to oppose a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses, an initiative that might also placate the discontented Röhm.

Nazi Party radical Julius Streicher organized the boycott but failed to anticipate or did not care about its broader economic ramifcations. The boycott, which began on 1 April 1933, precipitated a sudden slide in the German stock exchange. Most of the targeted businesses were fnanced by German banks, businesses that were themselves fnanced by national and international investors. Furthermore, because Germany's Jews only made up 1% of the national population, most of those working within these Jewish-owned businesses were non-Jews. As Jewish owners suffered, so too would their far more numerous employees. On the day of the boycotts, the public—to the surprise of the Nazi Party—reacted with a general indifference and occasionally obstinacy to the SA's information campaign.66 Not only did the boycott damage Germany fnancially, it had little impact on its target. In frustration, some zealous SA members responded violently to public obstinacy, but even these actions only served to harden the public's resolve. As the boycott began to have an effect on the broader economic structures, the Nazis' conservative allies became concerned—those people Hitler could least afford to rile. All plans for future initiatives were immediately and permanently shelved.67 For the Nazi regime, the boycott was a dismal and embarrassing failure.

This political blunder confrmed to Hitler that the most effective and realistic solution to "the Jewish question" lay not in violence, but in the gradual introduction and accumulation of antisemitic laws that, with time, would make daily life for Germany's Jews increasingly unbearable. If Jews encountered legally enforced discrimination at every turn, they might abandon all they owned and move elsewhere. A legal solution would suffciently placate Hitler's most antisemitic supporters because it showed at least something was being done to remove Germany's Jews. And because mass Jewish emigration would open up new and lucrative business and employment opportunities, the Nazis' powerful conservative allies and many other Aryan welfare benefciaries were unlikely to express any reservations.

On 7 April 1933, the Nazi Party introduced the Re-establishment of the Career Civil Service Act. This act determined that all German civil servants with at least one Jewish grandparent were to be dismissed.68 However, because von Hindenburg demanded the new law included exemptions for all Jews who had participated in or had family members killed during World War One, many Jewish civil servants managed to retain their government posts. Once again, Nazi attempts to undermine Germany's Jews had failed.69 Moreover, factions within the SA expressed their dissatisfaction with what seemed to them to be Hitler's soft legal solution. The SA continued to engage in sporadic acts of violence against Jews,70 and this hooliganism generated great unease among both Hitler's powerful conservative allies and the general public. And because these assaults typically traced back to Hitler's own inner ranks, the Führer decided to purge the more uncontrollable elements of the SA's leadership. In June 1934, inner-circle Nazis including Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler organized to have Röhm and other rogue SA leaders assassinated during what has become known as the Night of the Long Knives. These assassinations—"the Third Reich's frst mass murder"71—were in part designed to send a stern law-and-order message to the remaining SA rank and fle.72 But this political purge extended into a broader power grab: Some of the targets included von Papen's own colleagues. The brazen plan worked. Soon afterward von Hindenburg died, Hitler pushed a nervous von Papen out of national politics. If the public was startled by these criminal acts of violence, leading political theorist and jurist(!) Carl Schmitt helped calm their nerves by arguing that actually mightmakes-right: "The Führer's deed was…not subordinate to justice, but rather it is itself supreme justice."73 Schmitt, it transpires, was far from the only prominent academic fgure to provide reckless early support for Hitler and his clearly criminal regime—philosopher Martin Heidegger also helped the Party attain a level of high-society respectability.74 After Hitler himself successfully spun the murders in the media into an unfortunate yet morally necessary act,75 he then merged the offces of chancellor and president, assuming the new dual position himself. From this point, the Nazi Party held total dictatorial control of Germany. Claudia Koonz captures both the speed and enormity of Hitler's achievements:

In just over a year, he had mobilized ethnic populism to replace a constitutional democracy with a regime that could murder in the name of morality—and make its justifcation credible in the eyes of most Germans.76

With the removal of Röhm and other obstacles, Hitler was able to lay the foundations of what was at the time a politically more acceptable, legal-based solution to his Party's "Jewish question"—forced emigration. In September 1935, Hitler introduced the Nuremberg Laws, which, among other things, attempted to both defne the Jews and prohibit their marriage to, and extramarital relations with, non-Jewish Germans.77 According to this hastily introduced law, a Jewish person was anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents.78 And because the Nazis had no defnitive biological marker of Jewishness, the defning measure of a Jewish grandparent ended up being determined by baptismal records.79 Although clearly aimed mostly at the Jews, this law also applied to Germany's Gypsies.80

A year later, Göring was appointed to head the Four Year Plan (a national strategy of rearmament and self-suffciency), a time frame that hinted at when Hitler intended to go to war in the pursuit of Lebensraum.81 The massive military preparations, in conjunction with the construction of about 1000 kilometers of Autobahn highway and numerous major public building projects in Berlin and Nuremberg, saw the rate of unemployment decrease.82 The ensuing economic recovery—fnanced by what Aly describes as "fscally irresponsible" decisions to increase the national debt83—boosted the German public's confdence in their increasingly beloved Führer. As one passionate supporter, Helga Schmidt said, Hitler:

got rid of unemployment. Just about everybody had a job. He helped poor families with lots of children [who received] preferential coupons for foodstuffs, for clothing. They could buy them for less. Security for the population was restored. Crime disappeared completely. And, fnally, the cultural amenities [also contributed to Hitler's popularity], like the Strength through Joy Program, inexpensive visits to the theater, and things contributing to the population's cultural life in general. That won a lot of support for him.84

In fact, from November 1933 the Nazi's Strength through Joy Program offered "deserving German workers" something never previously heard of before: cheap holidays abroad.85 Also new was that the Nazis made May Day, a springtime celebration honoring workers, a paid holiday.86 Middle- and upper-class Germans also did well: Between 1937 and 1939, the ownership of tens of thousands of cut-price Jewish businesses was transferred into the hands of no doubt delighted Aryans87—some of whom did not even belong to the Nazi Party.88 Another frst was that Hitler promised that automobiles would become affordable for all German families.89 With increased opportunities like these, it is perhaps of little surprise that Hans Dieter Schäfer argues that in the frst six years of the Nazi regime, Gentiles were twice as likely to move up in German society as they had during the last six years of the Weimar Republic.90 By 1939, there were more jobs than Germans could fll and 200,000 foreign workers were brought in to cover the shortfall.91 With things going so well under a strong dictator who genuinely seemed to care about every class of (Aryan) German, why bother going back to Weimar-like democracy marred, as it was, having emerged from a humiliating military defeat, followed by widespread (lower) class dissension, hyperinfation, political instability, and a crippling economic depression?92 This is why so many non-Jewish Germans described the peace period under the Nazis (1933–1939) "as a 'great time.'"93 Too busy reveling in their own windfall, few if any of these lower- to upper-class Nazi welfare recipients stopped to contemplate who exactly was subsidizing their great times.94

The success of these and other achievements were also, in part, due to Hitler's management style. As Browning observes:

the Nazi system was composed of factions centered around the Nazi chieftains, who were in perpetual competition to outperform one another. Like a feudal monarch, Hitler stood above his squabbling vassals. He allotted 'fefs' to build up the domains of his competing vassals as they demonstrated their ability to accomplish the tasks most appreciated by the Führer.95

Those who succeeded in converting Hitler's desires into reality were rewarded with larger projects and more power. And the ferce competition to please Hitler saw some of his more entrepreneurial underlings attempt to anticipate the Führer's desires and then, through their own great initiative, convert these suspected wishes into reality.96 As early as 1934, Werner Willikens, a state secretary in the Agriculture Ministry, realized how the new system worked:

everyone with a post in the new Germany has worked best when he has, so to speak, worked towards the Führer. Very often and in many spheres it has been the case…that individuals have simply waited for orders and instructions…but in fact it is the duty of everybody to try to work towards the Führer along the lines he would wish […] But anyone who really works towards the Führer along his lines and towards his goal will certainly both now and in the future one day have the fnest reward in the form of the sudden legal confrmation of his work.97

The German Foreign Offce's Martin Luther provides an exemplary model of someone working toward the Führer's probable goals. Luther's meteoric rise up the Nazi ranks was, in part, due to his deployment of Carl Friedrich's rule of anticipated reactions (see Volume 1), where subordinates ask themselves "how would my superior wish me to behave?" Luther had an ability to anticipate from the bottom-up what his immediate superior, von Ribbentrop, needed before anyone else. And Luther was able to do so because, compared to his fellow subordinates, he could more accurately sense what Ribbentrop's boss—the Führer probably top-down desired.98 During the Obedience studies, Williams, the experimenter, tended to engage in a similar "seizing the initiative from below in response to vague signals emanating from above…"99 As the also "successful" Gestapo head Heinrich Müller explained to his men during World War Two, in the absence of written orders, they had to "get used to reading between the lines and acting accordingly."100 The consequence was the introduction of a more modern horizontal, rather than top-down vertical, chain of command, where talented individuals from the lower ranks were free to pursue initiatives that could end up having a major infuence on future policy.101 And the Führer greatly relied on the rule of anticipated reactions, as he said himself:

Where would I be…if I would not fnd people to whom I can entrust work which I myself cannot direct, tough people of whom I know they take the steps I would take myself. The best man is for me the one who bothers me least by taking upon himself 95 out of 100 decisions.102

Is it possible that Milgram, who was frequently absent from his laboratory, felt the same way about Williams? It transpires that Hitler's handsoff management style could also prove politically expedient. Should any of his underling's initiatives fail or even end up embarrassing the party, the Führer could always distance himself from personal responsibility because he never explicitly made such demands. And if Hitler (apparently) had no knowledge of such initiatives, he could rather conveniently claim plausible deniability, thus evading any political fallout.103

One area where competition in anticipating the Führer's desires remained intense was in the resolution of the all-important "Jewish question." On this issue, two main factions existed. On the one hand, there were those termed the "realists" who favored legislative changes that promoted forced emigration104 and on the other were those termed the "strong believers,"105 including party radicals like Julius Streicher (editor of the antisemitic publication *Der Stürmer*—*The Stormtrooper*) and Joseph Goebbels (head of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda). The strong believers thought that emigration of so-called inferiors to just beyond the Reich's geographical border would only enable them to reproduce and would do nothing to eliminate their potential future threat. Thus, when it came to the "Jewish question," they believed sterilization or even extermination was the only permanent solution.106 At this early stage, Hitler favored a policy of forced emigration, probably because it had already shown itself to be more "realistic." Two particular events, both in 1938, reinforced this preference: the Kristallnacht pogrom and the annexation of Austria.

During the summer of 1938, the Évian Conference was held in France. The aim of this meeting of political heads and various nongovernmental organizations was to explore the possibility of other countries accepting Germany's unwanted Jews. However, the talks soon stalled because the German government refused to give assurances that Jewish refugees could migrate with suffcient capital with which to start new lives abroad.107 So, even when Jews were willing to leave Germany, without capital—which the Nazi regime had frozen—most other nations in the wake of a post-1929 fnancial crisis refused to accept them or, at best, only small numbers. The failure of this conference ensured that most German Jews found themselves stuck in a country whose government did not want them. In frustration, the Nazi regime forced some Polish-born Jews living in Germany back to their homeland. However, the Polish government refused to accept them, arguing that because they had lived in Germany for so long, they were now German nationals. This border dispute rendered these Jews stateless refugees. On 7 November 1938, a desperate Jewish teenager, whose parents happened to be caught in this border dispute, reacted by assassinating a German embassy offcial in Paris. In revenge, Goebbels convinced Hitler to allow him to organize a nationwide pogrom aimed at Germany's Jews.108 Goebbels was probably trying to capitalize on the assassination as a means of promoting antisemitic sentiment within Germany and to claw back some of the power he and other "strong-believers" had lost to the "realists." The pogrom became known as Kristallnacht (night of crystal, or the "Night of Broken Glass"). Largely at the hands of Nazi Stormtroopers, on 9–10 November nearly 300 synagogues were burned down, hundreds of Jewish-owned businesses were vandalized and looted, and, like the communists before them, thousands of Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. The pogrom ended in about one hundred Jewish fatalities.

Because pogrom-like violence of this scale had not been seen in industrialized Western Europe for such a long time,109 Kristallnacht was a watershed event. But the pogrom also generated a variety of unforeseen problems for the Nazi regime. First, it led to the destruction of Jewish property that happened to be insured by German and international frms. Second, the chaos surrounding the pogrom sent more shock waves of fear through the volatile German stock exchange. And fnally, again to the regime's surprise, the ensuing disorder disgusted signifcant sectors of German society.110 These problems rendered Goebbels' pogrom a complete political disaster and thus further reinforced the realist position.111

Simultaneously, another major event bolstered Hitler's view that mass emigration offered the most likely "successful solution" to his Party's "Jewish problem." In pursuit of Lebensraum and to unify "all persons of German blood," the Wehrmacht annexed Hitler's homeland of Austria on 12 March 1938. Doing so meant Germany inherited Austria's 200,000 Jews112—even more Jews than the Nazis had been able to push out of Germany.113 Soon afterward, one of Himmler's low-ranking Nazi bureaucrats, Adolf Eichmann, developed an "assembly-line technique" to increase the effciency of the Austrian government's Jewish emigration application process.114 As Eichmann explained after the war, "an idea took shape in my mind: a conveyor belt. The initial application and all the rest of the required papers are put in at one end, and the passport falls off at the other…"115 Within six months, Eichmann's organizational process resulted in the deportation of one-quarter of all Austria's Jews. Eichmann's "realist" superiors could boast of this great success in contrast to the disastrous Kristallnacht pogrom. According to Karl Schleunes, the simultaneous failure of Kristallnacht and Eichmann's success caused a pivotal power shift within the upper echelons of the Nazi hierarchy:

The year 1938 is marked…by…a trend towards centralization of control over Jewish policy. In part this trend refected the newly found powers of Goering, Heydrich, and Eichmann; in part it refected the fnal failure of the emotional antisemitic wing of the Nazi movement to produce a solution to the Jewish problem through pogroms. The failure of the November pogrom fnally discredited the impulsive radicals and strengthened the hand of the realists whose work in 1938 promised a more effective solution through bureaucratic means. Most important of all, Hitler fnally made a choice between these two approaches to the Jewish issue.116

As effcient organizational means to the desired political end were introduced, the "hoodlums were banished and the bureaucrats took over."117 The "Göring-Himmler-Heydrich alliance,"118 with the support of Eichmann's effective organizational skills, gained supremacy in dealing with the "Jewish problem," wherever it might lead. Once Göring had been placed in charge, he delegated responsibility to SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, who, on 24 January 1939, authorized the opening of the Reich Central Offce for Jewish Emigration.119 Heydrich instructed that Eichmann's more effcient approach to mass emigration was to be applied in all of Germany's larger cities.120

While Hitler's actions signifed his support for the "realists," however, his rhetoric still tended to refect the views of the "strong believers."121 In a 30 January 1939 speech, he stated:

In my life I have often been a prophet, and I have mostly been laughed at. At the time of my struggle for power, it was mostly the Jewish people who laughed at the prophecy that one day I would attain in Germany the leadership of the state and therewith of the entire nation, and that among other problems I would also solve the Jewish one. I think that the uproarious laughter of that time has in the meantime remained stuck in German Jewry's throat. […] Today I want to be a prophet again: If international fnance Jewry inside and outside Europe again succeeds in precipitating the nations into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and with it the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.122

Because of Hitler's circa 1930 public relations makeover from vitriolic Jew baiter to refective political visionary, the above statement was actually one of only three occasions between 1933 and 1939 where the Führer publicly expressed his racial hatred of the Jews.123 Then, just over a month later in March 1939, Hitler certainly did his bit to encourage such a war when his troops annexed all of Czechoslovakia (including the Sudetenland). Because, in this case, the Nazis could not rely on their usual late 1930s justifcations for annexing other nations' territories—like their repossessing of land "stolen" as a result of the Treaty of Versailles or coming to the aid of German settlers "suffering" at the hands of nations just beyond Germany's border—Hitler's actually far broader covert ambitions to annex more *living space* became, for the frst time, undeniable.124 On a pan-European scale, it was clear that Hitler was, frst and foremost, aggressively in pursuit of Lebensraum.

When Hitler made his threat to annihilate European Jewry, it probably appeared to inner-circle Nazis as pure posture. His actions clearly supported the "realist" policy of forced emigration (and he had previously threatened the lives of German Jews, obviously with no follow-through). However, such threats were in all likelihood both posture and genuine. Posturing, because even if the Nazis gained total control of Europe sometime in the future, they had neither the strategy, nor the infrastructure, nor the technology—*no procedure*—to render them capable of exterminating such massive numbers of mostly women and children. Hitler's position here in some ways resembles Milgram's before the pilot studies: The Führer had a preconceived goal but, at that point in time, no procedure capable of converting it into a reality. Nonetheless, the point is that for Hitler, annihilation was and would remain for some time impossible.

Even so, his threats were not completely hollow. Although a means of massacring massive numbers of civilians did not then exist, Hitler's past experience hinted at the possibility that, with time, it could possibly be invented. As a courier in the Wehrmacht during World War One, Hitler had participated in about ffty battles.125 He had experienced trench warfare frsthand during the Battle of the Somme, which had killed or wounded more than a million men in less than six months.126 Many other high-ranking Nazis had also experienced the incredibly destructive power of modern warfare. If death on such a massive scale were possible in one context, why not in another—just change the target and obtain the same end result? Bartov argues:

while there is clearly a distinction to be made between the mutual killing of soldiers and the wholesale massacre of defenseless populations, it is crucial to realize that total war and genocide are closely related. For modern war provides the occasion and the tools, the manpower and the organization, the mentality and the imagery necessary for the perpetration of genocide. With the introduction of industrial killing to the battlefeld, the systematic murder of whole peoples became both practical and thinkable: those who had experienced the former could imagine and plan, organize, and perpetrate the latter.127

In fact, almost two decades earlier in *Mein Kampf*, Hitler had envisaged the application of the then-latest military technology to resolving his score with the Jews, suggesting that 12,000–15,000 "Hebrew corrupters" be "held under poison gas…"128 And historical events informed Hitler that other nations during wartime had managed to exterminate massive numbers of unwanted civilians. As we shall see, just over six months after making the above (January 1939) threat, Hitler acknowledged awareness of the Armenian genocide by the Turks and had long "admired" the US extermination of its indigenous population.129 As Germany, perhaps the most technically advanced nation in the world,130 approached the mid-twentieth century, who really knew what might be possible under the cover of war. Perhaps war and genocide could be part of a single Nazi ideological program. Just as Milgram would use the Holocaust as an initial guide to envisage a basic experimental procedure, Hitler used previous genocides and wars to image exterminating the Jews.

Nevertheless, until 1939 all signals suggested to the "realist" in Hitler that extermination remained impossible and Jewish emigration the more practical alternative. But the "strong believer" in Hitler knew that displacing "inferiors" beyond the border would not eliminate their perceived threat. And therefore a realistic strategy capable of mass extermination is, in all likelihood, what he ultimately desired. After all, underlings referred to the annihilation of European Jewry as "the Führer's wish"—something desired but like most wishes, probably unobtainable.131 For "realist" bureaucrats—Eichmann, his superior Reinhard Heydrich, and his superior Heinrich Himmler—who all worked competitively on the Jewish question, more power awaited those who could convert the Führer's wish into reality.

# The Change from Conventional Positive to Radical Negative Eugenics

How, it must be asked, could Hitler have felt so comfortable publicly threatening all of European Jewry just two months after many German "onlookers" had shunned the violent Kristallnacht pogrom? Perhaps these onlookers were more disgusted with the disorder than the terrifying experiences of the Jewish targets.132 Somewhat related to this, it is fairly clear that by the eve of World War Two, public support for or indifference to Nazi ideology and negative eugenics had increased. And it appears that the German public's increasing sympathy for or general indifference to the Nazi's radical worldview can, as the following argues, largely be attributed to systemic forces—the Nazi ascendency to power, and more specifcally, their total control over state fnances. That is, after the Nazis rose to power, they gained monopolistic control over Germany's "informational and social feld."

On assuming power, and especially after the formalization of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, the Nazi regime instituted a policy to fund the research only of those members of the German intelligentsia academics and scientists—who were willing to become National Socialists.133 This contractual clause inadvertently ensured that those most likely to obtain government funding were sympathetic to Nazi ideology or careerists who, concerned with their fnancial or social security, would tow the party line.134 Both groups could be counted on to provide the Nazi regime with scholarly data that at least did not confict with or, even better, bolstered the party's radical belief system. Beyond funding, other benefts for producing ideologically congruent research included rapid promotion, new employment opportunities, fellowships, lecture tours, accolades, press conferences, intensifed media coverage, and selection to sit on prestigious editorial boards.135 In fact, to uncover the latest fndings in racial research, throughout Germany fve multi-disciplinary antisemitic research institutes were created what we today would call think tanks.136 A number of German biologists, theologians, psychiatrists, and anthropologists—for example, Max Hildebert Boehm, Paul Brohmer, Eugen Fischer, Gerhard Kittel, Robert Ritter, Carl Schneider, Peter-Heinz Seraphim, and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer—not only politically supported the Nazis, most if not all ended up producing research that reinforced the party's racist and ableist ideology. While this "veritable academic industry" thrived,137 it was no coincidence that all of these fgures, to some degree, personally benefted.138 Although the ideologically congruent researchers only made up a minority of the academy, because the regime tended to shower them with attention, they appeared to be far more representative than they actually were.139 Thus, not only did most tenured professors refuse to play ideological ball, as long as they kept their criticisms to themselves, they were not punished. They were, however, excluded from receiving all the benefts that happened to be on offer.140 As the scholarly silent majority sat back and watched some of their colleagues rewarded for publishing fraudulent and grossly fawed research, their resentment must have been palpable. Although the Nazi regime injected large amounts of funding into discovering an irrefutable physiological means of distinguishing Jews from others, no robust marker—blood type, nose shape, skull size, or fngerprint pattern—was ever found.141 As scholars in the natural sciences quickly tired of ever fnding such a marker, a small yet infuential group of social sciences and humanities researchers continued to unravel the (apparently) latest distinctive characteristics of Jewish culture.142

Another understandably very small group of scholars were distinguishable because they not only vociferously challenged their colleague's pro-Nazi research, they also attacked the intellectual foundations of Nazi ideology. For this, their career trajectories, relative to the ideologues, moved in the very opposite direction. Consider, for example, Karl Saller, an anthropologist at the University of Munich, who "attacked the concept of a fxed Nordic race and said that modern Germans were racially mixed. Reinhard Heydrich banned him from teaching. Saller lost his chair at Munich. His fellow university teachers did not protest, instead they started to avoid him."143 Those scholars who refused to join the Nazi Party, or worse, like Saller, publicly challenged the regime's beliefs, were forced to take their dissenting voices elsewhere or were silenced through imprisonment or execution.144 The insights of these critics, as Glover notes, "spread round the world, sometimes posthumously, sometimes through their writing and teaching in exile." Most importantly, "they were no longer there, in German and Austrian universities, to ask the necessary questions."145 Germany as a whole was thereby diverted from exposure to these alternative and intellectually more rigorous perspectives.146 Sustaining the Nazi's blinkered worldview was that between 1933 and 1934 about 1600 Jewish academics were fred and replaced with no doubt grateful and predictably compliant "Aryan" professors.147 For both the new and remaining non-Jewish scholars, the message was clear: Hitler refused "to accept disagreeable information" and this intransigent worldview would be "a dominant feature of his style of government."148

Germany's police, whose job it was to uphold the barrage of new and intensifying antisemitic laws, underwent a similar but probably intensifed ideological fltering process.149 In fact, during recruitment drives, prospective offcers who had joined the Nazi Party before 1933 were deemed preferable over those who had not.150 The effects of this fltering process accelerated greatly when in 1936 the uniformed police were subsumed by Himmler's Nazi SS—Hitler's elite paramilitary guard. The ideologically driven merger also saw the militarization of law enforcement across Germany.151

The primary and secondary teaching professions were also purged of all "undesirables"—Jews and critical Leftists.152 There too, career advancement became near impossible without party membership.153 Although only a third or quarter of teachers were ardent Nazis,154 by 1936 all teachers working for the German government had joined the Nazi Party,155 and more than two-thirds of them started attending "twoweekly 'retreats'" where they were familiarized with the application of Nazi ideology.156 Because only a minority of them were strong believers, Koonz notes that the means of advancing Nazi doctrine at these teacher retreats was purposefully subtle—less explicitly racist and ableist, and more about promoting a positive affect toward "national pride," "ethnic solidarity," and [healthy white] egalitarian "we-consciousness…"157 The broad and insidious consequence of this multi-pronged employment process across the academic, police, and teaching professions was that only committed ideologues, opportunists, and those fearing confict with the party ended up flling the most infuential leadership posts. Despite the varied approaches of these different professional groups when dealing with the Nazi party, the outcome was the same: All their overt criticisms against the regime essentially evaporated.

For Aryans, more employment and advancement opportunities followed when Goebbels eliminated all Jewish infuence from the press, radio, publishing houses, and flm industry.158 This policy stripped Germany's Jews of any opportunity to publicly respond to their mistreatment or to appeal to the sympathies of the wider public. Then again, it was not as if the Jews or anyone else for that matter could complain because as early as 1934 the Nazis had introduced laws like the Heimtückegesetz, which banned all political slander and critical dissent against them.159 And as early as 1933, Party headquarters started sending infringement notices to non-Jewish Germans observed maintaining social relations with Jews. As one person who had received three such infringement notices told a friend married to a Jewish woman, their "pleasant chats…must unfortunately cease."160 Nor were these threats empty: It got to the point where just showing kindness to Jews could result in arrest.161 Some people who were previously "anything but a Nazi" started, for example, wearing swastika lapel pins. They did so not because they had been politically converted, but because doing so circumvented suspicions of them being political agitators.162 Fearful or simply jaded into submission, the socially easiest path for those personally critical of the Nazi's discriminatory measures was silence.

Drawing on Luhmann's scholarly legacy, Stefan Kühl argues that most Germans' silence to the Nazi's antisemitic legal assault generated an antisemitic "fctional consensus…"163 This antisemitic fctional consensus was the false perception among most Germans that—because Goebbels fooded the media with images of massive crowds of Germans captivated by Hitler's every word164—the Nazi's racial policies must have been unanimously popular. The perception surrounding the popularity of the Nazi's discriminatory policies also had a powerful controlling infuence on most German's everyday social interactions. That is, with time Germans assumed that their fellows would react with universal approval to their overt support for the Nazis and universal disapproval to any criticism they might have of the regime. So those Germans who personally disagreed with the regime's treatment of "inferiors" felt an intensifying pressure to keep such views to themselves, thereby securing their critical silence.165 Importantly, Kühl adds that the critical silence, however, only ended up fueling the antisemitic fctional consensus because this apparent consensus was founded on the "untested assumption" that everybody else agreed with the Nazi's legal assault.166 Others, like Uwe Storjohann, captured the essence of this fctional consensus, describing Germany under the Nazis as a "nationally stable union of non-understanders, keep-quieters, head-nodders, deaf-ear- and blindeye-turners…"167 And if the Jewish community themselves never complained about their advancing social and legal isolation (they of course couldn't), perhaps, in the minds of the unrefective majority, the Jew's hardships were perhaps not all that harsh after all.

Anyway, across the second half of the 1930s the Nazi intellectuals' (pseudo) scientifc research, in conjunction with additional Nazi spin, was injected into the national educational curriculum,168 newspapers (particularly Streicher's "semi-pornographic" *Der Stürmer* and Walter Gross's more "breezy middlebrow" *Neues Volk* (*New Volk*)),169 Nazi youth organizations,170 exhibitions,171 and movie productions. Consider, for example, the National Socialist Offce of Racial Politics and their mid-1930s production of a variety of documentary flms with titles like *The Sins of the Fathers*, *Sins against Blood and Race*, and *Palaces for the Mentally Ill*, all of which subtly contrasted "degenerate[s]" with healthy athletic Nordic types.172 Then in 1940, the German flm industry released their two most infamous antisemitic movies: *Jud Süss* (Jew Suess) and *Der ewige Jude* (The Eternal Jew). As Friedländer notes, the aim of these subsidized flms was the same, "to elicit fear, disgust, and hatred."173 Although *Der ewige Jude* was a fop,174 in just a few years *Jud Süss*, a movie that repeats verbatim Martin Luther's violent solution to the "Jewish question" had been viewed by 20.3 million Germans.175 As one viewer noted, "The Jew is shown here as he really is […] I would have loved to wring his neck."176 For some viewers, the movie clearly had its intended effect. The fact that criticizing *Jud Süss* was illegal makes Goebbels' reaction to its launch somewhat farcical: "The flm is a wild success. One hears only enthusiastic comments" and "Everybody praises the flm to the skies…"177

So around the start of World War Two, it appears a relentless propaganda machine in the near absence of any conficting information persuaded many ordinary Germans that a society without "inferiors" would probably be good for the Reich.178 As Oskar Gröning, an SS administrator later stationed at Auschwitz, put it, "We were convinced by our worldview that there was a great conspiracy of Jewishness against us…"179 Therefore, during the early 1940s, Gröning "carried on working at Auschwitz not just because he was ordered to but because, having weighed the evidence put before him, he thought that the extermination program was right."180 As the more directly involved perpetrator, Kurt Möbius admitted:

We police went by the phrase, 'Whatever serves the state is right, whatever harms the state is wrong.' I would also like to say that it never even entered my head that these orders could be wrong. Although I am aware that it is the duty of the police to protect the innocent I was however at that time convinced that the Jewish people were not innocent but guilty. I believed all the propaganda that Jews were criminals and subhuman [*Untermenschen*] and that they were the cause of Germany's decline after the First World War.181

Because, as we shall see, the Nazi regime socially constructed Jews as partisans and crooks, morally self-righteous killers like Möbius really did perceive "themselves as the executors of state measures taken against killers, murderers, and criminals."182 For Möbius and many others, the German people were (apparently) victims of various injustices, and it was these kinds of iniquities that helped fuel what developed into an unwavering and unrefective pursuit of self-righteous revenge. Although the Nazi's insidious social engineering program aimed to, at least, secure the wider German public's indifference to the fate of German Jewry, for some, as the above comments illustrate, it potentially paved the way for something proactively far more radical. And this purposefully calculated (mis)information campaign also went further than converting the removal of Jews and other inferiors into a social good—those Germans who chose to maintain friendly relations with so-called inferiors would, as Müller-Hill implied earlier, be responsible for destroying advanced Germanic civilization.183 So not only was previously bad behavior morally inverted into a social good, what was once considered good was reconfgured into something really bad.184 One of the Nazi's greatest obstacles during their intense propaganda campaign was that, as De Swaan points out, many Germans had been exposed to other religious, educational, and familial moral codes. Consequently, "[t]hey were not completely devoid of a moral sense…" And, much like during the Obedience studies, when insuffciently indoctrinated people were faced by intense moral dilemmas, "inner confict[s]" could plague their conscience.185

In summary, the cumulative consequence of the Nazi's social engineering program was that over time sectors within the German intelligentsia, teaching profession, and entire security apparatus (among other groups) contributed to and helped reinforce the regime's self-imposed "ideological echo chamber…"186 From every direction within this chamber, German society was encouraged to believe that they were the master race and that in order to save advanced Germanic civilization, *something* monumental needed to be done about the impending threat posed by those of inferior blood. Again, because all the normally credible and authoritative societal voices explicitly or passively seemed to agree with Hitler, then, in the eyes of ordinary Germans, perhaps Nazi ideology was not all that radical after all. In fact, for many Germans the Nazis provided a unique form of political leadership: Only they were willing to stand up and protect all that was good and great, unlike all those "liberal-pacifst" fools elsewhere in the world who not only paved the way for the destruction of superior Aryan blood, but had even been duped into spending "great sums of money" to protect "criminals and mentally deranged" inferiors.187 It was for this reason, as Neitzel and Welzer astutely observe:

the entire collection of events known as the "Third Reich" and the violence it produced can be seen as a gigantic experiment, showing what sane people who see themselves as good are capable of if they consider something to be appropriate, sensible, or correct.188

As Roy Baumeister argues, when the world is viewed through the average German's eyes during the lead up to World War Two—we are morally good, others are degenerate and evil189—Nazi ideology no longer appears, as many see it today: the epitome of evil. Instead, when German citizenry's carefully manufactured and purposefully blinkered worldview is considered, their movement toward an increasingly violent solution becomes both terrifyingly logical and comprehensible.190 Led by an apparent "fearless crusader for justice," many of those working within the Nazi regime genuinely came to believe they were pursuing the morally right, even righteous path.191 And if there had been some potential merit to this inherently supercilious belief system—those of the Jewish faith, Gypsies, Eastern Europeans, and those with disabilities really did pose a genetic, social, and cultural threat to "advanced" Western civilization—then in the name of free speech, perhaps such issues merited public debate. But the problem was not just that they were wrong, the intractable Nazis had no interest in, and even actively went to enormous lengths to avoid, exposure to conficting critical views. They simply could not bear to have the validity of their bigoted worldview challenged and then demolished by more informed critics like Karl Saller. And that most Germans were socially, fnancially, and materially doing so well under the Nazis only rendered this majority more receptive or at least amenable to Hitler's covertly destructive political agenda. Thus, overarching structural forces (the legal assault, selective employment practices, and the Nazi's self-imposed "ideological echo chamber") along with the showering of various self-interested benefts likely played a crucial role in many German's avid support for or indifference toward the Nazi regime's increasingly radical and destructive ambitions. Furthermore, because each change the Nazis introduced was, on its own, small and therefore seemingly insignifcant, with time their many little changes added up to the point that German society was imperceptibly blunted to the reality that, in the spirit of shifting baselines, "fundamental change" had taken hold.192

This was the subtle, creeping, and cumulatively effectual (mis)information process that rendered many Germans in favor of or indifferent to the Nazi's radical negative eugenics-based social policies, whatever exactly they ended up entailing. The key achievement of the Nazi's social engineering was that many so-called inferiors were moved beyond "the boundaries of the universe of obligation…"193 It was therefore implied to the German citizenry that as far as their government was concerned, whatever hardships might befall the Jews and other "sub-humans," they need not fret over it. These people simply no longer mattered. And should, in the near future, the Nazi regime instruct those in the German armed forces to harm these "inferiors," by the late 1930s such a request was no longer outside but tentatively within the parameters of one's expected duties. That is, as Kühl convincingly argues, as the start of World War Two approached, the Nazi propaganda machine ensured that many members in the German armed forces were likely to "view an order to kill as an expectation within the framework of their organizational zone of indifference."194 Furthermore, because "the systematic disenfranchisement of the Jews had" by this point in time, "progressed so far that not a single member" of the German armed forces in the soon to be occupied territories "had to worry about being punished by the authorities if they assaulted Jews in violation of the applicable laws and regulations."195 Thus, as the start of the war approached, these men would have sensed that if Germany proved victorious, they could—if they so chose—very likely assault "inferiors" with total impunity.

# The Nazi Decent into World War Two

As mentioned, to reverse all those past injustices like the Treaty of Versailles and perhaps, in the process, make Germany even greater, central to Hitler's covert ideological vision was that Germany go to war. In pursuit of Lebensraum, in March 1939 Hitler started to plan an invasion of Poland. First, the Wehrmacht would attack Poland from the west, and by prior arrangement, the Soviet Union would invade Poland from the east. After defeating Poland, the invaders intended to split the spoils with the western half going to Germany and the Soviets gaining the eastern half. The Nazis anticipated that Poland's leadership class—politicians, intellectuals, and government offcials—were likely to encourage their citizenry to resist German hegemony. Hitler, therefore, believed that securing Polish docility necessitated this group's elimination. Fearing high-ranking members of the Wehrmacht might resist Hitler's desires, Heydrich and others were charged with forming the Einsatzgruppen, a paramilitary force. The Einsatzgruppen consisted of about two thousand carefully selected SS men who, according to SS-Brigadeführer Werner Best, were chosen on the grounds that they were likely to work "ruthlessly and harshly to achieve National Socialist aims…"196 Lothar Beutel (one of the commanders) said that Heydrich told the Einsatzgruppen leadership on 18 August 1939 that as far as the Polish resistance movement and its leaders were concerned, "everything was allowed, including shootings and arrests."197 Heydrich also supplied the Einsatzgruppen with a list of 61,000 Polish Jews and Christians who were believed to be members of "anti-German" groups.198 Four days after Heydrich's speech to the Einsatzgruppen leadership and just over a week before the invasion, on 22 August 1939, Hitler informed his top military commanders:

Our strength is in our quickness and our brutality. Genghis Khan had millions of women and children killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees only in him a great state builder. […] Thus for the time being I have sent to the East only my "Death's Head Units" with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?199

But why would Germans agree to pursue such premeditated plans to annex Polish territory and kill its citizenry—how could they support such blatant skulduggery that might put their own lives at risk? As Göring said after World War Two, kindling the German people's support for the Polish invasion was, for the Nazi regime, a minor obstacle:

Why, of course, the people don't want war […] Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. […] voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifsts for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.200

Indeed, on Hitler's orders, the SS intelligence service fabricated an attack by the Polish military on a German radio station proximate to the shared border.201 This pretense, as Göring put it, proved suffcient in securing public support for the Polish invasion. For the invading German forces, this attack secured "a belief in the justice of conquest…"202 Bolstering this pretense was the belief common among those like Hitler that when colonizing other nations it is "morally acceptable—especially in wartime—to extinguish 'lower' civilizations that stood in the way of 'progress.'"203 And should any of the inferiors prove lucky enough to survive the onslaught, the colonizer would then bestow on them the (apparently) invaluable gift of a "higher" civilization. Whatever the outcome of the colonizing feat, the invaders would rather conveniently end up reconfguring their destructive aggression into an all-round social good.

# Conclusion

This chapter outlined, within the democratic state of Germany, the disconcerting rise and increasing popularity of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. The Party's political ascendency was largely due to a combination of the cunning political strategy of appealing to the desires of all Germans and an uncanny ability to capitalize on every bit of luck that fell their way. Although already effective with so little, when the Party ascended to power and accessed the enormous resources of the German state, Goebbels seized this opportunity to promulgate the Nazi's ideological vision by, as Milgram would put it, restructuring the social and informational feld. The Nazis seductively appealed to the inferiority complex that happened to lie at the heart of the average non-Jewish German: "Aryans" are genetically superior, a master race is entitled to more than others, and, in a quest to make Germany great, the Nazi Party intended on giving Germans all they (apparently) deserved. Across Germany, the Nazi's expansionist ideology and contempt for so-called inferiors spread. This imperialist vision of grandeur and the general disdain (or indifference) it engendered toward "subhumans" proved infectious. Within many Germans, the dark side of this infection expressed itself in the form of vanity, hubris, and a militaristic yearning for a united omnipotent Germany to, much like during the nineteenth century, dominate.

The success of Goebbels' social engineering program was largely due to the Nazi Party's structural and systematic elimination of dissenting and simultaneous concentration of consenting "expert" public voices. For many ordinary Germans, the Nazi Party seemed to know the best way forward—anybody who was somebody said so and nobody seems to disagree. And as the Nazi's imperialist ambitions and their unrelenting disparagement of the infectious "other" spread, simultaneously the average German became socially, fnancially, and materially better off, albeit typically at the expense of those "others."204 The prospect of reaching the top proved too irresistible for many. Blind faith in their intensely antisemitic Führer soared and many Germans, with a "well-developed calculating instinct for their private interests,"205 decided they would follow him wherever he might lead them.

# Notes


quite common today. Consider, for example, that most viewers of Quentin Tarantino's blockbuster *Inglorious Basterds* are unlikely to question the immorality of the enormous amount of killing taking place before their eyes—Nazis are bad and therefore they deserve to be killed by the vengeful American Jewish soldiers. The irony is that just before and during World War Two, Nazis like Möbius could have watched a version of *Inglorious Bastards*—except with Nazis on a hunt in the forests for (apparent) partisan Jews—and he likely would have cheered along much as many viewers do today when the Nazis in Tarantino's original version get their comeuppance. Of course, there is great danger in this "good versus evil" narrative: People who kill for morally "good" reasons only end up providing the survivors of their attacks with the same morally self-righteous justifcation for then trying to kill them; thereby, potentially generating a never ending cycle of violence (Baumeister 1997, pp. 31–96).


# References


Westermann, E. B. (2005). *Hitler's police battalions: Enforcing racial war in the east*. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Wilhelm, H. (1997). "Inventing" the Holocaust for Latvia. In Z. Gitelman (Ed.), *Bitter legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR* (pp. 104–122). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Wistrich, R. S. (2001). *Hitler and the Holocaust: How and why the Holocaust happened*. Toronto, ON: Random House of Canada Limited.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# World War Two and Nazi Forays into the Killing of Civilians

On 1 September 1939, the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, an act that initiated French and British declarations of war, and thus signaled the start of World War Two. With their massive numbers, superior weaponry, and Blitzkrieg tactics, the Wehrmacht quickly swept Polish defenders aside. Then, on 17 September, the Soviets attacked Poland from the east. As anticipated, the Polish civilian population fercely resisted the Germans, typically in the form of sniper attacks. The Wehrmacht's usual wartime policy in dealing with civilian resistance was twofold. First, captured resisters were tried in a military court and if found guilty, executed. Second, if resisters evaded capture, community leaders were taken hostage and their lives threatened if the partisan activity continued.1 However, on 3 September Himmler provided the German armed forces with a third and much swifter option: a shoot-to-kill authorization that allowed for the circumvention of a military trial.2 Some members of the German armed forces interpreted the authorization as a right to kill whomever and whenever they wanted; indeed, this is what it was. Armed with such powers, sectors of the Einsatzgruppen occasionally engaged in mob-like violence, acts which greatly concerned the Wehrmacht Commander-in-Chief Walther von Brauchitsch.3 Brauchitsch was so angry that on 21 September Himmler had to send Heydrich to personally smooth matters over with the powerful chief commander. Brauchitsch demanded one thing, the removal of Himmler's shoot-tokill order. In fear of having pushed infuential fgures in the Wehrmacht too far too soon, a few days later Himmler granted Brauchitsch's

© The Author(s) 2019 N. Russell, *Understanding Willing Participants, Volume 2*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97999-1\_3

request.4 Although Brauchitsch's resistance signaled to the Nazi leadership that some of the Wehrmacht's top brass was unwilling to faunt international military law, they also noticed that some were.5

By early October, only fve weeks into the campaign, Poland conceded defeat. Soon thereafter, the Germans divided their half of the new territory into two: a western section, which they called the Incorporated Territory (annexed into Germany), and an eastern section called the General Government (a semi-independent zone occupied by Germany and governed by Nazi lawyer Hans Frank). Germany's rapid expansion had, however, exposed a faw in Eichmann's emigration model for dealing with the "Jewish problem": The more nations the Wehrmacht conquered, the more Jews Germany inherited. There were 3 million Polish Jews,6 of which 600,000 to 700,000 lived in the now German Incorporated Territory. These numbers do not include the 18 million Christian Poles that the Nazi leadership would have to uproot when the time came to make room for in-coming ethnic German settlers. Before the new German/Soviet border tightened, the Germans tried to push as many of the unwanted Poles into the new Soviet territory. However, this was no long-term solution; it was only a matter of time before the Soviet authorities found out.

Eventually, the Nazi leadership decided to expel Poles from the Incorporated Territory and force them into the General Government. Polish Jews were to be sent to a reservation located near the General Government township of Nisko (in the eastern Lublin district). In an eager attempt to impress his superiors, on 17 October 1939 Eichmann tried to deport 912 Austrian Jews by train to the Nisko reservation. However, this attempt at mass deportation proved to be a more diffcult exercise than he anticipated. Complicating issues included the higher priority authorities placed on housing the infux of ethnic German settlers over relocating German Jews, along with other economic and logistical issues.7 Amid the ensuing chaos, Eichmann's display of initiative backfred and, as a result, most of the Jews were returned to Austria.8 The problem of the Polish Jews remained, but soon after Heydrich announced a new policy: "in order to have a better possibility of control and later deportation," Polish Jews across both the Incorporated Territory and General Government were to be concentrated in designated ghettos in all the major Polish cities.9 Implementation of this interim solution took place in 1940. Meanwhile, from early to mid-1940, Arthur Greiser (Governor of the Wartheland, a province within the Incorporated Territory) boasted in Nazi circles of his desire to render his fefdom *judenfrei* ("free of Jews"). To fulfll this desire, Greiser requested Hans Frank in the more eastern General Government to accept a few hundred thousand Wartheland Jews. Frank, who also one day hoped to make the same claim about his territory, balked at Greiser's demand. Adding to the ongoing complexities of what exactly was to be done with the Jews, Frank did not want his fefdom to become a dumping ground for others' unwanted peoples.10

Once secured in the Polish ghettos, there remained much debate over where to relocate all of these Jews. The realist Nazi bureaucrats identifed a few potential locations, the most popular of which became possible with the successful spring 1940 conquests of Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, and France. Jews were to be deported by ship to the island of Madagascar, a French colony off the south eastern coast of Africa.11 According to Himmler, on 25 May, "The Führer read the six pages (of the plan) through and found them very good and correct…"12 Despite his strong threats, Hitler again revealed he was a realist. And, as Browning observes,

This episode is of singular importance in that it is the only frsthand account by a high-ranking participant—Himmler—of just how a Hitler decision was reached and a *Führerbefehl*, or Hitler order, was given in respect to Nazi racial policy during this period. The initiative came from Himmler. However, he did not present Hitler with a precise plan; it was rather a statement of intent, a set of policy objectives. The details of implementation would be left to Himmler. Hitler indicated both his enthusiastic agreement and the men with whom the information could be shared […] He simply allowed it to be known what he wanted or approved.13

Kershaw agrees: When it came to the Jews, Hitler set a "vicious tone" then sanctioned and legitimated what he sensed were his underling's best—most realistically achievable—initiatives.14 However, access to Madagascar required naval dominance over Britain, something the Germans never achieved. Consequently, the Madagascar Plan was shelved pending a victory that never arrived. The Madagascar Plan might then have been the most realistic option, but as this solution stalled, Hitler went on to drop hints of his openness to supporting any solution, no matter how radical:

Typical of Hitler's stance was his wish, expressed towards the end of 1940, that his Gauleiter in the East should be accorded the 'necessary freedom of movement', to accomplish their diffcult task, that he would demand from his Gauleiter *after 10 years* only the single announcement that their territories were purely German, and would not enquire about the methods used to bring this about.15

The message was clear: Most important for Hitler was that the Jewish problem be solved; he did not care how they got there.

One beneft stemming from the Nazi's spate of military victories was that instead of funding their wars by shouldering more national debts or leveling unpopular taxes on the German public, they started fnancing subsequent military campaigns by plundering the economies of those they conquered.16 Consider, for example, France, who through increasing occupation fees ended up paying the Nazis about 900 billion francs17—money then invested into Hitler's plans for eastern expansion. But why did so many Germans support these acts of state larceny? There are probably several overlapping reasons. First, the Nazi regime made sure that every class of German both at home and abroad personally benefted from Hitler's military ambitions. For example, the Nazis used some of the occupation fees to increase their soldiers' wages.18 With more money in their pockets, the soldiers were then encouraged by both the regime and their families to purchase consumer items from the occupied territories and—to the detriment of the local economies and food supply—send their purchases back home. Herein lies the reason why between 1939 and 1945 Germany enjoyed the highest standard of living of any European nation in the war.19 As we shall see, this other form of Nazi welfare only drew the average German—who Aly describes as a "well-fed parasite…"20—a little further into turning a blind eye to some of the regime's subsequent and even more unethical criminal ventures. A second reason for supporting the Nazi's illegal occupation practices was that the soldiers' purchases were preserved by a facade of legality: The men did (at least initially) not steal but *paid* for all their consumer items.21 This, however, did not stop some Germans from sensing an injustice in their rising purchasing power. Consider, for example, the famous postwar writer and then Wehrmacht conscript Heinrich Böll who, despite the legal veneer surrounding his purchases, detected something unethical in his shopping sprees. In a letter dated September 1940 to his family back in Germany, Böll conceded:

The store shelves will of course now be emptied by soldiers…. I have reservations about joining in the stockpiling; although everything is paid for, it reminds me of robbing a corpse.22

But it was Hitler who, a few months into the start of World War Two, perhaps best expressed a third reason why so many Germans repeatedly backed the Nazi's ever-descending ethical bar: "No one will ask questions, once we've achieved victory."23 In other words, as Nazi power rose with each victory, Germans everywhere sensed—much like every compliant link across the Obedience studies—they could unethically participate in and personally beneft from the wider organizational system with probable impunity.

Spurred on by Germany's initial military success, as early as 31 July 1940 Hitler started seriously contemplating an attack on the Soviet Union.24 If indeed Hitler pursued this invasion, perhaps a territorial solution to the Jewish question could be found somewhere in the vast hinterlands of the Soviet Union. Around this time, the "Jewish question," however, was put aside in favor of tasks that demanded more immediate attention, such as the extraction of economic resources from the recently conquered Polish territories. One such venture involved an initially inconspicuous set of ex-army barracks near the Polish city of Krakow, which, during the spring of 1940, had been converted into a prison for German criminals and recalcitrant Poles.25 The Germans called the prison Auschwitz.

The strategic importance of what became known as Auschwitz I to the Nazi regime increased signifcantly after September 1940 when Oswald Pohl (Chief of the SS Main Administration and Economic Offce) discerned in the surrounding area immense economic potential.26 Pohl's assessment was independently confrmed when offcials from the German corporation IG Farben expressed an interest in the region's natural resources, centrally located railway junction, accompanying Nazi tax exemptions and, of course, access to cut-rate prison labor. On the downside, however, the area lacked any basic infrastructure.

On 1 March 1941, Himmler toured Auschwitz I with some IG Farben offcials. To attract corporate investment, he promised to greatly increase the size of the fedgling camp's manual labor pool. Himmler ordered an expansion of Auschwitz I's capacity to 30,000 and the construction of a massive satellite camp nearby capable of holding 100,000 laborers.27 Himmler informed IG Farben offcials that the laborers—drawn from the local Jewish and non-Jewish populations would be tasked with building whatever infrastructure they desired. Himmler also likely had in mind a different and far more effcient source of slave labor. Even before he visited Auschwitz I, Himmler knew of Hitler's secret intention in the coming months to invade the Soviet Union. The anticipated swift victory would mean a sudden food of Soviet POWs. Soviet POWs were a much more attractive source of slave labor than the local Polish population, because nearly all would be strong young men capable of arduous labor, whereas many Poles would come with families, including the young and old who would require housing and feeding for nothing in return.28

# The "Twisted Road" to "Realizing the Unthinkable"

Between the end of 1939 and mid-1941, as realist Nazi bureaucrats debated where to send Jews and other conquered peoples, events of central importance to the subsequent attempt to exterminate European Jewry took place elsewhere. Ordinary and arguably only moderately antisemitic Germans, who, according to Hilberg, came from a "remarkable cross-section of the German population,"29 began demonstrating an uncanny ability to eliminate fairly large numbers of defenseless civilians using what became by the war's end the three most common killing methods: shooting, starvation, and gassing.

# *Shooting*

During the invasion of Poland, as partisans did their best to resist the Nazi attack, the Wehrmacht were faced with orders to execute civilians—either those caught resisting or hostages taken in place of those still at large. A death sentence also awaited those on Heydrich's list of anti-German agitators. To kill all of these civilians, execution squad commanders employed the only method of killing unarmed people they knew—death by military-style fring squad. Victims were shot facing the shooting squad, separated by ten or so meters. For photographic evidence of these early military-style executions (September and October 1939), see https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/facing-death-six-polish-civilians-1939/ and https://www.ushmm.org/collections/the-museums-collections/ collections-highlights/german-invasion-of-poland-75-years-later/ from-the-museums-collections/execution-of-piotr-sosnowski.

As discussed in Volume 1, frearms render killing psychologically easier for perpetrators than when using weapons like the bayonet. Guns make killing relatively easier for the same reason these weapons tend to reduce the pleasure sexually motivated serial killers experience when killing: Firearms ensure the deathblow/s to victims need not be felt thus reducing the displeasure that more ordinary (typically squeamish) people would otherwise experience if they tried to kill with more tactile means. As Levin and Fox observe:

Among serial murders that are sexually inspired, the use of a gun is, in fact, remarkably rare. For those killers, physical contact is so crucial to satisfying their murderous sexual impulses that a gun robs them of the pleasure they receive from killing with their hands.30

Firearms also make killing physically easier, because, compared to other closer-range weapons and methods, they generate the force behind the lethal blow. In sum, frearms are comparatively more lethal than other more common tactile weapons or methods of homicide, because, as Egger and Peters succinctly put it, "a gun requires considerably less proximity, strength, agility, skill and squeamishness, and offers less opportunity for self-defence…"31 Furthermore, it should be remembered that as mass shootings in US educational institutions repeatedly illustrate, when it comes to raw power, concealability, and rapid fre, not all guns are equal.

Having said all this, frearms might make killing easier, but they do not make killing easy. Shooters are still likely to experience high levels of visual and perhaps even auditory perceptual stimulation—they directly see and hear the destructive consequences of pulling the trigger. In fact, as the number of Polish hostages increased—with three or even up to ten Poles executed for every German life lost32—some execution squad members started experiencing what Lieutenant General Max Bock described as "vast agitation and powerful emotional stress…"33 Stress increased when shooting certain types of civilians—executing children was deemed a particularly repugnant task.34 During these early executions, victims collapsed where they were shot (as shown in both the above links to photographs). Afterward, if nobody else could be found, the squad members had to dig graves to dispose of the bodies. Doing so meant that the shooters then had to directly confront the horrifc human consequences of their actions. According to Grossman, confronting a person one has just killed signifcantly accentuates the initial trauma, "since some of the psychological buffer created by a midrange kill disappears upon seeing the victim at close range."35

Although the German armed forces encountered some psychological diffculties when killing Poles in this way, they nevertheless managed to shoot approximately 16,000 civilians—about 5000 of whom were Jewish.36 Also, after the Poles conceded defeat, in the last months of 1939 the SS forces and ethnic German auxiliaries shot up to 50,000 members of the Polish intelligentsia and other civilian resisters (7000 of whom were Jewish).37

#### *Starvation*

Independent of Nazi offcials in Berlin, local German authorities in the two largest Polish ghettos at Lódź (Incorporated Territory) and Warsaw (General Government)—which between them contained about one-third of all Polish Jews under Nazi control38—decided at different times and for different reasons to seal off their ghettos from the adjacent non-Jewish communities.39 Cut off from outside help, the poorest Jewish prisoners began to perish from starvation and associated diseases. The destructive effects of these policies were frst observed in the Lódź ghetto, which, with 163,177 Jews40 crammed into a 2.6-square kilometer sector of the wider city,41 was sealed in April 1940. That summer Governor Greiser reported that from the "point of view of nutrition and the control of epidemics" life in the Lódź ghetto had already become untenable.42 Between June 1940 and the end of January 1941, more than 7000 Jews died in the Lódź ghetto.43

Alexander Palfnger, a German ghetto administrator, seized upon this catastrophe as a partial solution to the escalating "Jewish problem." As far as he was concerned, "A rapid dying out of the Jews is for us a matter of total indifference, if not to say desirable." According to Palfnger's interpretation of Nazi ideology, such an outcome was consistent with what he anticipated would become the regime's "radical course," because in relation to the "Jewish question the National Socialist idea…permits no compromise…"44 Palfnger thus provides another example of Carl Friedrich's rule of anticipated reactions (i.e., guessing what one's superior probably desires) or Browning's "seizing the initiative from below…"

Browning calls German ghetto administrators like Palfnger, who believed the Jews should be starved, "attritionists."45 Opposed to attritionists were another group of administrators termed "productionists," who believed that sources of labor should not be wasted, and that making the Jews work would not only fnancially beneft Germany, but also enable Jews to obtain food at no cost to the Reich, thus averting any risk of starvation. This self-sustaining policy could be maintained until Berlin decided where to send these Jews. As Palfnger's immediate superior, Hans Biebow (Lódź's chief ghetto administrator), argued on 18 October 1940, "everything must be done to make the ghetto self-sustaining."46 Biebow and his superior, Dr. Karl Marder (the deputy mayor of Lódź), set up a ghetto economy, indicating that in Lódź the "productionists" were in control and Palfnger was ignored.47

The discontented Palfnger soon transferred to the Warsaw ghetto, where by March 1941 nearly half a million Jews had been squeezed into just over three square kilometers of space.48 There he met like-minded "attritionists" Waldemar Schön and Karl Naumann, and together they generated conditions that promoted what Schön euphemistically termed "premature impoverishment…"49 But again Palfnger's intentions were subordinated to those of Warsaw's own "productionists" who dominated among the local German authorities. At a meeting on 3 April 1941, Walter Emmerich argued, "*The starting point for all economic measures had to be the idea of maintaining the capacity of the Jews to live*" [italics original].50 Thus, on 19 April 1941 a new "productionist" policy was introduced in Warsaw. Schön was replaced by Max Bischof who was told that if Palfnger caused any further problems he could have him removed. Palfnger stopped trying to anticipate Hitler's desires and, having narrowly avoided dismissal, by early May 1941 informed a surprised Adam Czerniaków (the Jewish council chairman that helped manage the ghetto), "that he will do everything to improve the food supply."51

Despite all this, because the Nazi regime struggled to meet the generous basic food requirements of its civilian population,52 being unable to always accommodate the needs of those at the top of their racial hierarchy meant that grueling times indeed lay ahead for the Jews at the bottom, irrespective of how hard they were willing to work. As Göring said, "If someone has to go hungry, it won't be the Germans…"53 In the end, promises of more food were made to the Jews in the Polish ghettos, but, as Biebow pointed out in January 1941, little arrived because it was continually "withdrawn for allegedly more urgent needs."54 People in the ghetto population received about 220 calories per day, which is about 15% of normal dietary requirements.55

During April and May 1941, a famine of endemic proportions took hold of the Warsaw ghetto killing 6000 Jews.56 Nevertheless, German administrators ("productionists" and "attritionists" alike) followed directives from Berlin that the Jews were not to leave the ghetto in search of food.57 These administrators were able to tolerate the deaths that resulted with relative psychological ease because, for reasons discussed in Volume 1, starvation as a method of killing causes little affective stimulation. None of the Germans involved—from those who rounded up and delivered victims to the ghettos, to the administrators, and the guards who prevented their escape—had to touch, see, or hear victims in their death throes. Excluding guards who frequently shot escapees, none of the perpetrators had to actually kill Jews. Instead, the German authorities were able to pass responsibility to a reifed "Berlin" for imposing such deadly conditions. They did not perceive themselves as the most responsible for the deaths. This strain resolving displacement of responsibility was made possible by the division of labor inherent within the ghetto administration's bureaucracy, which helped ease the perpetrators' psychological burden of death.

Being in positions of power, most Germans involved could, if they so chose, deploy Obedience study-like avoidance techniques to circumvent the perceptual reality of those slowly dying in the ghettos. Consider, for example, Claude Lanzmann's conversation with Deputy Commissioner of the Warsaw ghetto, Franz Grassler: "*Did you go into the ghetto?* Seldom. When I had to visit Czerniaków. *What were the conditions like?* Awful. Yes, appalling. I never went back when I saw what it was like. Unless I had to. In the whole period I think I only went once or twice."58 The reason Grassler rarely had to enter the ghetto was because the Nazis formed Jewish councils—the so-called Judenrat—and tasked them with organizing the day-to-day management and policing of the ghettos. Here, the Nazis deployed "the tried-and-tested colonial" technique "of indirect rule through favored natives who got privileges…in exchange for helping control everyone else."59 As we shall see, throughout World War Two the Nazis repeatedly relied on this divide and rule management technique. The Nazis did so because not only it more effciently minimized German labor, but also it spread complicity for any harmful outcomes onto the Jewish leadership. As one German offcial in Warsaw noted, during periods of extreme hardship the ghetto inhabitants would rather conveniently "direct their resentment against the Jewish administrations and not against the German supervisors."60 And when the Nazi overlords did have to enter the ghettos, the desperate and corrupting conditions endured by the starving population only served to reinforce the former's prejudicial stereotypes of the Ostjuden (Eastern Jew). These distraught and starved people often looked and sometimes even behaved just like the parasitic and threatening criminals the Nazis assumed them to be.61

#### *Gassing*

As early as July 1933, the Nazi regime passed the Weimar Republic's Law for the Prevention of Genetically Damaged Offspring, after which somewhere between 200,000 and 350,000 Germans were sterilized.62 However, several years later in October 1939, congruent with Nazi ideology, Hitler produced the following secret document,

Berlin, 1 Sept. 1939

Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. med. Brandt are charged with the responsibility of enlarging the competence of certain physicians, designated by name, so that patients who, on the basis of human judgment, are considered incurable, can be granted mercy death after a discerning diagnosis. (signed) A. Hitler63

This document, which Hitler backdated to the start of the war, authorized what the Nazi's euphemistically termed the euthanasia program: the extermination of people with physical and mental disabilities. Hitler signed the document because chancellery offcials informed him that the physicians approached to implement this policy would likely require an assurance from the state that they would not be held criminally liable for their harmful actions.64 That is, Hitler's advisors anticipated that those most directly involved would need to know that they could kill with impunity. Much like Milgram's decision to insert the strain resolving "Waver [*sic*] of responsibility" into his emerging procedure (see Volume 1),65 the chancellery offcials also anticipated that their subordinate harm infictors, fearing someone might later question them about their decision to hurt others, needed to feel they were suffciently covered.

For several reasons, this is an important document. First, it illustrates that when Hitler suspected a policy of exterminating "subhumans" had a *realistic* chance of successful implementation, the *strong believer* in him was willing to pursue it. Second, his backdating of this document to the same date he instructed his Death's Head Units to start killing "all" members of the "Polish race" and when he threatened to start annihilating "the Jewish race in Europe" triangulates when in earnest Hitler intended to convert Nazi ideology into a reality. It was from 1 September 1939 that he wanted to start killing *all* "subhumans."66 The problem for Hitler was that his subordinates were not yet willing or capable of converting his intentions into a reality. Nevertheless, this document irrefutably connects Hitler to, and establishes him as, the leading instigator of Nazi genocidal ambitions, which (in confict with his usual modus operandi) captures his direct top-down orders to kill.

Clearly, however, Hitler had confdence in the ability of Philipp Bouhler (from the private chancellery) and Karl Brandt (Hitler's private doctor) to set up an organization capable of converting his desire into a reality. In all likelihood, this confdence traces back to the fact that such killings would target a particularly powerless group segregated from wider society in secretive institutions. Furthermore, political resistance to this policy was unlikely because the wider German public would be distracted by the natural distress of a nation at war.

Bouhler and Brandt soon formed an organization called Tiergartenstraße 4 (T4). The organization started experimenting with different killing techniques, including lethal injection, which Brandt suspected T4 staff might willingly use on patients. However, he later concluded that this method was insuffciently "humane."67 Trial-and-error exploration confrmed that lethal injection was too slow and unreliable.68 It surely didn't help that this method of killing necessitated a physical connection between the injector (cause) and injected (effect), especially when patients died slow and presumably painful deaths. Then, Viktor Brack from Hitler's private chancellery, in conjunction with chemist Albert Widmann, suggested diverting pure bottled carbon monoxide gas into a hermetically sealed room,69 intuiting that this was a method the T4 staff might use. Put differently, when compared to lethal injection, Brack and Widmann suspected the more "humane" method of gassing might better ensure the act of killing would remain within the T4 staff's *Zone of Indifference*—a task that, without reservation, they would willingly partake. This method of killing was trailed soon after the start of the war when the tentacles of the euthanasia program reached across Germany's border and into the annexed Polish territories.70

More specifcally, in Poland Brandt helped set up the Lange Commando, headed by Herbert Lange, a "no-nonsense" fanatical Nazi.71 The 15-man strong commando was based in Fort VII, a recently established Gestapo prison located in Poznań (in Greiser's Wartheland province in the former Poland).72 Around October or November 1939, the T4 chemist August Becker arrived at Fort VII armed with cylinders of carbon monoxide. Becker was there to provide Lange with "technical assistance" in pursuit of an experimental killing operation.73 The Lange Commando locked a group of psychiatric patients in a prison cell that had rather hastily been hermetically sealed with clay.74 Carbon monoxide was then pumped into the cell, killing the patients. Throughout December, Lange and his men used this killing technique to exterminate patients from the surrounding area. They also instructed prisoners from Fort VII—non-Jewish Poles accused of partisan activity—to empty the cell and, in a nearby forest, bury the victims' bodies.75 After some refection, Lange deemed collecting and then killing patients at Fort VII ineffcient and soon after instructed his Polish prisoner work detail to help convert a truck with a large cargo cabin into a mobile gas chamber.76 Despite accounts that Lange had two or more of these early-model gas vans, Patrick Montague is confdent that only one such truck existed.77 Canisters of pure carbon monoxide were attached to the driver's compartment. From January 1940, this truck was observed being driven to victims located at various institutions throughout the Wartheland.78 Once patients were locked in the cargo cabin, gas was released by opening valves located in the driver's cabin. Again, Lange's prison work detail was instructed to dispose of the victims' bodies in a nearby forest. Using Polish workers for such tasks obviously enabled Lange's men to avoid having to touch the recently killed victims.

Perhaps inspired by Lange's efforts, back in Germany around January 1940 a team of T4 offcials were invited to Brandenburg-Havel prison to observe a demonstration. Twenty institutionalized men were locked in a cell79 and according to Becker, having recently returned from his trip to Fort VII, the cell was,

a tiled shower room, measuring about three meters by fve, and three meters high. On the periphery were benches, and along the wall, at about ten centimeters from the ground, a gas main about an inch in diameter passed. This pipe was pierced with little holes out of which the carbon monoxide came.80

A physician controlled a lever on the gas canister. After about twenty minutes, asphyxia set in followed by death.81 At least seventeen T4 offcials observed this demonstration—including Brandt, Brack, Widmann, Philipp Bouhler, Christian Wirth, Irmfried Ebel, and August Becker—all of whom went on to play central roles in the extermination of Jews.82 They deemed the demonstration so "successful" that having discovered what they suspected was the "one best way" to achieving Hitler's goal of exterminating people with disabilities, the euthanasia gassing program was initiated in Germany. Five permanent gas chambers were set up at various institutions throughout Germany, including Grafeneck, Bernburg, Hadamar, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein. These institutions tended to have benign, strain resolving names such as *The Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care* and *The Reich Work Cooperative for Institutional Care*. 83

Throughout the Wartheland between January and April 1940, Lange's roaming unit continued killing Poles with disabilities.84 The commando proved so effective that in May they were seconded to an East Prussian hospital (a few hundred kilometers north) where, across a mere two-week period, they gassed 1558 patients.85 Somewhat mysteriously, between 8 June 1940 and 3 June 1941 the Lange Commando ceased killing Poles with disabilities.86 Nonetheless, in terms of the broader picture, between the end of 1939 and the summer of 1941, T4 gassed at least 80,000 Germans87 and thousands of Poles with disabilities.88 This gassing technique generated little strain, trauma, or repugnance on the perpetrators who neither had to touch, see, nor hear their victims die. In fact, should they have desired it, gassing offered the killers the option of total perceptual avoidance.

# The Transformation of Himmler and Heydrich

Since early in 1939 when Heydrich had been charged with settling Germany's "Jewish problem," Himmler, his superior, fretted over the SS's repeated failure to resolve this issue. This concern came to a head in January 1941, when Himmler appealed directly to Heydrich for a solution to the problem of population exchange in the East between Jews, Christian Poles, and ethnic Germans.89 There was no obvious place yet available to send the Poles. Around this point in time, however, I would argue that Himmler and Heydrich underwent a gradual transformation. That is, across the period that their own more "realistic" policy of emigration faltered, moderately antisemitic Germans demonstrated an uncanny ability to eliminate fairly large numbers of defenseless civilians. It did not take long for Himmler and Heydrich to sense potential in previously rejected ideas of the "strong believers."

The emergence of this transformation perhaps traces back to the summer of 1940 when Himmler confrmed his "realist" status when he said, "'out of inner conviction,' he still rejected 'the physical extermination of a race through Bolshevik methods…[because they were] un-Germanic and impracticable.'"90 In other words, it was beneath the dignity of Germans to engage in acts of mass killing. Simultaneously, Heydrich parroted the same argument.91 And in any case, because such ideas were considered "impracticable," they were ruled out from further discussion. However, as Himmler implied, if extermination suddenly became feasible, he might be willing to reconsider.

So, it is clear that much like their Führer, Himmler and Heydrich only favored emigration over more radical "strong believer" measures because the former seemed more "realistic." Thus, for "realists" like Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich, the desire to exterminate "inferiors" had always been present92—keeping in mind that their preference to cram Jews into cargo ships and deport them to Madagascar's harsh tropical environment (perhaps governed by T4's Philipp Bouhler)93 was, in itself, inherently genocidal.94 However, before 1941 a realistic means of achieving largescale extermination did not exist. Hitler may have repeatedly hinted at his "wish" that the Jews be exterminated, but before 1941 all signals indicated that converting such a desire into reality was probably impossible.95 The impracticality of a "Final Solution" before 1941 helps to explain why there was no planning for genocide before then.96

But as the previously unrealistic ideas of the "strong believers" began showing greater potential than their own stalled "realist" strategies, both Himmler and Heydrich started contemplating ways of applying "strong believer" solutions to local manifestations of the "Jewish problem." For example, sometime after October or November of 1940, the Chief SS physician, Ernst Grawitz, claimed that Heydrich asked him to boost the death rate in the Warsaw ghetto by triggering an epidemic.97 More certainly, a few months later Himmler contemplated using the T4 euthanasia gassing technique in his over-crowded concentration camps. In a discussion in early 1941 between Himmler and Bouhler about prisoners no longer capable of productive labor, the SS-Reichsführer wondered, "whether and how the personnel and the facilities of T4 can be utilized for the concentration camps."98

Early in 1941, T4 leader Bouhler agreed to let Himmler use T4 personnel and facilities to rid the camps of 'excess' prisoners – notably those 'most seriously ill,' physically and mentally. Sometimes called 'prisoner euthanasia' or (by prisoners) 'Operation Invalid,' the resultant program was offcially 'Operation [or Special Treatment] 14f13.'99

The 14f13 killing program started in April 1941100 and was soon after extended to the recently built concentration camps in the East. By the end of May101 or July102 of 1941, ex-T4 personnel working in Operation 14f13 had arrived in the hinterlands of Poland, in places like Auschwitz I. In a related operation, 575 men from Auschwitz I who "were all worn out"103 were selected and transported by train to a T4 gas chamber hundreds of miles away at Sonnenstein in Germany.104 German camp offcials determined that these men could not be killed at Auschwitz I without causing a commotion.105 By the end of the war, Operation 14f13 had killed nearly 20,000 people.106

Himmler and Heydrich, of course, were not the only ones to sense potential in the ideas of the strong believers. Consider, for example, Rudolf Gater, a rationalization expert, who independently saw merit in ghetto administrator Palfnger's intuition when in March of 1941 he argued that, "conditions of undernourishment" in the Polish ghettos "could be allowed to develop without regard for the consequences."107 Also, on 16 July 1941 SS-Sturmbannführer Rolf-Heinz Höppner wrote in a letter to Eichmann,

This winter [in the Wartheland] there is a danger that it will not be possible to feed all the Jews. It should therefore seriously be considered whether the most humane solution would not be to eliminate those Jews unft for work by some fast-working method. That would in any case be more agreeable than leaving them to die of starvation.108

He concluded, "These things sound somewhat fantastic but are in my opinion defnitely feasible."109 Curiously, during the four-week period before Höppner wrote this letter, the Lange Commando had resumed, after their 12-month hiatus, exterminating Wartheland Poles with disabilities.110 Perhaps Höppner was cognizant of Lange's activities (both were based in Poznań),111 and maybe this explains why, with respect to the Jews, he had euthanasia gassing technology in mind.112 However, Himmler, who two months earlier had sent hundreds of Auschwitz's prisoners by train to be gassed in Germany, had already discovered that installing the T4 killing technology in the Eastern territories was actually impracticable. It was impracticable because gassing required cylinders of pure carbon monoxide which were expensive to produce, diffcult to transport out of Germany, and the quantities required to kill such large numbers of civilians simply did not exist.113 If gassing was ever to be relied upon in the East, all of these obstacles would have to be overcome. As Hilberg argued,

We are dealing not with a sudden decision but with the emergence of an idea. […] the idea of killing the Jews had now matured. As a plan for administrative action, the idea was not yet obvious or even feasible; but as a thought of something that could happen.114

But only those in direct control of the machinery of destruction— Himmler, "a genius for organization"115 and the "Architect of Genocide,"116 and Heydrich, "the real engineer" (as Gerald Reitinger called him117)—were in suffciently powerful positions to convert such ideas into reality.118 As both the "Realization of the Unthinkable"119 simmered and Hitler started unveiling his intentions to invade the Soviet Union, "Murder" as Browning observes "was in the air…"120

# Hitler and the Invasion of the Soviet Union

With a handful of successful military campaigns and most of Western Europe under his belt in December 1940, a Hitler brimming with confdence fnalized his plans to attack the Soviet Union. Termed Operation Barbarossa, the campaign was to start the following summer.121 Like the invasion of Poland, Operation Barbarossa would be a two-pronged assault. The Wehrmacht would lead the way, deploying its trademark Blitzkrieg tactics. Himmler's men would follow in the German military's wake and secure the captured territory. Again, the Nazi leadership suspected that Russia's so-called Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia would encourage common folk to resist German forces, and so on 13 March 1941, Hitler tasked Himmler's SS with the elimination of these leaders.122 On 26 March, Eduard Wagner (the Quartermaster General of the Wehrmacht High Command) and Himmler agreed with this general plan.123 A few days later on 30 March, Hitler informed a couple of hundred commanding offcers that during Operation Barbarossa they were not to rely on traditional military customs. Instead, this was a,

Clash between two ideologies… *Bolshevism equals a social criminality*. Communism [is a] tremendous danger for the future. We must get away from the standpoint of soldierly comradeship. The Communist is no comrade, either before or after. *It is a war of extermination* […] The troops must defend themselves with the methods with which they are attacked. *Commissars and secret service personnel are criminals and must be treated as such*. [italics added]124

If one reads a little between the lines here, because the Nazis closely associated Jews with Bolshevism, here Hitler was socially constructing the Jews—or at least the (apparent) Jewish Soviet leadership—into a population of criminals. And because, according to the dictates of Nazi ideology, Jews are genetically immutable, the only infallible and permanent means of eliminating this omnipotent crime problem was that it be exterminated. Hitler urging his commanders to exterminate Bolshevist Jews may sound like an extremely radical request, but it should be kept in mind that before unifcation, Germany's many states had long histories of killing those deemed by rule-making legislators to be "dangerous criminals." Interestingly, just over a year earlier in the November 1938 edition of *Das Schwarze Korps*, Heydrich explicitly captured what I suspect was the Führer's attempt at framing all Jews as "criminals…" On top of this, the SS-Obergruppenführer also makes the normative connection to what Germans had historically done with such people.

The German people are not in the least inclined to tolerate in their country hundreds of thousands of criminals, who not only secure their existence through crime, but also want to exact revenge. […] These hundreds of thousands of impoverished Jews [would create] a breeding ground for Bolshevism and a collection of the politically criminal subhuman elements. […] In such a situation we would be faced with the hard necessity of exterminating the Jewish underworld in the same way as, under our government of law and order, we are accustomed to exterminating any other criminals – that is, by fre and sword. The result would be the actual and fnal end of Jewry in Germany, its absolute annihilation.125

Again, Bolshevists were Jews, Jews were criminals, and, as long practiced throughout German history, it was quite normal for the government to execute those deemed by rule makers to be dangerous criminals. For many Germans in the armed forces, this was just the kind of reasoning that helped personally legitimize their killing of a large category of other human beings.

Putting aside the Nazi's gradual social construction of Jews into "criminals," it was Hitler's suspicion that a successful invasion of the Soviet Union would have many benefts for Germany. It would surely force Britain to concede defeat. If not, however, the Nazis would gain access to the fertile Ukrainian breadbasket, thus circumventing the effectiveness of any Allied blockade of the German civilian population, such as had occurred during World War One.126 The Nazis might also gain access to the Caucasus oil felds, the largest in Europe.127 And fnally, a Soviet defeat might discourage the Americans from entering the war. Tainting any such anticipated victory, however, were the four or perhaps fve million Jews living within the Soviet Union's post-August 1939 borders.128 Himmler and Heydrich, charged with resolving the Jewish problem, would have been particularly sensitive to this drawback. Then again, a successful conquest of Russia might (with the British Navy presumably out of the way) revive the Madagascar Plan as a potential solution to the "Jewish Question," and if not, the massive Soviet interior included several new possible expulsion sites (presumably viewed to be German colonial penal colonies), including the Ukrainian marshlands or even the Siberian wastelands.129

In preparation for eliminating the Soviet intelligentsia, about 3000 rank and fle men drawn from the SS, SD, the Gestapo, Sipo, Waffen SS forces, as well as the less politicized State Police, Reserve Police Battalions, and also some civilian draftees were recruited for special training in May 1941.130 The men were divided into four groups: Einsatzgruppe A, B, C, and D. These four groups were further subdivided into units called Einsatzkommandos (50–175 men each), and further again into Sonderkommandos.131 Also, a month earlier, around mid-April, Himmler instructed Police Battalion 322, and probably other police units, to prepare for operations outside of Germany.132

One interpretation of the Nazi regime's attack on the Soviet Union is that just before the start of the campaign, Himmler and Heydrich were so concerned about their ever-expanding "Jewish problem" that they subtly conveyed their ultimate desire to the commanders tasked with executing the "Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia" that they wanted their execution squads to exterminate every Jewish man, woman, and child encountered. As Breitman notes: "One reading of the events is that the Einsatzgruppen commanders already knew the fnal goal of Nazi Jewish policy and were given some discretion to accomplish as much as they could with limited manpower."133 This is not to suggest that before the start of the invasion execution squad commanders were given direct orders to exterminate Soviet Jewry (a controversial issue termed the Krausnick versus Streim debate),134 but rather that the commanders of the execution squads had a "vague notion"135 of what Himmler and Heydrich desired of them: They were to exterminate as many Jews as they possibly could.

The main reason I suspect there were no direct orders instructing all Jews to be killed is that before the campaign both Himmler and Heydrich were not sure their men would be willing and/or capable of fulflling such orders. As Jürgen Matthäus puts it, "Before the unleashing of Operation Barbarossa, the German leadership could not be certain that its political will would be carried out in the feld."136 Much of the SS leadership's skepticism came from the earlier Polish campaign during which German armed forces were ordered to shoot civilians. Although the Germans killed tens of thousands, they frequently experienced "vast agitation and powerful emotional stress" from doing so. Himmler's awareness of these psychological problems was so acute that in June 1940 he employed and promoted the brutal World War One veteran Oskar Dirlewanger (also a convicted pedophile) and supplied him with a battalion of ex-convict poachers—killing specialists—for the kinds of human shooting assignments that Himmler suspected most Germans would shy away from.137 But the task of eliminating just the Russian intelligentsia was so great that Himmler and Heydrich needed to rely on more numerous categories of Germans from the SS, Order Police, and Wehrmacht.

On the other hand, Himmler and Heydrich may have had reason to suspect that their ordinary men *might* be willing and capable of killing every Soviet Jew encountered given the right circumstances. During the Polish campaign, some members of the execution squads proved themselves entirely capable of regularly shooting defenseless men138—a diffcult task some perceived as a measure of manliness.139 This time the victims would not be somewhat similar-looking Poles, but Soviet Jews, people who were ethnically, culturally, and economically signifcantly different from the Germans who flled Himmler's ranks. Furthermore, Soviet Jews embodied the two main targets of nearly a decade of Nazi propaganda—the threat of "Jewish Bolshevism." On top of this, with some of his men having willingly executed many Poles accused of partisan resistance, it is perhaps of little surprise that with increasing intensity after the Polish invasion, Himmler liked to remind his men that "Where there are partisans…there are Jews, and where there are Jews, there are partisans."140 Because Himmler later came to believe that the word "partisan" tended to glamorize Bolshevism, in a special order he then requested the application of this word be replaced with "bandits," "franc-tireurs," and—in line with Hitler's own term—"criminals…"141

Importantly, because during the lead-up to the Soviet invasion the Nazi regime had socially constructed Jews to be both "partisans" and "criminals," Himmler and Heydrich likely suspected that the killing of all Jews—unlike during the start of the Polish campaign—might have been within the German armed force's *Zone of Indifference*. More specifcally, because the role of soldiers and police offcers occasionally involves killing "criminals" and "partisans" (respectively), the annihilation of all Jews was now a task that, with less reservation, they might—if psychologically capable—willingly partake. And even if armed Germans proved psychologically incapable of killing all Jewish civilians in the East, perhaps more fercely antisemitic Eastern European collaborators might do the job.

Whether German or Eastern European executioners succeeded or not in killing every Jewish person encountered, the end result would still be fewer Jews contributing to Himmler and Heydrich's escalating "Jewish problem."142 If their subtle plans resulted in a technically feasible solution, they could then invest far more resources into it. And if the plan failed dismally, and all available forces fatly refused to participate in something as unethical and unlawful as genocide, the SS leadership—including Hitler—could plausibly deny the existence of any such order (perhaps explaining why no direct orders to kill *all* Jews before the Soviet invasion have ever been found).143 It will be recalled that just before the Polish invasion Hitler had boasted to his commanders of sending "my 'Death's Head Units' with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish race or language." He must have felt a little embarrassed when they did no such thing, with some soldiers even suffering breakdowns when they tried to kill Polish civilians *en masse*. And perhaps it was here that a red-faced Hitler learned from his presumptuousness. As Henry Friedlander observed,

although Hitler believed that the cover of war would make radical exclusion through killing operations possible – which he emphasized by backdating his euthanasia authorization to the day the war began – he nevertheless did not issue a defnite order [regarding the "Jewish problem"] until he was certain that such an ambitious killing enterprise was feasible.144

Again, before Hitler would back a "strong believer" solution, such a solution had to be "realistic."145 And even if Himmler and Heydrich failed, because they left the door of plausible deniability wide open, they could evade the embarrassment that usually, when among their Nazi peers, accompanies such failure and simply move on to test some other more "realistic" strategy. And the Nazi leadership did have a history of issuing vague orders necessitating subordinate initiative, especially when those leaders wanted to retain the option of later denying responsibility for delivering those orders.146 Because Himmler and Heydrich were confdent that Germany would win the war and would soon be in total control of all of Europe, suspecting they could act with impunity, they likely believed themselves to have a free hand to dabble in genocide. Somewhat like Milgram, they suspected that from positions of power they could determine what was morally right and wrong. Quite simply, the SS leadership suspected they had an enormous amount to gain and little to lose in running their pilot study in genocide—what Konrad Kwiet terms a "testing ground for subsequent killings."147

Although Himmler and Heydrich were unsure if their men would kill every Jewish person they encountered, one variable they did control was their own actions. Having learned from their past experiences during the Polish campaign, from the top-down, they would do all they could to encourage, persuade, or, if necessary, coerce their men into doing what they ultimately desired.148 For example, during training for their future tasks, members of the Einsatzgruppen and Order Police were exposed to a deluge of antisemitic propaganda.149 Perhaps if the men had a strong ideological rationale for harming others, they might come to see the "necessity" of killing all Jews and associate the second part of their training schedule—shooting practice—as the means of achieving that end.150

Even though the rank and fle was not selected on an individual basis, the same could not be said of their feld commanders. Around mid-April 1941, Himmler started to personally select his Higher SS and Police leaders.151 And in terms of the Einsatzgruppen, not only were these commanders handpicked on the basis of initiative and independence152 but also nearly all of them possessed characteristics that reinforced the perception that they were credible and intellectual elites. As Müller-Hill observes, of the ffteen commanders in the Soviet interior between 1941 and 1943, six (40%) had doctoral degrees, and three others (20%) had studied law.153 Furthermore, 16 of 69 (23%) Einsatzkommando leaders held doctoral degrees, with the remainder having at least studied at university.154 Offcers were likely to have been educated at prestigious German or Austrian universities and often worked in the law profession.155 This was no coincidence: If there was a threat that the lower ranks might baulk at the legalities of exterminating certain categories of civilians, the binding force of uncompromising ideologues whose expertize frequently lay in the law itself might mitigate this risk. If they were not lawyers, the feld commanders typically came from other respected professions—the kind of high-status positions (like Dr. Milgram or Williams the Yale-based "scientist") a reluctant subordinate could conveniently place their faith in. Drawing on Müller-Hill's research, as Hilary Earl notes: "When a university professor, an economist, a priest, a doctor, or a lawyer order executions, 'they cannot be wrong…'"156

Despite carefully selecting the leadership class and then barraging the rank and fle with ideological propaganda and training with weapons fairly low in perceptual stimulation, a few days before the launch of Operation Barbarossa, Heydrich expressed doubts about the willingness and/or capability of his men to shoot civilians. With the intention of passing off such dirty work to local populations, Browning argues that Heydrich stressed in a meeting with the Einsatzgruppen commanders in Berlin on 17 June that, "No obstacle was to be placed in the way of the 'self-cleansing efforts'…of anticommunist and anti-Jewish circles."157 With respect to the German men's capacity to exterminate civilians, Matthäus argues the SS leader had a "fear of going too far too quickly," and (with a hint of the foot-in-the-door phenomenon) "instead of providing explicit orders for the rapid expansion of the killing process, the SS and police leadership in Berlin seems to have followed a course that can be described as controlled escalation."158 According to Breitman, Himmler likewise believed "Once they [his men] had carried out mass murder in response to an alleged crime or provocation, it would be easier to get them to follow broader killing orders later."159

On the eve of the attack, the German armed forces issued the rank and fle with the (purposefully ambiguous?) Commissar Order. The order stated, "This struggle demands ruthless and energetic measures against bolshevist agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, Jews, and complete elimination of any active or passive resistance."160 For groups such as the Einsatzgruppen, the Commissar Order was congruent with their *main* task: Much like during the Polish invasion, they were to secure the captured territory and kill any signs of national leadership. Having said that, with the help of their feld commanders, it was up to the men to interpret what "ruthless and energetic measures" against "Jews" engaging in "active or passive resistance" meant. Some would guess correctly and be rewarded. Others would fail (perhaps purposefully) to implement the SS leadership's desired course. For them, clearer hints secondhand or, if necessary, personally delivered oral orders—would be needed. True to Hitler's usual management style, ambiguous orders left the door of "personal initiative" wide open.161 With increasing clarity, time, and experience, the men in the feld would be shouldered with resolving what, for the more ambitious among them, would become an intense competition to fnd the "one best way" of shooting civilians *en masse*. 162 With words somewhat reminiscent of Milgram's pilot studies, as Browning put it: "What they were being asked to accomplish was at the time totally unprecedented. At this stage every step was uncharted, every policy an experiment, every action a trial run."163

# Conclusion

Between the end of 1939 and halfway through 1941, realist Nazi bureaucrats spent much time and energy debating where they could resettle an ever-increasing number of Jews and other conquered peoples. While at the same time, ordinary and arguably moderately antisemitic non-Jewish Germans164 began demonstrating their ability to kill fairly large numbers of defenseless civilians using what became by the war's end the three common methods of shooting, starvation, and gassing. With the repeated failure of the apparently more "realistic" policy of emigration, the most powerful "realist" bureaucrats started to sense potential in the previously rejected ideas of the "strong believers." As the invasion of the Soviet Union approached, an excellent opportunity appeared to at least test the feasibility of this radical solution. But would their men shoot all Soviet Jews? As Breitman argues, Himmler, Heydrich, and Kurt Daluege (of the Order Police) "did not yet know how smoothly the killing process would work, which leaders and units would prove effective, and whether there would be signifcant resistance, including resistance from the policemen themselves."165 Browning adds, "they did not know – indeed could not have known – if the plans they had been formulating would even work."166 Time would certainly tell.

# Notes


of orders which relied upon interaction, fully in keeping with Nazi tradition." See the Krausnick versus Streim debate (Breitman 1991, p. 290).


# References


Headland, R. (1992). *Messages of murder: A study of the reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the security police and the security service, 1941–1943*. London: Associated University Press.


Koonz, C. (2003). *The Nazi conscience*. London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.


Montague, P. (2012). *Chełmno and the Holocaust: The history of Hitler's frst death camp*. London: I.B. Tauris.

Müller-Hill, B. (1996). The idea of the fnal solution and the role of experts. In D. Cesarani (Ed.), *The fnal solution: Origins and implementation* (pp. 62–72). New York: Routledge.

Rees, L. (2005). *Auschwitz: A new history*. New York: BBC Books.


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# Operation Barbarossa and the Holocaust by Bullets—Top-Down Forces

This chapter explores the top-down forces utilized by the SS leadership to encourage ordinary and moderately antisemitic Germans to participate in the genocide of Jewish men, then women, and fnally all Jews, including children and babies. It delineates the SS leadership's central role in driving the extermination of Soviet Jewry. This chapter supports the previous argument that *before* the campaign, the SS leadership desired, but did not directly order, the extermination of Soviet Jewry. More specifcally, because ordinary Germans had participated in the killings of fairly large numbers of "Untermenschen" over the previous few years, the SS leadership suspected before Operation Barbarossa that their men might willingly exterminate every Soviet Jew encountered. They could not, however, be certain, and consequently, they felt it unwise to set out by issuing direct orders. Instead, during the invasion Himmler and Heydrich planned to do all they could to socially engineer their desire the so-called Führer's wish—into reality. I would argue that the SS leadership's rational intention to convert Hitler's desires into reality shares some similarity with the initially uncertain Milgram where, while inventing his baseline procedure, he did all he could to maximize his participants' participation in harm doing.

But if, from the start of the Soviet campaign, there were no direct offcial orders to kill all Jews, then the "staggering…speed with which the wave of mass murder gathered pace" remains a mystery.1 The next two chapters aim to shed some new light on this mystery. This depressing chapter in history begins with the so-called Holocaust by bullets.

© The Author(s) 2019 N. Russell, *Understanding Willing Participants, Volume 2*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97999-1\_4

# Operation Barbarossa

Operation Barbarossa began on 22 June 1941 when three million German troops entered Soviet territory. Following the Wehrmacht came the 3000 or so members of the four Einsatzgruppen units and at least nine thousand Order Police—about 18 battalions in all.2 As the Germans rapidly advanced into Soviet territory, large numbers of Red Army soldiers were, as Himmler had predicted, captured and sent to Nazi labor camps like Auschwitz I. Himmler had instructed Einsatzkommando Tilsit to carry out executions in response to sniper attacks against Germans. Between 24 and 27 June, Tilsit undertook three separate executions killing a total of 526 (mostly Jewish) Lithuanian men.3 These deaths signaled the start of the Holocaust in the Soviet interior.4 Himmler and Heydrich were apparently delighted with this early frst effort.5

On 25 June, the leader of Einsatzgruppe A, Franz Stahlecker, entered the Lithuanian city of Kaunas (or Kovno).6 In compliance with Heydrich's orders, Stahlecker assessed the intensity of local antisemitic fervor and released convicts from a prison, thus instigating possibly the frst pogrom of the campaign. On 27 June, a colonel in the Wehrmacht unwittingly stumbled on the pogrom. He saw a cheering crowd and, curious as to what was taking place, inquired further.

…I was told that the 'Death-dealer of Kovno' was at work and that this was where collaborators and traitors were fnally meted out their rightful punishment! When I stepped closer, however, I became witness to probably the most frightful event that I had seen during the course of two world wars. […] a blond man of medium height, aged about twenty-fve, stood leaning on a wooden club, resting. The club was as thick as his arm and came up to his chest. At his feet lay about ffteen to twenty dead or dying people. […] Just a few steps behind this man some twenty men, guarded by armed civilians, stood waiting for their cruel execution in silent submission. In response to a cursory wave the next man stepped forward silently and was then beaten to death with the wooden club in the most bestial manner, each blow accompanied by enthusiastic shouts from the audience. At the staff offce I subsequently learned that other people already knew about these mass executions, and that they had naturally aroused in them the same feelings of horror and outrage as they had in me.7

As bizarre as it might sound, it was not unusual for members of the German armed forces to fnd this brutal hands-on brand of violence so offensive that they would step in to save the Jewish victims, at least for the time being.8 During the above three-week-long pogrom, Lithuanians killed about 3500 Jews.9 Jewish women and children were not targeted. In other locations across the Eastern front, there was more,10 less, and no interest at all in killing Jews.11 Lithuanians may not have killed all or even most Jews, but fewer Jews still meant a smaller Soviet "Jewish problem" for the SS to later deal with. On 29 June, Heydrich issued a written order to "remind" the Einsatzgruppen commanders of his earlier verbal instruction to encourage "self-defense circles…."12

At this very early stage of the invasion, however, only a minority of German security forces set out to kill all Jews. One salient example occurred as early as 27 June, thus in violation with the Commissar Order, which never demanded such wide-sweeping actions. In the city of Bialystok, Major Weiss encouraged Police Battalion 309 and the Wehrmacht's 221st Security Division to kill over 2000 Jews—men, women, and children.13 At one point, at least 500 people were herded into a synagogue, which was dowsed in petrol and set alight with a stick of dynamite thrown through a window. When people desperately tried to escape the inferno through the building's windows, Weiss's men mowed them down with machine guns.14 One German police offcer expressed his reservations over what was taking place and was informed, "You don't seem to have received the right ideological training yet."15 Even though these Germans exceeded their offcial orders—how are children instigators of "active or passive resistance" and a threat to security?—Matthäus suspects Himmler approved.16 Massacres early in the campaign where all Jews were killed were, however, exceptions to the rule. Typically, only Jewish men were targeted during these early executions.17 There were also examples of behavior at the very opposite end of this violence spectrum. For example, for almost a month following the Commissar Order (until mid-July 1941) the 10th Regiment of the 1st SS Brigade chose only to guard bridges.18 But it was not long before the demands of the SS leadership increased in both clarity and breadth. For example, on 2 July 1941 Heydrich instructed that, "all Jews in state and party positions" were to be executed.19

Then at a 16 July meeting that Browning regards as a "turning point" for the Holocaust,20 Hitler informed a variety of inner-circle Nazis that Soviet territory was to be transformed into a "Garden of Eden."21 Browning adds that Hitler, per usual, did not give explicit orders, but the meaning behind his words was clear. "What role could Jews have in a German Garden of Eden?"22 Congruent with Himmler and Heydrich's strategy of controlled escalation, the next day the broadest killing orders yet were committed to writing for the frst time: From 17 July 1941, according to Heydrich, "all Jews" in the Soviet interior were to be shot.23

Einsatzgruppe B commander, Artur Nebe, suggested around mid-July 1941 that with so few men, what was demanded was simply unachievable.24 Nevertheless, some leaders in the feld came up with their own solution to this problem. For example, in early July the German security police in Kaunas formed a battalion consisting of Lithuanians, which came under the control of Karl Jäger's Einsatzkommando 3 (a sub-unit of Stahlecker's Einsatzgruppe A).25 Also in early July, a ffth Einsatzgruppe was formed.26 As early as 27 June 1941, Himmler reacted to the emerging manpower issue when he commandeered his Kommandostab Reichsführer SS brigades from the army (a total of 25,000 men), arguing, "I need these units for other tasks."27 Out of the 25,000 men, Himmler only intended to use Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Jeckeln's 7000-strong SS Brigade One and SS and Police Leader Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski's 4000-strong SS Cavalry Brigade to kill civilians.28 There was also another SS Brigade headed by Higher SS and Police Leader Hans-Adolf Prützmann.29 These men under Himmler's "personal command" mainly provided a second wave to the Einsatzgruppen's frst murderous sweep of the new territories.30 According to Breitman, the men in these Brigades were, relatively speaking, "a less politicized force than the Einsatzgruppen," and "not part of a political-ideological elite."31

In terms of their destructive tasks, how did these ideologically more moderate Germans fare? By 10 July, Himmler had decided to use Bach-Zelewski's men to search for Jews hiding in the Pinsk or Pripet marshes to the east of Lublin. About a week later, on 19 July, these men received orders to engage in the mass murder of all Jews.32 These orders—directly from Himmler—were repeated on 27 July.33 Although like many units elsewhere, Bach-Zelewski's men found it fairly stressful to execute Jewish men, they found shooting women and children greatly exacerbated their stress.34 The existence of psychological diffculties among the execution forces is confrmed in the letters these men sent back to their families in Germany.35

Shooters were not the only ones to suffer from intense bouts of stress. Early in the Soviet campaign, SS-Obersturmführer August Häfner described Sonderkommando 4a leader Paul Blobel's mental breakdown in July 1941, and his desperate call for a less stressful and more effcient killing method.

I found my unit, they were all running around like lost sheep. I realized that something must have happened and asked what was wrong. Someone told me that [Standartenführer] Blobel had had a nervous breakdown and was in bed in his room. […] He was talking confusedly. He was saying that it was not possible to shoot so many Jews and that what was needed was a plough to plough them into the ground. He had completely lost his mind.36

Other squad commanders who did not have to directly kill anybody also proved susceptible to mental breakdowns, including Einsatzkommando 3's Karl Jäger,37 Higher SS/Police Leader Bach-Zelewski,38 and (twice) Einsatzgruppe B commander Nebe.39

As Himmler and Heydrich had suspected, the order to shoot defenseless civilians *en masse* generated what the men in the feld themselves termed Seelenbelastung or "burdening of the soul."40 The SS Cavalry Brigade's mass shootings of all Jews in the Pripet marshes started to founder. Similarly, despite Einsatzkommando Tilsit's promising early efforts, Kwiet notes that some of the shooters also started to struggle to implement their orders.

[T]he attrition rate from psychological problems connected to the killings was not insignifcant. Some marksmen in *EK* Tilsit succumbed to feelings of nausea and nervous tension during the massacres. […] In many cases killers suffered vomiting attacks or developed severe eczema or other psychosomatic disorders.41

In fact, when Einsatzkommando Tilsit was instructed to also shoot women and children, a small proportion of the men fatly refused to do so. These men were pulled out of the extermination campaign.42 Such cases of insubordination between the end of July and mid-August of 1941 caused a patently frustrated Himmler to regularly criticize his Einsatzgruppen and police forces.43 To make matters even more stressful for Himmler, the Einsatzgruppen commanders were instructed on 1 August 1941 that, "the Führer [was] to be kept informed continually from here about the work of the Einsatzgruppen in the East…."44

With Hitler having implied only two weeks earlier that he desired that all Jews be shot, Himmler must have wondered if his men were up to the task. The SS leadership was equally interested in knowing how far their offcers would go and, as a result, they developed "an almost obsessive interest in receiving information about events in the feld."45 The day after Hitler's request, 2 August, Himmler criticized his SS Cavalry for their "soft behavior," and again demanded they kill more Jews.46 Both Himmler and Heydrich became notorious for categorizing functionaries as either "soft" or "hard."47 In response to Himmler, Bach-Zelewski's SS Cavalry Brigade and some local militias continued to shoot at least 3000 Jewish males over the age of fve on a daily basis.48 However, despite Himmler's direct order that the Pinsk action was to be completed, the men fatly refused—thus disobeying direct orders—to kill *all* Jews. This refusal was indicative that these men deemed Himmler's orders unacceptable—tasks they obviously placed outside the parameters of their *Zone of Indifference*. In fact, by the evening of 8 August the action was abandoned.49

To halt this kind of insubordination, Himmler and many other senior SS offcers below him personally visited the troops in the feld and directly instructed them to do as the SS-Reichsführer wanted and kill more Jews.50 Because the men were struggling, during these visits Himmler also attempted to personally reinforce, as dictated by Nazi ideology, the great necessity of the men's diffcult duties.51 If this did not have the desired effect and the men still refused to kill all Jews, the SS leadership applied more coercive techniques to encourage them to do what they desired. For example, during feld visits, Himmler and his most senior commanders told their men that having shot Jewish men they had to eliminate the risk of revenge attacks by also killing the women and children.52 Offcers in the feld soon started to rely on this justifcation for their destructive actions. One, for example, wrote in a letter to his wife, "But we are fghting this war for the survival and non-survival of our people. […] My comrades are literally fghting for the existence of our people."53 As in Milgram's web of obligation, once one starts moving in such a radical direction, suddenly deciding to stop becomes increasingly diffcult. Abruptly stopping, for example, would not erase the fact that, by any defnition, these Germans had already become killers of civilians. Primo Levi more specifcally terms this manipulative mafa-like technique the "bond of complicity"54—where, as Hannah Arendt notes, Germans in the East were encouraged to kill at least one person, and on performing this "irreversible act" they then entered a "community of violence" that suddenly and forever cut them off from "respectable society."55 After this, there could be no going back.

If Himmler's persuasions failed to work, one offcer noted the SS leadership had other, perhaps even more "malicious," strategies. "Himmler issued an order stating that any man who no longer felt able to take the psychological stresses should report to his superior offcer. These men were to be released from their current duties and would be detailed for other work back home."56 Himmler planned to replace any dropouts with new men. But, this seemingly attractive offer was an "evil trick" designed to highlight those who were "too weak" to be an offcer.57 The offcer also suspected (correctly as it turned out) that any declaration of softness would be detrimental to their career path. As Westermann states, "In cases where a fnal determination was made by the SS-Reichsführer against a policeman, the remark 'unsuited for duties in the East' was added to his personnel fle, precluding the opportunity for further promotion."58 To accept the offer to be released from shooting duties, the men had to be willing to dent the quality of their organizational membership—along with all the fruits associated with it.59 As a last resort, Himmler could and did fall back on the "Führer Principle" that required "unquestioning obedience to a single leader."60 As Breitman observes, the SS leadership relied heavily on "the weight of authority to override qualms of conscience or simple distaste for unpleasant tasks."61

One limitation of these and other top-down initiatives designed to socially engineer what the SS leadership desired was that they did nothing to physically shield the shooters from the cause of their stress. The closest Himmler came to suggesting such an initiative was when he told Bach-Zelewski's cavalry that, "All [male] Jews must be shot. Drive Jewish females into the swamps."62 Himmler, it seems, was trying to spare his men from the intense mental anguish associated with being directly responsible for murdering women. The quicksand, Himmler envisioned, would do the dirty work for them. However, the quality of his idea hints at the SS-Reichsführer's desperate state. In early August, SS Sturmbannführer Franz Magill informed Himmler that his idea had failed. "The driving of women and children into the marshes did not have the expected success, because the marshes were not so deep that one could sink. After a depth of about a meter there was in most cases solid ground (probably sand) preventing complete sinking…."63

These women and children—about 20,000 people—lived for another year until they were killed during an independent sweep.64

Further north, Gustav Lombard, the commander of the Mounted Unit of the 1st SS Cavalry Regiment, continued to push his men hard: "Not one male Jew is to remain alive, not one remnant family in the villages."65 Between 1 and 11 August, Lombard's men killed about 1000 Jewish men, women, and children per day.66 It is no coincidence that soon afterward Himmler promoted Lombard but demoted Magill.67 Certainly, this was, as Matthäus notes, one effective way to ensure that the "…unit commanders of the Security and Order Police got the message about the desired course of action and adapted in order to please their superiors. Clearly, these offcers were talking to each other and observing what their colleagues elsewhere were doing."68

# Finally the SS-Reichsführer "Understands"

Himmler, incensed by the refusal of some men to carry out his orders, and constantly reminded of their emotional diffculties, asked Einsatzgruppe B commander Nebe on 15 August 1941 to organize an execution while he (Himmler) was in Minsk.69 Having heard so much fuss, Himmler wanted to "see what one of these 'liquidations' really looked like."70 The SS-Reichsführer's Chief of Personal Staff, Karl Wolff, later stated that, "from his own mouth," Himmler had never seen people killed before.71 Nebe, in the presence of Bach-Zelewski, arranged for about 100 people to be executed—two of whom were women. Before the mass shooting, Himmler conveyed an air of casual indifference as he asked the Jews some questions. However, his blasé attitude disintegrated as the frst volley of shots was fred. His lack of experience of killing was exposed to all present.

Both Wolff and Bach-Zelewski remembered that Himmler was shaken by the murders. "Himmler was extremely nervous," Bach-Zelewski testifed. 'He couldn't stand still. His face was white as cheese, his eyes went wild and with each burst of gunfre he always looked at the ground.'72

Much as in the frst Obedience pilot series where some participants engaged in avoidance-type behaviors, Himmler looked away from the disturbing things happening in front of him; unlike the executioners, who could not do so.73 Kwiet notes the inspection "caused Himmler nausea (Unwohlsein) and symptoms of nervous collapse."74 When the two women lay down to be shot members of the squad lost their nerve, and fred badly, injuring, rather than killing them. At that point, Himmler "panicked [and] […] jumped up and screamed at the squad commander: 'Don't torture these women! Fire! Hurry up and kill them!'"75 This event illustrates how Himmler's idea of shooting did not equate with the task's disturbing perceptual reality. "Almost fainting, pale, limbs quivering" Himmler had come to understand personally the problem his men were facing.76 Bach-Zelewski must have felt vindicated because he then told Himmler, "*Reichsführer*, those were only a hundred. […] Look at the eyes of the men in this *Kommando*, how deeply shaken they are! These men are fnished [*fertig*] for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or savages!"77 Adolf Eichmann felt similarly. "I said [to the local SS Commander in Lwów] young people are being made into sadists. How can one do that? Simply bang away at women and children? That is impossible. Our people will go mad or become insane…."78

As the leading fgure present at the Minsk execution, Himmler felt compelled to try to reduce his men's distress by providing them with a variety of strain resolving justifcations. He reminded them that they need not feel guilty over what they did because—relying on the ability to displace individual responsibility elsewhere in the division of labor—they were only following his, and therefore Hitler's, orders. Somewhat related to this, Himmler understood, as presumably they should, that these diffcult and repulsive tasks were absolutely necessary. Finally, Himmler reminded the men that although vermin has a purpose in life, this did not mean that humankind could not defend itself.79 This kind of strain resolving speech was in line with Himmler's preconceived strategy of providing the men with a reason to kill.80 On the eve of a *Judenaktionen*, execution squads were purposefully fooded with a deluge of antisemitic propaganda—speeches, literature, flms, and documentaries.81 Nonetheless, as this event—and the last month or so—had illustrated, a determined Himmler did everything he could think of to best ensure his men killed all Jews.82

After the mass shooting in Minsk, Himmler, Wolff, Bach-Zelewski, and Nebe visited a recently formed ghetto, which included a large institution housing the mentally ill. Himmler, who by this time had clearly calmed down, suggested in strain resolving, euphemistic terms that Nebe "release" (i.e., kill) the patients.83 But for reasons discussed below, the shooters found killing such people nerve wracking. In fact, Nebe had already informed his deputy Paul Werner that he (Nebe) "could not ask his troops to shoot these incurably insane people."84 Nebe therefore inquired how Himmler thought he might carry out the task. Himmler replied "that today's event had brought him to the conclusion that death by shooting was certainly not the most humane"85 and asked Nebe "'to turn over in his mind' various other killing methods more humane than shooting."86 This was not a throwaway request. Himmler knew that Nebe had overcome similar killing-related obstacles during his time working in the T4's euthanasia program.87 This single conversation, as we shall see, powerfully infuenced the fate of massive numbers of Jews and other groups such as the German Gypsies, who were also forced into the Polish ghettos.88

# Pilot Studies in Killing Mid-to-Late 1941

Nebe went on to consult a former colleague from the euthanasia program, chemist Albert Widmann, one of the inventors of the bottled (pure) carbon monoxide gassing technique. Widmann came from the Reich Security Main Offce's (RSHA) Criminal Technology Institute in Berlin. During the middle of September 1941, Nebe and Widmann engaged in their frst ad hoc experiment. Just as Milgram had done by introducing a wall into his basic procedure, if Nebe and Widmann were to successfully diminish the "burdening of the soul," they would need to reduce the perceptual intensity associated with the act of harming. The duo's frst experiment using explosives intuitively moved in this direction, but failed to achieve the goal. "Twenty-fve mentally ill people were locked into two bunkers in a forest outside Minsk. The frst explosion killed only some of them, and it took much time and trouble until the second explosion killed the rest. Explosives therefore were unsatisfactory."89 Wilhelm Jaschke, a captain in Einsatzkommando 8, provides a more detailed account of what happened.

The sight was atrocious. The explosion hadn't been powerful enough. Some wounded came out of the dugout crawling and crying. […] The bunker had totally collapsed. […] Body parts were scattered on the ground and hanging in the trees. On the next day, we collected the body parts and threw them into the bunker. Those parts that were too high in the trees were left there.90

Obviously, this pilot was a total failure.

A month later, in October 1941, a group of men under Odilo Globocnik (commander of Lublin's SS and Police) independently developed a remarkably similar method of killing. Their technique required victims to lie in a ditch head-to-toe in batches of ten. Then, Globocnik's men would seek cover and lob hand grenades on top of them. Again, body parts flled the air. Although this method enabled the perpetrators to avoid the horrifc visual spectacle when killing, occasionally some victims were not killed outright. The severely wounded required what the perpetrators, using strain resolving euphemistic language, called "mercy shots"—a visually disturbing task they did not enjoy. Though Globocnik's men are believed to have killed about 75,000 civilians using this technique,91 it would seem that its distasteful side effects led to the grenade technique's eventual abandonment.

Two months earlier in August 1941, hundreds of miles away in Austria's Mauthausen concentration camp, Himmler had (as part of the 14f13 program) begun organizing for those prisoners no longer capable of labor to be gassed at the T4 facility in Hartheim, located about 30 kilometers to the west.92 This approach was costly and time-consuming, and so in October—the same month Globocnik's men were trialing their grenade killing technique—staff at Mauthausen started experimenting with a new method of their own. Inmates sentenced to death were deceived into thinking they were to have their photograph taken. After being instructed to stand opposite a camera-like device and pressing their back up against a section of wall vertically lined with small holes, an SS man on the other side would then surreptitiously shoot the inmate in the back of the neck. After the execution, another inmate would quickly transfer the body to an adjoining mortuary and clean away all traces of what had just taken place, resetting the scene for the next victim. This shooting technique was capable of killing about 30 inmates per hour.93 However, this killing method must have been abandoned because up until February 1942 Mauthausen continued shipping its unproductive prisoners to Hartheim.94 The prisoner manifest at Mauthausen continued to grow and so did the expense of getting rid of so-called useless mouths. Camp staff continued to search for a better—cheaper, effcient yet, for the perpetrators, inoffensive—means of ending the lives of unproductive prisoners.

Back in the Soviet interior, the failure of Nebe and Widmann's explosives experiment did not dent their motivation to continue searching for a more "humane" way of killing civilians. At an asylum in Mogilev, the duo embarked on a second experiment. Nebe, with Widmann's help, drew on his own previous experience and intuition to develop a method of killing that he thought ordinary Germans might willingly use. Nebe recalled an experience many years earlier when, after having driven home drunk one evening, he nearly killed himself after failing to turn the vehicle's engine off inside a garage.95 Drawing on this near-death experience, Nebe connected one end of a hose to the exhaust pipe of a running motor vehicle and the other end to a hermetically sealed room containing 20–30 mentally ill patients. The people inside the room soon died. A cheap, abundant, and mobile alternative gas to that used in the T4 euthanasia program had been found.

Widmann's trial after the war revealed that, "Nebe discussed the technical aspects of the idea with Dr. Heess and together they brought the proposal before Heydrich who adopted it."96 When Heydrich caught wind of this experiment, he contacted some subordinates in the RSHA, and they asked Friedrich Pradel and his chief mechanic Harry Wentritt97 if exhaust gas could be directed into a truck's sealed cargo cabin. The reasoning behind this idea was because "the fring squads in Russia suffered frequent nervous breakdowns and needed [what Pradel termed] a "more humane" method of killing."98 Based on Nebe's idea, Wentritt constructed the frst exhaust gas van prototype and in early November a killing pilot test was conducted on a group of Soviet POWs in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.99 The results were so satisfactory that from November 1941 the van prototype was put into production.100 The frst vans constructed in Wentritt's garage were sent to the East.

As Nebe and Widmann conducted their trial-and-error experiments in the East, in Auschwitz I a similar yet completely independent set of experiments was taking place. Soon after the start of Operation Barbarossa, Soviet POWs began arriving at Auschwitz I. The camp's Commandant, Rudolf Höss, had been ordered to immediately execute the offcer ranks.101 The Soviet offcers were shot in small groups at the infamous Black Wall.102 Despite initial enthusiasm, the German guards soon tired of the bloody task. As elsewhere, Höss and his men "had had enough of…the mass killings by fring squad ordered by Himmler and Heydrich."103 The shootings were moved to a more secluded location, and it was not long before the task started to fall on the shoulders of a select few who decided,

it would be more effcient to bring the condemned to the crematorium and kill them in the mortuary. "The walls were stained with blood, and in the background there lay the corpses of those already shot," [Pery] Broad [who worked in Auschwitz's Political Department] wrote after the war. "A wide stream of blood was fowing towards the drain in the middle of the hall. The victims were obliged to step quite close to the corpses and formed a line. Their feet were stained with blood; they stood in puddles of it. […] The right-hand man of the camp leader, *SS*-*Hauptscharführer* Palitzsch, did the shooting. He killed one person after another with a practiced shot in the back of the neck." The stench was so foul that in the summer of 1941 the chief of the political department, Grabner, prevailed on Schlachter to install a more sophisticated ventilation system that not only extracted the air he found sickening but also brought in a fresh supply from outside.104

Höss' deputy, Karl Fritzsch, also soon tired of these mass shootings. One day when Höss was away, Fritzsch decided to pursue an experiment. The idea for his experiment was stimulated by the camp's omnipresent vermin problem: Some of Fritzsch's men had been sent back to Germany to receive training in the use of Zyklon-B, an effective and deadly pesticide. Zyklon-B consisted of small pellets that turned into gas when exposed to oxygen at a temperature of (or above) 25.7 degrees Celsius.105 If Zyklon-B could easily kill vermin, it probably could kill humans as well.

On 3 September 1941 (less than two weeks before Nebe's experiments), a large group of Soviet and Polish prisoners were placed in a sealed detention cell known as Block 11. Pellets of the pesticide were then dropped into a small number of re-sealable vents in the roof. The victims died soon afterward.106 Upon Höss's return, Fritzsch replicated his experiment. Höss later admitted being surprised that Zyklon-B killed the victims so quickly. "A short, almost smothered cry, and it was all over."107 And it was cheap—it was established that around this point in time, it costs less than one US cent per victim killed.108 But most pleasing for Höss was that he was "relieved to think that we were to be spared all those blood-baths…."109 Unlike stressful shootings, for Höss "the gassings had a calming effect on me…."110 By instituting what Höss and his men found to be a less stressful method of killing, Fritzsch had secured for his German executioners a feeling of suffcient indifference needed to ensure they remained within their *Zone of Indifference*. Consequently, Himmler's higher "orders for actions" had, thanks to Fritzsch, become suffciently inoffensive and thereafter "unquestionably acceptable."111

After Fritzsch's experiments, Block 11 was abandoned and the morgue where Gerhard Palitzsch had been undertaking his shootings was converted into a gassing facility. The morgue had an attached crematorium so the victims' bodies would not have to be carted through the camp streets for disposal. Conversion of the mortuary into a gas chamber both reduced prisoner awareness of gassings112 and made the killings more effcient.113 The morgue's new ventilation system, initially installed to remove the nauseating smells generated by the mass shootings, serendipitously contributed to the viability of the gassing process by rapidly expelling the poisonous gas.114 With little delay between gassings, bodies could be transferred to the incinerator located close by in the crematorium.115 Thus was invented the gas chamber/body disposal unit called Crematorium I, which stimulated a major shift in Nazi killing techniques. Crematorium I's 77.28 square meter gas chamber116 was capable of killing up to 900 prisoners per gassing117 several times per day. The only limiting factor was the crematorium's 70-body per day disposal capacity.118

As the end of 1941 approached, increasing numbers of prisoners— Soviet offcers and non-workers targeted by Operation 14f13—were cheaply gassed and disposed of on-site, thus eliminating the need to shoot the former and, somewhat expensively, ship the latter by train to a T4 gas chamber hundreds of miles away in Germany.119 Word about Fritzsch's discovery must have spread quickly because soon after the fall of 1941 Mauthausen in Austria started constructing a permanent Zyklon-B gas chamber.120 Upon the gas chamber's completion in March 1942, transports of prisoners to the T4 facility at Hartheim ceased. On-site gassings with Zyklon-B at Mauthausen continued to 28 April 1945.121

Back at Auschwitz I, on 1 October 1941 Karl Bischoff was hired to manage the construction of the massive 100,000-person satellite camp that Himmler had promised to IG Farben offcials back in March 1941.122 This new camp, located about 1.5 kilometers from the main camp, was called Auschwitz II, but is now more infamously known as Auschwitz-Birkenau. Soon after hiring Bischoff, the late fall weather caused an increase in the Soviet POW death rate.123 The advancing cold and damp conditions, in conjunction with Auschwitz I's new effcient gassing method, caused an accumulation of bodies requiring cremation. Furthermore, Bischoff anticipated on the horizon a second and much greater body disposal problem: Himmler's 100,000-person satellite camp would, through the attrition associated with a camp with little food or heating, likely generate an even greater number of bodies in need of disposal. On 11 November, Bischoff addressed the frst relatively minor problem with a plan to increase Crematorium I's 70-body per day incineration capacity. He did so by requesting that engineer Kurt Prüfer from the frm Topf & Sons (designers and builders of Crematorium I) install a third incinerator.124 The potentially greater second problem was addressed during a meeting on 21 and 22 October 1941 when Prüfer convinced Bischoff to commission his company to build an industrial-sized crematorium. The new structure was to be built behind Crematorium I in Auschwitz I.125 Prüfer estimated that this massive crematorium would be capable of incinerating about 1440 bodies every 24 hours.126 This industrial crematorium even came with an elevator, making it easier to transport any bodies in excess of this number to what Bischoff and Prüfer anticipated would be two large basement-level morgues.127

By mid-1941 to late 1941, then, as a result of experiments conducted by a variety of Nazi offcials in places as far apart as Minsk, Mogilev, Lublin, Auschwitz I, and Mauthausen, new killing techniques had been discovered in an effort to fnd less stressful methods of disposing of large numbers of civilians than those offered by military-style mass shooting. Most of these experiments failed, or for some reason or another proved unviable, but as will be shown, further refnements—ironing out the kinks—ensured that Nebe and Fritzsch's discoveries would gain prominence. With exhaust fumes (carbon monoxide) and Zyklon-B, from September 1941 the Nazis had two cheap, plentiful, and mobile gases. They were the fnal remaining ingredient Himmler and Heydrich needed to convert the "Führer's wish" into a reality. The gaps in the theoretical formula that made total extermination possible were closing and a feasible "rough outline" was emerging.128 The gassing option was now a topic that any ambitious, goal-orientated, problem-solving Nazi bureaucrat could raise in discussions of how to rationally and permanently resolve the "Jewish question." September 1941 is therefore another important date in the history of the Holocaust. With Germany on the verge of gaining total hegemony over continental Europe, exterminating all of European Jewry was becoming increasingly possible. These discoveries therefore injected enormous power into any decision to exterminate European Jewry.129 However, the careful design, construction, and testing of a large-scale gassing enterprise would take some time. So in the succeeding months after Himmler observed the mid-August mass execution in Minsk, the shootings had to continue.

# The Holocaust by Bullets Continues

Himmler's insistence that shootings continue saw more squad leaders directly confront the SS-Reichsführer over the effect that the "burdening of the soul" was having on their men.130 By 1942, Heinz Jost, the new commander of Einsatzgruppe A, had become so concerned about the mental state of some of his men that he felt it necessary to directly challenge Himmler. Jost, however, got no further than others before him. Himmler snapped back, "Are you a philosopher? What is the meaning of this? What do you mean, problems? All that is concerned are our orders."131 Himmler's response may have been strategic. By refusing to sympathize with his squad leaders' concerns, he ensured that most returned to their troops with nothing but bad news: They had to follow the SS-Reichsführer's original command. The leaders in the feld would keep pushing their men until they grew accustomed to their grisly tasks, or else broke down. When some did break down, Himmler simply advised that these men be sent home and replaced with new shooters. As Gustave Fix of Sonderkommando 6 said, "I would also like to mention that as a result of the considerable psychological pressures, there were numerous men who were no longer capable of conducting executions and who thus had to be replaced by other men."132 Without access to new killing methods, Himmler must have felt this was the only way to deal with the ongoing problem with shooter stress.

Himmler's attrition and replacement policy were likely to have had another, albeit unanticipated, effect on the rates of killing. As Arendt insightfully noted, time saw the attrition and replacement policy eventually produce a concentration of ordinary men who differed from the ordinary men who dropped out—they could more regularly handle the intense strain associated with their bloody tasks.133 Therefore, the Germans who remained differed signifcantly from those who dropped out in that the former were not just willing, they were also able. Consider, for example, Einsatzkommando 3's leader Karl Jäger who submitted a ledger-style progress report to Berlin that denoted over 130,000 victims killed between 7 July and 25 November 1941. Before presenting this astounding statistic, Jäger wrote, "Following the formation of a raiding squad under the command of SS-Obersturmführer Hamann and *8*-*10 reliable men* from the Einsatzkommando the following actions were conducted in cooperation with Lithuanian partisans" [italics added].134 Such "reliable men"—selected by superiors because of their "strong nerves"135—earned the term "Dauer-Schützen" (permanent shooters).136

It would seem, therefore, that the SS leadership's gradually escalating orders and exertion of unrelenting top-down pressure started to have its desired effect. In June 1941, only men were targeted; however, by July women were regularly being killed. And by mid-August children were targeted.137 This general pattern—initial apprehension through to embracing the shooting of all Jews—is refected in the body counts. Consider the Einsatzgruppen, for example. From 22 June to mid-August 1941—that is seven weeks into Operation Barbarossa and over a month after the frst direct orders were issued that all Jews be killed the numbers of Jews shot varied from squad to squad, and region to region. Karl Jäger's Einsatzkommando 3 achieved unusually high numbers; 9188 civilians shot (10% of whom were women, with children spared).138 Conversely, the entire Einsatzgruppe D commanded by Otto Ohlendorf only shot 4425 Jews during the same period.139 By the end of July, the sum total of victims killed by all Einsatzgruppen units came to 62,805 civilians,140 most of whom (about 90%) were Jews.141 The victims were again almost exclusively males.142 However, after mid-August the death toll rapidly escalated. In the two weeks ending the month, Jäger's Einsatzkommando 3 killed 33,000 civilians (including an increasing proportion of females and now also children). The same pattern applied to the previously sluggish Einsatzgruppe D whose death toll before the end of September rose to 36,000.143 From August onward, entire Jewish communities started disappearing. Perhaps even to the surprise of Himmler and Heydrich, the German security forces and their Eastern European collaborators ended up exterminating about 1.4 million Jews.144 In his summary of these events, Friedländer captures this almost exponential escalation in death rates and the ongoing mystery surrounding them:

There is something at once profoundly disturbing yet rapidly numbing in the narration of the anti-Jewish campaign that developed in the territories newly occupied by the Germans or their allies. History seems to turn into a succession of mass killing operations and, on the face of it, little else. […] All there is to report, it seems, is a rising curve of murder statistics, in the North, the Center, the South, and the Extreme South.145

# Conclusion

What factors explain this rapid change from small- to large-scale slaughter? It would seem the SS leadership's persuasive, forceful, and sometimes coercive orders exerted a key top-down pressure. As Bloxham and Kushner argue, Himmler, often after meetings with Hitler, was instrumentally involved in "driving the murder process" forward.146 And once it was clear that all Jews were to be killed, shooters either pulled out or continued to participate. Those that remained were the men capable of fulflling their superior offcers' seemingly incontestable orders. As Matthäus argues, "Undoubtedly, encouragement from above had the effect of speeding things up."147 Thus, it is tempting to argue that obedience to authority played *the* key role in these destructive actions. When, however, a so-called tendency to obey is used to explain obedience, the logic is tautological, as was the case with Milgram's theoretical assertions (see Volume 1). Nevertheless, the perpetrators later interpreted their own actions in this way: They just followed orders from above. And the shooters frequently looked lost for words to fnd a better explanation. But, despite a common reliance on this defense, the subsequent war crimes trails highlight a glaring weakness. Take, for example, a question by one judge directed at Ohlendorf's assistant, SS Lieutenant Colonel Willy Seibert, who adamantly claimed that he was *only* following orders.

"Now…after receiving an order…from a superior offcer, to shoot your own parents, would you do so?" He blinked his puffy eyes as if to prolong his deliberations and then scanned the courtroom. […] Then, taking a deep breath, he expelled the words like one who had been hit in the chest: 'Mr President, I would not do so.'148

And as shown, some Germans refused to participate in the shootings. The shooters, therefore, did not *have* to follow their orders. Instead, they *chose* to do so.

When, however, one considers the interactive effect of the SS leadership's unrelenting top-down pressure *in conjunction* with bottom-up forces generated by those in the killing feld (men who happened to be armed with a means of inficting harm that, in terms of perceptual stimulation, could potentially be lowered to the point that killing other humans became psychologically less burdensome), the mystery behind Friedländer's so-called rising curve of murder statistics becomes much more comprehensible.

# Notes


# References


#### 128 N. RUSSELL

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# Operation Barbarossa and the Holocaust by Bullets—Bottom-Up Forces

Having examined the top-down forces the SS leadership exerted on the extermination campaign, this chapter explores the bottom-up forces generated by those in the killing feld. What becomes apparent is when managers and their functionaries work within an organizational process, they typically move toward "improving" an initially rudimentary system, much like Milgram and Williams did during the Obedience studies. With increasing experience over time—*past history*—some innovators add effciencies and eliminate ineffciencies, which helps advance the organizational system in the desired direction. As we shall see, during the Nazi regime's pursuit of the Holocaust by bullets, many of these kinds of innovations focused on making the act of killing with guns *both* more effcient and suffciently palatable for the German executioners. In this, I would argue, the Holocaust by bullets resembles Milgram's pilot studies where participants invented their own strain resolving coping mechanisms from the bottom-up, for example, avoidance behaviors where they purposefully looked away from the learner. These kinds of bottom-up innovations made what Milgram wanted psychologically easier (less stressful) for the participants to engage in. Likewise, on the Eastern front the easier the participation in harm doing became psychologically, the greater the proportion of ordinary Germans willing to partake in the infiction of harm. And the longer these Germans continued to participate, the greater the devastation. As this and the remaining chapters demonstrate, the more attention one pays to the strain resolving power of the means of inficting harm, the clearer the internal logic behind the Nazis' machinery of destruction becomes.

As I showed in the previous chapter, although Himmler and his commanders did all they could to ensure their men did what they wanted, mere words and orders could not eliminate the intense perceptual experience of shooting unarmed civilians at close range. As this chapter will show, squad commanders and executioners alike soon realized that if they wanted to avoid mental breakdowns, *they* would have to fnd their own more effective ways of relieving themselves of the "burdening of the soul." This is the kind of situation where, as Bauman argues, from the bottom-up, "bureaucracy picks up where visionaries stop."1

Although "Every…squad had its preferred methods,"2 after "lessons learned,"3 certain innovators in the feld discovered a series of less stressful and more effcient ways to shoot civilians. And after regular meetings "to debate the most effcient methods"4 and "frequent information exchanges,"5 the most effective of these ideas spread to other squads. What follows is a very general big-picture overview of the transition from the earliest (rudimentary) ineffcient and strain inducing shooting techniques to the emergence of the most effcient and popular strain resolving "one best way" of shooting civilians *en masse*. To gain a basic overview of what took place, we must briefy return to the start of Operation Barbarossa and the frst mass shooting undertaken by Einsatzkommando Tilsit.

# The First Executions

Einsatzkommando Tilsit's frst execution in Gargždai on 24 June differed from the early Polish executions in important ways. First, before the mass shooting, Tilsit's men searched for an existing burial site perhaps a hill-shaped land formation, ravine, or in their case, a tank trap. Second, victims were instructed to stand on the grave's edge and were then shot, so that most would fall into the pit. As a result, their bodies quickly and conveniently disappeared from the shooters' sight.6 Because the shooters did not have to dig the grave and then drag all the bodies into it, they avoided signifcant physical labor (effciency) and did not have to touch the bodies or see the unsettling wounds they had just inficted on defenseless civilians.7 Finally, this more effcient technique allowed the men to more effectively separate cause (pulling the trigger) from effect (killing). After the shootings, the executioners quickly flled in the graves and moved on. To save themselves the effort of having to search for a burial site, an even more effcient approach was to force the victims or locals requisitioned from the community to dig graves.8 For a photograph showing Lithuanian Jews forced by Germans to dig a grave pit in 1941, see https://dachaujacket.omeka.net/exhibits/show/photos/item/4602. Clearly, these new innovations frst emerged at some point between the frst executions of civilians during the Polish invasion and the start of Operation Barbarossa.9

After the men from Einsatzkommando Tilsit had secured a burial site, the condemned were instructed to walk toward the tank trap. On arrival.

A group of ten men was forced to take up position at the edge of the pit *with their faces turned toward the execution commando*. The twenty-man strong fring party stood at a distance of twenty meters from the pit's edge. Two marksmen aimed their rifes at one victim, an SS offcer gave the order to shoot. After each round a new group was driven to the edge of the pit and forced to push into it any corpses that had not fallen in on their own. [italics added]10

Despite all these innovations, perhaps having to look at the facial expressions of people in their last moments resulted in some executioners showing signs of "burdening of the soul" and succumbing "to feelings of nausea and nervous tension…."11

One of the earliest and more popular strain resolving techniques for dealing with this stress was to consume alcohol.

In Gargždai, Kretinga and Palanga, coveted schnapps rations were distributed [to the Tilsit executioners] following each *Judenaktion*, […] Killing orders issued in July 1941 instructed the SS and Police commanders to ensure that members of the execution commandos came to no harm. Within the framework of *seelische Betreuung* (pastoral care), social get-togethers in the evenings as well as excursions…took place in order to wipe out the impressions of the day.12

As Hilberg observes, most of the shooting squad members "were drunk most of the time—only the 'idealists' refrained from the use of alcohol."13 Alcohol was rationed by commanding offcers and became a central part of the extermination process for some squads. For example, because the mass shootings were associated with a decline in squad morale, Alfred Filbert of Einsatzkommando 9 thought it wise to issue his men with increasing rations of vodka.14

Elsewhere, Einsatzgruppe C relied on a similar yet more proximate shooting technique to Tilsit during its frst executions. As one shooter noted, "In Rovno I had to participate in the frst shooting… Each member of the fring-squad had to shoot one person. We were instructed to aim at the head from a distance of about ten metres."15 After fring at about fve people, this squad member stopped due to "nervous strain…."16 To alleviate this strain, the method of shooting was changed: Several shooters were tasked with fring at each victim. On 12 July 1941, Einsatzkommando member Felix Landau noted in his diary a problem with the multiple-shooter-per-victim technique. "Six of us had to shoot them. The job was assigned thus: three at the heart, three at the head. I took the heart. The shots were fred and the brains whizzed through the air. Two in the head is too much. They almost tear it off."17 Although this shooting technique produced a disturbing visual spectacle, many commanders, like Ohlendorf from Einsatzgruppe D, initially preferred it because it helped to "avoid any individual having to take direct, personal responsibility."18

The general passivity with which many, though certainly not all, Jews went to their deaths may also have aided in reducing the perceptual intensity of what would otherwise have been for their executioners a much more emotionally disturbing task. A Wehrmacht cadet offcer based in Ukraine wrote in August 1941.

What struck me particularly was the calmness and discipline of these [Jewish] people. […] The marksmen were members of the SS. On the orders of a superior they fred shots at the heads of these people with their carbines. […] Sometimes the tops of their skulls few up into the air. […] The people who were to be shot walked towards this grave as though they were taking part in a procession. […] They went composed and quietly to their deaths. I saw only two women weep the whole time I observed such executions. I found it simply inexplicable.19

Was this cadet trying to "blame the victims" for not resisting?20 Other witnesses, like Alfred Metzner, suggested that some Jews even went to the trouble of reducing the stressful nature of the executioners' task by going to their deaths in an orderly—some might say considerate—manner. "It was amazing…how the Jews stepped into the graves, with only mutual condolences in order to strengthen their spirits and in order to ease the work of the execution commandos."21 Why did the victims behave this way? Perhaps on realizing that escape was near impossible, facilitating a carefully aimed and immediately lethal (painless?) shot was surely preferable to a slower death associated with resisting.22 Complying with, and thereby accommodating, an irrational goal like mass extermination made some rational sense.

"Gypsies" (Roma), however, who as *Untermenschen* were also targeted during the Soviet campaign, frequently caused greater diffculties for German shooting squads. As Lieutenant Colonel Walther stated,

Shooting the Jews is easier than shooting the gypsies [*sic*]. I have to admit that the Jews are very composed as they go to their death—they stand very calmly—while the gypsies [*sic*] wail and scream and move about constantly when they are already standing at the execution site.23

But it was the mentally ill who put up the greatest resistance. After Stahlecker's destructive Einsatzgruppe A shot 748 mentally ill Lithuanians in October 1941 because they were apparently a "danger" to security, the Wehrmacht asked them to repeat the exercise at a similar institution. Stahlecker refused to repeat the exercise, arguing to Himmler that if the Wehrmacht deemed such dirty work so necessary then they should do it themselves.24 What Stahlecker and his men had discovered was that mentally institutionalized people typically refused to follow the instructions of those who intended to kill them and, as a result, they frequently became hysterical. The ensuing panic made the targets diffcult to kill with one shot (thus greatly heightening and prolonging the perpetrators' stress). Even Jäger's prolifc Einsatzkommando 3 had, by 1 February 1942, only managed to shoot 653 mentally ill patients out of a total of 138,272 victims (100,000 of whom were women and children).25 Other commanders, including Nebe, encountered similar diffculties.26 After Germans encountered such experiences, the mentally ill were no longer categorized as a "danger" to security, and their execution by fring squad was no longer deemed a priority. The prospective victim pool contracted, and attention shifted to target categories such as Jews, who generated less "burdening of the soul." The irony of the resistance of the mentally ill and the passivity of the "normal" Jews are highlighted in the existing literature. For example, after Einsatzkommando 5 had shot a group of mentally ill patients in Kiev, the men experienced what they termed an accompanying "heavy mental burden."27 Headland has drawn attention to the apparently "twisted thinking of these men." It was "much easier to kill people who were sane."28 Only the inherently irrational, it seems, were equipped with an effective strategy capable of subverting the increasingly rationalized goal of mass extermination. But it would not last. Despite Einsatzgruppe A's unwillingness to kill the mentally ill, Himmler knew of some specialists who would.

At the request of the Wehrmacht, Himmler decided on 4 October…that Sonderkommando Lange [and his]…gassing vehicles, should be brought by plane to Novgorod in order to kill patients in three psychiatric hospitals there, because the accommodation was urgently needed for troops.29

Despite the strain resolving mechanisms they had developed, the executioners and their squad leaders could still not avoid seeing their victims close-up just before and during the shootings. Bauman suggests that the shooters tried to distance themselves as far as possible from their civilian targets.30 This strategy, however, created a problem of its own: Less accurate shooting resulted in wounded or in some cases, unwounded civilians falling into the graves with the dead. After the shootings, these victims were buried alive. Some would then try to claw their way out of the graves. But Nazi commanders soon demanded changes. One SS-Commissioner-General complained in a letter to the Reich Minister,

Peace and order cannot be maintained in White Ruthenia with methods of that sort. To bury seriously wounded people alive who worked their way out of their graves again, is such a base and flthy act that this incident as such should be reported to the Führer and Reichsmarschall.31

The fring squads' accuracy had to be improved. But to do so the shooters *had to move closer* to the civilians, but the closer they got, the more they could see and hear them thus intensifying the psychological burden. It was a dilemma. Many years later, a Vietnam Special Forces veteran related his own similar experiences to Grossman. "'When you get up close and personal,' he drawled with a cud of chewing tobacco in his cheek, 'where you can hear 'em scream and see 'em die,' and here he spit[s] tobacco for emphasis, 'it's a bitch.'"32 Because Jews were defenseless and often acquiescent civilians, the Germans had opportunities to manipulate their victims in ways that the Vietnam veteran could not. To maximize accuracy, the executioners had to see exactly where they were shooting. One new technique used to alleviate the psychological strain associated with the shootings was to have victims turn their backs to the shooters, thus enabling the shooters to avoid any eye contact or see the fearful expressions on their faces. One photo illustrating the German's reliance on this shooting technique taken sometime during the frst three months of the Soviet invasion shows at least four men kneeling over the edge of a ditch with a larger number of executioners shooting at the back of their heads from a distance of less than fve meters: See https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa19151. In Grossman's words,

The eyes are the window of the soul, and if one does not have to look into the eyes when killing, it is much easier to deny the humanity of the victim. The eyes bulging out 'like prawns' and blood shooting out of the mouth are not seen. The victim remains faceless, and one never needs to know one's victim as a person. And the price most killers have to pay for a closerange kill—the memory of the 'face terrible, twisted in pain and hate, yes such hate'—this price need never be paid if we can simply avoid looking at our victim's face.33

Also, because with this shooting technique the victims faced away from their executioners, they were less directly forced to hear any crying or screaming. Having the victims kneel instead of stand lowered their center of gravity over the precipice. Thus, upon being shot, they were more likely to fall forward into the grave below. The risk of Germans later having to push (and thus touch) any victims who failed to fall into the grave was reduced.34 A fnal slight strain resolving innovation was the introduction of "rotating fring squads," which dispersed the distasteful task across an entire squad.35 As Browning argues, this generated enormous pressure on all rank and fle members to do their fair share of the dirty work.36 It should also be kept in mind that because these Germans stood in potentially hostile enemy territory where all Germans depended on one another for their safety, failing to shoot one's fair share of the victims risked losing their comrade's goodwill.37 When contemplating the potential consequences of losing this goodwill, many Germans perceived their decision to shoot over refusing to do so as the lesser of two evils.38 Even if a shooter simply proved psychologically incapable of continuing to undertake the executions—thus failing to do their fair share—most important of all was that they demonstrated to their fellow comrades that they at least tried to help out. This intense pressure to participate in the executions, however, only ended up implicating the vast majority of Germans. With nearly all guilty of having killed at least some civilians, none of course would ever be in a position to critique the massacres or their fellows' decision to take part in them.39

The shooting method of having the victims kneel and turn away, however, was also not without its problems. For example, sometimes victims' skulls would shatter when struck by bullets from close range—a sight the shooters were unable to avoid.40 To eliminate problems like this, the neck shot emerged as the "recommended shooting technique…."41 The neck shot required that the victim turn away from the executioner or lie facedown on the ground. Then, from point-blank range, the shooter fred a single shot into the nape of the neck (just above the shoulders). The bullet would enter the back of the neck, producing a small entrance wound and, on severing the victim's spinal cord, kill instantly. With the neck shot, executioners could avoid seeing the larger exit wound. Compared to earlier shooting techniques, the neck shot was un-survivable and clean, and because it resulted in instant death, many Germans perceived it as a more humane way of killing.42 For a photo showing a member of Ohlendorf's Einsatzgruppe D relying on this shooting technique, see https://collections.ushmm.org/search/ catalog/pa5355. This photo also suggests that Ohlendorf's early preference for the multiple-shooter-per-victim technique was eventually eclipsed by the more popular neck shot. For another photograph, see https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsatzkommando#/media/File:Einsatzgruppen\_ or\_their\_auxiliaries\_-\_Kovno\_1942.jpg. The neck shot shooting technique likely made it easier for a larger proportion of ordinary Germans to do their fair share of the dirty work.

With fewer psychologically fragile perpetrators and, thus, a larger number of capable ordinary Germans involved in the killings, ambitious leaders in the feld continued to seek out more effcient innovations. Probably the most signifcant development in this direction was Higher SS/Police Leader Friedrich Jeckeln's "Sardinenpackung" method, which developed fairly early in the Soviet campaign near the end of July 1941. August Meier, a "minor bureaucrat," describes the technique.

I still particularly recall an *Aktion* in Schepetovka which stands out in my mind as extraordinarily gruesome. It involved about a hundred people. Women and children were among those shot. Jeckeln said: 'Today we'll stack them like sardines.' The Jews had to lie layer upon layer in an open grave and were then killed with neck shots from machine pistols, pistols and rifes. That meant they had to lie face down on those previously shot [whereas] in other executions they were shot standing up and fell into the grave or were dragged in. […] I don't know if Jeckeln did any shooting, but I don't believe so.43

As Helmut Langerbein observes, Jeckeln's rationale behind this technique was, because the victims stacked themselves, the perpetrators not only maximized usage of the typically limited grave space, they also avoided "the added post-execution work of layering bodies…."44 As we shall see, with more time and greater experience, this stacking technique inadvertently generated other advantages that enormously increased killing effciency.

About a month into the Soviet campaign, the Wehrmacht expressed concerns about a sudden infux of Jewish refugees from Hungary into the Ukrainian city of Kamianets-Podilskyi. A Wehrmacht offcial believed the refugees were too diffcult to feed and also posed a "danger of [spreading an] epidemic…."45 In late August, Jeckeln announced his solution to this problem: By 1 September 1941 he would liquidate them. Jeckeln knew he could not undertake such a massive operation with just his own men, so he organized for other units to converge on the small township. He few in especially to lead the action, and on the frst day, he observed from a nearby hill the mass shooting of 4200 men, women, and children. On the second day, over 11,000 civilians were killed. A total of 23,600 victims had been shot by the massacre's end.46 Jeckeln, who on 12 August had been ordered to report to Himmler about his brigade's "lack of 'activity',"47 radioed Berlin with his body count statistics. According to Dieter Pohl, this late August massacre was "the largest of its kind and signaled a turning point in the Holocaust—a break from killing targeted groups of mostly Jewish males to the indiscriminate murder of entire Jewish communities."48 Indeed, the massacre brought "Jeckeln the accolades that he had hoped for from his superior."49 During the month of August 1941, Jeckeln's Kommandostab SS Brigade One, which Breitman notes was not "part of a political-ideological elite"50 (more moderately antisemitic?), had shot 44,125 civilians in Western Ukraine.51 This fgure exceeded that of all other police units.52 It was from this point on that the "curve of murder statistics" soared.

In terms of the broader military campaign in the East, September 1941 was a particularly good month for the Wehrmacht.

…Leningrad was successfully cut off in early September. The Ukrainian campaign that Hitler imposed on his reluctant generals quickly followed. On September 12 Ewald von Kleist's tanks broke through the Soviet lines behind Kiev. On the same day German forces cracked the defensive perimeter around Leningrad. In the words of Alan Clark, this day could be "reckoned the low point in the fortunes of the Red Army for the whole war." By September 16 Kleist had joined up with Heinz Guderian at Lokhvista to complete the vast Kiev encirclement. By September 26 Kiev had fallen and 665,000 Soviet prisoners had been taken.53

With the Soviet Union at such a low point, Hitler sensed that total control of Europe would soon be his. In the "euphoria of victory,"54 Hitler, brimming with confdence, suddenly reversed his earlier decision not to expel the German Jews unable or unwilling to leave the Reich.55 Hitler's decision may also have been infuenced by Karl Kaufmann, the Gauleiter of Hamburg, who in September apparently asked the Führer if he would deport Germany's Jews so that their apartments could be used to house Germans whose homes had been destroyed by British bombing raids56—bombings Nazi propaganda blamed the Jews for.57 Whatever the reason behind this change, Hitler's decision (as we shall soon see) sparked Eichmann, the so-called Nazi's people mover, into sudden activity. Because, as shown, most Germans benefted fnancially and materially from the Nazi military victories, perhaps the Nazi labor minister's demand around September 1941 that the pension gap between white- and blue-collar (Aryan) Germans be narrowed is unsurprising.58 A month later and with more military successes, on 4 October 1942 Göring was the bearer of more good news for Germany: "From this day on things will continue to get better since we now possess huge stretches of fertile land. There are stocks of eggs, butter, and four there that you cannot even imagine."59 Not publicly discussed, of course, was what diverting this food bonanza to Germany and its armed forces meant for those living in and around these fertile lands. A month before Göring's good news, in August 1942 Erich Koch (Reich Commissioner for Ukraine) had already cemented his food policy guidelines, stating:

Ukraine is required to provide everything Germany lacks. This requirement is to be fulflled without regard to casualties …. The increase in bread rations is a political necessity crucial to our ability to pursue the war to its victorious conclusion. The grain we lack must be extracted from Ukraine. In light of this task, feeding the civilian population there is utterly insignifcant.60

As the Wehrmacht continued to push further into the Soviet interior, not far behind came Jeckeln effciently executing unusually large numbers of Jews. In early September, Jeckeln's HSSPF Russia South shot 4144 Jews in the Ukrainian township of Berdychiv.61 A week or so later, his men, accompanied by Police Battalion 45, killed another 12,000 Jews. Most of the victims were women, children, and the elderly.62 Wherever body counts were unusually high, Jeckeln could be found. The secret behind Jeckeln's ability to rapidly wipe out entire communities was the advancing organizational process he attached to his "Sardinenpackung" shooting technique.

# The Bureaucratized Mass Shooting Process: Babi Yar

On 19 September 1941, an advanced party from Paul Blobel's Sonderkommando 4a (Einsatzgruppe C) arrived in Kiev.63 The city was home to Ukraine's largest Jewish population. At a meeting between Jeckeln, Blobel, and Kurt Eberhard, Jeckeln set his sights on eliminating Kiev's entire Jewish population and arranged for other units, including some Ukrainian auxiliaries, to help with the task.64 Soon after, announcements on the streets of Kiev instructed all members of the Jewish community to meet at 8 a.m. on 29 September at a particular downtown location. All Jews were to bring offcial documents, warm clothing, linen, and any valuables. Those who failed to show up would be hunted down and shot. On the appointed day, a large crowd gathered. German and Ukrainian forces arranged them into a purposefully staggered line. Then, according to eyewitness Sergei Ivanovich Lutzenko, "in tight columns of one hundred each" the Jews "were marched to the adjoining Babi Yar" ravine.65 Another account by Lev Ozerov notes that at Babi Yar "an entire offce operation with desks had been set up…."66 A truck driver named Höfer describes what he saw:

The Ukrainians led them past a number of different places where one after the other they had to remove their luggage, then their coats, shoes and overgarments and also underwear. They also had to leave their valuables in a designated place. There was a special pile for each article of clothing. It all happened very quickly and anyone who hesitated was kicked or pushed by the Ukrainians to keep them moving.67

Removing the victims' clothing before shooting them generated two main advantages: the clothes could later be sold on for proft and, in terms of control, earlier executions confrmed that naked victims were less likely to make a run for it.68 The Babi Yar ravine,

was about 150 metres long, 30 metres wide and a good 15 metres deep. Two or three narrow entrances led to this ravine through which the Jews were channeled. When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the Schutzpolizei and made to lie down on top of the Jews who had already been shot. This all happened very quickly. The corpses were literally in layers. […] When the Jews reached the ravine they were so shocked by the horrifying scene that they completely lost their will. It may even have been that the Jews themselves lay down in rows to wait to be shot. […] there was a 'packer' at either entrance to the ravine. These 'packers' were Schutzpolizisten, whose job it was to lay the victim on top of the other corpses so that all the marksman had to do as he passed was fre a shot.69

The packers helped to ease the psychological burden on the shooters by ensuring victims were facedown and thus faceless, robbing them of their individuality.70 There were so many people to kill that the shootings continued until darkness, with the action resuming at frst light the following morning.71 Paul Blobel divided his men into groups of 30, with each group spending an hour each on shooting duties.72 With specialist contributors who collected clothing and valuables, channeled victims into the ravine, and "packed" the victims to await the arrival of the marksmen who shot them, Jeckeln had developed a bureaucratized, assembly-line process of mass murder. With more civilians killed in less time, this massacre overshadows that in Kamianets-Podilskyi. Despite Jeckeln's record-breaking feat, his report to Berlin tersely noted, "Special commando 4a, together with Einsatzgruppe C Headquarters and two commando groups of the South Police Regiments, executed 33,771 Jews in Kiev on 29 and 30 September 1941."73

At the same time that Nebe and Fritzsch were undertaking their gassing experiments, Jeckeln's application of means-to-end formal rationality enabled him to destroy a greater number of civilians than any other unit yet. A secret offcial report noted at the time that the key to this staggering result was Jeckeln's application of some "extremely clever organization" to overcome the usual "diffculties resulting from such a large-scale action."74 As Yaacov Lozowick observes, "It seems no accident that the orderly, well-planned murder of 33,000 Jews took place at Kiev at the end of this period, rather than at Lvov near the beginning."75 Much like Milgram would later do at Yale during his pilot studies, project manager Jeckeln also gradually and systematically refned his procedure of harm infiction. And with more time, Jeckeln's "factory-orientated approach"76 underwent further refnements; the division of labor increased with ever more specialist functionaries performing ever more refned specialist tasks, including a reliance on specialist shooters who were willing and capable of doing more than their fair share of the dirty work.77 At a mass shooting eight weeks after the Babi Yar massacre,

In the pits…there were to be only a few active marksmen, each of whom used a machine pistol set on single shot. Walking over his victims, a "shooter" could fre ffty shots and then receive a new magazine from a comrade whose sole responsibility was reflling cartridges […] After a number of magazines, the marksmen would take a break. Row after row, marching block after marching block was to be killed in this manner, in accordance with Jeckeln's minutely worked out method….78

Thus, as Angrick and Klein put it, with time and increasing experience Jeckeln came to prefer deploying in the pits "a small circle of truly emotionless SS men," "primarily his 'old' men…who had 'already done' something like this" at earlier executions.79 Still, due to the highly stressful nature of such work, Jeckeln felt it was necessary to rotate with "additional men for the relief…."80

Because, during the campaign, Jeckeln received the aid of various military units—Wehrmacht regiments, Einsatzkommando units, Police battalions, and Ukrainian auxiliary forces—his "one best way" of massacring civilians soon spread elsewhere. If Germans in the armed forces decided in the future to deploy Jeckeln's "controlled" shooting process—and as we shall see, they did—"calculable" and highly "effcient" results of around 15,000 people killed per day became "predictable." Jeckeln's inherently bureaucratic mass shooting process advanced all four components of a formally rational system.81 It is Jeckeln's process (along with the innovations by other contributors, like Einsatzkommando 3's Karl Jäger) that best explains the rising curve of murder statistics in the Soviet interior after mid-August 1941. And Jeckeln's increasingly bureaucratized shooting process—with its division of labor, specialization of labor, clear responsibilities, written records, rules and procedures, impersonality of relations—could do so because as Weber argues,

The decisive reason for the advance of bureaucratic organization has always been its purely technical superiority over any other form of organization. The fully developed bureaucratic mechanism compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.82

I therefore challenge the so-called de-bureaucratization argument during the Holocaust by bullets.83 In fact, the rational evolution of the execution process and the record-breaking Babi Yar massacre in particular can, I believe, be described more precisely as a modern bureaucratic process.

Despite the increased bureaucratization, an earlier problem persisted. Even some of the "ordinary" executioners, who after several months of killing had risen to the top of Himmler's shooter attrition process, were still in need of, as Jeckeln put it, "relief…." For example, Kurt Werner, a marksman at the Babi Yar massacre, admitted after that, "It's almost impossible to imagine what nerves of steel it took to carry out that dirty work down there. It was horrible…."84 Like the Obedience study's Mrs. Rosenblum, Werner only seems concerned about his pain. With a seemingly endless supply of Soviet Jews to kill, the question was how much longer could the most calloused of German killers like Werner keep it up? Shooting squad reports such as the one Jeckeln submitted to Berlin after Babi Yar rarely mention any psychological problems among the perpetrators. However, as Headland noted earlier, offcials were constantly aware of the issue and gave it a great deal of attention.85 As Rudolf Höss said after the war,

Many gruesome scenes are said to have taken place, people running away after being shot, the fnishing off of the wounded and particularly of the women and children. Many members of the Einsatzkommando [Nazi shooting squads], unable to endure wading through blood any longer, had committed suicide. Some had even gone mad.86

In confrmation of much of this, in November 1941, lawyer Helmuth von Moltke wrote in a letter to his wife that at least one hospital existed "where SS men are cared for who have broken down while executing women and children."87 A Wehrmacht neuropsychiatrist who treated many of those affected believed that about 20% of men suffered from psychological disorders associated with the shootings.88 Even those German executioners who did not break down, as Annette Schücking, a female aid based in the East, reported, "all had an intense need to talk."89

Despite the ongoing psychological problems, Jeckeln still proved capable of obtaining high body counts. Perhaps this is why on 10 October 1941, Heydrich mused about deporting Germany's Jews to new camps in Einsatzgruppe C's area of operations in Ukraine.90 It is no coincidence that Einsatzgruppe C happened to fall under Jeckeln's umbrella of control.91 Indeed, a week later, on 18 October, after meeting with the General Government's SS and Police Leader Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger and the previously mentioned Odilo Globocnik, Himmler ordered the cessation of Jewish emigration.92 Himmler would now be in charge of when the Reich Jews would leave Germany and where they would be sent. In reaction to Hitler's earlier decision during the September "euphoria of victory," around mid-October the RSHA (Eichmann) started organizing trains packed with German and Austrian Jews (from cities including Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Breslau) to start rolling east. However, somewhat mysteriously, the plan to send German Jews to Ukraine was soon dropped. Instead, these trains were redirected to Minsk (Belarus), Kaunas/Kovno (Lithuania), Riga (Latvia), and, most proximately, Lódź (Poland). In the German university town of Göttingen, locals—presumably victims of British air raids—reacted to this news by "fooding" the NSDAP district offce with applications for the soon-to-be-vacated Jewish apartments.93 Because these German Jews were limited to leaving with no more than 50 kilograms of luggage,94 the household effects they had to leave behind—furnishings, appliances, textiles, and such—were passed on to "deserving" Germans.95

The deportation of trainloads of these Western Jews to various eastern cities signaled signifcant movement in the Nazi regime's solution to the "Jewish question." Eichmann, the SS's people-moving expert, knew that if the SS was to succeed, it would need to draw on the expertise, resources, and support of other German governmental agencies. But doing so would require that the usually secretive SS discloses its intentions to others. With such cooperation in mind, on 29 November Eichmann sent invitations on Heydrich's behalf to almost a score of mostly high-ranking civil servants from certain government agencies, for example, the Transportation Ministry. The meeting, scheduled for 9 December, has become known as the Wannsee Conference.96 Heydrich attached to the invitations a 31 July 1941 mandate from Göring97 that reinforced that he (Heydrich) had total control over resolving the Jewish question,98 and therefore, all invitees were to cede to his needs. Those invited were the people whose acquiescence Heydrich would demand, and whose help and resources Eichmann would need, to resolve once and for all the persistent and expanding "Jewish question." And it was at this meeting that a new plan would be revealed.

But soon after the invitations were sent out, Germany was struck by several signifcant blows on the military front lines. First, in the Soviet interior, the onset of winter from about November 1941 saw the Nazi war machine grind (freeze?) to a halt. Then, beginning on 5 December the Soviets managed to muster a forceful counteroffensive. Germany's lightening victory over the Soviets would not come as easily as Hitler had so confdently anticipated. The resumption of the successful march to victory would have to await the spring thaw. The second and immediately more disconcerting blow to the German military came just a few days later on 7 December 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor—an act which caused the USA to declare war on Japan. Due to the Axis Pact between Italy, Japan, and Germany, the USA's declaration of war against Japan required Germany to declare war against the USA. If the USA could free itself from a predictably diffcult campaign against the Japanese in the Pacifc, the already stretched Nazi war machine would face, on multiple front lines, a new, highly industrialized, and no doubt awesome foe.

In response to these military setbacks, on 12 December 1941, Hitler, according to Goebbels' diary, "decided to make a clean sweep [of the Jews]."99 An entry in Himmler's diary, dated 18 December, confrms that around this point in time the policy toward all Jews changed. "Jewish question | exterminate as partisans."100 For the previous six months, Soviet Jews had been the targets of genocidal actions, so this statement was obviously not specifcally directed at them. Powerful Jews in the Reich, Europe, and America were, as far as Hitler was concerned, behind Germany's recent military setbacks.101 All such groups, at least those within reach, would now pay the price.

But *how* exactly were all the Western Jews transported to the East to be killed? As shown, over the previous few months, a variety of trial-and-error experiments had taken place—some of which indicated strong signs of probable success. Still, as Hilberg argues,

As of November 1941, there was some thinking about deporting Jews to the *Einsatzgruppen* so they could be killed by these experienced shooters. That is why German Jews were transported to Minsk, Riga, and Kovno.102

If so, why were most of these cities located in Einsatzgruppe A's northwestern sphere and none in Jeckeln's southwestern territories? Put differently, why was the Nazi's most effective executioner being excluded from this tentative plan? The answer to this question is that he was not excluded—in mid-October 1941 Himmler decided to replace Hans-Adolf Prützmann (Higher SS and Police Leader of Northern Russia) with the far more "effcient" Jeckeln.103 By November, Jeckeln, with his team intact, had relocated to the north (based in the Latvian capital of Riga).104 According to his own testimony after the war, nearing mid-November Jeckeln received orders from Himmler for his frst assignment: liquidate the 25,000–28,000 Latvian Jews in the Riga ghetto incapable of productive labor.105 For this assignment, Jeckeln intended to apply his trusted "Kiev model…."106 He settled on a site in a clearing in the Rumbuli forest about 10 kilometers south of Riga.107

On 25 November 1941, about 250 kilometers south of Riga, the frst of the Reich Jews arrived on Eichmann's trains at the Lithuanian city of Kaunas. The nearly 3000 German Jews on board—mainly women and men and a small number of children—were met by Karl Jäger's effcient Einsatzkommando 3 and were soon after shot.108 Back in Riga, on 30 November Jeckeln implemented his plan to liquidate the Latvian Jews in the Rumbuli forest. But the previous evening a train with 1000 Jews from Berlin arrived.109 On his own initiative, Jeckeln decided to also kill the new arrivals frst thing in the morning, instead of housing them in the recently vacated Riga ghetto as planned.110 Einsatzgruppe A's Dr. Rudolf R. Lange (not to be confused with T4's Herbert Lange) tried to defy Jeckeln's decision. Lange not only stood up to Jeckeln but also informed both Heydrich and an immediately furious Himmler what was taking place. Himmler's order to Jeckeln that this particular trainload of Jews was not to be shot arrived too late—all were killed earlier in the day. It is not clear why Himmler wanted to save, for the meantime, this particular transport.111 What is clear is that although many more trainloads of Western Jews soon followed, *most were not shot*. Instead, these Reich Jews were housed in the Lódź, Minsk, and Riga ghettos.112 Indecision in the Eastern territories seems to have set in. As Browning notes, "In the last months of 1941, the total mass murder of the deported Reich Jews was clearly not yet being implemented."113

One explanation for the hesitancy is that the onset of winter made grave digging in the permafrost impossible.114 This may be part of the answer, although such conditions did not seem to stop Jäger and Jeckeln's winter massacres.115 Much of this mystery must then be explained by the fact that the shooting squads were struggling with the increased psychological burden associated with having to shoot *Western* Jews. Wilhelm Kube, the Generalkommissar for White Ruthenia based in Minsk, highlighted the problem when he noticed that two young Jewish women from Germany appeared to have fully Aryan features. Although in the 1930s, he was rightfully described by one scholar as "an inveterate antisemite"116—and described Minsk Jews as "indigenous, animalistic hordes"117—it appears Kube developed strong second thoughts about the "Final Solution" when it came to shooting Jews from "our cultural milieu."118 And until "a more discrete and 'humane' way" could be found, Kube refused to shoot Reich Jews.119 Soon after, however, Heydrich overruled Kube's reluctance and these Western Jews were eventually shot. But of course, for those implementing these orders, if the most seasoned of German executioners struggled to kill every Eastern Jew placed before them, it is not diffcult to imagine they faced heightened psychological diffculties when ordered to shoot civilians from the west who dressed, sounded, and sometimes looked much like themselves. Most of these Jews did not resemble the images promoted in Nazi propaganda: poor Eastern Jews whose impoverished appearances were a side effect of the wartime condition imposed on the ghettos by the Nazis themselves. Perhaps Jeckeln could fnd a solution. However, it appears the SS-Reichsführer was quickly losing faith in his chief executioner. At a meeting on 4 December, Himmler told Jeckeln:

shooting is too complicated an operation…For shooting, he [Himmler] said, one needs people who can shoot, and…this affects people poorly, therefore Himmler said further, it would be best to liquidate the people by using gassing vehicles, which had been prepared in Germany according to his instructions, and that by using these gassing vehicles the troubles connected with shooting would fall to the wayside.120

For Jeckeln, more bad news followed. The day before this meeting Rudolf Lange was promoted to Chief of the KdS Latvia.121

Of course, it was from September 1941 Höss's Zyklon-B gassing technique and Nebe's gas van innovations held the potential to provide an apparently more "humane" means of killing civilians. By the time of the above meeting between Himmler and Jeckeln, the SS in Berlin had already placed an order with Prüfer from Topf & Sons for a crematorium to be built in Mogilev (near Minsk),122 which, according to Gerlach, they intended to combine with a gas chamber "not to kill the remaining local Jews but those of Western and Central Europe."123 An extermination camp for Jews was being planned for Mogilev,124 and since the German military had priority use over the Soviet railway, the emerging plan was to transport the Jews to the camp by boat along the Bug, Pripet, and Dnieper rivers.125 In fact, in Mogilev, "Not only was a large crematorium ordered, but HSSPF Hamburg Rudolf Querner apparently also ordered large quantities of Zyklon-B gas from Tesch & Stabenow, and HSSPF Ostland in Riga [Jeckeln] expected this gas to be delivered."126 If, indeed, Jeckeln supported this delivery of Zyklon-B to Mogilev, it would suggest that even he conceded that gassing was probably the more preferable means of killing Western Jews. The decision to use gassing technology in Minsk (stationary chamber) and gas vans in Riga on "Old Reich" Jews "not ft for work" can be traced to a letter written by Erhard Wetzel (racial advisor in the Eastern Ministry) to Hinrich Lohse (Reichskommissar for the Ostland) on 25 October 1941:

…[T4's Victor] Brack of the Führer's Chancellery has already declared himself willing to work on the production of the required accommodation as well as the gassing apparatus.127

Gas vans were indeed sent to Riga and parts for Prüfer's crematorium were delivered to Mogilev where they sat awaiting construction. Infrastructure along the waterways had been too badly damaged for boat transport, and as a result, in 1942 the plan was abandoned.128

Also important, by early December 1941, as Himmler spoke to Jeckeln, Nebe's gas vans had already started rolling off the production line and were being sent to the East. Therefore, as Himmler implied at this meeting, he no longer needed Jeckeln's specialist skill-set at the last link in the machinery of destruction. With other options on the horizon, the problematic shootings were no longer needed and Jeckeln's star role in Nazi Jewish policy was over. Pending the arrival of the vans, leaders like Kube passed on the usual shooting duties to their Latvian and Lithuanian collaborators.129 Kube's solution actually highlights what, in the absence of the new killing technology, became the German executioners' most popular self-invented strain resolving coping mechanisms that reduced (eliminated?) their "burdening of the soul."

# The Insertion of "[E]nd [S]pecial [U]nits"

From the start of the Soviet campaign, Himmler noticed that even without guns antisemitic Eastern Europeans still seemed far more eager than his own men to attack Jews. What more could he gain from arming them? It seems Himmler raised this possibility in Berlin during Hitler's 16 July 1941 "Garden of Eden" meeting; however, the Führer was adamant that Eastern Europeans should never be armed.130 But, toward the end of that month, as his Kommandostab SS Cavalry Brigade desperately herded Jewish women and children into the shallow Pripet quicksands, Himmler disobeyed Hitler's order by copying the German security police's early July initiative to set up a battalion of Lithuanians and placing them under the control of Jäger's Einsatzkommando 3. On July 25, Himmler offcially "authorized the creation of auxiliary police forces from the reliable non-Communist elements among Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Byelorussians."131 He did so because, in his words, "the task of the police in the occupied eastern territories cannot be accomplished with the manpower of the police and SS now deployed or yet to be deployed."132 However, as Breitman observes, the Eastern collaborators,

and their future use as executioners refected *more than just a shortage of German policemen.* Whereas Himmler, Daluege, Bach-Zelewski, and some other high offcials had some concerns for the morale of German police, they did not much care what happened psychologically to the non-Germans as long as there were enough of them to carry out their appointed tasks. [italics added]133

Simply increasing German manpower was unlikely to work, but Himmler suspected that augmenting Eastern European manpower might. Himmler's disobedience may, therefore, be explained by his suspicion that Eastern Europeans might make better executioners than ordinary Germans. By the end of 1941, 33,000 Eastern European collaborators had joined German extermination squads.134 Six months later, the number had risen to 165,000, and by January 1943, it had almost doubled to 300,000.135 However, simply arming large numbers of Eastern Europeans was, by itself, inadequate. In the spirit of Weberian formal rationality and means-to-end logic, the task at hand demanded meticulous organizational preparation.136 Under the careful management of German authorities, Eastern European collaborators were slotted in as the last link in the Nazis' shooting assembly line where they could effciently perform their specialist labor.

A mass shooting undertaken in August 1941 in the Ukrainian village of Belaya Tserkov illustrates the kind of roles given to collaborators. After German soldiers shot all the men and women, and two of the boys, the rest of the children were held in a house without food or water until Ukrainian auxiliaries were brought in to shoot them. However, the Ukrainians left behind the 90 or so children under the age of seven mainly toddlers and babies. According to Blobel's subordinate, August Häfner,

…Blobel ordered me to have the children executed. I asked him, 'By whom should the shooting be carried out?' He answered, 'By the Waffen– SS.' I raised an objection and said, 'They are all young men. How are we going to answer to them if we make them shoot small children?' To this he said, 'Then use your men.' I then said, 'How can they do that? They have small children as well.' This tug-of-war lasted about ten minutes. […] I suggested that the Ukrainian militia of the Feldkommandant should shoot the children. There were no objections from either side to this suggestion….137

Regarding the proposed execution site, Häfner continued,

The Wehrmacht had already dug a grave. The children were brought along in a tractor. […] The Ukrainians were standing round trembling. The children were taken down from the tractor. They were lined up along the top of the grave and shot so that they fell into it. The Ukrainians did not aim at any particular part of the body. They fell into the grave. The wailing was indescribable. I shall never forget the scene throughout my life. I fnd it very hard to bear. […] Many children were hit four or fve times before they died.138

Blobel, presumably having recovered from his mental breakdown a month earlier, clearly had no qualms about ordering the Ukrainians to undertake this mass execution. Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, he chose not to attend.

Eastern Europeans were increasingly given the tasks of shooting women and children, which Germans often shied away from.139 As one member of Einsatzgruppe A stated,

The orders for the third or fourth Einsatz were particularly important because they gave instructions for members of the local population to be used to carry out the actual dirty work, to which *end special units* should be set up. The purpose of this measure was to preserve the psychological equilibrium of our own people…. [italics added]140

Although German supervisors and executioners may not have liked to admit it, the locals in these "end special units" (i.e., the last and most stressful link in the Nazi's destructive bureaucratic chain) were responsible for producing some of the bleakest statistics. For example, the Jäger report (which lists the deaths of over 130,000 civilians killed in under fve months) states the massacres were undertaken by only eight to ten "reliable" Germans in "cooperation with Lithuanian partisans…."141 As Matthäus said of the Lithuanians under Jäger's control, "these men contributed massively towards the staggering fgure…."142 MacQueen concludes that,

Jager's "achievement" has to be considered largely as a triumph of managing the Lithuanian Schutzmannschaft forces (some 8000 men by the end of 1941) and the Lithuanian Police, without whom this deadly work would not have been remotely possible.143

In fact, during the liquidation of the Riga ghetto even Jeckeln trialed Jäger's most prized innovation when he supplemented his specialist German marksmen with a rapid rotation of Latvians. The rotation, however, did not last very long because most of the Latvians became too drunk to adequately perform their specialist role.144

It seems, then, that the most common strategy German authorities adopted to prevent members of their execution squads from becoming, in Bach-Zelewski words, "neurotics or savages," was one that shielded German perpetrators from all perceptual engagement. As a security police interpreter in Liepaja stated, "It was only in the early days that members of our section had to man the fring-squad. Later we had a Kommando of Latvians who made up the fring-squad."145 The reason this strategy proved so popular among German troops is not hard to guess. Just as in Milgram's Peer Administers Shock condition, where an actor fulflled the role of shock-infictor, it enabled all Germans across the division of labor to make essential contributions to the overall process (victim capture, roundup, cordon duty, and so on) without feeling (or appearing) personally responsible for the deadly outcome. This strategy powerfully promoted responsibility ambiguity among all Germans involved. As Wendy Lower put it, with the help of non-German shooters, "Even at the lowest level of the Nazi hierarchy, one could play one's part in the 'fnal solution' without dirtying one's hands…."146

The use of Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and other collaborators at the killing-end of the assembly line (the most destructive of whom were, for obvious reasons, eagerly sought by the Germans outside their homelands as "end special units"147) raises another question. If the psychological strain generated by shooting civilians was as debilitating as many Germans attested after the war, why did these collaborators not experience comparable levels of strain and trauma? One possible reason may be, as Bauer noted earlier, that German perpetrators came from a mildly antisemitic society, while these collaborators were much more violently antisemitic. To ensure that the orders of those in Berlin were met, the Germans frequently required the help of those from certain Eastern European nations who had indisputable reputations for hating Jews and may have been more willing to act on such feelings. Another possible reason might be, as Jeckeln noted during his trial after the war, "Latvians were excellent for the job of murdering Jews, since they had strong nerves for executions of that sort."148

However, there is evidence that Eastern European collaborators struggled with the psychological burden of killing as much as anyone else, as their proclivity for drunkenness during executions suggests. But perhaps the strongest explanation is that in the wake of Operation Barbarossa, many Eastern European soldiers became prisoners of war and could only win release if they agreed to do the Germans' dirty work. And release meant they were less likely to die from starvation.149 Again relying on the colonial management technique of favored natives obtaining privileges in exchange for controlling the others, as Göring himself said, the only non-Germans to be fed during the Soviet invasion were those "performing important tasks for Germany."150 Many Eastern European "end special units," therefore, likely also struggled psychologically with the shootings, but continued to participate in a desperate effort to secure their own survival.

Whatever the numerous and no doubt overlapping reason(s) the Eastern collaborators had for participating, this kind of analysis only serves to draw attention away from the key instigators—the Germans. Here Breitman draws attention back to the Nazi regime and its rational and creative bureaucrats,

After the war Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski explained that the extermination camps arose because Germans and Central Europeans were not suited to be mass executioners. Stalin, he said, always had people to employ for this purpose—for example, the Latvians. Although the Nazis found some individuals to serve as killers, there was no collective eagerness to do so. The extermination camp…was something that the Russians could not accomplish: it refected the German gift for organization. Bureaucrats created it, he concluded.151

# Conclusion

In an attempt to ease the psychological burden of shooting civilians, the feld leadership and their men introduced a variety of strain resolving coping mechanisms aimed at reducing the perceptual intensity of the mass shootings. These bottom-up techniques, including the consumption of alcohol, a focus on shooting the most compliant victims, evolving shooting techniques, and, after the bureaucratization of the shooting process, a dependence on Eastern European "end special units," powerfully aided the advance toward what Milgram would later term (perceptual) avoidance. This, in a nutshell, is how the German perpetrators coped with what Hilberg described as "weighty psychological obstacles and impediments," and over time helped them avoid becoming "neurotics" or "savages…."152

As the shooting squads' most effective strain resolving mechanisms spread, the body count grew, and the closer these men came to achieving the desires of their leaders far away in Berlin. As Lower points out, from the top-down Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich defned and pushed in favor of the "fnal solution." Implementation, however, came through the bottom-up initiatives of those in the feld in the lower and middling ranks.153

This process reminds us of Milgram's pilot studies where he decided to replace the translucent screen with a solid wall and, as a consequence, enhanced the psychological ability of a greater proportion of his participants to implement his top-down desires. Indeed, as mentioned, Milgram's idea to introduce a wall in the offcial experiments was instigated by his participants (thus from the bottom-up), who looked away from the learner in order to make it psychologically easier for them to infict more shocks.

"The primary question concerning the Holocaust as a crime based on the division of labor is…" according to Michael Allen, "[w]hat interrelationship existed between centralized authority and spontaneous initiative at the local level?"154 A convincing answer to this question would seem to go a little further than the "rule of anticipated reactions," or what regional functionaries in the East themselves referred to as "anticipatory obedience."155 The leadership set policy goals and upper-level feld management (Jeckeln, Jäger, Ohlendorf, and their problem-solving ilk) discovered strain resolving and effcient techniques, the introduction of which was probably motivated by a mix of coercive pressure from the SS leadership, their own personal ambitions, and a desire to ensure their subordinates did not become "neurotics or savages."156 Also, motivated by a desire to ease their own stress, sometimes the executioners contributed to the banalization of the shooting techniques. As the most directly involved perpetrators found their tasks psychologically more bearable, they were able to perform them longer and, as a result, came ever closer to achieving the desires of the leadership in Berlin.

Using the terminology of organizational theorists, the emergence of the suffciently banal shooting techniques was of crucial importance because the less stressful the executions became, the more likely the German shooters could remain within their *Zone of Indifference*. And once able to remain within the *Zone of Indifference* and thereby having accepted their new destructive roles, then their creative internal rationalization machine—much as outlined by Albert Bandura's theory of moral disengagement—was able to exert "self-infuence." The shooters would, for example, tell themselves and other Germans that they were, for example, fghting for the Reich's survival, and because Jews kept breaking the rules of occupation, all were—as Hitler and Himmler said from the start—"partisans" and "criminals" worthy only of death. The logical conclusion of all such rationales was the same: "what we are doing is necessary."157 Of course, the German shooters had so much power over life and death decisions that nobody in the occupied territories could or would dare inform them that following the rules of occupation (like never leaving a barren ghetto) was in itself a death sentence that forced Jews to become "partisans" and "criminals."158

Crucial in making all this possible was the process of rationalization that saw the mass shootings become an increasingly bureaucratic process. As Bauman states,

Once the objective had been set, everything went on exactly as Weber, with his usual clarity, spelled out: 'The "political master" fnds himself in the position of the "dilettante" who stands opposite the "expert", facing the trained offcial who stands within the management of administration.' The objective had to be implemented; how this was to be done depended on the circumstances, always judged by the 'experts' from the point of view of feasibility and the cost of alternative opportunities of action.159

As subsequent chapters will show, advancing formal rationality where certain experts made the killing of civilians both more effcient and less offensive only continued, thus enabling the Holocaust to reach ever greater and more devastating heights.

Although the use of guns was labor intensive, involved complex logistics, and was hard to keep hidden from public view, with time and experience, it nonetheless proved capable of killing civilians on a horrendous scale. Despite an initially slow start to the shooting campaign, by the end of the war this method of extermination had killed about 25% of all Jewish Holocaust victims. The number of Roma (Gypsies) shot is not clear but likely numbered in the tens of thousands.160 But as far as the leading Nazis were concerned, the major limitation of frearms was that their men were forced to witness an undeniable connection between their contributions and their lethal effects. The main shortcoming of guns was that they made many of the German executioners feel and appear too responsible for their actions—there was insuffcient responsibility ambiguity at the last link in the organizational chain. The resulting responsibility clarity stimulated among some executioners intense feelings of guilt and, most commonly, repugnance (feelings that varied in intensity, depending on the type of victim). While throughout the war the Nazi regime never completely abandoned this highly mobile method of killing, as 1941 came to an end it was clear that frearms alone could not provide any long-term "solution" to the Nazi's now European-wide "Jewish problem,"161 especially when many of the victims dressed, sounded, and often looked like the perpetrators. What was needed instead was a *more* impersonal, less public, less labor intensive, and even more industrial and organized method of mass extermination. When Himmler dumped Jeckeln in early December 1941, the SS-Reichsführer clearly sensed that a new method was on the horizon.

# Notes


message to Minister Rosenberg: Minister Rosenberg should inform Reichskommissar Lohse that he, Brack, had a gassing apparatus ready for shipment to Riga. Brack told me that the gassing apparatus was to be used on the Jews, and that Eichmann had agreed that this gassing van should be sent to Riga. Jewish convoys would also be sent to Riga and Minsk. […] In the course of this briefng, Brack told me that this was a Führer-order or Führer-commission" (quoted in Fleming 1984, p. 110). See also Angrick and Klein (2006, p. 338, as cited in Longerich 2012, p. 548).


that Schneider (1993, p. 193) terms these shooters Latvia's "most famous 'export'."


# References


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# The Rise of Operation Reinhard

Soon after the start of the Nazi regime's furtive T4 euthanasia project in 1939, rumors spread that the Nazi regime was killing Germans with disabilities. On 8 July 1940, for example, a provincial probate judge wrote in a letter to the minister of justice, "'Everyone knows as well as I do' that 'the murder of the mentally ill is as well known a daily reality as, say, the concentration camps.'"1 These suspicions were confrmed when some of the victims' families received death certifcates claiming clearly spurious causes of death. Some said that victims who had long ago had their appendixes removed died of appendicitis.2 Heated and public protests ensued—most notably led by Count Clemens August von Galen, the Archbishop of Münster.3 The Nazis may have been a dictatorship but they knew, as all long-lasting autocracies do, broad public dissent does not bode well for political longevity. For this reason, Hitler had always been sensitive to the emotional vagaries of public opinion.4 After placing the popular and potentially infuential von Galen under house arrest, on 24 August 1941, the Führer ended, at least offcially, the euthanasia program.5 At just the same time, however, the Eastern shooting campaign was expanding and, because these massacres were causing psychological problems for many shooters, Nebe and Fritzsch were about to embark on their search for a more "humane" way of killing civilians (ending in their discoveries of two cheap and mobile gassing techniques).

This chapter details what evolved into the large-scale gassing programs in the East, with a particular emphasis on Operation Reinhard—the extermination of Jews in the city ghettos of the General Government.

© The Author(s) 2019 N. Russell, *Understanding Willing Participants, Volume 2*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97999-1\_6

What follows shares much in common with the pattern of escalation depicted in the previous chapters: initially low rates of killing, top-down pressure to increase those rates, the application of formal rationality from the bottom-up (increased experimentation, bureaucratization, and the honing of a less stressful killing process), resulting in increased kill rates that only served to stimulate new top-down pressures to meet new and even more ambitious goals, thus occasioning an ever-expanding cycle of destruction. Much like with the shootings, top-down and bottom-up forces "radicalized each other."6 Much like Milgram's pilot studies where all the kinks in his increasingly powerful procedure were ironed out, with time and experience the key innovators during this gassing program also ironed out every kink that threatened their goal—kill every person sent their way. As we shall see, the result was Operation Reinhard, an increasingly effcient program that killed between 1.5 and 1.7 million people in just 20 months.

# New Opportunities

With the suspension of T4's euthanasia program, individuals who had developed an expertise in gassing civilians suddenly found themselves out of work. One such person, the previously mentioned chemist August Becker, later explained what the SS-Reichsführer had planned for them: "Himmler wanted to deploy people who had become available as a result of the suspension of the euthanasia program, and who, like me, were specialists in extermination by gassing, for the large-scale gassing operations in the East which were just beginning."7 Becker notes in more detail,

When in December 1941 I was transferred to Rauff's department he explained the situation to me, saying that the psychological and moral stress on the fring squads was no longer bearable and that therefore the gassing programme had been started. He said that gas-vans with drivers were already on their way to or had indeed reached the individual Einsatzgruppen. My professional brief was to inspect the work of the individual Einsatzgruppen in the East in connection with the gas-vans. This meant that I had to ensure that the mass killings carried out in the lorries proceeded properly.8

From November onward,9 the Einsatzgruppen received at least 15 gas vans ftted out with Nebe's exhaust innovation: Einsatzgruppe A two; Einsatzgruppe B four; Einsatzgruppe C fve; and Einsatzgruppe D four.10 The inventive chemist, Albert Widmann (from the RSHA's Criminal Technology Institute), was on hand to provide the execution squads with assistance and advice on using the vans—a role Becker would soon fll. A member of Blobel's squad by the name of Lauer described what Spektor believes was the earliest documented gas van operation on Soviet territory. In November 1941:

Two gas vans were in service. I saw them myself. They drove into the prison yard, and the Jews—men, women, and children—had to get straight into the vans from their cells. I also know what the interior of the vans looked like. It was covered with sheet metal and ftted with a wooden grid. The exhaust fumes were piped into the interior of the vans. I can still hear the hammering and the screaming of the Jews—'Dear Germans, let us out!'11

The gas vans enabled the executioners to avoid the stressful visual spectacle associated with guns, but clearly they failed to shield them from the noise generated by those dying inside. A witness, Eugenia Ostrovec, described tactics reminiscent of Milgram's participants talking over the learner's screams in an attempt to neutralize this remaining source of perceptual information. "When it was quite full, the doors were frmly locked. The driver started the engine and left it running at full revs, but he couldn't drown the cries of the prisoners and the trampling of feet inside the van."12 Although some gas van operators certainly used the truck's motor to help neutralize the victims' screams, Becker's report to Berlin of 16 May 1942 reveals that this was unlikely the only reason for pressing on the accelerator: "In order to get the Aktion fnished as quickly as possible the driver presses down on the accelerator as far as it will go."13

Because the original euthanasia program had used canisters of pure carbon monoxide, which is both odorless and colorless,14 gassing technicians were more likely to have been spared the cries of panicking victims. In those cases, by the time the condemned realized what was happening to them, it was generally too late to react. On the other hand, the malodorous and visible diesel fumes used in the vans left victims alert to the presence of great danger and they reacted with desperation. They produced frightful sounds that proximate perpetrators found diffcult to avoid.

But for the perpetrators, the sounds of dying people were not the only disturbing source of perceptual stimulation they encountered. Blobel's chauffeur described the visual spectacle that greeted perpetrators once the victims were killed. "The back doors of the van were opened, and the bodies that had not fallen out when the doors were opened were unloaded by Jews who were still alive. The bodies were covered with vomit and excrement. It was a terrible sight."15 Faced with such a sight, the mentally fragile Blobel "looked, then looked away, and we drove off. On such occasions Blobel always drank schnapps, sometimes even in the car."16 Perhaps fearing Heydrich's accusations that he was "soft,"17 the attentive and pandering Blobel was determined to complete his distasteful assignment. Blobel's avoidance behavior is refected in a report sent from RSHA chief mechanic Pradel to Rauff on 5 June 1942 on ways to improve the vans. "The observation windows that have been installed," which helped the perpetrators determine if the victims had died, "…could be eliminated, as they are hardly ever used."18

While Einsatzgruppe C came to depend on their gas vans, other squads made little or no use of them, preferring instead to continue shooting their victims. Becker implied a reason for this in a report he sent to Berlin on 16 May 1942:

I would like to take this opportunity to draw your attention to the following: some of the Kommandos are using their own men to unload the vans after the gassing. I have made commanders of the Sonderkommandos in question aware of the enormous psychological and physical damage this work can do to the men, if not immediately then at a later stage.19

Where Blobel's men had Jews unload the vans, other Einsatzgruppen units decided, for security reasons, to deploy their own men to perform this harrowing task.20

For many perpetrators, it was important to kill victims as quickly as possible. In this respect, the gas vans were clearly inferior to a bullet in the back of the neck. Although the gas vans enabled the Germans to avoid having to see their victims die, the prolonged screaming and the visual spectacle after the back doors of the van were opened made it diffcult to deny the reality that their victims had died slow and agonizing deaths. Consequently, some of the Einsatzgruppen commanders and their men formed the opinion that compared with the neck shot, the vans actually caused greater emotional stress for perpetrators. The verdict of a 1972 court case in Munich stated,

The defendant Schuchart declared to a member of the commando that personally he would have preferred to be shot rather than gone into the truck. When the doors were opened the bodies were all entangled and covered with excrement. As a result of complaints from members of the commando, the defendant Schuchart later refused to use the gas vans again, on the grounds that it was impossible to persuade his men to carry out such a task.21

Of course, forcing Jews to remove their own people from the vans meant the executioners could, if they so desired, avoid the perceptual realities of their genocidal contributions.22

Indeed, the inventors of the gas van paid little attention to the slow and painful manner of their victims' deaths because their search for a more "humane" method centered, frst and foremost, on alleviating the executioners'—not the victims'—psychological stress. The members of the Einsatzgruppen tasked with using these vans then faced what they would have interpreted as a moral dilemma: to use frearms that killed instantly and were arguably less painful for the victims, but generated an unavoidable visual spectacle that inficted an immediate and lasting psychological burden on the shooter, or to use gas vans that could eliminate any disturbing visual spectacles for themselves, but inficted a cruel and prolonged death on the victims. Many German executioners believed the gas van to be an inhumane and "cowardly" means of inficting death. As Hans Stark said of the gas vans during his trial after the war:

"It was a terrible sight." Judge Hofmeyer: "Did the people appear to have gone through an agonizing death struggle?" "I didn't look closely; one glimpse was enough for me." "How did you feel?" "Never again." "Why? Did you think it was wrong?" "No, certainly not." "Well, then, why 'never again' if it was right and necessary?" "When someone was shot it was entirely different, but the use of gas was not manly, it was cowardly."23

There were other problems too. It did not help matters that the vans struggled to master the frequently muddy Soviet late-fall terrain. Also, the Einsatzgruppen's 15 or so vans could not match the killing effciency of a mass shooting like Babi Yar.24 Hilberg is correct: In the end, Nebe's gassing innovation was not the killing "panacea" that Himmler and many shooting squad members were hoping for.25 Many of the men returned to shooting or simply passed this dirty work on to their Eastern European collaborators. It transpires, however, that another group outside the Einsatzgruppen—the euthanasia program's Lange Commando—also received several exhaust fume gas vans. And in the hands of T4 gassing professionals like Lange, Nebe's innovation went on to have, as we shall see, devastating consequences for those Jews and Gypsies still alive in the Wartheland.

# The Origins of the First Extermination Camp: Chełmno

It will be recalled that based on Himmler's mid-October 1941 instructions to Eichmann, Lódź was to be one of the four cities to receive trainloads of Western Jews. More precisely, on 18 September, Himmler wrote to Wartheland Governor Arthur Greiser and told him to expect the arrival of 60,000 Western Jews, all of whom were apparently to be moved further east the following spring.26 Greiser negotiated this number down, and across October and November, 20,000 Western Jews and 5000 Austrian Roma Gypsies were sent to the already over-crowded Lódź ghetto.27 How the Lódź ghetto was supposed to accommodate this large infux of people—where that winter offcials like Rolf-Heinz Höppner expected many Jews would starve—was now Greiser's problem. Lódź's Jewish council would not have welcomed Himmler's news: The resettlement of so many relatively rich Western Jews into the ghetto would likely accentuate starvation among the poorest Polish Jews because the former's greater wealth would cause the general cost of food to rise.28 In a panic, Greiser instructed Wilhelm Koppe, Lange's superior offcer, to somehow fnd a way of ensuring the ghetto could accommodate this large infux of newcomers.29 It is no coincidence that around this point in time the Lange Commando went from gassing Poles with disabilities (T4) to exterminating the potentially far more numerous Wartheland Jews (and others).30 Lange and his men were unlikely fazed by this sudden change to a more numerous victim category: A proportion of their usual victims had been Jewish and, anyway, others elsewhere over the last few months had been shooting Jews *en masse*. Because Greiser and those below him like Marder and Biebow were, as Browning argues, committed "productionists," Lange was instructed to kill only non-working Jews.31 He could not, however, set out by killing non-working Jews in the Lódź ghetto—word of his instructions might spread panic among his main target population. Lange needed to start somewhere else—a more isolated locale where he could hone an increasingly refned large-scale killing operation.

The Lange Commando's "opening salvo" on the Jews was aimed at those living in the Grodziec and Rzgów ghettos in Konin County, located about 100 kilometers northwest of Lódź. 32 Although the details surrounding this massacre are hazy at best, evidence suggests that across several days in late September and early October 1941, the Lange Commando very likely gassed and probably shot about 1500 Jews.33 Then, after gassing 290 elderly Jews in late October about 50 kilometers to the south of these ghettos,34 Lange's men soon returned to Konin County. This time the Lange Commando had the much larger rural ghetto in Zagórów—about 3000 non-working Jews—in their sites.35 Facing this larger victim pool, Lange must have wondered how, armed with one gas van dependent on limited supplies of gas canisters and 15 or so armed men (with no Jeckeln-style mass shooting experience), his commando was supposed to quickly exterminate so many people. It appears Lange, facing this killing conundrum, did what other rational problem-solvers a month or two before him did in places like Minsk, Mogilev, Lublin, Auschwitz I, and Mauthausen. That is, from the bottom-up, as best he could, Lange improvised and invented a potentially effective means of meeting his top-down superior's demands to rapidly kill large numbers of civilians: He "experimented with a new form of killing."36 In doing so, Lange obviously hoped that his newly devised method would provide suffcient room for the large infux of Western Jews that had arrived or were heading to the Lódź Ghetto. According to one non-Jewish Polish prison laborer Mieczysław Sękiewicz, around mid-November 1941, the Zagórów Jews were transported to a nearby forest. In the forest, two large pits had been dug, the larger of which had been layered with chunks of unslaked lime. Lange's men then ordered the naked Jews to enter and stand in the larger pit. From "above the only thing visible was the heads of the people, tightly packed in the pit."37 Then, according to Sękiewicz:

I noticed four vat-like things on the truck. Next, the Germans set up a small engine, which was probably a pump. Using a hose, they connected it to one of the vats. Two of the Gestapo offcers then dragged the hose from the motor to the large pit. They started the motor and these two Gestapo offcers holding the hose began pouring something onto the Jews crowded in the pit. I think it was water, that's what it looked like but I'm not sure […] Apparently, as a result of the slaking of the lime, the people began to boil alive. The screaming was so horrible that those of us who were sitting near the clothing tore off pieces of material and put them in our ears. The horrible screams of those being boiled in the pit was joined by the screaming and wailing of those still waiting to be executed. That lasted for about two hours, possibly longer.38

The next day Sękiewicz observed that "[t]he mass of people inside had collapsed and sunk towards the bottom of the pit. The bodies were packed so tightly together that they remained in the somewhat vertical position; only their heads were tilted in all different directions."39 Lange must have assessed his experiment a failure because despite the slacked lime achieving his goal—in just a few hours a large number of Jews had been killed—the commando gassed the remaining victims.40 Presumably, the Germans, again with themselves in mind, found this new killing method too harrowing.

Around the time of this massacre, that is mid-November, commando member Walter Burmeister recalled driving Lange to Berlin.41 Around the period of Lange's stay in Berlin, T4 leader Karl Brandt perhaps caught wind of Lange's disturbing experience when trying to quickly exterminate large numbers of Polish Jews and aware that contemporaneously the Einsatzgruppen were receiving the latest in gas van technology, deemed it wise to direct a few of Nebe's vehicles to the Wartheland. More certainly, Brandt informed Koppe (Lange's superior) that "the 'testing of Brack's [Nebe's] gas' was planned for the Warthegau [Wartheland]."42 Lange returned to his team in Poznań with instructions to set up a new permanent base close to the Lódź ghetto.43 With his preconceived goal to construct a permanent gassing facility, Lange in the role of the problem-solving project manager kicked into action. First up, he needed a location, more manpower, and, upon the arrival of his new feet of gas vans, an effcient extermination process. Nearing the very end of 1941, Lange selected a castle with a large basement located in the small township of Chełmno.44 Lange found the castle attractive for several reasons: It was secluded in a quiet rural setting yet connected to road and rail networks. Also, Chełmno was centrally nestled among the largest Jewish populations living in the Wartheland,45 particularly the Lódź ghetto only 60 kilometers away.46 Seclusion was important because, again, Lange's deadly assignment had to remain a secret from his Jewish targets. But with several Jewish communities living within a fve- to 15-kilometer radius of the castle, Chełmno's prized central location also threatened to reveal its dark secret. Once Lange had recruited more manpower, he would need to neutralize this threat to preconceived goal achievement.

After the Konin County massacre, Lange's usual crew was sent to Chełmno. In need of more staff, Lange had increasing numbers of police offcers based in Lódź transferred to his new camp. One of Lange's recruitment and retention strategies was, much like Milgram, to anticipate his prospective helpers' likely needs and desires. For example, one technique Lange relied on was the lure of pecuniary reward: On top of their usual salary, his German staff, much like those in the shooting squads,47 "received a daily bonus of 12 Reichsmarks that doubled their pay relative to the others…."48 On top of this, Lange gave his men special allotments of liquor and cigarettes.49 One of the police transferees from Lódź was Alois Häfele, who arrived at Chełmno with some of his men around January 1942. On arrival, Lange told Häfele and his men that he (Lange) had been tasked with gassing local Jews, but in order to fulfll his orders he needed more manpower. According to Häfele, Lange added that to maintain secrecy about Chełmno's purpose, he only needed the new recruits to perform guard duties and thus "We would have nothing to do with the extermination of the Jews themselves."50 Lange's attempt to recruit these policemen by suggesting they only had to perform ancillary (yet necessary) tasks is, again, somewhat similar to Milgram's Peer Administers Shock condition. Then again, Lange's strain resolving inducement may actually have been more congruent with the foot-in-the-door technique. That is, soon after Häfele committed himself to performing mere guard duties, he became more intimately involved in the killing of Jews and eventually became a key fgure in the camp's extermination process.51 Because Lange's orders had come from the very top of the Nazi hierarchy, he also alluded to the great national importance attached to them. As another camp guard Kurt Möbius said: "Hauptsturmführer Lange had told us that the orders concerning the annihilation of the Jews had been given by Hitler and Himmler."52

But if Lange intended to increase the scale of killing, who would he burden with the more arduous and repulsive tasks that his German staff were likely to shy away from? During the period he was setting up Chełmno, Lange returned to the prison at Fort VII and paid his old Polish work commando a visit. On meeting with his old body disposal unit, Lange commented on their poor and somewhat emaciated physical condition and then supplied them with a meal of bread and sausages. Lange then informed the Poles that, if they were interested, he could really use their help on a new operation.53

Like all good project managers, Lange knew just what to say and do to get every diverse link in his anticipated organizational chain interested in working toward goal achievement. Because Lange utilized sometimes different routes when attempting to anticipate and then appeal to his helper's sometimes different motivational needs and desires, like Milgram, he was able to fnd a way of getting each of them on board with organizational goal achievement. Some signed on because they would make a rather generous living, there were promotional opportunities, and perhaps they saw great merit in Nazi ideology. Others might well have felt indifferently toward or even disagreed with Nazism, but during hard and dangerous times, who is going to turn down a wellpaid and (relatively) safe job likely to come with lots of material perks? Some of Häfele's men, for example, might have accepted Lange's generous employment offer because of a preference to remain among an old and trusted group of comrades—people of great personal importance with whom they would do anything to remain on good terms with. And perhaps being involved in a top secret mission personally backed by Himmler and Hitler was enough to pique the interest of the more ambitious among them. For the most desperate of those Lange approached, clearly all it took was the offer of a decent meal and the opportunity to see another day. This is how Lange enhanced what organizational theorists term employee "performance motivation…."54

Interestingly—and in confict with Goldhagen-like single motivational explanations of the Holocaust—Lange's reliance on various means of incentivizing his workforce illustrates the insuffcient singular force of Nazi ideology.55 On this note, although Lange was no doubt a strong-believing Nazi, it is unlikely he would have been concerned that some of his prospective helpers might have ardently disagreed with his politics or even Chełmno's organizational goal—all he cared about was that they performed their specialist roles. And much like Himmler and Heydrich before him, Lange did everything he could to make sure all those below him did just that. On the frequently discussed issue of perpetrator motivation during the Holocaust, as Kühl forcefully argues,

the motives for an organization member's actions play a subordinate role for the organization because organizations ultimately disregard the concrete motives of their members when they formulate behavioral expectations. Whether members meet an organization's formal expectations because of their identifcation with the goal, coercion, collegiality, money, or enjoyment of the activity is of secondary importance – just as long as they do it. The unsettling aspect from a sociological viewpoint is that, when it comes to organized violence, the motives driving people to participate in torture, shootings, or gassings are incidental. In the end, all that matters to the organization is that its members do what is expected of them….56

Nearing the end of 1941, some Polish prisoners and locals from the surrounding area were tasked with renovating the Chełmno castle.57 It took them about a month to set the camp up,58 upon which Lange's old guard addressed the previously mentioned threat to secrecy posed by those Jewish communities who lived near the castle. That is, between 8 and 11 December, Koło's Jewish community, just 14 kilometers away, were rounded up and killed in Lange's old gas van (thus using canisters of carbon monoxide), and then buried in a nearby forest.59 These local Jews became Chełmno's frst victims. As 1941 came to an end, Lange's men proceeded to exterminate nearly every Jewish person living within a 20-kilometer radius of the camp.60 Consequently, secrecy about Chełmno was secured, at least among the remaining Wartheland Jews. Then, in early January 1942, Lange's men received orders to kill another new category of victim: the previously mentioned 5000 Austrian Roma Gypsies, who only two months earlier had arrived in the Lódź ghetto. It transpires that these Gypsies were restricted to a small and isolated corner of the ghetto,61 and their living conditions were so atrocious that most of them contracted typhus.62 In a desperate rush to inhibit the infectious disease from spreading, fx-it-man Lange received a call from his superiors. It took the commando eight days to gas and shoot the Gypsies, a task for which a no doubt grateful Lódź ghetto administration paid Lange 20,000 Reichsmarks.63 But as far as Lange's main goal was concerned, the most important event around this point in time was that in January 1942, three new vans ftted with Nebe's innovation arrived at Chełmno.64 After the camp infrastructure had been constructed, these vans suddenly provided Lange with access to a much cheaper, more abundant, and accessible source of gas. It was from this point onward that Lange's men were able to start making major in-roads into their goal to eliminate non-working Jews in the Wartheland. However, just as the Lange Commando was about to convert their goal into reality, a few events that were to have a major bearing on the course of World War Two took place.

# Centralization of the Extermination Process: The Wannsee Conference

In early to mid-December 1941 as Lange set up his camp, as mentioned, the German advance into the Soviet interior was repelled by a forceful Russian counteroffensive and the USA entered the war. At this time, Hitler informed his inner circle that all European Jews—Eastern and now also Western—were to experience a "clean sweep." Hitler's intentions at the private 12 December meeting appear to closely mirror his public threat issued back on 30 January 1939 to annihilate "the Jewish race in Europe." As the Training Journal of the Order Police dated December 1941 notes, the signifcant difference between early 1939 and late 1941 was that advances in capability had made Hitler's threat of extermination technically feasible.

The word of the Führer [in his speech of January 1939] that a new war, instigated by Jewry, will not bring about the destruction of anti-Semitic Germany but rather the end of Jewry, is now being carried out. […] What seemed impossible only two years ago, now step-by-step is becoming a reality: the end of the war will see a Europe free of Jews.65

Now, the challenge to Nazi plans came from another source, a more diffcult war on the Eastern, Western, Italian, and African fronts and the consequent need to fnd all the help they could to win the war.66 The regime's desperation for slave labor meant it could ill afford to exterminate all Jews at that time. With respect to both the Jewish question and the threat of the Allied forces, the Nazi regime needed to seriously and quickly reassess their plans of attack.

The latest policy on the Jewish question was to be revealed at Heydrich's Wannsee Conference on 9 December. However, because Hitler had recently declared war on the USA, emergency military preparations dictated that some of the invitees could not attend. Also, the new Chief of KdS Latvia, Rudolf Lange, who according to Angrick and Klein "had without a doubt been accorded by Reinhard Heydrich a special role at this meeting," was, for reasons that will become apparent, also unable to attend.67 The Wannsee Conference was, therefore, postponed until 20 January 1942. In terms of the agenda, the only major difference between the proposed 9 December meeting and the 20 January postponement was, somewhat curiously, the addition to the original invitee list of two high-ranking offcials from the General Government: Hans Frank and Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger (both of whom ended up sending their assistants).68 David Cesarani argues that Heydrich's addition of representatives from the General Government to the invitee list suggests either an earlier oversight or, more intriguingly, that in light of Hitler's 12 December inner-circle meeting, the purpose of the Wannsee Conference had been broadened beyond the deportation of just Reich Jews to the Ostland.69

On 8 January, Göring issued a decree on labor policy. All Soviet POWs—the Nazis' preferred, but now diminishing, source of slave labor—were henceforward to be assigned only to the all-important production of armaments.70 These and other major policy changes indicated that the Nazi regime had plans in the spring to bounce back from its recent military setbacks.

When the Wannsee Conference fnally went ahead, 14 mostly state secretaries and other high-ranking government offcials were in attendance. The relatively lowly ranked shooting squad leader Rudolf Lange and Eichmann were also there, with the latter (or his assistant) tasked with taking the minutes, which were not verbatim. These minutes, however, are the only record of what was said. To these men, Heydrich revealed the latest plan to resolve the Nazis' "Jewish problem." Heydrich started the meeting by repeating Göring's 31 July mandate that delegated to him [Heydrich] full authority for resolving the "Jewish question."71 As he asserted his authority, Heydrich made it clear that there were to be no other competitors secretly working toward the Führer's wish, only collaborators. Previously failed attempts at resolving this question were discussed, as was a new solution that the Führer had apparently authorized.72 More specifcally, a country-by-country survey showed that about 11 million Jews lived in Europe.73 To deal with this population, the entire continent was to be "combed from West to East…."74 Hitler's despised German Jews were to be a priority in this roundup, apparently because of a "housing problem and other sociopolitical considerations."75 Those Jews caught in the Nazis' nets were to be transported by train, thus drawing on Eichmann's strengths, and held in a small number of centralized concentration camps. Upon arrival at these camps, prisoners would undergo a selection process to identify those capable of productive labor. Those selected would go on to help strengthen Nazi Germany's economy and military capability.

According to Friedländer, Heydrich noted, "The evacuated Jews would be assigned to heavy forced labor (like the building of roads), which naturally would greatly reduce their numbers. The remnants, 'the strongest elements of the race and the nucleus of its revival,' would have to be 'treated accordingly.'"76 Presumably, the Jews assigned to hard labor would receive an insuffcient quantity of food, which would ensure that a normally innocuous task like road-building would greatly weaken them and perhaps even prove lethal. Heydrich, who was alluding to Organization Schmelt's earlier use and abuse of slave labor to construct the Autobahn in the East,77 euphemistically termed this process "natural diminution."78 When no longer capable of productive labor, these Jews were to be killed. Those who were killed would be replaced with new arrivals. This plan—referred to by some historians as "extermination through work"79—would not only counter the criticisms of the "productionists" regarding the wasteful extermination of potentially useful and now sorely needed slave labor, but could also appease the "attritionists" by eventually bringing about the total extermination of the European Jews.

So how did the Nazis intend to kill those Jews no longer capable of labor? And what, at the start of this process, was to be done with those not selected for work—the old, young, and weak? According to Friedländer, Heydrich said,

decorated war veterans, invalids, and elderly Jews (from Germany and possibly some Western or Scandinavian counties) would be deported to the "old people's ghetto" in Theresienstadt (where they would die off). But what of all the others, the unmentioned vast majority of European Jewry? Heydrich's silence about their fate stated loudly that these nonworking Jews would be exterminated. The discussion that followed the RSHA chief's address clearly showed that he was well understood.80

Some evidence, however, suggests that apparent attendee "silence" to and "understanding" of Heydrich's speech might more accurately be described by words like "curiosity" and even "skepticism." For example, according to Cesarani, during Eichmann's 1961 trial in Jerusalem, he confrmed that at Wannsee, "there had been blunt talk about killing methods in the second, informal half of the meeting."81 If true (and Eichmann obviously stood to gain nothing by mentioning such things at his trial), perhaps this explains the presence of the relatively lowly and out-of-place Rudolf Lange. Most certainly, he was the only person present at Wannsee with expertise in the resettlement (killing) of Reich Jews sent to the East.82 In fact, Lange had been unable to attend the cancelled 9 December meeting because the previous day his services as a supervisor during the massacre of Jews in the Rumbuli and then Bikernieki Forests could not be spared.83 At the 20 January meeting, however, Lange could relay frsthand that mass shootings had, indeed, included Reich Jews (recall his run-in with Jeckeln)—mostly the elderly, women, and children. Perhaps Lange had been carefully selected as an invitee among the Wannsee elite because, unlike the most proven practitioners of mass shootings, the callous-mouthed Jeckeln or the ex-tradesman Karl Jäger, Lange was a jurist with all the accouterments that accompanied a person with a Ph.D. in Law. That is, Lange was much more likely to possess an air of sophistication, which might aid in taking the sharp edge off the barbaric topic under consideration.

Either way, Lange could have at least explained to the others frst hand that, although there had been problems, since June 1941 hundreds of thousands of unwanted Jews had been shot.84 Furthermore, when this method faltered, as it had when the shooting squads were faced with orders to kill Western Jews, Lange could have mentioned the recent arrival of gas vans in Riga,85 or Heydrich could have chipped in by referring to the new gassing facilities at Auschwitz and Chełmno. Again, Heydrich knew about Organization Schmelt and it is interesting to note that since mid-November 1941 Schmelt had been sending exhausted road workers to Auschwitz to be gassed in Crematorium I.86 As Heydrich said at Wannsee, "even now practical experience is being gathered that is of major signifcance in view of the coming Final Solution of the Jewish Question."87 Eichmann was involved in the decision to send gas vans to Riga88 and had visited Chełmno in January,89 or perhaps earlier in December.90 He had been instructed by Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller to observe, as Eichmann put it, "what was going on there."91 So it is possible Eichmann also weighed in on the conversation. What became clear at Wannsee, then, was that the Nazis were rapidly moving in the direction of a more perfect "one best way" formula of extermination that made provisions for the most useful Jews to make a brief contribution to strengthening Nazi Germany on their way to the grave. Representing Hans Frank, Staatssekretär Josef Bühler requested,

that the General Government would welcome it if the fnal solution of this problem would begin in the General Government, as, on the one hand, the question of transport there played no major role and consideration of labor supply would not hinder the course of *Aktionen*. […] [This was because] of the approximately two and a half million Jews under consideration, the majority were in any case unft for work.92

Perhaps Heydrich expected a response like this from Bühler—Heydrich was basically offering to kill anybody's unwanted Jews and, as all present would have known, nobody had more unwanted Jews than Governor Frank.93 As mentioned, Frank had long held desires of one day making his fefdom *Judenfrei*.

Putting this speculation aside, Bühler's request that the Jews in the General Government should be targeted frst was accepted and soon after given the code name Operation Reinhard (in ftting memory of Heydrich, who was assassinated a few months later). The Wannsee Conference eventually broke down into a debate over what to do with genetically mixed German-Aryan Jews (whom one Wannsee attendee interestingly noted would surely prefer sterilization over death, or as attendee Otto Hofmann more delicately put it "evacuation").94 Nonetheless, Heydrich had achieved his main goals: He presented a rough outline of the latest fnal solution to those leading bureaucrats in the civil service agencies whose help he needed to make it a reality and, relying on his somewhat coercive and manipulative style, he obtained their consent and future compliance.

Six days after the Wannsee Conference, on 26 January 1942, Himmler signaled the relinquishment of his preferred source of slave labor when—in line with Heydrich's above plan—he informed the Inspector of Concentration Camps,

As no Russian prisoners of war can be expected in the near future, I am sending to the camps a large number of Jews who have emigrated [sic!] from Germany. Will you therefore make preparations to receive within the next four weeks 100,000 Jews and up to 50,000 Jewesses in the concentration camps. The concentration camps will be faced with great economic tasks in the coming weeks. *SS*-*Gruppenführer* Pohl will inform you in detail.95

In response to Himmler, Pohl stated in a report on 30 April 1942, "keeping prisoners on the grounds of security, re-education, or prevention was no longer a priority"; instead, the "main emphasis" had "shifted towards economics…."96 On the same day, Pohl also informed the concentration camps that, "In order to achieve maximum performance this deployment must be exhausting in the truest sense of the word."97

With Höss's then fve-month-old Zyklon-B gassing technique and Lange's activities in Chełmno probably gaining steam, Himmler did not need to worry about the potential economic burden of housing and feeding the unproductive "useless mouths" of the young, old, and exhausted in his concentration camps. Now, he could cheaply and effciently have these Jews exterminated on arrival. Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but one month after the Wannsee Conference, the fle on the Madagascar Plan was closed in favor of an alternative strategy.98 And as we shall now see, after the Lange Commando received their new gas vans in January 1942, their destructive activities indeed gained steam.

# Chełmno's Extermination Process: A Deadly Game of Deception

At Chełmno, as far as Koppe knew, the Lange Commando was,

employed only *on an experimental basis* to begin with. This idea was based on the fact that a certain Dr. Brack, of Hitler's private chancellery, had already done some preparatory work with poison gases, and that these were to be tried out by the Sonderkommando Lange. […] Sonderkommando Lange was the *obvious choice* for carrying out the gassings…. [italics added]99

For several reasons, the Lange Commando was, as Koppe put it, the obvious choice in this new "trial and error"100 killing experiment. First, unlike some in the Einsatzgruppen units, Lange's men had learned a few years earlier not to unload the vans themselves. Second, any "soft" members of the Lange Commando who found the vans to be disgusting, stressful, dishonorable, or inhumane had, through attrition, long ago left the T4 ranks.101 All such people had been replaced by others until eventually every position was flled by men unencumbered by such concerns. Third, the men remaining in the Lange Commando had accumulated extensive experience and had obviously become emotionally inured (routinized) to killing increasing varieties of "useless mouths" those with disabilities, Polish Jews, and Gypsies. This is why the Lange Commando was, as Koppe said, the "obvious choice…" But considering that many of Lange's victims would come from the Wartheland's Lódź ghetto, which, at the time, was receiving trainloads of Western and particularly German Jews, the true test would come in whether the commando could handle exterminating non-workers who dressed, sounded, and often looked much like themselves.

Across the winter months of 1941–1942, Lange's men quickly refned and then settled on a standard operating procedure. As Montague points out, the initial extermination process at Chełmno was "not fxed; there was no outlined plan to follow…" But, as the following shows, "as a result of the experience gained from each new transport…" by the cold season's end, an effcient technique of mass extermination had emerged.102 Because the victims came from all over the Wartheland, methods of transportation to Chełmno varied: trucks; trains followed by walking; trains then trucks; and eventually, trains followed by use of a narrow gauge rail line.103 Whatever the mode of transportation, Lange's men preferred breaking up the last part of the journey by detaining the victims in some kind of holding pen: A nearby synagogue, church, and an old mill were all trialed for this purpose.104 In these holding pens, Lange's men would restrict the victims' access to food, water, and sanitary facilities. This holding pen technique was purposefully designed to induce fatigue and render the victims docile to subsequent instructions. With time and increasing experience, the Lange Commando settled on a preferred holding pen: have the Jews wait under armed guard in freezing conditions in the courtyard outside the purposefully bright and inviting Chełmno castle.105 When the Jews were suffciently desperate for shelter, camp guard Kurt Möbius describes what happened next:

[T]hey waited some time in the courtyard. Then Plate or I addressed them. We told them that they were to be sent to Austria to a large assembly camp, where they would have to work. But, it was explained to them, they would frst have to take a bath and have their clothes deloused. We told the Jews this so that they would not know what fate awaited them, and to encourage them to obey calmly the instructions that they were given. After this the Jews—men, women, and children—were taken to the ground foor of the castle.106

This purposefully polite speech was actually delivered by a variety of Lange's men, one of whom, the previously mentioned Walter Burmeister, occasionally wore a physician's white coat to bolster the guise that Chełmno was indeed a medical-type delousing facility.107 German-speaking members of Lange's Polish work commando aided with translation.108 To draw the freezing victims a little further into the net, the castle's ground foor was purposefully kept warm.109 According to Burmeister, during the next part of the process,

New arrivals undressed in the hall […] Their valuables and money were collected by Poles from the work detail. The Poles also wrote down the names, but that was only for form's sake. […] When the Jews had undressed, they were ordered to go down the stairs and into the cellar. […] signs hung bearing the words: 'To the Baths.' […] From the cellar, the naked people continued straight on, leaving the building by a rear door and going up onto a wooden ramp. One of the gas vans…was backed up to the end of the ramp with the doors open. […] The people who came out of the cellar by the rear door did not have any choice but to climb into the van. As soon as the interior was full…the door was closed.110

Again, according to Möbius,

Most of the Jews got into the gas van calmly and obediently, trusting in the promises made to them. The Polish workers accompanied them. They carried leather whips with which they struck obstinate Jews who had become mistrustful and who hesitated to go further.111

Another guard, Theodor Malzmüller, provides more detail about this part of the process:

The Jews were made to get inside the van. The job was done by three Poles, who I believe were sentenced to death.112 The Poles hit the Jews with whips if they did not get into the gas-van fast enough. When all the Jews were inside the door was bolted. The driver then switched on the engine, crawled under the van and connected a pipe from the exhaust to the inside of the van.113

According to commando member Wilhelm Heukelbach, "Soon screams and groans could be heard coming from the interior. Those inside were hammering on the sides of the van."114 The initial protocol was to drive the vans out of the castle grounds to the burial site in the Maiden forest several kilometers away, thus killing the victims on route. But vans loaded with screaming victims passing through Chełmno's village streets detracted from Lange's desire that the local (Gentile) community remain unaware of his tasks.115 Consequently, Lange's men had to adopt a less time-effcient protocol: The vans remained within the castle compound in a stationary position—for about 10 minutes or so116—until all the victims were dead. From the time the victims arrived at Chełmno to the time they entered the gas vans, no more than one-and-a-half hours had elapsed.117 The vans loaded with dead bodies were then driven from the castle to the forest. Hauptscharführer Gustav Laabs describes what happened during his frst driving mission:

After about three kilometers we arrived in a clearing in the wooded area that runs alongside the road to Warthbrücken. In the clearing the offcer told me to stop in front of a mass grave, where a work detail of Jews was working under the supervision of a police offcer. There were also several policemen spread out in a circle, who were obviously on sentry duty. The police offcer supervising the work detail ordered me to back the van up to the mass grave.118

According to Jacob W., a non-commissioned police offcer, the clearing in the forest contained several mass graves shaped like large swimming pools, each about three meters deep. Two particularly large graves measured about thirty meters long and ten meters wide.119 Across the winter of 1941/1942, these graves were dug using pickaxes and shovels.120 From the spring onward, however, more effcient digging machinery was introduced.121 One of the mechanically dug graves ended up being 254 meters long(!)122 Laabs continues,

Then the policeman who had driven in the cab with me undid the padlock that fastened the doors. A few members of the work detail were ordered to open the double doors. Eight or ten corpses fell to the ground, and the rest were thrown out of the back by the members of the work detail.123

After all the victims' gold teeth had been extracted,124 their bodies were dumped in the graves and left to rot. Because the graves in the wintery conditions took so long to excavate, maximized utilization of this limited space was achieved by having the victims' bodies stacked facedown and head-to-toe.125 Initially, the Polish collaborators performed all of these grisly and arduous tasks, but, perhaps as a reward for their loyalty, with time Jewish work commandos were set up and performed most of this labor. Thereafter, the Poles moved on to other (relatively) more attractive roles: van maintenance; collecting and sorting clothing, valuables, and luggage; and even occasionally driving the vans.126 In terms of role allocation, much like during the mass shootings, all the worst—arduous, stressful, and/or repulsive—jobs were assigned to some subordinate category of non-German.

If members of the Jewish work detail were unwilling or unable to perform their frightful roles, they were shot. According to a non-commissioned offcer by the name of Josef I,

Almost every day members of the Jewish work detail were shot in the forest camp, in the evening before the commandos returned to Kulmhof [Chełmno]. They were always Jews who were unft for work or who refused to work. Most of the time fve or six were killed, but sometimes as many as ten people were shot. The executions were mostly carried out by Polizeimeister Lenz. He ordered the Jews to lie face down on the edge of the mass grave. Then he took his pistol and shot them in the back of the neck. The other Jews then had to throw the bodies into the mass grave.127

Working in the Jewish work commando was undoubtedly a nightmare beyond imagination, and it is not surprising that many chose death over the offer to work and live a little longer.

After establishing the above standard operating procedure across the winter of 1941–1942, in March 1942 the "ironfst[ed]" Lange was transferred to the RSHA head offce in Berlin and was replaced by the more "easygoing" commandant Hans Bothmann.128 Easygoing or not, Lange's set procedure under Bothmann's supervision saw Chełmno continue to consume large numbers of Jewish lives. More specifcally, it has been estimated that one cycle of the killing process at Chełmno could, depending on the size of the van used, kill between 35 and 170 civilians.129 According to Möbius, one cycle could be performed "fve to eight, sometimes even ten times a day" and, depending on the infux of Jews, do so potentially six days a week.130 Obviously, Chełmno was never intended to single-handedly offer a solution to the Nazi's Europeanwide "Jewish question." Chełmno started out as an experiment to resolve a local problem—a pilot study that aimed to eliminate all the "useless mouths" in the Lódź ghetto, thereby making room for infuxes of Western Jews.131 And unlike Lange's earlier experimental foray with slacked lime, the Chełmno pilot proved successful in achieving its goal. Between 16 January and 2 April 1942, 44,064 Jews from the Łódź ghetto were murdered in Chełmno.132

Two weeks later, on 16 April 1942, Himmler, after meeting with Hitler, few into Poznań and met with Greiser and Koppe. What could they possibly have talked about? The following day Himmler, Koppe, and possibly Greiser met with some Baltic German settlers in the township of Koło (whose entire Jewish population, it will be recalled, had been exterminated in Chełmno several months earlier).133 It is not known if Himmler visited the nearby castle, but he did order that 10,000 Western Jews in the Łódź ghetto (originally from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Luxemburg) be killed next. Four weeks later, his orders had been converted into a reality.134 This was the frst largescale mass gassing of Western Jews.135 As Montague notes, by "May 15, only 31 percent of these Western European Jews, who had arrived only some six months earlier, remained in the ghetto."136 Killing the diffcult-to-shoot Reich Jews—men, women, and children—who dressed, sounded, and often looked much like the Germans themselves obviously posed no problem for Lange's men. In fact, no matter what category of victim—whether they be mentally ill, Eastern Jews, Gypsies, Western Jews—Lange's gassing commando, eventually under Bothmann's management, never seemed to complain about any "burdening of the soul." A leader from Berlin just need to point his fnger in a certain direction, and soon after all in that direction were dead.

The closest the Germans working at Chełmno came to encountering a major problem was when spring arrived. That is, the victims' bodies started decomposing and bodily fuids started spilling out of the mass graves. The putrid stench that flled the air proved so powerful that on 11 June 1942, Chełmno stopped accepting further transports.137 The remains in the graves needed to be cremated. Independent of this problem, in March 1942 Himmler had already tasked the mentally fragile but nonetheless determined Paul Blobel with discovering the most effcient and effective techniques of mass cremation.138 He did this because as the snow on the Eastern front started to thaw, it was feared that an advancing Red Army might discover mass graves flled with Soviet POWs and civilians. Even worse, what if the Wehrmacht's up-and-coming counteroffensive failed and Germany ended up losing the war? Facing such possibilities, a less confdent Himmler realized that his days of acting with impunity might be numbered.139 Consequently, Blobel's goal was to erase all evidence of the Nazi's genocidal past.140 His frst assignment was the recently closed Chełmno camp where in the summer of 1942 he assembled a large group of Jewish workers known as Kommando 1005. Kommando 1005 set about exhuming, then cremating, the remains of the extermination camp victims in massive outdoor bonfres.141 During Blobel's stay at Chełmno, he too used trial-and-error techniques of discovery until his team settled on the most effcient and effective techniques of mass cremation.142

Once Blobel's men got on top of the body disposal problem, Bothmann's commando was able to get back to what they did best. With several vans used across the score of months that Chełmno was open, the number of victims quickly added up. Information from a 1962 trial at Bonn has shown that between December 1941 and July 1944 at least 153,000 people for whom documentation existed were killed in the gas vans at Chełmno.143 Having said this, because documentation did not always exist, according to Montague the actual victim count was "no doubt" higher.144 Despite this massive number and as a dark sign of things to come, Chełmno was just the frst of what Hilberg terms the most "primitive" of the Nazi extermination centers.145 Despite its (relatively) primitive nature, the camp at Chełmno was thorough—of all the civilians sent its way, only seven managed to escape.146 In the end, Chełmno saw the alignment of a number of factors that foreshadowed the success of mass killing on a much larger scale: a cheap/mobile gas, an industrialized assembly-line organizational process, centralization (where mobile victims were delivered to a stationary execution plant), and a hardened and professionally trained pool of specialist executioners. Therefore, on all fronts, Chełmno, as a small-scale experiment, glowed with immense killing potential. All that was needed were ideas likely to improve overall systemic effciency, increase its scale, and fnally replicate the number of such facilities. Elsewhere other more ambitious project managers were doing just this.

# The Emergence of Operation Reinhard

More than three months before the Wannsee Conference and just as Lange was receiving instructions to kill Jews in the Wartheland, on 13 October 1941,147 Odilo Globocnik suggested to Himmler148 that the General Government should be "Germanized" by killing the local Jews.149 More specifcally, Globocnik envisioned that killing off some local Jews in the General Government would help relieve the food supply problem, stem black market activity, and free up accommodation for newcomers,150 particularly for inbound Slovakian and Reich Jews.151 Himmler thus approved Globocnik's construction of a death camp in the General Government.152 Perhaps the failure of Globocnik's own men around this point in time to fnd a more "humane" method of killing local Jews (using grenades) explains why, as the following shows, he was eventually sent the civilian-killing specialists who, after being "employed only on an experimental basis," might prove more capable of Germanizing the General Government.

Viktor Brack, a former member of the disbanded T4 team, stated in his postwar testimony,

In 1941, I received an order to discontinue the euthanasia program. In order to retain the personnel that had been relieved of these duties and in order to be able to start a new euthanasia program after the war, Bouhler [head of the Führer Chancellery] asked me—I think after a conference with Himmler—to send this personnel to Lublin and place it at the disposal of SS *Brigadeführer* Globocnik.153

In fact, as 1941 came to an end, ninety-two ex-T4 personnel were sent east by the Führer Chancellery.154 One of them, Christian Wirth, became Globocnik's top aide on 14 October 1941,155 just one day after Himmler's meeting with Globocnik.156 Wirth had been present at the frst-ever euthanasia gassing pilot two years earlier and then started killing people at the T4's permanent gas chamber in the Brandenburg-Havel prison. Subsequently, Wirth was employed at Hartheim, the most "effcient" of all the T4 facilities, where, according to Adam, "he distinguished himself…by his organizational abilities."157 In December 1941, Wirth arrived in Lublin.158 Although Wirth was acquainted with the "advantages and disadvantages" of the gas vans used in the Soviet interior and at some point observed the killing process at Chełmno,159 he does not appear to have contemplated using such vehicles in the General Government. Wirth's means-to-end logic more closely resembles an extension of the kind of system he had relied upon in Germany: a permanent gas chamber facility with the more effcient capacity to dispose of bodies on-site. Also gas vans had volume and weight limitations, but a permanent gas chamber had no such restrictions and could—should it ever be required—potentially handle much larger numbers of victims per cycle.

On 1 November 1941, construction on Wirth's death camp—called Belzec—began.160 The center's gassing apparatus was sourced from a recently abandoned T4 euthanasia facility in Germany.161 According to Stanislaw Kozak, a Polish construction worker,

we built a third barrack, which was 12 m. long and 8 m. wide. This barrack was divided by wooden walls into three sections, so that each section was 4 m. wide and 8 m. long. These sections were 2 m. high. The interior walls of these barracks were built such that we nailed the boards to them, flling in the empty space with sand. Inside the barrack the walls were covered with cardboard; in addition, the foors and the walls were covered with sheet zinc to a height of 1.1m.162

The actual gassing apparatus must have taken a long time to stripe and then transport out of Germany because the construction of Belzec's gas chambers was not completed until the end of February 1942. Then, Wirth, much as Lange had a few months earlier, pursued a number of pilot studies to test, refne, and iron out the kinks of his killing process. According to SS-Unterscharführer Franz Suchomel, "Belzec was the laboratory. Wirth was camp commandant. He tried everything imaginable there."163 Again like Lange, Wirth initially used pure bottled carbon monoxide.164 These pilots were undertaken over a period of several days and involved several convoys, each consisting of about four to six freight cars of Jewish victims.165 Soon afterward, the canisters were substituted by exhaust fumes generated by a stationary 250 horsepower engine.166 After test-running the new system, the Belzec extermination center opened on 17 March 1942. Although at this point (mid-March 1942) 75–80% of eventual Holocaust victims could be counted among the living, 11 months later only 20–25% would remain alive.167

Importantly, back in the fall of 1941 when Globocnik frst approached Himmler over his desire to kill local Jews by building what became the Belzec extermination center, there were no plans to build other similar and accompanying death camps in the General Government. But at some point in time after the end of 1941 (probably early 1942), Wirth became suffciently confdent in Belzec's enormous killing potential. It was only on this realization that—with much larger numbers of victims in mind longer-term plans to build other potentially "improved" Belzec-like extermination camps were devised. I say this because it is unlikely the Nazi regime would invest signifcant sums of money into constructing such a large-scale multi-site project that, in the absence of any testing, might actually prove to be a failure. As Dieter Pohl insightfully notes, at some level a "limited capacity" version of Belzec *frst had to prove its worth* before any "upgrading" was possible.168 And obviously the best assessor of that worth was gassing expert Wirth. In support of this, as Wirth's liaison offcer, SS-Untersturmführer Josef Oberhauser said, after Belzec frst opened "the gassings were not yet part of a systematic eradication action but were carried out to test and study closely the camp's capacity and the technical problems involved in carrying out a gassing."169 Upon Belzec, as it turned out, proving its destructive worth, as Oberhauser implies, it also made sense that the new death camp would serve as the experimental prototype from which all subsequent centers—Sobibor and Treblinka—would learn and advance.170 Having said all this, Wirth must have become confdent in Belzec's enormous killing potential just before or as the camp opened in, as just mentioned, mid-March 1942, because construction at Sobibor started sometime during the same month.171

Anyway, Wirth's observations of Belzec in action led to his recommendation that Sobibor be built on a larger section of land. More space at Sobibor meant, for example, that unlike at Belzec, more than a maximum of twenty train carriages at a time could enter the camp172 and that confscated property could more effciently be stored on-site. It also meant at Sobibor a potentially longer path separating the undressing area from the gas chambers could be built (presumably better ensuring those victims undressing were less likely to hear the screams of those ahead of them in the process being gassed).173 Wirth's biggest concern, however, was that frequent usage of Belzec's wooden gas chambers might fail to resist the internal pressures generated by the collective force of large groups of panicking victims.174 It was therefore decided that Sobibor's gas chambers should be made from brick rather than wood. The newer and improved Sobibor extermination center, which opened in May 1942, was to be managed by ex-T4 employee Franz Stangl, whom Globocnik apparently believed to be "a good organizer…."175 The initial chambers at Belzec and Sobibor were capable of killing approximately 150–200 and 140–160 people per gassing, respectively176—a task that could be performed several times a day.177

In mid-June 1942, Wirth suspended operations at Belzec so the wooden chamber could be replaced with a structurally stronger facility.178 This suspension signaled the end of Belzec's frst stage. In its three months in operation, nearly 100,000 Jews were killed.179 Clearly, Belzec was a far superior killing facility to Chełmno (which at its peak effciency took twice as long to kill the same number of people).180 A month later, Himmler visited Globocnik at Operation Reinhard's headquarters in Lublin, presumably to receive a detailed progress report. By this time, Globocnik was armed with data about Belzec and Sobibor's killing capacity, the latter of which Himmler apparently visited that day.181 Like Belzec, Sobibor had killed 90,000–100,000 Jews in its frst three months of operation.182 A few days later on 19 July 1942, after some meetings with Hitler, Himmler issued the staff of Operation Reinhard an end-ofyear deadline.

I herewith order that the resettlement of the entire Jewish population of the General Government be carried out and completed by December 31, 1942. From December 31, 1942, no persons of Jewish origin may remain within the General Government, unless they are in the collection camps in Warsaw, Cracow, Czestochowa, Radom, and Lublin. All other work on which Jewish labor is employed must be fnished by that date, or, in the event that this is not possible, it must be transferred to one of the collection camps.183

It was during this month—July 1942—that Himmler apparently informed his personal masseuse, Felix Kersten, that his present work would end in "the greatest piece of colonization which the world will ever have seen."184 Around this time, the prospective German benefciaries of Himmler's colonial ambitions invested, as perhaps best captured by Götz Aly, great hope in his success: "By 1942 German children were staging imaginary gunfghts on the 'black soil' of central Russia, while hundreds of thousands of soldiers' wives dreamed of owning country estates in Ukraine."185 German authors Thea Haupt and Ilse Mau soon contemplated the writing of a primer designed to "acquaint small children with the ideas behind the settlement plan and transfer the cowboys-and-Indians romanticisms [of the American West] to Eastern Europe."186

A week or so after Himmler delivered his end-of-year deadline, Treblinka, the third and most "perfect" of Wirth's three extermination centers, was completed.187 This center was to be managed by another ex-T4 employee, Irmfried Eberl, a medical doctor who was also present at the euthanasia gassing pilot. According to Unterscharführer August Hingst, who worked at Treblinka, Eberl's ambition, somewhat like that of the highly competitive Jeckeln, was to kill as many people as possible, and certainly more than the other two centers.188 Eberl's strategy to achieve this goal seems to have been to solicit and accept more victims than both Wirth at Belzec and Stangl at Sobibor, to have the gas chambers running almost continuously, to dump the bodies in mass graves dug mechanically by an industrial scoop shovel, and, fnally, to simply hope the center's staff and facilities were able to sustain a frightfully high rate of killing. Eberl boldly accepted 312,500 potential victims in Treblinka's frst fve weeks of operation.189 However, as Eberl discovered, although Treblinka was the most "perfect" of the three Operation Reinhard facilities, it was not absolutely perfect. The commandant's ambitions exceeded the extermination center's ability to absorb such massive numbers of civilians, and a backlog of freight cars crammed with Jews started to accumulate outside the camp gates. With no access to water, many of the Jews simply perished in the intense summer heat.

Simultaneously, the high summer temperatures also started to cause problems at Sobibor and Belzec. Much like at Chełmno, the recently buried bodies started to bloat, causing the thin surfaces of the camps' mass graves to burst open. Sobibor worker Leon Feldhendler described the scene. "After gassing, the people were laid into the graves. Then, out of the soil, blood and bad odor of gas began to surface; terrible smells spread over the whole camp, penetrating everything. The water in Sobibor became rancid."190 Blobel's recent discoveries of the most effective mass outdoor cremation techniques were passed on to Globocnik, who introduced them to all three of the Operation Reinhard camps.191 For example, according to Feldhendler, at Sobibor a large pit was dug "with a roaster above it. The bodies were thrown on the roaster. The fre was ignited from beneath, and petrol was poured on the corpses. The bones were crushed into ashes with hammers…."192 Burning so many bodies, however, was a time-consuming task that generated a major bottleneck in the otherwise smooth-fowing system. The rate of killing declined. As all other camps would soon discover, maximum killing capacity greatly exceeded the on-site ability to both effciently and hygienically dispose of victims' bodies.

Eberl at Treblinka, however, was unwilling to slow down, and chaos soon reined throughout the camp. Before long, the extermination center's tight security measures deteriorated to the point where escapes became common.193 These security breaches quickly attracted the attention of Globocnik and Wirth who, upon seeing the camp in disarray, dismissed the overly ambitious Eberl. Eberl was replaced with the more reliable Stangl (while Franz Reichleitner, another ex-T4 employee, took over at the smaller Sobibor center). Even so, the 210,000194 or 280,000195 lives Treblinka extinguished in just its frst fve weeks of operation meant the latest Nazi extermination center had fexed its genocidal muscle.196 Eberl was not exaggerating when he earlier wrote in a letter to his wife, "The pace in Treblinka is truly breathtaking."197 As survivor Abraham Krzepicki put it, the mass slaughter at Treblinka resembled "A factory of horror whose sole product was bodies."198

Nevertheless, the problems at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka put Himmler's end-of-year deadline in jeopardy. Globocnik and Wirth were aware that, just like at Belzec, the killing capacity of the gas chambers at both Sobibor and Treblinka had to be increased. Consequently, they needed to build additional or completely new and much larger gas chambers. Plans to expand, however, generated new problems that also threatened the achievement of Himmler's deadline. Larger chambers at Belzec and Sobibor had to be flled with suffciently lethal quantities of exhaust fumes. This not only meant increased fuel costs but also that victims would take longer to die. The new and much larger gas chambers could, therefore, generate fnancial and temporal ineffciencies. At Treblinka, however, the cumulative improvements that often come with the application of goal-directed means-to-end rationality saw the elimination of these problems with a single innovation. There, simply lowering the ceiling height of the new set of gas chambers by 60 cm both increased killing effciency and lowered fuel costs. With less space to fll with suffciently lethal concentrations of exhaust fumes, this innovation reduced the asphyxiation time and thus decreased the amount of time before bodies could be removed.199 The three camps' new and larger gas chambers all produced massive increases in killing effciency. According to Yitzhak Arad, the number of victims per gassing in the new chambers at Belzec and Sobibor doubled. At Treblinka, it may have quadrupled (Table 6.1).200

At his trial following the war, Franz Stangl admitted, when asked about the second period of exterminations at Treblinka, that, "the


**Table6.1**The rate of killing at Operation Reinhard extermination campsa

aAdam (1989, p. 146)

optimum amount of people gassed in one day, I can state: according to my estimation a transport of thirty freight cars with 3,000 people was liquidated in three hours. When the work lasted for about fourteen hours, 12,000 to 15,000 people were annihilated."201

Operation Reinhard not only met Himmler's end-of-year deadline by exterminating all the Jews in the General Government,202 but was also expanded to include the Jews of Bialystok and the Ostland.203 On 12 February 1943, Himmler once again visited Sobibor.204 One month later, on 13 April 1943, Globocnik successfully pushed for Wirth to be promoted to SS-Sturmbannführer or Major.205 At the end of Operation Reinhard in late October 1943, 1,500,000–1,700,000 Jews had been murdered.206 Approximately 600,000 were killed at Belzec,207 250,000 at Sobibor,208 and between 700,000 and 800,000 at Treblinka.209 Operation Reinhard also proved highly proftable: After deportation and extermination costs, it has conservatively been estimated that almost 179 million Reichsmarks were diverted into the Nazi coffers210—money then pumped into the Nazi war machine.211 And unlike the labor-intensive mass shootings, "these three huge extermination factories in which approximately one-third of all Nazi genocide victims were murdered, were never operated by more than a little over 100 German camp offcials."212 Belzec, for example, required several hundred worker Jews, a hundred or so Ukrainians, and just 20 Germans (many in distant managerial roles).213 Such effciency depended greatly on the total compliance of the victims themselves. A closer look at Belzec's standard operating procedure reveals how the compliance of most victims was secured.

On 19 August 1942, hygienist professor Wilhelm Pfannenstiel of the SS, armed with a stopwatch, observed Belzec's carefully organized killing process:

After they had undressed, the whole procedure went fairly quickly. They ran naked from the hut through a hedge into the actual extermination centre. The whole extermination centre looked just like a normal delousing institution. In front of the building there were pots of geraniums and a sign saying 'Hackenholt Foundation', above which there was a Star of David. The building was brightly and pleasantly painted so as not to suggest that people would be killed here. From what I saw, I do not believe that the people who had just arrived had any idea of what would happen to them. Inside the building, the Jews had to enter chambers into which was channeled the exhaust of a [100(?)]-HP engine, located in the same building.214

According to survivor Rudolf Reder, two Russian staff members operated the engine.215 In Pfannenstiel's view, once locked in, "it was only then that the people sensed something else was in store for them. It seemed to me that behind the thick walls and door they were praying and shouting for help. After about twelve minutes it became silent in the chambers."216 In another account, Pfannenstiel stated it took eighteen minutes for the victims to die. Whether it was twelve or eighteen minutes, he still "found it especially cruel" that it took so long.217 Whether by accident or design, Pfannenstiel believed that the gas chambers' new strain resolving "thick" concrete walls helped muffe (reduce) the intensity of the victims' screams. Before the victims were removed and cremated, a Jewish work detail stripped the bodies of anything of potential value, particularly gold teeth and any hidden valuables.

To encourage the victims at Belzec to enter the gas chambers of their own accord, the perpetrators relied on certain tried-and-tested tricks of deception, including the installation of fake showerheads (as at the T4 institutions) and promising the victims work on the condition that they undergo delousing (as at Chełmno). With its pleasantly painted buildings and strategically placed geranium pots designed to alleviate victims' fears that they had arrived at a death camp, Belzec also developed some of its own techniques of deception. As survivor Ada Lichtman notes, similar tricks were used at both Sobibor and Treblinka:

We heard word for word how SS-Oberscharführer Michel, standing on a small table, convincingly calmed the people; he promised them that after the bath they would get back all their possessions, and he said that the time had come for Jews to become productive members of society. They would presently all be sent to the Ukraine, where they would be able to live and work. The speech inspired confdence and enthusiasm among the people. They applauded spontaneously, and occasionally they even danced and sang.218

One survivor observed that at Sobibor this speech was, much like at Chełmno, delivered by a German wearing the white coat of a medical doctor.219 Another technique of deception was that after arriving, some victims were coerced into writing postcards to their relatives, informing them of the apparently auspicious outcome of their journey to the East: They said the Germans treated them well and there was food, shelter, and employment.220 Obviously, all these tricks were designed to ensure an unencumbered fow of docile victims into the camps.

Some of those Jews lucky enough to escape returned to the ghettos to warn others of the impending danger. Word soon spread, and for those Jews forcibly transferred by train to unknown destinations, words like "Belzec," "Sobibor," and especially "Treblinka" became signals of imminent death. Increasingly, Jews arriving at the extermination centers were no longer easily duped by the "showers" or the promises of work. Growing numbers of victims refused to comply with their executioners' requests and some engaged in spontaneous acts of resistance. Probably, the earliest signifcant and verifed act of resistance occurred at Treblinka. In the second week of December 1942, a group of youths from the Kelbasin camp refused to enter the gas chambers. With fsts, knives, and even a grenade, they resisted. A riot ensued, but with superior frepower the guards rapidly quelled the resisters, resulting in massive carnage.221

Wirth and Stangl feared such resistance because it not only endangered their own lives but also removed a key ingredient that enabled them to infict death on such a massive scale—victim docility. Sharing much in common with Jeckeln's shooting process, the gassing operations from start to fnish required that victims remain totally compliant, because any resistance would create bottlenecks in the system,222 which would threaten the achievement of Himmler's ambitious goals and tight deadlines. In Ritzer's terminology, victim docility provided the Germans with greater "control" over the fow of the process, which enhanced "predictability," whereby it became possible to anticipate the weekly output of bodies. As the ability to predict increased, "calculability" became possible, allowing managers like Himmler to set ambitious, but not unrealistic, production targets by calculating the output of bodies expected over a certain number of weeks. And to achieve Himmler's targets, every week a certain minimum number of people needed to be killed.223 Just two weeks after the revolt at Treblinka, Stangl introduced more sophisticated techniques of deception in order to reinstate the essential ingredient of victim docility.

AT CHRISTMAS 1942 Stangl ordered the construction of the fake railway station. A clock (with painted numerals and hands which never moved, but no one was thought likely to notice this), ticket-windows, various timetables and arrows indicating train connections 'To Warsaw,' 'To Wolwonoce,' and 'To Bialystock' were painted on to the façade of the 'sorting barracks'; all for the purpose of lulling the arriving transports – an increasing number of whom were to be from the West – into a belief that they had arrived in a genuine transit camp.224

Another technique of deception appeared just 40 meters from the gas chambers where,

a small musical ensemble stood under a tree. Three Jews with yellow patches, three musicians from Stock, stood and played there on their instruments. […] They played enthusiastically. It was diffcult to make out their repertoire…these were apparently the latest hit songs favored by the Germans and Ukrainians.225

Much like the pleasant pots of geraniums, this cheerful ensemble suggested anything but a death camp. However, it seems the main purpose of the music was to "drown out the victims' screams on their way to the gas chambers…so that they would not be heard throughout the camp…."226 An orchestra was also present at Sobibor,227 where, according to survivor Mirjam Penha-Blits, the latest musical hits could be heard "blasting out…" of loudspeakers.228

Just how successful these deceptions were is unclear. What is clear is that they served to intensify the concerns of members of the camps' Jewish work details, who were ever mindful of their precarious existence. With more time than new arrivals to plot, plan, arm, and identify weaknesses within the system, it was working Jews who posed the greatest threat to Operation Reinhard. Two major revolts instigated by Jewish underground organizations ended in escapes. The frst occurred on 2 August 1943 at Treblinka, which facilitated the escape of a small number of prisoners and the deaths of many. Half-a-month later, on 19 August 1943, Treblinka was closed.229 The second major revolt occurred at Sobibor on 14 October 1943 and ended in signifcant staff casualties and many escapes.230 Along with meticulous planning and near-perfect execution, a major contributing factor to the success of this revolt was that German staff broke an all-important camp rule. As Richard Glazor, one of the escapees, explained,

The idea [to revolt] was almost ripe back in November 1942. Beginning in November '42, we'd noticed…that we were being "spared," in quotes. We noticed it and we also learned that Stangl [*sic* Franz Reichleitner], the commandant, wanted, for effciency's sake, to hang on to men who were already trained specialists in the various jobs: sorters, corpse haulers, barbers who cut the women's hair, and so on. This in fact is what later gave us the chance to prepare, to organize the uprising.231

At other camps, Jewish workers were periodically executed and replaced with new workers as per instructions, thus reducing the risk of revolt. But at Sobibor this rule was ignored. Five days after this successful revolt, on 19 October 1943, it was decided to close and dismantle Operation Reinhard, which had already achieved both its original and most of its new objectives.232

This somewhat premature shutdown, however, left a few tasks remaining. How, for example, was Himmler to erase the last offcial trace of Jews in the General Government, who, due to their better physical condition, had been selected to work in various commercial and military enterprises (the majority of whom were at the Majdanek, Poniatowa, and Trawniki labor camps)? Himmler moved quickly and with stealth because if these surviving Jews caught wind of the successful revolt at Sobibor, it was feared they might be inspired to act similarly.233 Without industrial-sized gas chambers to do his dirty work, the safest option was to have these workers shot. With the help of SS and Police Leader Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, Himmler hatched Operation Harvest Festival (or Erntefest). The frst stage of this operation involved instructing management at all three labor camps to have their prisoners dig zigzag trenches in felds close to the camp boundaries (ostensibly for defensive military purposes). Then, on 3 November 1943, several thousand police and SS men simultaneously surrounded the camps. Using Jeckeln's Babi Yar model, over the next two days the Jews were stripped of their clothes and forced toward the trenches through heavily armed cordons of police and SS men. Then, they were systematically shot in the trenches. The victims who followed were to stack themselves like sardines on top of those shot before them. By the end of the second day, 43,000 Jews had been shot in the largest mass shooting of civilians undertaken by Germans during World War Two.234 Arad explains what happened next at Trawniki.

A group of 100-120 Jews from the Milejow camp (east of Lublin) were brought to cremate the corpses of the murdered. After two or three weeks, when they fnished the cremating work, they were also shot. They were shot in small groups, and each group had to cremate the corpses of the previous group. The last group was cremated by the Ukrainian guards.<sup>235</sup>

The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 participated in Operation Harvest Festival. However, these "ordinary" Germans only performed cordon and transport duties.236 For a big job like "Majdanek and Poniatowa during Erntefest, the Security Police of Lublin furnished the shooters." These ordinary yet no doubt capable Germans, having risen to the top of Himmler's attrition process, were, according to Browning, killing "specialists."237

# Conclusion

This chapter traces a "rational" journey in mass murder that started out as pilot studies and rapidly expanded into a carefully calculated, continuously improving, and ultimately successful attempt to murder all the "useless mouths" in the General Government. Between late 1941 and mid-1942, a journey of discovery took place among a competitive group of specialists that generated rapid advances across all four components of a rationalized system: increased control, calculability, predictability, and effciency (along with a movement from human to more non-human technology). That is, after gradually developing a standardized set of mostly non-human cordon/security measures—sealed, electrifed, and barb-wired perimeters, minefeld buffer zones, 24 hour armed security towers, regular Jewish worker rotations—and relying on a variety of equally controlling techniques of deception, eventually one innovator—Christian Wirth—managed to invent a virtually inescapable and highly effcient assembly-line process of mass murder. The key to the success of Wirth's veritable factory of death was the uncanny ability of his system to effciently convert a constant, calculable, and therefore predictable fow of docile victims into dead bodies.

Wirth's journey of discovery shares much in common with Jeckeln's. Much like the shooting campaign, the "twisted road" from Lange's gas vans through to the construction of the Treblinka extermination camp exhibited initially low rates of killing, top-down pressure to increase those rates, the application of formal rationality from the bottom-up (increased experimentation, bureaucratization, and the honing of a less stressful industrialized killing process), resulting in increased kill rates that only served to stimulate new top-down pressures to kill more Jews thus occasioning an ever-expanding cycle of destruction. A key commonality between both murder campaigns was an interactive relationship between top-down and bottom-up forces whereby, as Matthäus observes, "[n]ot only did those committing mass murder learn by doing, but their top commanders and those in planning positions learned as well."238

The key distinguishing feature separating the murder campaigns was that Wirth's "one best way" of killing civilians was more successful than Jeckeln's largely because Wirth developed a more impersonal, less public, less labor intensive, and more industrial and organized means of mass extermination. Consequently, unlike the shooting squads who balked over killing certain types of victims, Wirth and his fellow ex-T4 gassing experts revealed an uncanny and unparalleled knack for killing without complaint any civilians sent their way: Gypsies, Reich Jews, the elderly, women, children, even babies. When Wirth scaled all the weighty psychological obstacles associated with killing civilians and refned his frightfully effcient killing process, he toppled Jeckeln from his star innovator role in Nazi Jewish policy. Wirth became *the* solution to the Nazi regime's seemingly unresolvable and expanding "Jewish problem."

But in the Nazis' competitive bureaucracy where entrepreneurial functionaries constantly tried to outdo one another, Wirth's elevated status did not last long. Operation Reinhard gassing factories were only designed to exterminate people unable to work. Few of these victims were lined up as working fodder for the German war effort or broader economy. However, as discussed at the Wannsee Conference, for all the other Jews in Western and Central Europe who had not experienced the starvation conditions endured by those entrapped in the Polish ghettos, the Nazis' fagging military fortunes meant that a camp of dual purpose—elimination through work and, for non-workers, immediate extermination—was now needed. This more productive, yet still highly destructive work and death camp would become the new most "perfect" solution. It was called Auschwitz-Birkenau. Destruction with far greater effciency was about to be perfected.

# Notes


smaller villages and towns, where he undertook selections of workers and non-workers. The former were transported to factories in the Łódź ghetto and the latter were sent off to be exterminated (Montague 2012, p. 72).


Padfeld (1990) also concludes, "it is diffcult to understand why Lange was there or why the conference had to be postponed for him unless he was to explain the practicalities of liquidation" (p. 357).


off fngers, pulled out gold teeth. They even looked in the anuses and, with the women, genitalia" (quoted in Cesarani 2016, p. 462).


extermination camps in the General Government was likely to be a highly lethal "success." Consequently, it was also around this point in time that Globocnik was given the green light to try and exterminate all the Jews in the General Government (Kershaw 2000, p. 129). But why would the green light for Operation Reinhard come a month or two after construction at Sobibor had started? The go-ahead for the wider project by higher-ups surely came before late April.


depended on deceiving these 'half-starved, yammering fgures' and preventing panic from ensuing" (p. 142).


# References


#### 218 N. RUSSELL

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# The Solution to the Jewish Question—Auschwitz-Birkenau

At face value, Operation Reinhard and the Auschwitz concentration camp system appear somewhat similar, the main common denominator being the goal of killing massive numbers of human beings. Having said that, a closer look reveals each was governed by different, discrete policy objectives: Operation Reinhard's policy was to kill all the "useless mouths" in the Polish ghettos while Auschwitz focused on extermination through work. Even so, as this chapter will show, Auschwitz moved toward its objective using the same mechanism as Operation Reinhard and, later, Milgram did—the application of intuition, past experience, and close observation of the pilot-testing process (all of which advanced effciency, predictability, calculability, and control, along with a greater dependence on non-human technologies). With a more pronounced emphasis on industrialization, Auschwitz achieved its most signifcant "advancement"—the one that distinguished it most from other solutions to the "Jewish problem"—in the matter of the most powerful strain resolving mechanism of all—the means of inficting harm.

Killing on an industrial scale distinguished Auschwitz in three main ways: effciency, proftability, and (from the Nazi perspective) "humaneness." The Nazis, it seems, regarded the Auschwitz process as the most humane solution to the "Jewish problem" in two main ways. First, for the most directly involved perpetrators, Auschwitz was a relatively stressfree, and with the camp's high standard of living, pleasant place to work. Second, Auschwitz developed a standard operating procedure that the Nazis in and beyond the camp—including the German public cognizant of the extermination campaign1—perceived as a gentle, even kind, way of killing other human beings on an unprecedented scale. Although it was neither of these, the process's designation as "most humane" seems to have eased many of the reservations that Nazi functionaries might have otherwise felt.

As this chapter will show, the general perception that Auschwitz offered the most humane solution to the Jewish problem was particularly dangerous, because in all likelihood it extended the life cycle of the effcient and proftable policy of extermination by work. That is, the mutually inclusive combination of advanced formal rationality and what, for the most directly involved perpetrators, was a less stressful killing process translated into an effcient body-consuming machine that, if not for the Soviets, would have probably known no end. The easier and less the stressful killing became, the more victims the leadership in Berlin found in need of extermination. What follows explains how the most effcient and proftable killing process developed during the Holocaust, and why many Nazis perceived it as humane.

# Humble Beginnings

As Soviet military strength grew after the winter of 1941, Himmler's plans to fll Auschwitz with Russian POWs naturally faltered.2 Thus, he turned to a less desirable source of slave labor—Jews. But the frst group to arrive at Auschwitz I around this time was incapable of productive labor: 400 mainly elderly people sent from an Upper Silesian labor camp to be killed.3 In mid-February 1942, these Jews were gassed in Crematorium I.4 Their death screams could be heard throughout the main camp, and German staff raised concerns that—despite a few attempts to dampen these noises5—gassing victims here probably lacked necessary "privacy…"6 Therefore, as more Jews incapable of work arrived at Auschwitz I, more were transferred to the nearby Birkenau satellite camp. On 27 February 1942, Hans Kammler, the head of the construction division of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Department, decided that it made more sense for the industrial-style crematorium—Crematorium II—which, Bischoff and Prüfer originally planned for Auschwitz I, instead be built at the more secluded Birkenau site.7 Soon after this decision, on 20 March 1942 (just as Operation Reinhard started), a stone cottage on the new satellite camp was hastily converted into a gas chamber to deal with the ongoing infux of non-workers to Birkenau.8 The 60–80 square meter cottage called Bunker I proved capable of killing about 500 victims per gassing.9 As in the early stages of Operation Reinhard, Jewish work commandos dumped the victims' bodies into large nearby pits. According to Camp Commandant Höss, "Whereas in the spring of 1942 only small operations were involved, the number of convoys increased during the summer…"10 To keep up with the bureaucratic momentum that supplied increasing numbers of victims and to avoid bottlenecks, Höss felt, "we *had* to create new extermination facilities" [italics added].11 Of course, he did not *have* to do this; as a problem-solving bureaucratic functionary, he chose to do it. In June 1942, Birkenau's gassing capacity increased when Bunker II, another stone cottage, was converted into a gas chamber. Measuring about 105 square meters, Bunker II was larger than Bunker I and capable of killing about 800 people per gassing.12 The victims' bodies were also dumped in nearby pits.

On 17 and 18 July 1942, Himmler visited Auschwitz for the second time. During this visit, he personally observed Bunker II in action.13 The gassing operation he saw included mostly young and old Jews. According to Höss, Himmler "made no remark regarding the process of extermination, but remained quite silent."14 Himmler's reaction in this case stands in stark contrast to his earlier response to the mass shooting of mostly men in Minsk, which had caused his face to turn "white as cheese…" With the removal of the distasteful visual spectacle, Himmler was no longer disturbed by the massacre of civilians.15

During this visit, Himmler informed Höss, who after the war acquired a reputation for being unusually frank,16 "Eichmann's [train transport] program will continue…and will be accelerated every month from now on."17 Himmler then instructed Höss to increase Birkenau's population capacity from 100,000 to 200,000.18 Himmler's intention was to bolster the Nazi war machine by building a regional armaments industry that would draw upon Birkenau's slave labor force.19 But, because many of those bound for Auschwitz were incapable of productive labor, Himmler also apparently instructed Höss to exterminate those Jews incapable of work.20 Because Himmler had just seen Bunker II in action, he knew that killing large numbers of non-workers as they arrived in Auschwitz would pose no problem for Höss, who had, as Lasik put it, the requisite "organizational talents."21 But the SS-Reichsführer did raise concerns about the adjacent pits full of rotting bodies. Again, just in case Germany lost the war, Himmler deemed it wise to eliminate any evidence of Nazi war crimes. Doing so would also address the local authority's concerns that the 107,000 bodies buried in the pits were polluting the groundwater.22

Himmler's solution to the body disposal problem was two-fold. First, as a shorter-term measure, in September 1942 Paul Blobel's Kommando 1005 was sent to Auschwitz to apply the best outdoor body-burning techniques they had discovered that summer.23 Second, and as a longerterm solution, Höss would expedite Topf & Sons' construction of Birkenau's industrial crematorium (Crematorium II). Himmler's concern re-emphasized the central problem also encountered in the Operation Reinhard camps: Killing was generally easier than body disposal.24 But he clearly sensed that Birkenau held the potential to overcome such problems, which perhaps explains why during his visit he requested that Birkenau be doubled in size and Höss promoted to Lieutenant Colonel.25

The SS-Reichsführer's demand to expand Birkenau's capacity to 200,000 must have sent camp offcial Karl Bischoff into a spin. The increased death rate that would come with doubling the camp's size would mean even more bodies in need of cremation. To eliminate any risk of bottlenecks, on 19 August Bischoff ordered another Topf & Sons' industrial crematorium.26 This crematorium—Crematorium III—located opposite Crematorium II was to be a mirror image of its predecessor. See, for example, the following Allied forces aerial photograph taken in 1944 of both crematoria: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/ en/photo/aerial-photograph-showing-gas-chambers-and-crematoria-atthe-auschwitz-birkenau.

Out of a fear that these new facilities might still fail to handle the anticipated number of bodies, plans were made to build several other smaller facilities: Crematoriums IV, V, and VI (never built). Although the plans for Crematoriums IV and V included their own gas chambers, they were to be constructed next to Bunkers II and I (respectively) so that, if needed, the newer facilities could be co-opted to cremate the victims from these older gassing facilities.27

With all this construction likely to take some time, the bodies of victims gassed in the meantime were burned using Blobel's open-fre techniques in massive pits adjacent to Bunkers I and II. This short-term solution, however, generated a problem of its own, exposing the camp and local community to the pungent smell of burning fesh.28 The elevated smokestacks of the industrial crematoria would somewhat eliminate this problem, which provided another incentive to expedite their construction.

A few months later, in September 1942, Himmler's order to double the capacity of Birkenau to 200,000 prisoners was scaled back to 140,000 when Armaments Minister Albert Speer convinced Hitler of Himmler's probable incompetence in the area of arms production.29 Despite this setback to Himmler's ambitions, the construction plans for Crematoria II to V remained unchanged and preceded with haste.

With the onset of the 1942–1943 winter, the operators of Bunkers I and II encountered an unanticipated problem. The cold weather made it diffcult to raise the room temperature in the gas chambers above the requisite 25.7 degrees Celsius that enabled the vaporization of Zyklon-B pellets. To avoid this problem in the future, the plans for Crematorium II were changed: Its more insulated basement-level morgues were converted into massive underground gas chambers. Doing so simply required replacing the morgues' body chutes with a staircase, which victims would descend. The fnal plan had the larger of Crematorium II's two morgues serving as an undressing room and the smaller as a massive, partially underground gas chamber.30 This decision was made easier by the fact that the morgue (now gas chamber) already came with a powerful odor-expelling ventilation system. It will be recalled that the earlier conversion of Crematorium I's morgue into a gas chamber (around late 1941) had highlighted this technology's usefulness for expelling poisonous gas.31 A minor setback of the new plan was that architect Walter Dejaco's blueprints, produced on 19 December, arrived too late and the concrete for the chutes had already been laid and therefore required demolition.32 By 29 January, Bischoff and his team stopped referring to the smaller of Crematorium II33 and started terming it a "gassing cellar [Vergaungskeller]."34 Because the gas chamber was so big and any gas within it could be extracted so quickly (and replaced with fresh air), the application of this ad hoc decision to both Crematoriums II and III increased Auschwitz-Birkenau's killing/ body disposal capacity enormously.

In early March of 1943, Crematorium II was ready to undergo a series of tests, the biggest of which occurred around the middle of the month when 1492 women, children, and elderly Jews were gassed and then cremated. Incineration of these bodies took more than a day, thus highlighting the inaccuracy of Prüfer's initial calculation: It had failed to incinerate 1440 bodies in 24 hours. After some minor adjustments, the facility's maximum incineration capacity reached 750 bodies in 24 hours, and on 31 March, Crematorium II was ready for use. Death and incineration in Crematorium II basically involved a six-step process. Step One: Victims lined up outside the extermination center then descended the stairs into the morgue converted into an undressing chamber. Step Two: victims undressed. Step Three: The naked victims entered another slightly smaller chamber—the second partially underground morgue recently converted into a gas chamber—termed the "showers." Step Four: German "disinfectors" would climb on top of the gas chamber and pour Zyklon-B crystals through sealable ceiling vents35 with the victims then dying below. Step Five: When the victims had died, the gas fumes would be extracted and the Jewish work commando, on entering the chamber, would strip the bodies of all valuables. Step Six: the Jewish work commando would transfer the bodies to the adjacent crematoria (one level above) to be incinerated. The following video clip provides a basic overview of this process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q75pOXBr4e0. For a virtual reality walk-through of Crematorium II, see https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=x3EeTFtYr5E.

A week before Crematorium II's test-run, on 22 March 1943, Crematorium IV was completed. However, by May this facility had been permanently decommissioned because of a major structural defect that only worsened with time.36 The completion of Crematorium II was followed by Crematorium V and then III on 4 April and 24 June 1943, respectively.37 Thus, as Operation Reinhard wound down, Auschwitz-Birkenau's role in the Final Solution ramped up.

By the frst half of 1943, however, as all this construction came to an end, the tide of the war turned rather decisively in the Soviet's favor. In February 1943, the Wehrmacht was defeated in the Battle of Stalingrad. Then in August, it was defeated again in the Battle of Kursk, its fnal offensive attack on Soviet territory. The Nazi war machine never recovered from these blows, and thereafter, all Germans knew that the Russians were coming. However, earlier, during the "euphoria of victory," Germany had been persuaded into willingly or indifferently supporting their government's pursuit of a variety of horrifc war crimes. And many of these crimes involved Soviet victims, a nation that in light of its enormous loses could in victory hardly be expected to act with benevolence. Having allowed the undertaking of such dark deeds, Germany probably wouldn't be able to act with impunity after all. Suddenly, the folly, selfshness, and greed of it all became apparent. Germany collectively started to contemplate its fate. Many Germans no doubt considered assassinating Hitler and then blaming it all on the machinations of a hypnotic madman. Indeed, during 1943, there was a rapid increase in assassination attempts on Hitler. In desperation, perhaps Germany could negotiate a permanent truce. But it was too late for all that. As Hitler reminded his inner circle: "Gentlemen, the bridges behind us are broken."38 Germany as a nation had arguably long passed the Obedience study's persuasion phase (the frst part of the experiment where participants were convinced into inficting the intensifying shocks) and, having supported wrongdoing, by 1943 was deep inside the experiment's after-capitulation phase (the point after participants commit themselves to completing).39 "[T]hat is good", Goebbels noted in his diary on March of the same year, because "a *Volk* that have burned their bridges fght much more unconditionally than those who still have the chance of retreat."40 All that Germany could do was fght on to the bitter end, thereby delaying the inevitable.

But fght is not all that they did. A document from the German Postal Censor's Offce in Ukraine, which surveilled all private correspondence, warned that the Nazi perk for Germans stationed in the east to purchase then post-cheap local goods back home had spiraled out of control. This undated report, probably written soon after the defeat at Stalingrad, elaborates on "the only thing about Ukraine that interests the majority of the authors"—black marketeering41:

The illegal trade is not just aimed at acquiring personal family necessities. It is becoming a "*business*," carried out on a commercial basis. People are investing and earning money. The letters promise that money grows on trees in Ukraine and that people can get rich there quickly. "Here, you can become a rich woman overnight." Ordinary people are in a position to write home that they have already "earned" thousands. Others want to convert profts made in Ukraine into cars and property in the Reich. In nouveau rich fashion, jewels and expensive furs are purchased for housewives. […] All of this supports the harsh conclusion that is often drawn in the letters: Ukraine is a black market paradise.

The report ends in a statement that supports Heinrich Böll's earlier observation that Germans' stockpiling of goods in the occupied territories reminded him of robbing a corpse: "People often refer to Germans working in business and civilian administration in Ukraine as 'East hyenas.'"42 Instead of black market trading, other Germans preferred the more direct "shopping with a pistol…"43 For example, in Lithuania, the company commander of Police Battalion 105 spent "a day and night" packing "crates of loot" to send back home to Bremen.44 Many saw stealing as a well-deserved perk in exchange for having undertaking their emotionally taxing genocidal tasks.45 And anyway, so these men no doubt told themselves, if they didn't keep the stolen goods, someone probably "less deserving" than themselves would. Such rampant corruption was common in the East because the risk of the Nazi authorities prosecuting them was slim—an inherently criminal regime was not in the strongest position to accuse others of criminality. Consequently, many ordinary Germans sensed they could engage in such personally benefcial acts with total impunity.46

This kind of corruption spread to much of the civilian population back home in Germany. As Jews from all over Western and Central Europe were increasingly rounded up and sent to places like Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazis confscated millions of cubic meters of their household effects and then redistributed them to German bombing raid victims, young newlyweds, large families, and war widows. Occasionally, the recipients were distinguished members of the SS and military.47 In the heavily bombed working-class districts of Hamburg, for example, librarian Gertrud Seydelmann recollected:

Ordinary housewives suddenly wore fur coats, traded coffee, and jewelry, and had imported antique furniture and rugs from Holland and France. … Some of our regular readers were always telling me to go down to the harbor if I wanted to get hold of rugs, carpets, furniture, jewelry, and furs. It was property stolen from Dutch Jews who, as I learned after the war, had been taken away to the death camps. I wanted nothing to do with this. But in refusing, I had to be careful around those greedy people, especially the women, who were busily enriching themselves. I couldn't let my true feelings show.48

These housewives never killed any Jews, and as aerial bombardment of German housing increased in the last few years of the war, their emotional universes were all consumed by *their* victimization. And anyway, so these housewives likely told themselves, if they refused to capitalize on this infux of property, (again) some other less deserving German than themselves no doubt would. After such rationalizations suffciently disarmed their guilty conscience, a competition of who among them could successfully acquire the most prized possessions of a murdered people ensued.

Back at Auschwitz-Birkenau, from mid-1943, the camp's multiple gas chambers and crematoria facilities, managed by the organizational talents of Eichmann and Höss, were capable of effciently killing and hygienically disposing of more human beings than any of the Operation Reinhard camps. All that was needed was an opportunity to prove it. That opportunity came on 19 March 1944 when the German armed forces invaded Hungary, which the Nazis (correctly) suspected was about to desert the Axis alliance in favor of the allies.49 Germany's successful invasion of Hungary occurred as elsewhere the Nazis were losing enormous tracts of land. Germany might lose the war, but there was still an opportunity for Hitler to win his personal battle with the European Jews.50 With hegemony over Hungary and the loaded gun of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi leadership decided to exterminate the Hungarian Jews.

Although several months before the Hungarian invasion Höss had left Auschwitz for a higher administrative position in Berlin,51 he returned to his old job to do what he did best. As Hilberg puts it, "Hungary was going to lift Auschwitz to the top."52 To have any chance of achieving "Aktion Höss,"53 the energetic commandant needed to act with celerity and unprecedented levels of effciency. He had a three-track railway siding laid inside the Birkenau complex—an innovation that enabled three trains to enter the camp perimeter at any one time.54 From mid-May 1944, Höss expected from Eichmann an average delivery of about 12–14,000 Hungarian Jews a day.55 Because most of the arrivals were young and old, only about 10–30% were selected as workers.56 The rest were sent on-foot to Crematoria II, III, and V, while smaller groups were gassed in Bunker II, which had been re-commissioned for the special action.57

However, it soon became apparent that Auschwitz-Birkenau's maximum incineration capacity could not keep up with such a massive and continuous infux of victims. The inventive Höss therefore devised a combination of old and new techniques. These included the construction of several massive outdoor incineration pits, the biggest of which measured around 45 m long by 8 m wide and 2 m deep.58 There about 5000 bodies a day could be incinerated.59 Another technique Höss deployed included over-flling the industrial crematoria and then having a Jewish work detail use hammers to crush the partially incinerated bodies into ash. This solution came with the attendant risk of damaging the crematoria. Nonetheless, both strategies greatly increased Birkenau's maximum incineration capacity to around 800060 or even 10,000 bodies per day.61 Therefore, after the selections of workers from non-workers, Auschwitz-Birkenau could keep up with the daily infux of around 12–14,000 Jews.

Refecting on Höss' "assembly-line operation,"62 camp worker SS-Unterscharführer Pery Broad recalled, "There was never a break. Hardly had the last corpse been dragged out of the chamber to the cremation ditch in the corpse-covered yard behind the crematorium, than the next batch was already undressing."63 This blitzkrieg against the Hungarian Jews—which took place across a seven-week period between 15 May and 9 July 1944—ended in the deportation of nearly 440,000 people to Auschwitz-Birkenau, most of whom were gassed on arrival.64 According to van Pelt and Dwork, "At no other time was Auschwitz more effcient as a killing center."65 Indeed, Höss, with the constant fow of Eichmann's trains, had taken Auschwitz-Birkenau to the top. But because the camp reached its full body-consuming stride so late into the war, it ended up killing "only" between 1,100,000 and 1,500,000 civilians.66 Although Auschwitz never got to demonstrate its long-term destructive potential, it still became what Hilberg termed "the largest death center the world had ever seen."67 In light of the rapid decimation of the Hungarian Jews, one can only imagine the number of people the Nazi regime would have killed had Auschwitz-Birkenau remained open for just a few more years. Hayes actually estimates that had the war continued and the Nazis were able to round up and transport the remaining European Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau, all could have been killed and their bodies cremated by the end of 1946.68

# Auschwitz-Birkenau: Formal Rationality and the Most Efficient Means to the End

In terms of the four main components of formal rationality—effciency, predictability, control, and calculability—Auschwitz-Birkenau took resolving the Jewish question to a new and even higher level. Trains from all over Europe packed with several thousand Jews each entered a heavily guarded, electrifed, and basically inescapable camp perimeter. With the selection of non-workers from workers complete, effciency required the key ingredient of victim docility, as had been the case during Operation Reinhard. Once again, the T4's usual tricks appeared. "Very politely, very amiably, a little speech was made to [those selected for immediate death]," noted French physician André Lettich. A German would tell them, "You've arrived after a trip; you're dirty; you're going to have a bath. Undress quickly!" To further bolster the pretext, on some occasions Lettich claims, "towels and soap were distributed."69 If the process moved too slowly, German camp workers might capitalize on the fact that the victims were likely thirsty after having endured a threeto four-day train journey. They might promise a drink of water or coffee, but only after the new arrivals had taken a delousing shower. This offer, which the Jews frequently applauded, helped ensure a calm, smooth, and continuous fow of bodies through the system.70

By offering the strongest prisoners a chance for survival in exchange for their labor, the camp guards also managed to diffuse the most threatening source of Jewish resistance. Those selected as workers had an identifcation number tattooed on the inside of their wrist to track their movements within and beyond the camp, and their gradual demise from living to dead. The promise of false hope helped to motivate the slowly starving Jews to work hard: Auschwitz I's camp gate (mis)informed all that "Arbeit Macht Frei"—"Work will set you free." Prisoners not only worked hard for free but also did so in return for barely any food. When their productivity dropped below a certain level or they were deemed surplus to requirements, like their unproductive relatives before them, they too were sent to the gas chambers. Even if these workers eventually realized their fate, there was no time left to organize a revolt and they were often too weak to resist anyway. After these workers had been killed, they were replaced by healthier new arrivals. Trapped within the highly secure and largely inescapable enclosure, these new slaves typically shared the same fate as those before them.71

Alice Lok Cahana's account of the gassing process at Auschwitz-Birkenau (which was essentially the same for both non-workers and worn-out workers) illustrates more of the Nazis' tricks of deception. On 7 October 1944, Cahana and her sister were selected to go to a new barrack but on the way they were instructed to frst take a shower for hygiene purposes. They were sent to "a nice building with fowers at the windows."

I see fowers in a window—reminding you of home. Reminding you that mother went out when the Germans came into Hungary, and instead of being scared or crying or hysterical she went to the market and bought violets. And it made me so calm. If Mother buys fowers it can't be so bad. They will not hurt us.72

With the fowers having set Cahana's worst fears at ease, she willingly entered the changing room where "an SS woman said, 'Everyone put their shoes nicely together, your clothes on the foor.'"73 But were they really about to take a shower? More props suggested so. "The 'changing rooms', the anterooms to the gas chambers [were]…overt stage sets, with their numbered pegs for clothing ('Remember your number!') and the signs in various languages advertising the benefts of hygiene."74 Next, Cahana notes, "we were taken into a room—naked."75 After entering, a solid door quickly closed behind them. Before they could establish what was happening, the door suddenly swung open and they were quickly ushered out of the so-called showers. Cahana and those with her had, by the narrowest of margins, avoided certain death because the Jewish work detail had staged a revolt.

Had there not been a revolt, a van with the markings of the Red Cross would have pulled up outside. The van's markings were, according to Auschwitz bookkeeper Oskar Gröning, designed to "create the impression" to all those who could see from near and far that, in line with the pretense, this facility was indeed a delousing station—"people had nothing to fear."76 A couple of Germans would exit the van and, donning gas masks, climb on top of the semi-underground gas chamber. The two "disinfecting operators," as they were euphemistically termed, would then await a signal from a higher authority fgure (sometimes a medical doctor) to pour carefully measured quantities of Zyklon-B crystals into the roof vents.77 Then, the two operators would close and seal the lids behind them,78 return to their van, and drive off. And because they drove off, they remained perceptually oblivious to the pandemonium and terror left in their wake.79 It took about 10–12 minutes to kill all the victims,80 upon which the industrial-strength air vents would expediently remove the gas from the chamber. Next, the Jewish Sonderkommando entered the chamber and stripped the two, perhaps two and a half, thousand or so, victims81 of anything valuable—hair, hidden items, gold teeth. The stripping process took about four hours.82 The bodies were then dragged into the adjacent lift and transferred to one of the crematoria where they were incinerated. The German overseers or even their Eastern European collaborators need not engage in any of this horrifc labor. In an action, reminiscent of Milgram's processing blocks (one hour per participant), Clendinnen notes about Auschwitz-Birkenau's highly rationalized system, "When the episode was over and the rooms emptied, there would be a frantic rush to remove all traces of the last audience and to reset the scene for the next intake and the next performance."83 A single performance at Auschwitz—the start-to-fnish conversion of a single convoy into ash—took on average 72 hours.84

Because many workers required close supervision over fairly long periods of time, Auschwitz's system of "extermination through work" was dependent on far more (relatively expensive) German guards than the Operation Reinhard camps—2500 on average.85 Having said this, like Operation Reinhard but so different from the mass shootings, few Germans were required to run Auschwitz's extermination facilities. With a large Jewish slave labor workforce and Jewish kapo enforcers, as Rees says of Auschwitz's Crematoria II and III,

The whole horrifc operation was often supervised by as few as two SS men. Even when the killing process was stretched to the limit there were only ever a handful of SS members around. This, of course, limited to a minimum the number of Germans who might be subjected to the kind of psychological damage that members of the killing squads in the East had suffered.86

Auschwitz-Birkenau, like Operation Reinhard, could kill a set maximum number of victims per day, thus enabling the calculation of monthly or even yearly genocidal mortality rates. As a result, predicting how long it would take to "disappear" Europe's entire population of Jews became technically possible. Indeed, in terms of calculability and predictability, Auschwitz exceeded Operation Reinhard for two main reasons. First, Auschwitz's indoor crematoria ensured that unpredictable rainy weather did not reduce the camp's normal body-burning capacity. Second, the diesel motors used in Operation Reinhard frequently broke down,87 regularly causing major bottlenecks in the system. At Auschwitz, Zyklon-B posed no such risk because packing humans into a hermetically sealed and insulated chamber reliably and predictably saw the room temperature rise over the requisite 25.7 degrees Celsius.

Auschwitz had another advantage. Although all prisoners who entered were, as in Operation Reinhard and the mass shootings, robbed of all their valuables, over the long term the system of "extermination through work" was a potentially more proftable form of extortion. To feed, clothe, and lodge a worker in Auschwitz cost 1.34 Reichsmarks per day, but to hire the least skilled laborers, the Nazis charged employers 3–4 Reichsmarks.88 Between 1940 and 1945, the Nazi state earned 60 million Reichsmarks from Auschwitz's slave labor system.89 The longer the Auschwitz stayed open, the more proft the Nazis could accrue. Operation Reinhard and the mass shootings, however, could—for obvious reasons—only generate high profts over the short term. Quite simply the system at Auschwitz became the Nazi regime's model solution to its European-wide Jewish question because of its effciency and longerterm proftability.

In 2001, I visited Auschwitz during a backpacking tour across Eastern Europe. Afterward, I, like most visitors, was left wondering what kind of cold, calculated, and cunning person could envisage, design, and then build such a monstrous factory of death. But the answer that has emerged from my subsequent research sees this singular monstrous person disappear into the collective mass. Instead, I found numerous perpetrators who independently and together suggested and tested a wide variety of potential "improvements." The ideas that proved most effective—for example, to utilize Eastern European collaborators and Jewish labor for the most diffcult positions, to install air ventilation systems in a morgue, to use faster-acting Zyklon-B gas, to construct a contiguous gas chamber and crematorium, to convert Crematorium II's basement-level morgues into an undressing room and gas chamber, and fnally to increase the scale of everything—were retained. And all the ideas that, with time, proved ineffective were dropped. Eventually, the most effective means accumulated until an ugly beast emerged—one increasingly capable of converting the preconceived goal discussed at Wannsee into a reality.

Auschwitz-Birkenau stood at the end of a long journey of ad hoc experimentation that chipped away at the numerous and varied problems associated with exterminating millions of unwanted civilians. The invention of Auschwitz cannot be attributed to any one person. The resulting responsibility ambiguity at every link in the organizational chain only made it psychologically easier for all involved to play a part in the perpetrator collective that, "only in small ways," contributed to the camp's invention. And it was Auschwitz's disjointed invention that probably explains why, after the war, perpetrators could not pinpoint who exactly invented the ghoulish yet undeniably clever process of extermination. For the perpetrators—but also for victims, survivors, and postwar observers—the end result that was Auschwitz-Birkenau became an incomprehensible enigma beyond rational explanation.

But, it is here that a centrally important Milgram-Holocaust linkage is found. Consider, for example, Milgram's discovery that substituting a translucent screen separating the participant from learner with a solid partition could greatly increase the completion rate—an idea actually stimulated from the bottom-up by his participants' avoidance behavior. Milgram did not know why exactly this small innovation increased the completion rate, he just knew it did. And when discoveries like this moved him closer to his preconceived goal, he retained them. Over time, these kinds of innovations accumulated until a "devilishly ingenious"90 procedure emerged and he achieved his goal—maximization of the baseline completion rate. And afterward, Milgram, the main but not only inventive force behind the Obedience experiments, could not explain the disturbing results he had obtained.

# Conclusion

Auschwitz was the terminus of the "twisted road" to the Holocaust. It represents the Nazis' most preferred solution to their self-defned "Jewish problem." As in Operation Reinhard, staff at Auschwitz collectively found ways to extend a little more all four components of a formally rational organizational system—greater effciency, predictability, calculability, and control. Just some of the key ideas that advanced formal rationality included the use of tracking tattoos, industrial-sized, weatherproof, indoor crematoria, a gas dependent on body heat, new tricks of deception, and railway tracks of suffcient capacity. Auschwitz's innovations saw the killing and cremation of humans on a greater scale and in a shorter amount of time than any earlier system they had developed. On top of all this, the program of extermination through work was less wasteful (of slave labor), and therefore, the system overall was far more proftable than Operation Reinhard. As Bauman argues:

Considered as a complex purposeful operation, the Holocaust may serve as a paradigm of modern bureaucratic rationality. Almost everything was done to achieve maximum results with minimum costs and efforts. Almost everything (within the realm of the possible) was done to deploy the skills and resources of everybody involved, including those who were to become the victims of the successful operation. Almost all pressures irrelevant or adversary to the purpose of the operation were neutralized or put out of action altogether. Indeed, the story of the organization of the Holocaust could be made into a textbook of scientifc management.91

Without a doubt, there were many examples of great ineffciency during the Holocaust—for one, the Nazi management system with its overlapping jurisdictions stimulated the duplication of tasks as different factions independently vied to resolve whatever it was they thought the Führer wished. Having said this, it was still a management system that went on to produce more effcient winners and less effcient losers. Once the process took its course, the leadership was able to pick and choose from a range of options the best available solution to any one problem. And from this perspective, Höss' Auschwitz was *the* winner among a wide range of competitors. In terms of developing the most rational solution to a seemingly intractable problem—in conjunction with business acumen and entrepreneurial capitalism where the pursuit of proft was taken to its unregulated natural extreme—nothing competes with Auschwitz.

However, as the next chapter will show, the clear presence in Auschwitz of an ever-advancing form of Weberian formal rationality provides an incomplete picture. The extermination machine had to be as effcient and proftable as possible, but it also had to ensure that those Germans most directly involved could avoid experiencing any "burdening of the soul"—any feelings of shame, guilt, or (most commonly) repugnance that killing civilians could stimulate. The Germans most directly involved had to be able to avoid the conclusion that they had become mass executioners of defenseless men, women, children, and babies. The killing process at Auschwitz extended previous boundaries of formal rationality and did so in a way that German perpetrators in and beyond the camps were able to call "humane."

# Notes


vestibule. Moreover, it proved necessary to improve the ventilation of Leichenkeller 2 (which was only deaerated) by adding an aeration system to bring air into the room. After the furnaces had been tested and their output better estimated, it became clear that they could not handle the "yield" of two gas chambers. Consequently, Leichenkeller 2 became an undressing room" (Pressac and van Pelt 1998, p. 224).


# References


Longerich, P. (2012). *Heinrich Himmler*. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Marcus, S. (1974). Book review of 'obedience to authority' by Stanley Milgram. *The New York Times Book Review, 79*(2), 1–3.


#### 240 N. RUSSELL

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# The Nazi's Pursuit for a "Humane" Method of Killing

When Nazis from a wide variety of ranks, whether lowly Rolf-Heinz Höppner in Lódź or Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss, Wilhelm Kube, Karl Brandt, or even those of the heights of Heinrich Himmler spoke of a "humane" method of killing other human beings, what exactly did they mean? One outcome of this book is a tentative outline of the key characteristics—a Weberian Ideal-Type—of what the Nazis regarded as the most humane method of killing. As this chapter will argue, when these and other Nazis spoke of such matters, what they seemed to desire was a method of killing that rated highly on four main conditions. First, victims should remain totally unaware that they are about to die. Second, perpetrators need not touch, see, or hear their victims as they die. Third, the death blow should avoid leaving any visual indications of harm on the victims' bodies. And fnally, the death blow should be instantaneous. At the start of the Holocaust, the Nazis did not have a cheap and effcient method of killing civilians that came remotely close to meeting all four of these conditions. Over time, however, and with much competitive trial-and-error experimentation, certain innovators in places like Auschwitz inched their way ever closer to this ideal.

# No Anticipation of Death

Most Nazis strongly preferred that their many civilian victims not experience the stress of knowing they were about to die. To secure such a condition, the Nazis relied most often on elaborate props of deception.

© The Author(s) 2019 N. Russell, *Understanding Willing Participants, Volume 2*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97999-1\_8

These included, for example, promises of water, food, and work after taking a quick shower, fake railway stations, pleasantly painted gas chambers with fowers and a carefully placed Star of David—all to trick victims into thinking they had not arrived at a place of death. So why was it so important to the perpetrators that the victims not anticipate their own deaths? One explanation is that such props encouraged victim docility, which helped to secure a smooth and effcient fow of victims through the killing process. There is certainly much truth to this explanation; however, a closer look reveals other, more subtle but equally important motives.

A strong indicator that the "overt stage sets" were not only about securing an effcient killing process comes from an example near the end of the war. At the Stutthof camp between August and November 1944, camp commandant Paul Werner Hoppe instructed his subordinates to kill all Jews who were old, sick, and unable to work.1 To deal with similar requests in the past, a railway car was converted into a hermetically sealed Zyklon-B gas chamber. In this case, a group of Jewish women were told they were to go to a stocking and darning shop—easy indoor work—and had to be transported there by train:

One of the SS men put on a railroad employee's uniform and whistled, as is usually done in marshaling yards. To make the subterfuge complete, an ordinary car was placed next to the gassing car […] The SS staff of the camp urged the twenty or thirty victims to hurry: it was time to leave; they had to go clear to Danzig. As soon as everybody was in the car, the doors were closed. Then the gas was thrown through the opening in the roof.2

Why did this SS man go to such ineffcient lengths—putting on a special uniform, blowing a whistle, arranging another carriage, and putting on such a big show? Did he simply wish to avoid the display of force and physical intimidation that would have more effciently resulted in the women doing as they were told? In fact, he seems to have tried to tempt the women into willingly, perhaps even cheerfully, entering the gas chamber of their own accord. It seems that such elaborate and ineffcient deception likely grew out of a concern for the reaction victims might have had to knowledge of their impending deaths. If they were oblivious to their fate, then the victims could be expected to avoid the reactions of terror likely to accompany such knowledge. Thus, for the victims, the elaborate deception would make for a less stressful and therefore more "humane" dying experience. This is no doubt part of the explanation, as the following admission by SS-Mann Heinrich Hesse makes clear:

One of the Jewish people killed by me was a Jewish woman aged between twenty and thirty, I cannot remember exactly. She was a beautiful woman. I was glad to be able to shoot her so that she did not fall into the hands of the Untersturmführer. But please don't take that to mean that I enjoyed it. I said to the Jewess when I brought her from the cellar that the Untersturmführer wanted to speak to her, or something to that effect. My only thought was that if I had to do something I should cause the person as little pain as possible. I did not want the Jewess to suffer fear of death. I then made her come out of the cellar. She went in front of me. On the way to the grave or graves, which had already been dug, I suddenly shot her from behind.3

Here, again the perpetrator's sole concern seems to have been the stress generated by the victim's "fear of death." The same concern led to a refnement to the Zyklon-B killing method. The SS preferred using Zyklon-B that had its distinctive nutty smell removed, which the manufacturers added to provide humans with an early warning of the gas's lethal presence.4 Even after deceiving their victims into entering the "shower," the SS preferred they remain incapable of identifying the mysterious "delousing" gas. This deception, however, fooled nobody—the victims could immediately feel that the gas was nocuous. Therefore, it appears that the purpose behind removing the smell was a Milgram-like "balm to the…conscience"5 whereby although the victims still ended up dying, the perpetrators could tell themselves that they never saw death coming. That is, the removal of the nutty smell was a strain resolving technique of self-deception where the perpetrators made a slight change to the killing method that really did little more than making them feel a lot better about their extermination of other human beings.

Another closely related explanation for the preference to deceive victims is that perpetrators hoped to avoid having to deal with their victims' guilt-inducing reactions to suddenly realizing they were about to die. Having to encounter potentially emotional victims just before killing them—the begging, sobbing, crying, screaming, and expressions of absolute horror—would have probably made the perpetrators feel like the ruthless executioners they had become. Keeping victims oblivious to their fate arguably resulted in much less stress for the perpetrators. When, as survivor Ada Lichtman noted, the props of deception encouraged victims to dance, sing, and applauded on their way to the grave, perpetrators would have found the psychological stress associated with being an executioner much easier to bear. Certainly, these acts of deception made for a relatively less stressful and more tolerable work environment.

The importance of subterfuge for easing perpetrators' guilty consciences is perhaps best illustrated in the powerful emotional sting killers often experienced when their victims saw through the techniques of deception. With just a few words, powerless people were capable of inficting deep wounds on the guilty consciences of the most effcient Nazi killers. Consider, for example, the recollections of Rudolf Höss, in regards to a "shattering" event that he believed he would "never forget:"

One woman approached me as she walked past and, pointing to her four children who were manfully helping the smallest ones over the rough ground, whispered: 'How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful, darling children? Have you no heart at all?' […] I remember, too, a woman who tried to throw her children out of the gas-chamber, just as the door was closing. Weeping she called out: 'At least let my precious children live.' There were many such shattering scenes, which affected all who witnessed them.6

For Höss, there were other events:

On one occasion two small children were so absorbed in some game that they quite refused to let their mother tear them away from it. Even the Jews of the Special Detachment were reluctant to pick the children up. The imploring look in the eyes of the mother, who certainly knew what was happening, is something I shall never forget. The people were already in the gas-chamber and becoming restive, and I had to act. Everyone was looking at me. I nodded to the junior non-commissioned offcer on duty and he picked up the screaming, struggling children in his arms and carried them into the gas-chamber, accompanied by their mother who was weeping in the most heart-rending fashion. My pity was so great that I longed to vanish from the scene: yet I might not show the slightest trace of emotion.7

In the most sophisticated of killing centers like Auschwitz, elaborate acts of deception could secure victim docility and greatly aided in maintaining killing effciency. But it was equally important that such techniques *also* enabled perpetrators to generally avoid the great psychological stress that they were killers of defenseless civilians. For the most directly involved Germans, techniques of victim deception also served as tools of self-deception so that the killing of other human beings felt to them like a humane and gentle experience.

# Touching, Seeing, or Hearing

The Nazi regime's pursuit of a method of killing capable of destroying large numbers of civilians gradually moved in a direction that allowed German perpetrators to emotionally distance themselves from their victims. By the time Crematorium II was completed at Auschwitz, the Germans most directly involved in the killing process need not touch, see, or hear their victims die. According to German political prisoner Karl Lil, once victims of Auschwitz were trapped in the hermetically sealed gas chambers, little of their fate could be detected by those outside. "A few seconds later a cry, muffed, stifed by the concrete walls. And then, a few minutes afterward, a brownish-yellow vapor poured out of the chimney."8 Because the most directly involved Germans could be, if they so chose, physically and emotionally distant from the act of killing, they tended to perceive this method as a more humane and gentle experience (again, for them).

How could the Germans regard a method of killing that barely stimulated their sensory systems as humane? The more perceptually benign the method of killing, the greater the disconnect between cause and effect. And the greater the disconnect between cause and effect, the greater the responsibility ambiguity. And it was this responsibility ambiguity that helped those Germans working in the camps to perceive themselves only indirectly involved. This distinction made no difference to the lethal outcome, but it did wonders for German perpetrators' self-perceptions. When Germans in Auschwitz killed, the separation of cause from effect inherent in the process ensured that the end result did not *feel* gruesome or beastly, like say, killing with their bare hands. For Höss, the Zyklon-B method was, as he put it himself, more "humane."9 Much like the desk murderers in Berlin, or those that rounded up victims, or drove the trains, partaking in the killing process for Höss and his men was not gruesome because none of them were "directly" involved. The indirectness of the entire operation seductively ensured that their essential contributions to the wider organizational process resembled the structurally disconnected and perceptually benign contributions of all the other specialist functionary links further up the organizational chain.

As the perceptual distance between cause and effect increased, Germans in the camps became more and more able to avoid encountering the consequences of their lethal contributions. Avoidance was an option for the German camp staff because, much like Milgram's participants, they were in a position of power to control what they were willing to know (or not know). It had become possible for all Germans involved to engage in "intentional ignorance"10—all could look away and then continue to contribute and beneft from that contribution. This is why Stangl was able to say, "unless one was actually working in the forest, one could live without actually seeing; most of us [Germans] never saw anybody dying or dead."11 As Hayes notes, this occurred in the ghettos as well: "the Germans were adept at insulating themselves from the worst aspects of the killing processes […] they often made the Jewish police forces do their dirty work of rounding up people who did not appear for deportation when scheduled to do so."12 If Germans never saw anything, how could they be directly responsible? Stangl, for one, went to great lengths to make sure he was unlikely to experience anything that might upset him. For example, when asked after the war where the worst place in the extermination camps was for him, his response suggests he put great effort into shielding himself from the realities surrounding him. "'The undressing barracks,' he said at once. 'I avoided it from my innermost being; I couldn't confront them; I couldn't lie to them; I avoided at any price talking to those who were about to die: *I couldn't stand it*'" [italics added].13 Stangl's self-centered viewpoint which skirted over his victims' actually horrifc experiences was not only very common among the German perpetrators,14 it shares some similarity to Mrs. Rosenblum's sole concern with *her* terrible experience during the Obedience studies. What Stangl failed to consider was that it was his selective avoidance of personal encounters with his approximately one million victims that ensured that he was indeed able to "stand it." Höss conceded, "My inner scruples about remaining in the concentration camp, despite my unsuitability for such work, receded into the background now that I no longer came into such direct contact with the prisoners as I had done in Dachau." As Wistrich said of both Höss and Stangl, "Their sleep was never disturbed since they rarely saw any suffering faces, concentrating as they did solely on the organizational task at hand."15 As Primo Levi perceptively put it:

The best way to defend oneself against the invasion of burdensome memories is to impede their entry, to extend a *cordon sanitaire*. It is easier to deny entry to a memory than to free oneself from it after it has been recorded. This, in substance, was the purpose of many of the artifces thought up by the Nazi commanders in order to protect the consciences of those assigned to do the dirty work and to ensure their services, disagreeable even for the most hardened cutthroats.16

It transpires that the Führer often informed those like Himmler tasked with implementing the Holocaust that extermination should be implemented as "humanely" as possible.17 And what it seems he meant by this was that killing should be "done impersonally." For Hitler, killing "impersonally" was, according to John Toland, synonymous with doing so "without cruelty."18 This is why during Himmler's second visit to Sobibor in 1943, the camp guards were instructed not to wear their whips and truncheons19—the leadership desperately needed to hold on to the belief that (where possible) their goal was a generally cruelty-free and humane enterprise. Cruelty was, however, as Goldhagen so convincing shows, endemic.20 But this tactile "hands on"-type cruelty—often physical beatings—was, as Levi implied at the end of Volume 1, usually not lethal (and often—although certainly not always—it had a "rational" organizational purpose).21 Violence during the roundups and in the concentration camps was, generally speaking, only lethal when Germans had ready access to means of killing that enabled them to (at least) avoid having to touch their victims.22 And when Germans were more intimately connected to the deaths of their victims, they often—although again certainly not always23—had quite different experiences to the more indirect perpetrators like Stangl and Höss. Consider, for example, the postwar admission by one elderly German to his son:

the brown eyes of a six-year-old girl had never let him rest. He was a Wehrmacht soldier in Warsaw during the ghetto uprising. They were clearing the bunkers, and one morning a six-year-old girl came out of one of these bunkers and ran over to hug him. He could still remember the look in her eyes, both fearful and trusting. Then his commander ordered him to stab her with his bayonet—which he did. He killed her. But the look in her eyes followed him all those years. […] He had never told it to anyone before.24

Of course, technocrats concentrating on step-by-step organizational tasks—timetables, transports, supplies, disposal—while others suffer, shares much in common with the Obedience Studies. As one participant in the Remote condition stated, "It's funny how you really begin to forget that there's a guy out there, even though you can hear him. For a long time I just concentrated on pressing the switches and reading the words."25 Unlike the above Wehrmacht soldier, technocrats were, with varying degrees of success, able to "forget," because the technology is structurally divorced from the moral.

As long as Höss, Stangl, and most other Germans in the more advanced gassing camps received no (or only a few) perceptual cues, it seems they could avoid thinking about the implications of their contributions. For the vast majority of Germans working within Auschwitz, the camp's structural compartmentalization—its many different sectors greatly aided in separating cause from effect. Auschwitz bookkeeper Oskar Gröning, for example, took great comfort in the fact that he worked in the much larger "living" section of the camp; he could claim to have nothing to do with the remotely located, compartmentalized, and relatively tiny gas chamber sector. As Gröning said himself:

Part of living in Auschwitz was perfectly normal. […] It was like a small city. I had my unit, and gas chambers were irrelevant in that unit. There was one side of life in Auschwitz, and there was another, and the two were more or less separate.26

For the vast majority of German perpetrators who worked within the camp, it was almost as if the mass killing of human beings was not even happening. Such mind games were easier to maintain in Auschwitz than in the Operation Reinhard camps because the former, unlike the latter, was frst and foremost a *work* (not extermination) camp.27 Unlike at Auschwitz, in the Operation Reinhard camps every worker, strategy, objective, and building was much more closely connected to the sole task of extermination. Thus, the Germans based in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka had to be more profcient than those at Auschwitz in the art of self-deception and delusional thinking.

Even at Auschwitz, however, there were occasions when, even for the most determined of offcers, confronting death was unavoidable. Höss, for example, saw things he wished he had not. But he relied on certain strategies to deal with such encounters. When upset, he "found it impossible to go back to my home and my family." Instead, "I would mount my horse and ride, until I had chased the terrible picture away."28 Germans at Auschwitz able to control how much perceptual information they were exposed to lived, as Willem A. Visser't Hooft put it, "in a twilight between knowing and not knowing."29

The power to know what was happening in concept but not in perceptual reality was even greater for the leadership comfortably based in Berlin. Walther Funk, the Nazi Minister of Economic Affairs, said of the atrocities after the war: "That was just the trouble; we were all blinded."30 Funk is largely right, except that during the war (even after it; see below footnote) he actively chose not to look in fear of what he might see. After the war and at the Nuremberg trials, the Allied forces used their greater power to reverse the Nazi leadership's earlier option to engage in avoidance by forcing them to view the chilling liberation flm footage of the insides of Nazi concentration camps. Suddenly unable to so easily avoid the perceptually intense reality, some of these leading Nazis reacted by trying to look away from the footage playing before them, many looked stunned, shocked, and, for the most part, shameful. One of them—again the "blinded" Funk—could not help sobbing and crying.31

If, as Stangl said, the Germans in the camps rarely ever saw any death, such purposeful avoidance powerfully aided in reducing their feelings of responsibility for the end result. Much like those in the Peer Administers Shock condition, all those indirectly involved could argue that they were not responsible because they never directly hurt anybody. Stangl was keen to point out, "Of course, I wasn't 'involved' in that sense… Not in the operational sense."32 This seemingly trivial difference was of great importance to Stangl—as perhaps best illustrated by how upset he became when accused of being more directly involved:

Stangl, insisting that he had never shot into a crowd of people, appeared to be more indignant about this accusation than about anything else, and to fnd irrelevant the fact that, whether he shot into the group or not, these very same people died anyway, less than two hours later, through actions ultimately under his control.33

After the war, Eichmann became equally indignant when he was accused of beating a boy to death.34 A similar reaction might have been expected had participants who completed Milgram's Peer Administers Shock condition been accused of directly inficting shocks on the learner. Actually, every German perpetrator right up to Hitler not involved in the "operational sense" could rely on Stangl's strain resolving logic. Eichmann, for one, repeatedly argued, "I never killed a single one. […] I never killed anyone and I never gave the order to kill anyone."35 Eichmann said that after the Wannsee Conference he:

felt something of the satisfaction of Pilate, because I felt entirely innocent of any guilt. The leading fgures of the Reich at the time had spoken at the Wannsee Conference, the "Popes" had given their orders; it was up to me to obey, and that is what I bore in mind over the future years.36

The problem for Eichmann was that he was willing to admit (or could not deny) that he was, in his own words, guilty of "aiding and abetting…"37 Although he was purposefully (and, in terms of his career, opportunistically) lost in the fog of responsibility ambiguity, this admission directly connected him to the Holocaust. So, in the sense that he knew without knowing, Eichmann, irrespective of all his strain resolving coping mechanisms, was guilty. No matter how he spun the mind games in his head, he (like Milgram) *was* responsible for his harmful contributions, and he knew it. "I created a situation for myself in which I could fnd a spark of inner calm. The main medicament was: I have nothing to do with it all personally. They are not my people. […] But my nervousness got worse. I had no rest at night."38

The reason Eichmann never personally killed anyone was that, in all likelihood, he was no killer. To be clear, *from his desk* Eichmann proved more than capable of sending millions of people to their deaths. But, remove the distancing factors offered by bureaucracy and technology, Eichmann—intense anti-semite or not, evil monster or not—was impotent, squeamish, and likely harmless.39 Consider, for example, his timid reaction to someone describing the gassing procedure: "I was horrifed. My nerves aren't strong enough…I can't listen to such things…without their affecting me. Even today, if I see someone with a deep cut, I have to look away."40 As mentioned, during the winter of 1941–1942, the meek Eichmann was sent to Chełmno to gather a detailed account of the camp's extermination process. The experience left him so shaken that he both forgot to time the operation with his stopwatch and politely declined an offer to observe, through a peephole, the victims in their death throes.41 For Eichmann, worse was to come. Asked to record the Chełmno process, he felt obliged to observe the visually intense end result. He saw:

the most horrifying thing I had ever seen in my life. The gassing van drove up to a somewhat long pit, the doors were opened, and the corpses were tossed out. It was as if they were still alive, their limbs were so supple. […] and I can still picture the way a civilian pulled teeth out with a pair of pliers. Then I cleared out.42

Even the Germans most directly involved in operations at Auschwitz-Birkenau could hold on to the strain resolving logic that, like Höss, Stangl, and even the more distant Eichmann, they too were *only* indirectly involved. They *merely* dropped Zyklon-B crystals or switched on a diesel motor—they were *just* technicians. They never killed anybody, not personally anyway. If such coping mechanisms failed to salve their consciences, they, much like Milgram's "obedient" participants, could tell themselves or others that they would never have done such things of their own accord. They were just following orders. As said, the German gas chamber supervisor Werner Karl Dubois, who participated in both the T4 program and Operation Reinhard:

What should be taken into account is that we did not act on our own initiative, but in the context of the Reich's Final Solution to the Jewish problem.43

Similarly, Höss was keen to point out, "I must obey, since I was a soldier."44 But, again, like many of Milgram's participants, he also continued under the sneaking suspicion that he could probably act with impunity. "You see, in Germany it was understood that if something went wrong, then the man who gave the orders was responsible."45 Eichmann was no different. Despite the occasional nervous feelings of responsibility, he suspected that because he did not *appear* responsible for directly killing anyone, he too (opportunistically) believed himself "covered…"46 Hidden within the fog of responsibility ambiguity, Eichmann knew that he could (and did) blame the Nazi Popes. Höss's men no doubt blamed him, he blamed Himmler, and Himmler blamed Hitler. But, again, Hitler never killed any Jews, not *directly* anyway. Perhaps Milgram was right when he argued that the same psychological process inherent within modern bureaucratic organizations infuenced both his "obedient" participants and the Nazi perpetrators.47 That is, when goal achievement is, as it was in both these cases, divided between groups of specialists, fragmentation of the overall process enables the displacement of personal responsibility. Under such a system, the person ultimately responsible for the evil act seems to disappear.

If displacing responsibility for one's actions did not ease the "burdening of the soul," another technique capable of subduing such feelings was to concede that all involved were a little bit responsible. As the bookkeeper Oskar Gröning, for example, claimed, he was only a "small cog in the gears." But if all perpetrators are a little bit responsible, no single person is ultimately responsible. This kind of thinking can reduce personal feelings of responsibility because everyone is just a little bit guilty of what Eichmann earlier called "aiding and abetting…"—a relatively minor infraction during the Holocaust (so they liked to tell themselves). Most certainly, at no other point or place during the entire Holocaust did responsibility ambiguity at every link in the organizational chain reach the heights it did at Auschwitz.

Because Germans working in the most advanced gassing camps could all argue that they had neither heard, seen, nor touched the end result of the extermination process, all could claim that they were not personally responsible. And if, to some extent, they could convince themselves they were not personally responsible, then the vast majority felt little or no "burdening of the soul," and thus they were at a much lower risk than members of the shooting squads of becoming "neurotics" or "savages." Because the camp workers had the option of perceptually circumventing the frightful consequences of their contributions, they were comparatively more capable of carrying on, of contributing to the apparently "necessary" yet "humane" murder of other human beings on an unimaginable scale.

# A Peaceful and Gentle Death

Another factor of the "humane death" that many Nazi perpetrators valued highly was that the method of killing civilians should leave no postmortem indications of pain or violence. Preferably, victims' bodies would show no bloody wounds or other signs of physical trauma like bruising. Also, no signs of defecation, vomiting, or frothing at the mouth or nose. Finally, a victim's postmortem countenance should appear calm and neutral as if to suggest they were peacefully sleeping. It was the T4 chemist August Becker who perhaps best captured all this when, as mentioned, he complained to his superiors about certain gas van operators: "In order to get the Aktion fnished as quickly as possible the driver presses down on the accelerator as far as it will go. As a result the persons to be executed die of suffocation and do not doze off as was planned." He then added, "It has proved that if my instructions are followed and the levers are properly adjusted death comes faster and the prisoners fall asleep peacefully. Distorted faces and excretions, such as were observed before, no longer occur."48 On the measure of eliminating postmortem indicators of a violent death, gassing was clearly preferable to using frearms because it did not leave the horrifc wounds produced by the early mass shootings. But different types of gas produced different results. Kurt Gerstein (the Chief Disinfection Offcer) argued that carbon monoxide gassing left a greater mess than Zyklon-B. When the doors of the carbon monoxide chamber opened, "the bodies were thrown out blue, wet with sweat and urine, the legs covered with excrement and menstrual blood."49 For this reason, Höss preferred Zyklon-B:

There was no noticeable change in the bodies and no sign of convulsions or discolorations. Only after the bodies had been left lying for some time, that is to say after several hours, did the usual death stains appear in the places where they had lain. Soiling through opening of the bowels was also rare. There were no signs of wounding of any kind. The faces showed no distortion.50

Even if Höss's impression was an exaggeration (and it probably was),51 because Germans at Auschwitz were able to purposefully avoid encountering what actually took place in the gas chamber, the untested belief that Zyklon-B left no signs of a painful death fulflled the strain resolving role of another Milgram-like "balm to the…conscience."

# Instantaneous Death

The fnal characteristic the Nazi's most "humane" means of killing was that it killed instantaneously. The victim should be dead before he or she could register any pain. As Browning, clearly astounded, notes, "a quick death without agony of anticipation was considered an example of human compassion!"52 On this measure, no method could compete with a bullet in the back of the neck (but, of course, killing with guns failed in other ways, most notably, the anticipation of death and the infiction of visually disturbing wounds).

Although Zyklon-B performed well on most of the four conditions, when compared with a bullet in the back of the neck, it still killed slowly. It could be argued that the introduction of the numerous techniques of deception (one of which applied after the docile victims were locked inside the chamber) was, at least in part, introduced with the purpose of addressing this weakness. Again, it was preferable that the victims never saw death coming. But clearly such measures were not enough because the Nazi planners attempted to directly increase the speed with which Zyklon-B killed. For example, on one rare occasion when Höss chose to observe the gassings through a peephole in the gas chamber door, he noticed:

those who were standing nearest to the induction vents were killed at once. It can be said that about one-third died straightaway. The remainder staggered about and began to scream and struggle for air. The screaming, however, soon changed to the death rattle and in a few minutes all lay still.53

Just as Milgram would later tweak his procedure, Höss's observation appears to have stimulated a subtle change to the design of the gas chamber. While Crematoria II and III were, as mentioned, designed as mirror images of one another, the link to the Allied aerial photo presented in the previous chapter revealed one slight difference:

gas introduction columns of crematorium II were arrayed in a straight line, roughly along the longitudinal axis of the gas chamber, whereas in crematorium III they were spaced in pairs on both sides of the axis. This placement was meant to ensure rapid and uniform spread of the poison inside the chamber.54

This innovation ensured that more victims died, as Höss put it, "straightaway." Although Zyklon-B still killed slower than a shot to the neck, it did its work faster than any other type of gas available to the Nazis. Höss elaborated:

The doctors explained to me that the prussic acid had a paralysing effect on the lungs, but its action was so quick and strong that death came before the convulsions could set in, and in this its effects differed from those produced by carbon monoxide or by a general oxygen defciency.55

As we have seen, Wirth had tried to remedy the relative sluggishness of carbon monoxide by lowering the height of the ceiling in Treblinka's second set of gas chambers. But even with this innovation, his method could not compete with Zyklon-B. As Wellers notes:

Gerhard Peters, the general manager of Degesch, the frm that developed Zyclon B and delivered it to Auschwitz, was able to establish scientifcally that hydrocyanic acid is six times more toxic than chlorine, thirty-four times more than carbon monoxide, and 750 times more than chloroform.56

Without a doubt, the carbon monoxide exhaust fumes used during Operation Reinhard could be an effcient means of killing large numbers of humans (as was leaving freight cars full of Jews outside Treblinka for too long in the intense summer heat, as Eberl did), but concerns lingered about celerity. These concerns explain why Pfannenstiel went to Belzec armed with a stopwatch. It is interesting to note in this context that a month after Himmler's July 1942 visit to Auschwitz where he observed Bunker II in action, Kurt Gerstein and Rolf Günther were instructed (probably by the SS-Reichsführer himself) to pay Wirth a visit at Belzec. As Hilberg points out:

They had about 200 pounds of Zyklon with them and were about to convert the carbon monoxide chambers to the hydrogen cyanide method. The unwelcome guests stayed to watch a gassing which took an especially long time (over three hours) because the diesel engine had failed. To Wirth's great embarrassment and mortifcation, Gerstein timed the operation with a stopwatch. Facing the greatest crisis of his career, Wirth dropped his pride and asked Gerstein "not to propose any other type of gas chamber in Berlin." Gerstein obliged, ordering the Zyklon to be buried on the pretext that it had spoiled. Höss and Wirth were henceforth enemies.57

The two men were enemies because the delivery of Zyklon-B clearly signaled to Wirth that he had lost to Höss in the ferce competition to discover a more perfect solution to the seemingly unresolvable "Jewish problem": the most "humane" means of converting the Führer's wish into reality. According to Konrad Morgen, after the regime dumped him, all that was left to Wirth before he was killed in an ambush in Italy near the war's end was invidious bragging rights: Höss (who had no T4 Euthanasia experience) was his "untalented pupil."58

An interesting question remains. If only work Jews had to face the horrifc realities of the insides of the gas chambers, why were Germans who could, and typically did, avoid such spectacles, so concerned about fnding a method of extermination that killed quickly, cleanly, imperceptibly, and covertly? Put simply, many Nazis believed extermination to be necessary, and for the German camp staff Zyklon-B helped deactivate the censuring gaze of their guilty conscience.59 If they were somewhat involved in the killing process, at least they could tell themselves it was humane.60 As Hans Mommsen notes: "Inhumanity had frst to be declared as 'humanity' before it could be put into technocratic practice, with moral inhibitions thereafter reduced to a minimum."61

After the war, Höss tried to explain all this to the Allied forces when he "spoke proudly of his 'improvements.'"62 But his indignant audience could not comprehend his logic—his words were surely the ramblings of a madman. Höss then tried to bridge their understanding by adding that if not for him, many of the victims would have died more horrifcally. But a frightful faw remained in Höss's logic. If he and the other Nazi innovators had never introduced their "humane improvements," killing by other, more gruesome, methods likely would have stimulated defance among the ranks (much as it did when the SS Cavalry Brigade refused to implement Himmler's direct orders in 1941 to shoot women and children in the Pripet marshes using a more traditional military-style execution technique). Thus, without the "humane" enhancements, the number of victims would have been much lower (and Himmler and Heydrich's little experiment would probably have been abandoned in favor of other more "realistic" solutions).63 But instead, innovators and problem-solvers like Höss provided the remote and blinkered Nazi leadership with ever-greater capacity to eliminate an ever-expanding array of so-called inferiors.

Some of the above quotations capture why, for the Nazi leadership, Höss was more than just the most effcient of Nazi mass murderers. He was really the epitome of the perfect Nazi in the (killing) feld—the kind of executioner genocidal managers like Himmler and Heydrich greatly desired and heavily relied upon. In terms of effciency, Höss was creative, determined, and ambitious. But he was also controlled, outwardly unemotional, and thus suffciently "hard," as they termed it.64 Despite his masked performance of "hardness," during the implementation of his diffcult duties, Höss also managed to remain what Himmler termed "decent…" As the SS-Reichsführer said himself on 4 October 1943 during a speech where, to an audience of high ranking SS offcers, he touched on the Holocaust:

Most of you must know what it means to see a hundred corpses lie side by side, or fve hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck this out and—excepting cases of human weakness—to have kept our integrity, that is what has made us hard. In our history, this is an unwritten and never-to-be-written page of glory…65

During the Holocaust some Germans had, as Himmler notes, fallen prey to human weakness: They were too "soft" and could not do what (apparently) needed to be done. Or worse, they abused their positions of power by opportunistically gratifying their pathological proclivity for sadism or penchant—perhaps stimulated by feelings of boredom—for unnecessary cruelty.66 Decent Germans, according to Himmler, were never unnecessarily cruel. As he said in the same speech: "We shall never be rough and heartless when it is not necessary, that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude towards animals, will also assume a decent attitude towards these human animals."67 What could Himmler possibly have meant by such words? He was alluding to Jewish Kosher animal slaughter techniques which Himmler, like Hitler, believed to be inherently cruel and inhumane. In 1944, as Clemens Giese and Waldemar Kahler (both involved in the introduction of the November 1933 Nazi animal protection laws) noted:

The animals protection movement, strongly promoted by the National Socialist government, has long demanded that animals be given anesthesia before being killed. The overwhelming majority of the German people have long condemned killing without anesthesia, a practice universal among Jews though not confned to them, …as against the cultivated sensitivities of our society.68

When the sensitive Himmler instructed that "human animals" be killed—much like with other animals—it was preferable these acts be undertaken without cruelty—all were gently to go to sleep. Unlike the "weak" Germans who inficted extraneous cruelties on their human victims, Höss had no interest in or time for such base pursuits. Thus, always with his eye fxed frmly on achieving the bureaucratic goal at hand, Höss proved to be a far deadlier executioner than the pathological and tyrannical killers.

Therefore, what Himmler—and clearly Hitler—liked about executioners like Höss was that he was the kind of person who would "carry out mass murder with self-control and 'decency' rather than with sadism" (the last of which the Nazis deemed a crime for which some Germans faced prosecution).69 Höss, the consummate professional, was what the Nazi leadership believed to be an effcient yet, were possible, *civilized* killer. This is why, as mentioned, Höss could say with a straight face:

I fnd it incredible that human beings could ever turn into such beasts. The way the 'greens' [conventional criminals] knocked the French Jewesses about, tearing them to pieces, killing them with axes, and throttling them—it was simply gruesome.70

Such interpersonal violence was barbaric, cruel, and unbecoming of a professional, rational, sensitive, humane, and thus civilized Nazi executioner.71 To use these adjectives in the same sentence as the noun Nazi may cause an incredulous snicker among many readers. But to do so perhaps risks missing something which, in my view, is crucial yet so frequently misunderstood when it comes to the Holocaust: For the most expert of Nazi genocidaires like Höss, the distasteful duty of killing was a higher calling because, as Hayes observes, the Nazis genuinely believed "that the Reich's expansion to the east was part of a civilizing process that expanded European culture at the expense of supposedly barbaric Asia."72 Of course, for many years now undefeated Europeans (and their descendants) of all stripes have relied on this "Nazi"-like logic to justify the expansion of their settler colonies. And with reference to the word "humane," as Neitzel and Welzer incisively observe:

Ideologists of annihilation like Himmler or practitioners like Rudolf Höss continually stressed that destroying human lives was an unpleasant task that ran contrary to their "humane" instincts. But the ability to overcome such scruples was seen as a measure of one's character. It was the coupling of murder and morality – the realization that unpleasant acts were necessary and the will to carry out those acts *in defance of* feelings of human sympathy – that allowed the perpetrators of genocide to see themselves as "respectable" people, as people whose hearts, in Höss' words, "were not bad."73

Perhaps there is a little more to the sociology of Norbert Elias than previously imagined.

As Bauman notes, extermination through work, the Zyklon-B stationary gas chamber, and the industrialized cremation process fnished the war as "the most perfect" solution to the Jewish problem that "the Nazis had time to invent…"74 It was cheap, proftable, highly effcient, *and* the most "humane" method they could fnd (thus suggesting there might exist a dialectical link between the apparently incompatible Bauman on rationalization and Elias on civility).75 In the end, Höss beat out people like Jeckeln, Lange, and Wirth to win the competition to fulfll Hitler's wish mainly because his method of killing rated highest on the most important of the four characteristics discussed above: Zyklon-B did not require Germans to touch, see, or (barely) hear the killing of their victims. And as a result, these Germans could convincingly engage in strain resolving acts of self-deception, telling themselves that the gassings "probably" killed without any anticipation of death, killed without leaving any marks indicative of a painful death, and killed quickly, even if, in reality, this was not true.

But despite Höss's success in this competition, the leading Nazis never found his methods completely satisfactory. As Bauman implies in the above quotation, the method of killing at Auschwitz was not perfect per se: In reality, it did not eliminate the anticipation of death, it did not kill instantaneously, and it did leave marks indicative of a painful death. What the Nazis ultimately desired was a method of eliminating unwanted civilians that did not necessitate killing. Even before the start of the Soviet invasion, Nazi realists had pursued and almost discovered what the Chief Doctor of the SS, Ernst-Robert von Grawitz, termed the "perfect solution to the problem"76—sterilization.

# The Search for the Most Efficient, Profitable, and Humane Method of Killing (Without Killing)

As Höss and others competed to kill more effciently, a group of Nazi scientists undertook a variety of experiments to invent a cheap, rapid, and surreptitious technique of mass sterilization. It was believed that by sterilizing those deemed inferior, large categories of people like Jews, Gypsies, and other groups could be eliminated through natural death. Moreover, by eliminating the ability of these "inferiors" to procreate, all could safely be retained as a long-term source of slave labor, thereby providing the opportunity for all Germans "to pursue higher pleasures."77

The search for a solution started in March 1941 as the Soviet invasion was being planned. After corresponding with the T4's Victor Brack, Himmler became interested in mass sterilization as it might be applied to the expanding Jewish problem. Hilberg outlines the general contents of Brack's correspondence with Himmler:

It started as a sober account of the possibilities of X-rays in the feld of sterilization and castration. Preliminary investigations by medical experts of the chancellery, wrote Brack, had indicated that small doses of X-rays achieved only temporary sterilization; large doses caused burns. Having come to this conclusion, Brack ignored it completely and continued with the following fantastic scheme: The persons to be "processed"…would step up to a counter to be asked some questions or to fll out forms. Thus occupied, the unsuspecting candidate for sterilization would face the window for two or three minutes while the offcial sitting behind the counter would throw a switch which would release X-rays through two tubes pointing at the victim. With twenty such counters (cost: 20,000-30,000 marks apiece) 3000-4000 persons could be sterilized daily.78

Also in March 1941, Himmler expressed interest in Professor Carl Clauberg's nonsurgical attempts at female sterilization. The technique called for circumventing conception by injecting an irritant into the uterus. Himmler requested Clauberg's transfer to the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück where he could perfect his method. At the time, however, Clauberg held no interest in relocating and negotiations between the two ceased. Perhaps because Hitler initially disapproved of this potential solution, Himmler's interest in sterilization waned.79

In October 1941, however, Adolf Pokorny, a retired army medial practitioner, contacted Himmler in regards to another possible mass sterilization technique. Pokorny informed Himmler about a Dr. Madaus at Radebeul-Dresden who had apparently sterilized mice and rats with a serum extracted from a South American plant called Caladium seguinum.80 In reference to Himmler's preferred source of slave labor, Pokorny pointed out:

If, on the basis of this research, it were possible to produce a drug which, after a relatively short time, effects an imperceptible sterilization on human beings, then we would have a powerful new weapon at our disposal. The thought alone that the three million Bolsheviks, who are at present German prisoners, could be sterilized so that they could be used as laborers but be prevented from reproduction, opens the most far-reaching perspectives.81

Despite the Führer's disapproval of this strategy, on 10 March 1942 Himmler ordered Pohl to offer Madaus a research contract to undertake experiments on concentration camp prisoners, and within six months Madaus had agreed to the transfer.82

A few months later, in June of 1942, Brack felt it important to remind Himmler of the potential advantages of sterilization over killing. "Castration by X-rays…is not only relatively cheap but can also be performed on many thousands in the shortest time."83 He also pointed out that Chief Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler had been able to set up an experimental research program. Soon after, ex-T4 employee and medical doctor Horst Schumann began experiments on men and women at Auschwitz.84 Around the same time, on 7 July 1942, Clauberg fnally accepted Himmler's offer to move to Auschwitz to start an experimental program on who Clauberg termed "unworthy women…"85

All of these programs ended in failure, the only outcome being the misery and misfortune of all those unfortunately selected as research subjects. Had just one of these programs succeeded in producing a perfect method of killing without killing, Hilberg is convinced the net of potential human targets would have widened:

In the very conception of these explorations, the destruction process threatened to escape from its narrowly defned channel and to engulf everyone within reach who might be branded as "inferior." Already, the fate of *Mischlinge* of the frst degree hung in the balance while the Interior Ministry waited for the perfection of mass sterilization techniques. In consequence of the failure of these experiments a development was arrested which had spelled in its dim outlines the doom of large sections of the population of Europe.86

As Ernst Kaltenbrunner (Heydrich's replacement) said in 1944, "Germany must see to it…that the populations of eastern Europe and most of the Balkan and Danubian countries are forced to die out as a result of sterilization and the destruction of the ruling class in these countries."87

By the end of the same year, even those Himmler believed to be ugly were being lined up for extermination.88 Clearly, the less the method psychologically burdened the most direct perpetrators' conscience, the easier it would be for them to perform their tasks. And the easier the task, the wider the potential pool of targets. Interestingly (or disturbingly):

When Clauberg returned from Russia to Germany in October, 1951, he had the frst opportunity in ten years to tell interviewing reporters that just prior to his capture he had perfected his sterilization method after all. The new method consisted of a simple injection, and he was now looking forward to its application, albeit only in "special cases."89

If Clauberg had perfected his method of sterilization before the end of the war and then used it on "inferior" populations, it is likely that he would have surpassed Höss in the rationionally driven competition to discover the most "humane" method of converting the Führer's wish into reality. But, of course, these Nazi scientists failed, leaving the regime with the next best option: the most advanced gassing systems at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and fnally Auschwitz-Birkenau.90

# Conclusion

Although implementing an effcient (formally rational) system of mass murder was of great importance to the Nazi regime, it was equally important for the perpetrators across the division of labor to fnd a method of killing perceived to be "humane." Four main factors were involved: Optimally victims had (1) no anticipation of death; (2) need not be touched, seen, or heard when being killed; (3) died gently; and (4) instantaneously. As the victims' horrifc experiences clearly illustrate, in reality the most popular methods of killing in places like Auschwitz were not "humane" experiences at all. "Humane killing," as the perpetrators saw it, was probably a contradiction. A method of killing only had to feel suffciently humane to them to act as a strain resolving mechanism. That is, much like the all-important responsibility ambiguity, these kinds of perpetrator beliefs played a crucial role in reducing the so-called burdening of the soul. And the less the soul was burdened, the easier it became for the leadership to persuade, tempt, or coerce the most directly involved ordinary Germans into inficting harm on others.

Perpetrator perceptions over "humane" methods of killing might help increase our understanding of what it was that was so *moderate* about German anti-semitism. That is, unlike the Eastern Europeans and their barbaric pogroms where Jews were clubbed to death by the "Deathdealer of Kovno," most "moderately antisemitic" Germans would only kill Jews with more "humane"—clean, emotionally distant, and civilized—methods. Although many ordinary Germans had come to agree that *something* needed to be done about the "Jewish problem"—thus indisputably rendering them anti-semitic—their more sensitive constitutions rendered the Eastern European pogrom an offensive fnal solution. The Wehrmacht colonel who observed the death-dealer in action believed it "probably the most frightful event that I had seen during the course of two world wars," and aroused in him and other Germans present a similar feeling of "horror and outrage." And when offended like this, Germans were commonly observed to behave in ways that sharply conficted with the popular perception of the cruel and sadistic Nazi killer. As Arendt observed:

in Rumania even the S.S. were taken aback, and occasionally frightened, by the horrors of old-fashioned, spontaneous pogroms on a gigantic scale; they often intervened to save Jews from sheer butchery, so that the killing could be done in what, according to them, was a civilized way.91

Thus, from this perspective, the anti-semitism common among Germans was, relatively speaking, much more moderate compared to that found in some Eastern European countries. The problem, however, with this moderate anti-semitism was that it stimulated a demand for a more "humane" and "civilized" method of killing that happened also to advance killing effciency enormously.

Thus, in places like Auschwitz, it became possible for only moderately anti-semitic or even indifferent Germans to easily and repeatedly participate in a killing process capable of exterminating Jews on an unprecedented scale. And because the most advanced killing methods hardly "burdened the soul" (unlike the less organized and more repulsive pogroms where intense feelings of hatred quickly fzzled out), the German's seemingly banal machinery of destruction could continue consuming the lives of victims with no end in sight. It would seem to me that this is how and why moderate anti-semitism so common among Hitler's willing executioners ended up being so much more deadly and destructive. It is here that I believe we fnd an answer to Bauer's "real question" of how during the Holocaust so many moderately anti-semitic Germans were so quickly converted into willing executioners.

After the war when Germans were bombarded with the horrifying evidence of the Holocaust, many Nazi sympathizers rejected the Final Solution's methods, but in many cases the moderate anti-semitism remained. Consider, for example, one German architect's rather defensive, candid, and no doubt common postwar reaction to the Holocaust:

[T]he Jews … were a problem. They came from the east. You should see them in Poland; the lowest class of people, full of lice, dirty and poor, running about in their Ghettos in flthy caftans. They came here, and got rich by unbelievable methods after the frst war. They occupied all the good places … in medicine and law and government posts! … [What the Nazis did] of course … was no way to settle the Jewish problem. But there was a problem and it had to be settled some way.92

As Koonz points out, after the war the conscience of many respectable yet clearly Nazifed Germans (like that above) remained untroubled, "because they could forget their passivity in the face of white-collar persecution and simultaneously express moral outrage about the violent attacks and coarse language common in the hardcore Nazi subculture."93 Somewhat like the architect, one German POW said to another during a bugged conversation: "I quite agree that the Jews had to be turned out, that was obvious, but the manner in which it was done was absolutely wrong, and the present hatred [directed at post-war Germany] is the result."94 From such evidence, Felix Römer concludes (much like during the Obedience studies where Milgram's application of greater power typically trumped the participants' more benign individual preferences) that even when Germans in the armed forces professed their belief that "extreme violence against defenseless civilians…cross[ed] a line, they were" still, far more often than not, "capable of such violence, the minute group pressure of the circumstances demanded it."95 All this aside, perhaps these moderately anti-semitic Germans would have been more amenable to the Nazi's preferred but unperfected fnal solution of mass sterilization: the most "humane" method of killing (without killing). Maybe Norbert Elias was right after all, "if humanity can survive the violence of our age, [our descendants] might consider us as late barbarians."96

# Notes


can become a repetitive and routinized task, acts of cruelty can also aid in relieving perpetrators' feelings of boredom (e.g., see Goldhagen 1996, p. 259 and Schelvis 2007, p. 113). This arguably occurred during the Obedience studies when, as mentioned, the experimenter occasionally broke out of his usual robotic delivery and would—seemingly playing a game of cat and mouse—invent his own rhetorical prod-like devices in an attempt to entrap participants into inficting further shocks.


Keitel wipes brow, takes off headphones […] Hess glares at screen looking like a ghoul with sunken eyes over the footlamp […] Keitel puts on headphone, glares at screen out of the corner of his eye […] von Neurath has head bowed, doesn't look […] Funk covers his eyes, looks away […] Sauckel mops brow […] Frank swallows hard, blinks eyes, trying to stife tears […] Fritzsche watches intensely with knitted brow, cramped at the end of his seat, evidently in agony […] Goering keeps leaning on balustrade, not watching most of the time, looking droopy […] Funk mumbles something under his breath […] Streicher keeps watching, immobile except for an occasional squint […] Funk now in tears, blows nose, wipes eyes, looks down […] Frick shakes head at illustration of "violent death."—Frank mutters "Horrible!" […] Rosenberg fdgets, peeks at screen, bows head, looks to see how others are reacting […] Seyss-Inquart stoic throughout […] Speer looks very sad, swallows hard […] Defense attorneys are now muttering, "for God's sake—terrible." Raeder watches without budging […] von Papen sits with hand over brow, looking down, has not looked at screen yet […] Hess keeps looking bewildered…piles of dead are shown in a slave labor camp […] von Schirach watching intently, gasps, whispers to Sauckel […] Funk crying now […] Goering looks sad, leaning on elbow […] Doenitz has head bowed, no longer watching […] Sauckel shudders at picture of Buchenwald crematorium oven…as human skin lampshade is shown, Streicher says, "I don't believe that" […] Goering coughing […] Attorneys gasping […] Now Dachau […] Schacht still not looking […] Frank nods his head bitterly and says, "Horrible!" […] Rosenberg still fdgeting, leans forward, looks around, leans back, hangs head […] Fritzsche, pale biting lips, really seems in agony […] Doenitz has head buried in his hands […] Keitel now bowing head […] Ribbentrop looks up at screen as British offcer starts to speak, saying he has already buried 17,000 corpses […] Frank biting his nails […] Frick shakes his head incredulously at speech of female doctor describing treatment and experiments on female prisoners at Belsen […] As Kramer is shown, Funk says with a choking voice, "The dirty swine!" […] Ribbentrop sitting with pursed lips and blinking eyes, not looking at screen […] Funk crying bitterly, claps [*sic*] hand over mouth as women's naked corpses are thrown into pit […] Keitel and Ribbentrop look up at mention of tractor clearing corpses, see it, then hang their heads […] Streicher shows signs of disturbance for the frst time […] Film ends. After the showing of the flm, Hess remarks, "I don't believe it." Goering whispers to him to keep quiet, his own cockiness quite gone. Streicher says something about "perhaps in the last days." Fritzsche retorts mournfully, "Million? In the last days—No." Otherwise there is gloomy silence as the prisoners fle out of the courtroom."


"were meant to bring order into what had become a chaotic situation and to mark the end of the persecution of the Jews" (Lösener 1961, pp. 262– 313, as cited in Koonz 2003, p. 190). Although these laws likely reduced violent attacks on German Jews and *seemed* to usher in a new period of civility, they also made possible this enemy's disenfranchisement, impoverishment, and eventual extermination. As Koonz (2003, p. 224) argued with respect to all Germans: they "found it hard to grasp the reality that lawful, orderly persecution would turn out to be more deadly than random cruelty."


The summary of that conference states: "During various visits to the penitentiaries, prisoners have always been observed who – because of their bodily characteristics – hardly deserve the designation human [*Mensch*]; they look like miscarriages of hell [*Missgeburten der Hölle*]. Such prisoners should be photographed. It is planned that they too shall be eliminated [*auszuschalten*]. Crime and sentence are irrelevant. Only such photographs should be submitted which clearly show the deformity" (pp. 642–643). Alluding to the potential danger of such policies for the Nazis themselves, the Gauleiter of Danzig-West Prussia Albert Forster once said of Himmler: "If I looked like Himmler, I would not talk about race!" (Levine 1969, p. 350, as cited in Rutherford 2007, p. 67).


They should have thought of a different solution" (quoted in Schelvis 2007, p. 254). Many Germans, even decades after the war, continued to long for the Nazis because as one woman pointed out: "During the war we didn't go hungry. Back then everything worked. It was only after the war that things turned bad" (quoted in Aly 2006, p. 179).


# References


Headland, R. (1992). *Messages of murder: A study of the reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the security police and the security service, 1941–1943*. London: Associated University Press.


*persecution: Bureaucracy, business, and the organization of the Holocaust* (pp. 340–360). New York: Berghahn Books.


**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Conclusion—The Milgram-Holocaust Linkage and Beyond

This book set out by asking a question that has perplexed Holocaust historians for many years: How did an only moderately antisemitic society in Germany end up killing millions of European Jews? I suggested one way to shed new light on this question might be to explore Stanley Milgram's Obedience studies, concentrating particularly on their invention. I reasoned that Milgram's invention of his experiments and the Nazis' invention of the Holocaust share a key similarity: Both successfully transformed large numbers of "ordinary" and arguably indifferent people into willing infictors of harm. Therefore, if it were possible to delineate Milgram's start-to-fnish journey in transforming most of his participants into infictors of harm *on a likeable person*, perhaps my fndings might offer some insight into how *only moderately antisemitic* Germans so quickly became willing executioners. Volume 1 revealed that when inventing and then collecting his data, Milgram relied heavily on formally rational techniques of discovery and organization.

In terms of the invention of the Obedience experiments, after hearing many Nazi war criminals plead that during the Holocaust they only followed higher orders, Milgram wondered if ordinary people in a social psychology experiment would also follow orders to infict harm on an innocent person. He set out with a preconceived goal: run a harm-inficting experiment that would "maximize obedience…" Because Milgram did not have a procedure capable of generating such a result, he had to invent one. Then, relying on forces he suspected caused the Holocaust—Nazi-like pledges of loyalty, strict obedience to harmful orders, and little steps toward a radical outcome—he envisioned a rather rudimentary basic experimental procedure where participants accepted a pledge to obey orders to engage in an escalating physical assault. Soon realizing this idea would unlikely achieve his goal to maximize obedience, Milgram started applying his intuitive feel and drew on his previous experiences as a social psychologist to envision what he thought might better move him toward preconceived goal achievement. Two key innovations emerged: Instead of a physical assault, Milgram sensed participants might more likely infict "harm" if they were instructed to deploy fake shocks from an emotionally and physically distancing electrical device (effectively substituting human labor with a more predictable, controllable, calculable, and effcient source of non-human technology). Also, he envisioned a more effcacious institutional justifcation for inficting the shocks: By hurting the learner, the participant would help establish whether or not punishment improved learning. Rather powerfully, this procedural change morally inverted the infiction of harm on an innocent person into a commendable social good.

Although this emerging procedure started to appear a little less like the Holocaust captured in the laboratory setting, to test its potential to achieve his desired end result, Milgram had his students run a series of pilot studies. Not only did the frst pilots demonstrate the basic research idea held enormous potential—about 60% of participants inficted every shock—Milgram also observed them engage in unanticipated behaviors that inspired new procedural innovations that he thought might move him even closer to converting his preconceived goal into a reality. Importantly, these improvements were beyond his intuitive feel and past experiences of what he imagined might generate a high completion rate. For example, in the frst pilot series participants could see an outline of the learner through a translucent screen. For many participants, the image of a pained learner clearly caused discomfort—seeing a connection between cause and effect likely made them feel too personally responsible for their actions. To Milgram's surprise, however, some of the distressed participants resolved the weighty dilemma before them by turning away from the pained learner and then continued to infict further shocks. Thus, instead of Milgram from the *top*-*down* adding his own manipulative innovations to the basic procedure, these participants from the *bottom*-*up* invented their own such techniques. Inadvertently, these self-initiated actions helped move Milgram toward preconceived goal achievement. They did so because when some participants turned away from the pained learner, Milgram's observation of this behavior caused him to wonder if introducing a solid wall to subsequent pilots might cause the completion rate to increase beyond 60%. If Milgram was right, then introducing a wall into the standard procedure would bring him even closer to goal achievement. Milgram's suspicions proved correct: During the next pilots, a wall was introduced and in the fnal trial run termed the Truly Remote Pilot, "virtually all" participants inficted every shock asked of them. This trial saw Milgram achieve his preconceived goal and signaled that he was fnally ready to run his frst offcial baseline—an experiment he was confdent would obtain a surprisingly high completion rate.

Thus, with time the "rules and regulations" surrounding Milgram's gradually improving procedure became the most effcient and predictable "one best way" for the experimenter (an actor) to control participants into doing what he (Milgram) wanted: to (ostensibly) infict harm on an innocent person. And it was *past history*—Milgram's intuitive feel, past experiences, and close observations of the pilot studies—that had, through a process of trial-and-error discovery, gradually led him to a procedure that could push and pull nearly all into doing what he wanted. If he wanted to achieve his preconceived goal during the frst offcial baseline condition, all Milgram's helpers—research assistants, actors, *and* participants—just needed to follow his latest and most effective "rules and regulations."1 This, I would argue, was the rationally driven and somewhat circuitous learning process that guided Milgram toward the invention of his "one best way" to preconceived goal achievement.

The key to the success of the Obedience research was that, as best illustrated by the Truly Remote Pilot, every specialist task across the study's organizational chain—from the National Science Foundation funders, the participant "processing" team, to the shock-inficting participants—felt or appeared suffciently banal and thus adequately devoid of personal responsibility for any harm inficted. It was critical that every functionary involved came to suspect that, because of the division of labor inherent within any bureaucratic process, all could blame someone else for their morally dubious yet personally (fnancially, materially, and/ or socially) benefcial contributions to a harmful process. All needed to suspect that they could contribute to the infiction of intense stress or, in the case of the participants, physical harm with probable impunity. None could feel and appear to be most responsible. Such conditions made it much easier for Milgram (and the experimenter) to persuade, tempt, and (if needed) coerce all helpers into fulflling their specialist role.

In summary, Milgram's biggest leaps toward goal achievement came after he substituted a Nazi-like pledge to obey with the socially more acceptable pursuit of "scientifc" discovery and a direct physical assault with the non-human technology of the "shock" machine, introduced the non-human technology of a wall, and (inadvertently) constructed the non-human participant-processing technology of bureaucracy. These innovations, in particular, ensured that by the time Milgram ran his frst offcial baseline condition, most ordinary people at the end of his participantprocessing assembly line willingly inficted "harm" on an innocent person. During the invention of the baseline experiment, it is therefore fair to conclude, frstly, that Milgram behaved less like a social scientist and more like a goal-orientated project manager trying to socially engineer a preconceived result. Secondly, Weberian formally rational techniques of discovery, organization, and non-human technologies played a central role in the invention and production of the Obedience study's surprising results.

In Volume 2 of this book, I illustrated how certain innovators within the Nazi regime relied on the same Milgram-like formally rational techniques of discovery and non-human organizational technologies to achieve their preconceived goals. This shared reliance on Weberian formal rationality, I argue, forms the most important Milgram-Holocaust linkage—it played *the* key role in transforming so many ordinary and only moderately antisemitic Germans into willing infictors of harm.

Inspired by the extermination of Indigenous North Americans and Armenians, Hitler rationally drew on past experience and an intuitive feel to envision initially rudimentary strategies of eliminating German and later European Jews—a group whom he despised. Throughout the 1930s, however, there was neither a strategy, nor the organizational infrastructure or technology—*no procedure*—to render the German state capable of exterminating such massive numbers of mostly women and children. Despite the Nazis' unrelenting and intensifying propaganda campaign, which morally inverted the removal of all Jews from the Reich into a social good, Hitler's personal preference remained unachievable. As a result, the Führer moved on to other apparently more realistic solutions to his most urgent problem—the Jews were to be shipped to Madagascar.

It could be argued that Hitler's desire, in conjunction with ordinary Germans' increasing capability to kill fairly large numbers of civilians after September 1939, stimulated a rational search for a technically feasible method of extermination. And, as apparently more realistic solutions like deportation were rendered unrealistic, powerful, and ambitious, project managers like Himmler and Heydrich started to sense merit in the once unrealistic solution of extermination—particularly mass shooting. The invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 offered a unique opportunity to pilot test various shooting techniques that at least aimed to work toward the so-called Führer's wish. Despite some "promising" discoveries and "auspicious" results by innovators like Jäger and especially Jeckeln that interactively (from both top-down and bottom-up forces within the execution hierarchy) emerged with increasing time and observational experience, major limitations remained with frearms as a means of mass extermination. Not least of which was that ordinary German executioners were forced to witness an undeniable connection between their causal contributions and the lethal effects. That is, guns made those most directly involved feel and appear too responsible for their actions. Little or no responsibility ambiguity remained at the last link in the organizational chain (just as Milgram would later discover). The resulting responsibility clarity often stimulated intense feelings of guilt and, most commonly, repugnance. Thus, Himmler (like Milgram) concluded that another way had to be found.

As this realization settled in, innovators across the organizational machinery of destruction independently pursued other exploratory pilot studies, trialing the viability of potentially more compartmentalized yet effcient killing techniques that could be attached to the last link in Eichmann's people-moving organizational process. The most "successful" of these killing experiments involved different logistical and technical means of gassing civilians. Over time, and building on previous experience (particularly the T4 Euthanasia project), certain front line innovators made increasingly destructive discoveries—Lange's gas vans at Chełmno, Wirth during Operation Reinhard, and fnally Höss and his men at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Indeed, when Höss's advanced, highly effcient, relatively impersonal and apparently more "humane," gassing and body-incineration technique was attached as the last link in Eichmann's people-moving chain, ambiguity over responsibility for the end result increased, rendering frontline German perpetrators largely unaffected by their contributions (especially considering Jewish prisoners disposed of the victims' bodies). Consequently, the violent capabilities of German executioners in places like Auschwitz increased enormously. Unlike the shooting squads who sometimes balked over killing certain types of victims, Höss's men showed an uncanny ability to kill without complaint truly massive numbers of civilians: Gypsies, Reich Jews, the elderly, mentally ill, women, children, even babies.

Throughout, this journey of discovery achieved sustained increases across all four of Ritzer's components of a formally rational system. This pattern was particularly evident as less predictable human labor was substituted for more controlling, predictable, calculable, and effcient non-human technologies. I therefore argue that the Nazi regime gradually evolved an ever-improving formally rational genocidal infrastructure, which, lying behind the executioners' individual actions, greatly contributed to the destructive end result. With time, the Nazis discovered that (much like with the Truly Remote Pilot) the less the touching, seeing, and hearing associated with harm infiction, the greater the "banality of evil" at the last, *and thus every*, point along the genocidal chain. And the more "banal" the process felt and appeared to all those involved, the more ambiguous the issue of responsibility and, as a result, the easier it became for authority fgures (even peers) to persuade, tempt, and coerce ordinary and *only* moderately antisemitic Germans into killing. At each link across the organizational chain, every functionary helper had to be able to blame someone or something else as more responsible for their harmful contributions to the process—thus, the theory of responsibility ambiguity.2 It is here that I believe we fnd the answer to Bauer's "real question" of how so many only moderately antisemitic Germans were quickly converted into willing executioners. Moreover, it is here that we come to recognize what Milgram actually uncovered in his laboratory not people "just following orders" but the deployment of an inherently problem-solving, malevolent organizational process that—from the topdown *and* bottom-up—socially engineered the leadership's preferred preconceived goal into a terrifying reality.

Theories proclaiming, as I just have, a strong Milgram-Holocaust linkage have, however, been vigorously critiqued in the more contemporary literature, largely because the Obedience studies have been shown to confict in many ways with the Holocaust's fner historical details. Indeed, the current consensus in the Obedience studies literature is that Milgram's research provides few, if any, insights into how during the Holocaust the undoable became doable. Consequently, all attempts to advance linkages between the Obedience studies and the Holocaust—including Milgram's own—have encountered stern criticism. Lutsky perhaps best summarizes these authors' criticisms when they dismiss all previous attempts to link the perpetration of the Holocaust with Milgram's experiments: "What an emphasis on obedience slights, however, are *voluntary individual and group contributions to Nazi ideology, policy, bureaucracy, technology, and ultimately, inhumanity*" [italics added].3 As I've shown, however, the Obedience studies were not about obedience *per se*, which (despite Milgram's beliefs) constituted more of an excuse that helped participants displace elsewhere responsibility for their actions. Instead, as the last three chapters of Volume 1 illustrate, the "Obedience" studies actually revealed the impact of voluntary individual and group contributions to an (albeit scientifc) ideology, goal-orientated organizational policy (maximizing the completion rate), coercive bureaucracy, and strain resolving technology. And in Milgram's laboratory, I argue that all these factors contributed enormously to the generation of inhumane behavior. So in confict with the present consensus even among Milgram's strongest advocates that the Obedience studies have at best only minor explanatory power when applied to the Holocaust, I suggest this primary similarity (formal rationality) advances a strong Milgram-Holocaust linkage along new lines.

To be clear, I do not mean to suggest that Milgram accurately simulated the Holocaust in the laboratory setting. To ensure his baseline procedure was both workable and capable of achieving a high completion rate, Milgram frequently added his own (non-Holocaust-related) strain resolving and binding techniques (e.g., his substituting the "pledge to obey" with the infiction of harm in the name of science). Major differences like this, however, mean that my list of commonalities between the Obedience studies and the Holocaust itself could be invalidated by an equal and perhaps even longer list of differences in historical facts. Milgram himself faced such criticism. Despite advancing numerous and initially convincing linkages, his critics were quick to remind him that *unlike* his experiments, German perpetrators were exposed to an intense propaganda campaign, despised their victims, acted with enthusiasm, volunteered to harm their victims, engaged in excesses, and afterward rarely expressed remorse. In short, my critics could also argue that much like Milgram, I too have fallen prey to the Conformation Bias: The tendency to only present evidence that confrms my preconceived beliefs (my above Milgram-Holocaust linkages), followed by a failure to mention any conficting facts.

There is, in fact, one historical difference between Milgram's participants and the Nazi executioners that, perhaps more than any other, conficts sharply with my Milgram-Holocaust linkage. That is, most Germans who refused to, for example, shoot Jews did so because of sheer physical revulsion.4 Nearly all of Milgram's participants, on the other hand, refused to harm their victim on *ethical* grounds: "I don't think it's right."5 Thus, before Milgram's participants and Hitler's executioners decided whether or not to harm another person, *there was a moral dimension inherent in the former's dilemma that was absent from the latter's*. 6 Put simply, Milgram's participants and Hitler's ordinary Germans were faced with resolving a completely different type of dilemma, thus generating at the base of their respective decision-making process a foundational difference in kind and not degree. Because of this substantive difference, it could be argued that the Holocaust and the Obedience studies are incomparable events, therefore invalidating all attempts to advance any Milgram-Holocaust linkage. As logically compelling as this argument might sound, I disagree.

Instead, I suspect the Obedience studies and the Holocaust share a *certain* commonality that is so important that it is capable of negating the technical historical differences that separate them. That is, both Milgram and the most "successful" Nazi innovators applied formally rational techniques of discovery, bureaucratic organization, and other non-human technologies to overcome any obstacles that got in the way of goal achievement. For example, during Operation Barbarossa, Himmler's goal was for his men to shoot every Jewish person they encountered. Initially, however, many Germans struggled and even refused to shoot all Jews because they found it revolting. Consequently, certain Nazi innovators used rational techniques of discovery, organizational processes, and other non-human technologies in an attempt to scale this obstacle interfering with goal achievement. Milgram, on the other hand, had a conceptually similar although technically different goal: to ensure that most participants inficted excruciating "shocks" on an innocent person, thus maximizing his baseline experiment's completion rate. However, during the pilot studies, many of Milgram's participants refused to shock the learner because they thought it was unethical to do so. As shown, Milgram used rational techniques of discovery, organizational processes, and other non-human technologies to scale this obstacle interfering with goal achievement. Therefore, it may not matter that different obstacles were encountered—or even different paths pursued—during their quest to arrive at similar (although technically different) destinations. What is most important is that both Milgram and the most "successful" Nazi innovators used the same formally rational tools—techniques of discovery, organizational processes, and other non-human technologies—to fnd a way—*any way*—of arriving at goal achievement.7 And with more time and greater experience, the most innovative among them found increasingly more effcient, predictable, calculable, and controlling solutions. Thus, again, the single most important Milgram-Holocaust linkage of all is Weberian formal rationality.

Because basically all people in contemporary society rely on formally rational problem-solving techniques for personal goal achievement, could it not be argued that the generalization of my above conclusion is rather useless because it could be shaped to explain just about any malevolent social outcome? While we all may rely on formal rationality, it is important to note that only the most powerful people in society are able to use it as a tool to achieve macrocosmic goals that can, on a grand scale, adversely affect the lives of many other beings. Only the powerful have the wherewithal to procure the services of an army of problem-solving specialist helpers, to build enormous bureaucratic organizations, and to source and then insert other effcacious non-human technologies. In fact, it could be argued that the powerful are so because, more than others, they have the resources to deploy the most effective formally rational tools with which to try to secure their large-scale personal goals. Milgram (as a fully funded professor at Yale University) and the Nazi leadership are examples of such powerful people. Well-resourced government and corporate leaders, along with particularly persuasive individuals, are other examples. Armed with preconceived goals, these societal leaders are more capable of securing the help and expertize of a second group, less powerful functionaries, who fll specialist organizational posts across an emerging division of labor. This second group has (with varying degrees) some power because they too have a choice, albeit a more modest one, to either agree or refuse to help the powerful achieve their preconceived goals. It is a modest choice because, as we have seen, the powerful often have top-down means of motivating—pushing and pulling—helpers into doing what they want. Examples of this second group include Milgram's research assistants, his actors and, had the experiment been real, the participants (all of whom had the choice to refuse or agree to perform their specialist roles in the wider organizational process). During the Holocaust, this second group included all of those Germans below the Nazi leadership—those working within the perpetrator infrastructure, along with the consenting or indifferent German public. Other examples include functionary bureaucrats working in government or corporate posts. And the way the powerful use specialist helpers within a problem-solving bureaucratic organization can indirectly or directly cost a third group, the powerless, dearly, as happened both in the Obedience studies and in the Holocaust. The powerless are those whom the choices of the powerful leave, for the most part, without any choice at all. Examples include, again had the Obedience studies been real, the learner, the Jews, and other civilian victims of Nazi hegemony.

So, it could be argued that in the case of both the Holocaust and the Obedience studies the powerful used the expertize of functionary helpers, access to bureaucratic organization, and other non-human technologies to advance their own self-interests and did so at the expense of the powerless. Thus, if we assume that during the Obedience studies the learner was genuinely harmed, what Milgram captured in the laboratory setting was the application of goal-directed formal rationality by the powerful as a means of devising an unequal social structure from which, at enormous cost to the powerless, the powerful ultimately benefted. And because the powerless can do little to resist predation, the Obedience studies captured in the laboratory the use and abuse of formal rationality as a self-serving and unethical tool of power, oppression, and inequality. And when viewed through this lens, what the Obedience studies actually captured on a relatively small scale, as other scholars of Milgram's research have long suggested, can be generalized to the Holocaust, as well as to multiple other examples of organizational malevolence so common in modern society.

Consider the following examples wherein to achieve their own personal "Rational Goal/s" and extend their power, fnancial/business, political, and/or social leaders (the "Powerful") have applied the tool of formal rationality—bureaucracy—to achieve their personally benefcial goals, which, in some shape or form, directly or indirectly generated an "Externality" paid for by the "Powerless" (Table 9.1).

Much like in the Obedience studies, powerful people constructed/ maintained the above organizations by offering functionary helpers some kind of personal beneft in exchange for their participation (typically in the form of fnancial reimbursement, non-fnancial benefts, prestige, or job security). Because it is in their interests to do so, most functionaries


**Table 9.1** Some destructive organizational processes in modern society

naturally accept the offer. When, as in all the above examples, a full contingent of specialists agree to fulfll their roles, their collective actions immediately or eventually end up directly or indirectly costing a particular powerless group dearly. The division of labor, along with other avoidance-enabling non-human technologies, allows the powerful and their specialist helpers to avoid directly experiencing (or be affected by) the potentially disturbing perceptual consequences that their contributions end up having on the powerless.

Beyond the division of labor, an important non-human technology relied upon by many of the powerful and their functionary helpers in the above examples was geographical distance (the harm occurred far away in the sweatshop factory, on the mysterious kill foor, somewhere in the Middle East or Soviet hinterland). For powerful people and their specialist functionaries, however, this kind of structural compartmentalization detracts from their level of awareness. And this lack of awareness, coupled by the involvement of many functionary contributors, can, as mentioned, stimulate "responsibility ambiguity": general confusion over who is totally, mostly, partially, or not at all responsible for a harmful end result. The presence of responsibility ambiguity across a totally compartmentalized organizational chain (much like the Truly Remote Pilot) can, as mentioned in Volume 1, encourage the emergence of two types of functionaries. The frst type of functionary can make their eventually harmful contributions to the wider process because they are genuinely unaware of and do not realize the consequences of their actions (e.g., the technician who built Milgram's shock machine, but presumably never saw what Milgram did with it). Compartmentalization and responsibility ambiguity throughout an organizational chain can, however, also encourage the emergence of a second type of functionary. Quite differently, this second type of functionary comes to sense opportunity amid the confusion: Despite secretly knowing (in concept) about the negative effects their contributions will have on the powerless, they nonetheless sense that they can continue contributing to, and personally benefting from, the infiction of harm on the powerless safe in the knowledge that they can probably do so with impunity (e.g., Milgram who publicly claimed he believed his experiments were harmless, but just in case they weren't, he earlier also attempted to protect himself by ensuring all participants signed a legal waiver). This second type of functionary can probably act with impunity because should, in the unlikely case, they ever be held to account for making their contributions, they know that thanks to compartmentalization, they can (disingenuously) claim to have been the frst type of functionary: They were (apparently) unaware of the harmful consequences of their actions. And if that doesn't work, they can simply blame someone else as more responsible than themselves or diffuse (dilute) personal responsibility across all the other contributors. This organizational loophole exists because the presence of other contributors and various avoidance-promoting non-human technologies makes denying responsibility easy and localizing it diffcult. Thus, bureaucratic organization provides a fertile environment for a metaphorical haze or fog to rather conveniently descend over the issue of awareness and responsibility. So, even when the powerful and their functionary helpers know (in concept) that their collective contributions to goal achievement will end up directly or indirectly costing some powerless group dearly, because they appear or feel suffciently "covered," many are willing to prioritize their relatively trivial desires (salaries, enormous profits, employee benefts, promotions, medals, prestige, and other perks), over the more important needs of the powerless (avoiding death, illness, and misery).8

In fact, the wider organizational structures surrounding helpers actually discourage them from doing otherwise because the system is geared toward ensuring that engaging in wrongdoing is easy and convenient, and resisting unethical goal achievement is both diffcult and personally burdensome (as whistle-blowers and resisters—a third type of bureaucrat—in some of the above examples know only too well). Thus, formal rationality, as Milgram inadvertently illustrated on a relatively microcosmic scale, can be a very effective tool for the powerful and their functionary helpers to pursue a personally benefcial yet iniquitous organizational goal. And within that organizational system, it is the inherent murkiness surrounding the issue of awareness and responsibility that enables all involved to abuse their greater power with probable impunity.

The "powerful" and their helpers in the above examples would likely dispute my associating their behavior with that of Milgram and his helpers during the Obedience studies, and especially with what I hope contributes to a better understanding of the Holocaust. Their intentions, they would no doubt argue, were to variously protect their electorates from murderous criminals, generate jobs in a poor Indian city, bring freedom to Iraqis living under tyranny, promote international trade with an ally, generate jobs in a poor Bangladeshi city, produce affordable cars for struggling Americans, supply affordable food to all Americans, and distribute grain fairly throughout a union. However, two points should be kept in mind. First, it is the powerful who control the initial framing of their rational goals—the powerful control the script and have an infuential say in socially constructing their formally rational goal/s as a moral "good." Consequently, they have the power to present goal achievement to their functionary helpers (and potential critics) in the form of a noble task (as Milgram did). And in a "yes-man" functionary environment, where all helpers are likely to personally beneft in some way, who is going to challenge the boss's account? Although the powerful may genuinely believe their goals to be noble, it is rare that they do not have vested interests in their own success. Milgram, for example, likely believed in all earnestness that his experiments would provide new insights into how the Nazis perpetrated the Holocaust. But at the same time, he also seems to have sensed that whether or not his experiments achieved this outcome, he would beneft fnancially and professionally from his conversion of innocent people into stuttering wrecks. And because Milgram was in a relatively stronger position of power, he also knew there was probably nothing his "subjects" could do about it—recalling the unemployed Fred Prozi's undisguised starring role in Milgram's documentary, despite Prozi's reservations about his face being shown, as he said, "nationwide or something…"9 Milgram assured him the video recording would only be shown to psychologists. What Milgram failed to anticipate was that after publishing his frst baseline experiment, someone with equal or even greater power might come after him. Indeed, a year after this publication, Berkeley University's Diana Baumrind attacked Milgram with her searing ethical critique and the then untenured Milgram thereafter failed, in another broken promise, to publish the results of his incomparably unethical Relationship condition. Ironically, Milgram's Asch Conformity experiment-like actions to "conceal" this "purely private" "secret" arguably revealed the order of his priorities: His academic career came before the dissemination of scientifc knowledge—results that might reveal insights into the Holocaust. The powerful may espouse grand and what they believe to be moral intentions (much as Hitler did in his quest to bring Germany to greatness), but would an independent audience (with no vested interest in goal achievement) come to the same conclusion? And if the goal is indeed so grand and noble, would the powerful continue perceiving that goal as a moral good if they suddenly found themselves in the position of the powerless?

Although the comparison is far from perfect in every case, each of the examples in the above table involves formally rational decision-making as a means of bringing about a predetermined end, in which functionary helpers used techniques of discovery, bureaucratic organization, and other non-human technologies to fnd the one best way of overcoming any obstacles impeding goal achievement. And thus, they all share key elements with the Obedience studies: a division of labor, responsibility ambiguity, displacement/diffusion of responsibility, bureaucratic momentum, moral disengagement, perceptual avoidance for all or most links in the organizational chain, self-interested benefts, and, because of the disparity in power inherent to their iniquitous systems, the option for all to contribute to goal achievement with probable impunity.

Making contributions to iniquitous systems rarely feels all that bad to those involved because engaging in wrongdoing becomes normative—everyone around them is doing it. And in such an environment, anybody with any power is unlikely to draw critical attention to the iniquity experienced by powerless groups, because they in some way are likely benefting from that inequity. All therefore have a vested interest in maintaining a consensual silence. Should anyone feel a pinch of guilt, they can remind themselves of the boss's morally inverted noble cause. And should any outsider mention the things that all would prefer, for personal comfort, remain unsaid—whistle-blowers, activists, investigative journalists, regulatory watchdogs—all functionaries can self-invent their own whitewashing and guilt-neutralizing coping mechanisms: "I'm just following orders, what can I do?" "I'm just trying to make ends meet," and in a brutal world sometimes "shit happens" (but mysteriously rarely to me).

It is for these reasons that I believe formal rationality provides the most compelling way to generalize Milgram's laboratory fndings to the outside world. Milgram himself sensed this connection, arguing that bureaucratic organization was perhaps "the most common characteristic of socially organized evil in modern society."10 It is even tempting to go a little further and argue that what the Obedience experiments captured on a relatively small scale is the cold, calculated, and ignominious abuse of power that has become common practice in our increasingly unequal neoliberal societies wherein, with the time and necessary experience to fnd the "one best way" to goal achievement, the powerful can implement ever more effcient, predictable, calculable, controlling ways to advance their own interests, while the poor (and now increasingly middle class) must suffer the consequences. This is a point worth pondering when one considers the popularity of neoliberalism among social elites—free international trade, increasing privatization, strong property rights, deregulation, fscal austerity, and the promise of so-called trickle-down wealth advancing the well-being of all peoples. All that seems to have objectively increased, however, is income inequality.11 No wonder after World War Two German war criminals ftted back so quickly and easily into contemporary society: This was exactly the kind of iniquitous political system the Nazi leadership took to unnatural extremes. It is almost tempting to argue the Nazis were quite simply ahead of their time. As Omer Bartov uncomfortably reminds us, "…Western representations of the Holocaust fail to recognize that this extreme instance of industrial killing was generated by a society, economic system, and civilization of which our contemporary society is a direct continuation."12

Formal rationality is so applicable to modern life that it extends to what are probably the two greatest threats to life on earth today: nuclear holocaust and climate catastrophe.13 In terms of the frst, just before the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, Raul Hilberg ominously alluded to the new world powers' formally rational pursuit of what is a far more effcient, predictable, calculable, and controlling method of genocide than Auschwitz's gassing system:

The bureaucrat of tomorrow… is better equipped than the German Nazis were. Killing is not as diffcult as it used to be. The modern administrative apparatus has facilities for rapid, concerted movements and for effcient massive killings. These devices not only trap a larger number of victims; they also require a greater degree of specialization, and with that division of labor the moral burden too is fragmented among the participants. The perpetrator can now kill his victims without touching them, without hearing them, without seeing them.14

It is certain that at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, neither the American nor the Soviet leadership would have had any diffculty in fnding bureaucratic compliance with commands to push the buttons that would have killed tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of civilians.15

The moral dilemma at the end of the Obedience studies' organizational chain may not sit perfectly with the Holocaust. But it may ft better with what is arguably the second other greatest threat to life on earth: climate catastrophe.16 In our "golden age of low-cost energy,"17 greenhouse gas emissions are the consequence of worldwide economic and population growth. But for some time now the scientifc community has warned increasing carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane emissions, and the higher global temperatures they cause, will precipitate a worldwide environmental catastrophe. Independent audiences (those without any vested interests) presented with this moral dilemma would very likely conclude that choosing to increase instead of signifcantly decreasing greenhouse gas emissions would be the morally wrong course of action. So is it possible that, given worldwide greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase despite much talk of "planned reductions," humankind has started to fall into an insidiously regressive and seemingly inescapable Milgram-like trap? Certainly, it seems that almost no one among the most powerful—Security Council politicians, Fortune 500 CEOs, rank-and-fle (functionary) corporate/government employees, the middle and working classes, developed world consumers, investors, and voters—are prepared to address the issue seriously. Collectively, we refuse to sincerely confront an issue likely to bring about "civilization collapse" because of what are perceived to be far more pressing, immediate, interests—the promise of a higher standard of living, greater economic growth, more jobs, and the prioritization of convenience over sustainability. As Jarod Diamond convincingly argues, the risk of societal collapse increases when "there's a confict of interest between the shortterm interests of the decision-making elites and the long-term interests of the society as a whole, especially if the elites are able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions. Where what's good in the short term for the elite is bad for the society as a whole, there's a real risk of the elite doing things that will bring society down."18 As we climb the metaphorical carbon parts per million (ppm) "shock board"—320 ppm in 1965; 330 ppm in 1975; 345 ppm in 1985; 360 ppm in 1995; 380 ppm in 2005; 400 ppm in 201519—is it possible we have already entered the Obedience study's dreaded post-capitulation phase where no one breaks off? Do we refuse to reduce our carbon footprint because secretly we all know that across the oil economy's division of labor there is always someone else to blame for our personally benefcial yet eventually destructive contributions to the wider process? Those ultimately responsible for climate catastrophe can disappear because developed world consumers can blame weak government, government can blame intransigent voters, corporations can blame insatiable consumer demand, and developed world citizens can blame greedy corporations. And do we also continue to do nothing (except assiduously contribute to and beneft from climate catastrophe) because privately we all know that by the time life on earth starts getting really nasty—say by 2100 when southern Spain has turned into a desert—we'll all be dead.20 That is, is the cause of our inaction that we all secretly know we are unlikely to become victims—this is only going to be a real problem for our descendants thus freeing us to act with impunity? Climate catastrophe—along with the national debt, oceans of plastic, polluted "fracked" groundwater—is what our children will inherit from us.

When I think about climate catastrophe, I cannot help sense a connection between developed world peoples and Germans who lived in, and benefted from, the Nazi regime. This is, for me, inadvertently best captured by Götz Aly. At the start of his fascinating book *Hitler's Benefciaries: Plunder, racial war and the Nazi welfare state*, he points out that what he discovered:

belies the optimistic conviction that we today would have behaved much better than the average person did back then. Readers of these pages will encounter not Nazi monsters but rather people who are not as different from us as we might like them to be. The culprits here are people striving for prosperity and material security for themselves and their children. They are people dreaming of owning a house with a garden, of buying a car of their own, or of taking a vacation. And they are people not tremendously interested in the potential costs of their short-term welfare to their neighbors or to future generations.21

Clearly, we, as links in this chain of destruction, are *all* responsible for our harmful contributions, and thus every one of us must shoulder the obligation to do our fair bit to substantively reduce our carbon footprints. This is true, but one important caveat remains. When it comes to climate catastrophe, it is the most powerful people—like the "carbon capital elite"22—and the organizational infrastructures they control that have the greatest chance of encouraging—instead of furtively blocking—progressive change. For example, although across the late 1970s to the mid-1980s Exxon scientists, managers, and executives developed a "sophisticated understanding of the potential effects of rising CO2 concentrations,"23 for some years after this awareness—particularly under the leadership of Lee Raymond and Rex Tillerson—one of the world's largest oil companies,

…ExxonMobil has embarked on a deliberate campaign of confusion and disinformation producing a counter-science to manufacture public uncertainty by funding a diffuse network of ideologically driven advocacy organizations, as well as other issues management, public relations, lobbying, and legal tactics.24

Yet in light of this "broadly successful"25 attempt to manipulate and control the social and informational feld in favor of the oil industry's self-interested desires, Tillerson, who strongly supports extracting the Arctic's now (thanks to climate catastrophe) increasingly accessible vast oil reserves,26 then has the nerve to blame climate catastrophe on international consumers and their demand for more oil: "It's back to that insatiable appetite that the world has for energy. Oil demand is going to continue to grow."27 So Tillerson has actively attempted to manipulate public opinion to the point it aligns with his own self-interested desires, but then blames climate catastrophe on the choices of those people he has effectively manipulated. This is somewhat like Milgram who invented a manipulative experiment that he could only envision personally benefting from, going on to accuse those who completed it of being "moral imbeciles…"28 Again, we are all personally responsible for our harmful actions, but the leadership with the greatest ability to control the wider infrastructure has an even greater responsibility to promote progressive and ethical change. As this book's journey into both the Obedience studies and the Holocaust illustrates, the fsh rots from the head down.

In conclusion, when I watch Milgram's 45-minute documentary flm with my students, I do not see "obedience to authority," and I'd go so far as to call anyone who does a fool. Looking beyond his laboratory walls, I instead see climate catastrophe, nuclear war, and untold other examples of organizational malevolence so common in modern society. It is interesting to note that although Milgram was never confdent about what he'd captured in his laboratory, he was certain that whatever it was, it did not bode well for the longevity of humankind. With a variety of disasters looming, it is not diffcult to sense Milgram's concern over the strong propensity for powerful people and their functionary helpers to prioritize relatively trivial personal interests over the need to act in response to more urgent moral demands. His words of warning may prove to be prophetic:

The behavior revealed in the experiments reported here is normal human behavior but revealed under conditions that show with particular clarity the danger to human survival inherent in our makeup… This is a fatal faw nature has designed into us, and which in the long run gives our species only a modest chance of survival.29

# Notes


handle these obsessions, I apparently still have lost completely the control over my nerves and am no longer able to manage my willpower. I can't suppress my tears." So Mundschütz had lost control of his willpower (that was obviously in favor of participating in the executions) and was apologizing to his superior for failing to have "performed as a man." Because of his nervous breakdown, Mundschütz was simply reassigned to other ancillary (non-shooting) duties. However, Mundschütz remained unsatisfed by this reassignment and requested a transfer out of Einsatzgruppe D completely. As he explained: "Now I am supposed to drive around shopping. I am asking you to save me from this charge, because I don't want to bother my comrades nor other people with the unhappy performance of a crying soldier. … If you, sir, have a heart and understanding for one of your subordinates, who wishes nothing more than to sacrifce himself for Germany but does not want to stage the drama of a supposed wimp, please do remove me from here" (quoted in Kühne 2010, p. 86). As Kühne notes, those Germans who pulled out of the shootings like Mundschütz "did not question the morality of the community, but instead interpreted their own psychological constitution as abnormal" (2010, p. 87)—he was a weakling.


# References


**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Bibliography: Volume 2

Abse, D. (1973). *The dogs of Pavlov*. London: Vallentine, Mitchell.


© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 301 N. Russell, *Understanding Willing Participants, Volume 2*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97999-1


*and control: Conference proceedings* (pp. 197–204). Canberra, ACT: Australian Institute of Criminology.


*Bureaucracy, business, and the organization of the Holocaust* (pp. 236–256). New York: Berghahn Books.


# Index

**0-9** 14f13. *See* Operation 14f13

#### **A**

Abse, Dannie, 17, 19 Adam, Uwe, 91, 93, 121, 122, 196, 203, 204, 207, 210–213, 235, 237 After-capitulation phase, 225 Aktion Höss, 136, 169, 227, 253 Alcohol, 131, 152, 155 Allen, Michael, 153, 161 Allied blockade, 83 Allies, 27, 33, 34, 118, 227 Alvarez, Alex, 16, 19 Aly, Götz, 26, 193, 294 *Hitler's Benefciaries:Plunder, racial war and the Nazi welfare state*, 294 Anderson, Tony, 1 Angrick, Andrej, 89, 141, 155, 157–161, 178, 206, 212, 265 Antisemitism, 26, 95, 262, 263 mild, 23, 151

moderate, 1, 2, 16, 17, 70, 78, 88, 95, 101, 137, 262–264, 277, 280, 282 Arad, Yitzhak, 92, 121, 122, 156, 161, 204, 207, 209–213, 269 Archbishop of Münster. *See* von Galen, August Arendt, Hannah, 54, 93, 106, 116, 119–121, 124, 263, 268, 269, 272 Armenian genocide, 42 Asch, Solomon, 290 Assembly line, 4, 14, 149, 151, 280 Attritionists, 72, 73, 180 Auschwitz I, 69, 80, 102, 112, 114, 115, 173, 220 II, 114 -Birkenau, 17, 114, 203, 219, 223, 224, 226–232, 251, 262, 281 Black Wall, 112 Block 11, 113–114 Bunker I, 221 Bunker II, 221, 227, 255 Crematorium I, 115, 181, 220

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 315 N. Russell, *Understanding Willing Participants, Volume 2*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97999-1

Crematorium II, 220, 222–224, 232, 245 Crematorium III, 222–224, 254 Crematorium IV, 222, 224 Crematorium V, 222, 224 Crematorium VI, 222 Austria, 38, 39, 66, 114, 184, 188, 296 Vienna, 143 Autobahn, 35, 180 Automation, 4 Avoidance, 7, 74, 78, 108, 129, 152, 155, 170, 233, 246, 249, 287, 289, 291 Axis, 144, 227, 254

#### **B**

Babi Yar, 139, 141, 142, 171, 201 Balm to the conscience, 243, 253 Banality of evil, 15, 268, 282 Bandura, Albert, 15, 153 Bangladesh, 287, 289 Barnard, Chester, 14, 19, 122 Bartov, Omer, 41, 56, 292, 297 Battle of Kursk, 224 Battle of Stalingrad, 224 Battle of the Somme, 41 Bauer, Yehuda, 18, 54, 90, 92, 95, 151, 263, 282 Baum, L. Frank, 60 Bauman, Zygmunt, 18, 130, 134, 154–156, 161, 233, 237, 259, 271 Baumeister, Roy, 49, 59, 155 Baumrind, Diana, 209, 290 Baur, Erwin, 25, 27, 53 Bayonet, 71, 247 Becker, August, 76, 77, 168–170, 204, 253 Belarus Minsk, 143

Mogilev, 115, 147, 173 Belgium, 67 Belzec, 191–195, 197, 198, 210, 212, 248, 255, 262 Best, Werner, 51 Beutel, Lothar, 51 Bhopal, 287 Biebow, Hans, 73, 172, 204 Bikernieki Forests, 181 Binding, Karl, 25, 87 Binding factors, 7, 8, 18 Birkenau. *See* Auschwitz Bischof, Max, 73 Bischoff, Karl, 114, 115, 123, 220, 222, 223 Black Wall. *See* Auschwitz Blitzkrieg, 65, 81, 228 Blobel, Paul, 105, 139, 140, 149, 169, 170, 188, 189, 194, 222 Block 11. *See* Auschwitz Bloxham, Donald, 55, 57, 94, 118, 120, 124, 157, 161, 211 Bock, Max, 71 Böll, Heinrich, 68, 225 Bolshevik, 78, 260 Bolshevism, 82, 84, 203 Bond of complicity, 106 Bothmann, Hans, 187–189 Bottleneck, 4, 194, 199, 221, 222, 231 Bouhler, Philipp, 76, 77, 79, 261 Brack, Viktor, 76, 190 Brandenburg-Havel prison, 77, 190 Brandt, Karl, 76, 174, 241 Breitman, Richard, 83, 87, 88, 104, 107, 137, 148, 152 Britain, 28, 67, 83 British Naval Blockade, 25 Navy, 83 Broad, Pery, 113, 228 Brohmer, Paul, 43

Browning, Christopher, 28, 36, 67, 72, 81, 87, 88, 103, 135, 145, 172, 202, 253 Bug, river, 147 Bühler, Josef, 182 Burdening of the soul, 105, 110, 116, 130, 131, 133, 147, 188, 234, 252, 262 Bureaucracy, 2, 3, 11, 12, 14, 16, 40, 74, 130, 154, 168, 202, 203, 221, 233, 250, 252, 257, 279, 280, 283–286, 289–292 momentum, 14, 221, 291 process, 2, 12, 16, 141, 142, 154, 279 Bureaucrats, 2, 40, 42, 88, 152, 182, 286 Burmeister, Walter, 174, 185

#### **C**

Cahana, Alice Lok, 229, 230 Caladium seguinum, 260 Calculability, 3, 4, 15, 199, 202, 219, 228, 231, 233 Canadian government, 287 Carbon capital elite, 294 Carbon footprint, 293, 294 Carbon monoxide, 76, 77, 80, 110, 115, 169, 177, 191, 253–255 Catholic, 31 Center Party, 31 Church, 184 Cattle, 287 Caucasus oil felds, 83 Cesarani, David, 55–58, 60, 89–93, 119, 120, 156–159, 179, 181, 204, 206, 209, 211, 234, 265, 268 Chamberlain, Stewart, 24 *Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care, The*, 78

Chełmno, 172, 174–177, 181, 183, 184, 186–190, 193, 194, 198, 250, 281 Chicago stockyards, 160 Christian, 23, 28, 51, 66, 78 Poles, 66 Clark, Alan, 137 Clauberg, Carl, 260 Climate catastrophe, 292–295 Commissar Order, 87, 103 Communists, 28, 31, 32, 39, 51, 81 Concentration camp, 32, 39, 79, 80, 111, 112, 167, 180, 182, 183, 219, 246, 247, 249, 260, 261 Conformation Bias, 283 Control, 3–7, 9, 14, 32, 34, 40, 41, 43, 66, 72–74, 81, 86, 104, 138, 139, 143, 148, 150, 199, 202, 219, 225, 228, 233, 246, 249, 279, 289, 294, 295 Controlled escalation, 87, 104 Crematorium I. *See* Auschwitz Cuban missile crisis, 292 Czechoslovakia, 41, 188, 205 Czerniaków, Adam, 73, 74

# **D**

Dachau, 246, 267 Daluege, Kurt, 88, 148 Darwin, Charles, 24 *On the Origin of Species*, 24 *Das Schwarze Korps*, 82, 92 Davenport, Charles, 24 Dawidowicz, Lucy, 204, 207, 210, 270 Death-dealer of Kovno, 102, 262, 263 Death's Head Units, 51, 75, 85 De-bureaucratization, 142, 161 Deception, 183, 198–200, 202, 229, 233, 241–244, 248, 254 Degesch, 255

Dejaco, Walter, 223 DeJarnette, Joseph, 26 Denmark, 24, 67 *Der ewige Jude*, 47 *Der Stürmer*, 38, 47, 57 *Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life, The*, 25 Dibelius, Otto, 59 Dirlewanger, Oskar, 84, 270 Disinfecting operators, 230 Displacement of responsibility, 74, 291 Division of labor, 12, 13, 74, 109, 141, 150, 153, 262, 279, 285, 287, 288, 291–293 Dnieper river, 147 Dow Chemical Company, 287 Dubois, Werner Karl, 251 Dwork, Deborah, 53, 54, 89, 92, 122, 123, 204, 206, 211, 228, 234–237

#### **E**

Earl, Hilary, 87 Eastern Europe, 28, 49, 85, 117, 148, 149, 151, 152, 172, 193, 230, 232, 261, 263 Ebel, Irmfried, 77 Eberhard, Kurt, 139 Effciency, 3, 4, 24, 39, 130, 137, 171, 189, 193, 195, 197, 200, 202, 203, 212, 219, 227, 228, 232–234, 245, 256, 263 Egger, Sandra, 71, 89 Eichmann, Adolf, 5, 17, 39, 40, 42, 66, 80, 109, 138, 143–145, 160, 172, 179–181, 207, 221, 227, 228, 235, 249–252, 268, 281 Einsatzgruppe A, 83, 102, 104, 116, 133, 134, 145, 149, 169 B, 83, 104, 105, 108, 169

C, 83, 132, 139, 140, 143, 169, 170 D, 117, 132, 169 Einsatzgruppen, 51, 65, 83, 86, 87, 93–95, 102–105, 117, 144, 155, 168, 170–172, 174, 183, 204, 205, 269 Einsatzkommando 3, 104, 105, 116, 117, 133, 141, 145, 148 5, 133 8, 110 9, 123, 131 Tilsit, 102, 105, 121, 130–132 Elias, Lindzin, 156 Elias, Norbert, 258, 264, 273 Elms, Alan, 9 Emmerich, Walter, 73 Enabling Act, 32 End special units, 150–152 England, 51 Enlightenment, 23, 38 Eugenics negative, 24–28, 43 positive, 24, 26, 28 Euphoria of victory, 138, 143, 224 Euthanasia program, 75, 76, 110, 112, 167–169, 172, 190, 207 Évian Conference, 38 Experimenter, 1, 6–8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 19, 37, 58, 266, 279, 280, 297 Extermination through work, 180, 219, 231, 233, 259 Externality, 286, 287 Exxon, 294 ExxonMobil, 294

#### **F**

Factory farming, 287 Farmer's League, 57

Feldhendler, Leon, 194 Fictional consensus, 46, 58 Filbert, Alfred, 123, 131 Fischer, Eugen, 25, 27, 43, 53 Fix, Gustave, 116 Foot-in-the-door technique, 175 Ford, Henry, 3, 4, 14, 15 Ford Motor Company, 287 Formal rationality, 2, 3, 15, 16, 29, 140, 148, 154, 168, 202, 220, 228, 233, 234, 280, 283, 285, 286, 289, 291, 292 Fort VII, 76, 77, 175 *Foundations of the 19thCentury, The*, 24 Four Year Plan, 35 France, 24, 28, 38, 67, 68, 158, 226 Frank, Hans, 66, 67, 179, 182, 221 French, 65, 67, 229, 258 Friedrich, Carl, 37, 72 Friedlander, Henry, 53, 54, 57, 85, 91–94, 121, 122, 203, 210, 211 Friedländer, Saul, 32, 47, 53, 54, 56, 58, 59, 90, 91, 117, 119, 124, 156, 158, 159, 180, 206, 210, 234 Fritzsch, Karl, 113–115, 140, 167 Führer, 34–38, 41, 53, 67, 79, 82, 105, 107, 124, 134, 138, 148, 167, 178, 179, 234, 247, 261, 280 Chancellery, 147, 159, 190 Führer's wish, 42, 101, 115, 159, 161, 179, 255, 262, 281 Funk, Walther, 249, 267

#### **G**

Galton, Francis, 24 Gater, Rudolf, 80 General Government, 66, 67, 72, 143, 168, 179, 182, 190, 191, 193, 197, 201, 202, 211

Gentiles, 36 Gerlach, Christian, 119, 123, 147, 159, 160 German(s) Aryan, 30, 35, 36, 52, 138, 182 Baltic, 188 ethnic, 28, 66, 72, 78, 84 Foreign Institute, 92 Foreign Offce, 37 Jews, 17, 23, 28, 29, 33–35, 38, 39, 41, 45, 46, 48, 50, 51, 59, 66, 70, 72–74, 78, 80, 82–85, 87, 88, 90–92, 94, 101, 103, 104, 106, 110, 117, 133, 134, 138, 139, 142–148, 151, 153, 159, 169, 173, 174, 178–180, 182, 184, 188, 189, 197, 200, 203, 220, 221, 223, 226–228, 251, 256, 257, 259, 262–264, 270, 272, 277, 280, 282, 284, 286 nationalism, 27, 30 Postal Censor's Offce, 225 settlers, 41, 66, 188 stock exchange, 33, 39 Germany Berlin, 35, 72, 73, 75, 87, 110, 116, 137, 142, 143, 148, 151, 153, 188, 245, 249, 255 Bernburg, 78 Bonn, 189 Bremen, 226 Breslau, 143 Frankfurt, 143 Göttingen, 143 Hamburg, 138, 226 Munich, 27, 44, 143, 171 Prussia, 30, 58, 78 Saxony, 25 Gerstein, Kurt, 253, 255 Gestapo, 37, 76, 83, 181 Giese, Clemens, 257 Glazor, Richard, 200

Globocnik, Odilo, 111, 143, 189 Glover, Jonathan, 44, 53, 56, 57 Goebbels, Joseph, 38, 39, 45–47, 52, 144, 225 Goldhagen, Daniel, 55, 119, 156, 157, 176, 247, 265, 270 Göring, Hermann, 34, 35, 40, 51, 52, 73, 138, 143, 151, 179 Graebe, Hermann, 156 Grafeneck, 78 Grassler, Franz, 74 Grawitz, Ernst, 79, 259 Gray zone theory, 296 Great Britain, 24 Great Depression, 30 Gregory, Robert, 15, 18 Greiser, Arthur, 66, 172 Grodziec ghetto, 173 Gröning, Oskar, 47, 230, 248, 252, 272 Grossman, Dave, 71, 90, 134, 135, 156 Group pressure, 5, 264 Guderian, Heinz, 137 Günther, Rolf, 255 Gypsies Austrian Roma, 172, 177 German, 35, 110 Roma, 133, 154

#### **H**

Hackenholt Foundation, 197 Hadamar, 78 Haeckel, Ernst, 24 Häfele, Alois, 175, 176 Häfner, August, 104, 149 Hartheim, 78, 111, 114, 122, 190 Haupt, Thea, 193 Hayes, Peter, 228, 246, 258 Headland, Ronald, 89, 123, 133, 142, 156, 158, 269 Heess, Dr., 112

Heidegger, Martin, 34 Heidenreich, Richard, 123 Heimtückegesetz, 45 Hesse, Heinrich, 243 Heukelbach, Wilhelm, 185 Heydrich, Reinhard, 40, 42, 44, 51, 65, 66, 78–88, 101–104, 106, 112, 115, 117, 143, 144, 146, 152, 170, 176, 179–182, 256, 281 Hilberg, Raul, 18, 70, 81, 89, 93, 120, 121, 123, 131, 144, 152, 155–161, 171, 189, 204, 209, 212, 227, 228, 236, 237, 255, 260, 261, 269, 271, 272, 292, 297 Hildebert Boehm, Max, 43 Himmler, Heinrich, 34, 42, 241 Hingst, August, 194 Hitler, Adolf, 26, 28–43, 45, 46, 48–55, 67–70, 73, 75–77, 79, 81, 82, 85, 88, 94, 101, 103, 106, 109, 118, 137, 143, 144, 148, 153, 157, 159, 167, 176, 178, 179, 188, 223, 224, 227, 250, 251, 258, 259, 263, 265, 271, 272, 280, 284, 296 Hoche, Alfred, 25, 53 Höfer, 139 Hofmann, Otto, 182 Holland, 24, 28, 67, 226 Holocaust, 1, 5, 6, 17, 42, 102, 115, 137, 153, 154, 176, 191, 220, 233, 252, 257, 258, 263, 277, 278, 282–286, 289, 290, 292, 295 by Bullets, 17, 101, 116, 129, 142 studies, 1 Hoppe, Paul Werner, 242 Höppner, Rolf-Heinz, 80, 172, 241 Höss, Rudolf, 112, 113, 142, 241, 244, 258, 270

Humane killing instantaneous, 262 little perceptual stimulation, 119, 170 no anticipation of death, 262 Hungary, 137, 227, 229

#### **I**

Ideal type, 3 IG Farben, 69, 114 Incorporated Territory, 66, 67, 72 India, 29 Indians. *See* Indigenous North Americans Indigenous North Americans, 280 *Inglorious Basterds*, 59 Intentional ignorance, 246 Intuition, 80, 112, 219 Iraq, 289 Invasion of, 287 Italy, 28, 144, 255 Ivanovich Lutzenko, 139

#### **J**

Jacob, W., 186 Jäger, Karl, 104, 105, 116, 117, 141, 145, 181 Japan, 144 Jaschke, Wilhelm, 110 Jeckeln, Friedrich, 104, 136–143, 145–147, 150, 151, 153, 154, 159, 161, 173, 181, 194, 199, 201–203, 212, 259, 281 Jews/Jewish Austrian, 39, 66, 143 -Bolshevik intelligentsia, 81, 83 Bolshevism, 82, 84 civil servants, 34 Dutch, 226

Eastern, 74, 143, 146, 178, 188 German, 26, 28, 38, 41, 66, 94, 138, 143, 144, 159, 179, 184, 270 Hungarian, 227, 228 Latvian, 145, 148, 151 police, 45, 47, 85, 86, 103–105, 108, 137, 139, 140, 145, 148, 175, 178, 186, 201, 246 Polish, 38, 51, 66, 67, 70, 72, 73, 75, 84, 85, 172, 173, 184 question, 1, 17, 28, 33, 38, 42, 47, 69, 72, 83, 108, 115, 142–144, 178, 179, 181, 187, 228, 232, 271, 277 Reich, 27, 40, 47, 72, 138, 143– 145, 147, 161, 179, 181, 188, 190, 203, 280, 282 Sonderkommando, 83, 134, 139, 161, 170, 183, 230, 269 Soviet, 17, 66, 69, 70, 82–85, 88, 101, 104, 133, 137, 138, 142, 144, 260 Spanish, 158 Underground, 200, 224 Wartheland, 67, 77, 80, 172, 177, 189 Western, 23, 27, 39, 66, 81, 143–147, 172, 173, 181, 188, 204, 226 work detail, 77, 185, 186, 198, 200, 227, 230, 265 Joe Fresh, 287 Jones, Edward, 15 Josef I, 187 Jost, Heinz, 116 Judaism, 24, 28 Judenfrei, 67, 182 Judenrat, 74 Jud Süss, 47 Just following orders, 251, 282, 291

#### **K**

Kahler, Waldemar, 257 Kaltenbrunner, Ernst, 261 Kammler, Hans, 220 Kapo, 231 Kaufmann, Karl, 138 Kelbasin camp, 199 Kershaw, Ian, 18, 56, 67, 89, 159, 210 Kersten, Felix, 193 Khan, Genghis, 51 Kiev Pathological Institute, 266 Kittel, Gerhard, 43 Klein, Peter, 89, 141, 155, 157–160, 178, 206 Koch, Erich, 138 Kommando 1005, 189, 222 Kommandostab Reichsführer SS brigades, 104 Kommandostab SS Brigade One, 137 Kommandostab SS Cavalry Brigade, 148 Könekamp, Eduard, 92 Konin County, 173, 175 Koonz, Claudia, 34 Koppe, Wilhelm, 172 Kozak, Stanislaw, 191, 210 Koło, 177, 188 Krausnick versus Streim debate, 83, 93, 94 Kristallnact, 38 Krüger, Friedrich-Wilhelm, 143, 179, 201, 206 Kszepicki, Abraham, 195 Kube, Wilhelm, 146, 241 Kühl, Stefan, 19, 46, 50, 57–59, 89, 121, 157, 161, 176, 205, 236, 265, 296 Kulmhof. *See* Chełmno Kushner, Tony, 55, 57, 94, 118, 120, 124, 157, 161, 211 Kwiet, Konrad, 86

#### **L**

Laabs, Gustav, 186 Landau, Felix, 132 Lang, Theo, 271 Lange, Herbert, 76 Lange, Rudolf, 146, 178, 179, 181 Lange Commando, 76, 78, 80, 172, 173, 178, 183, 184 Langerbein, Helmut, 137 Lanzmann, Claude, 74 Lasik, Aleksander, 89, 221, 234–236 Latvia Liepaja, 150 Riga, 143, 145 Lauer, 169 Law for the Prevention of Genetically Damaged Offspring, 75 Learner, 6, 8–11, 13, 19, 129, 153, 169, 233, 250, 278, 286 Lebensraum, 28, 31, 35, 39, 41, 50 Lenz, Fritz, 25, 53 Lenz, Wilhelm, 187 Lethal injection, 76, 266 Lettich, André, 229 Levi, Primo, 106, 156, 247 Lewin, Abraham, 91 Lichtman, Ada, 198, 244 Lil, Karl, 245 Lithuania Gargždai, 130, 131 Kaunas or Kovno, 102, 143 Kretinga, 131 Palanga, 131 Lithuanian auxiliary police, 160 Lódź ghetto, 72, 90, 172–174, 184, 188 Lohse, Hinrich, 147 Lombard, Gustav, 108 Lösener, Bernhard, 269 Lower, Wendy, 151 Lozowick, Yaacov, 140, 297

Luhmann, Niklas, 15, 46 Luther, Martin, 23, 37, 47 Lutsky, Neil, 283 Luxemburg, 67

#### **M**

Madagascar, 67, 79, 92, 280 plan, 67, 83, 183 Madaus, Dr., 260, 261 Magill, Franz, 107, 108 Maiden forest, 186, 265 Majdanek, 201, 202, 213, 236 Maliczak, Henryk, 208 Malzmüller, Theodor, 185 Marder, Karl, 73, 172 Matthäus, Jürgen, 84 Mau, Ilse, 193 Mauthausen, 111, 114, 115, 173 Maximize obedience, 5–7, 277, 278 May Day, 35 McDonaldization, 15 McDonough, James, 9 Meier, August, 136 Mein Kampf, 26, 42 Mercy shots, 111 Metzner, Alfred, 132 Michel, Hermann, 198 Middle class, 291 Milejow camp, 201 Milgram, Stanley, 1, 277 Milgram-Holocaust Linkage, 2, 16, 233, 280, 282–285 Miller, Arthur G., 1 Minister of Economic Affairs, 249 Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, 123, 148 Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, 38 Minsk ghetto, 109, 145 *Mischlinge*,, 261 Möbius, Kurt, 47, 59, 175, 184, 185, 187 Mommsen, Hans, 18, 56–58, 60, 89, 90, 92–94, 234, 236, 256, 265, 266, 269 Montague, Patrick, 77 Moral dilemmas, 48 Moral disengagement, 15, 153, 291 Morocco, 158 Mounted Unit of the 1st SS Cavalry Regiment, 108 Müller, Filip, 269 Müller, Heinrich, 37, 181 Müller-Hill, Benno, 27, 48, 53, 54, 57, 86, 87, 94 Multiple-shooter-per-victim technique, 132 Mundschütz, Martin, 296 Murata, Taketo, 9

#### **N**

National Science Foundation, 279 National Socialism, 43 National Socialist government. *See* Nazi party National Socialist Offce of Racial Politics, 47 Naumann, Karl, 73, 122, 123, 265 Nazi death camps, 5, 191, 203, 226 era, 1 ideological origins, 42 ideology, 17, 23, 26–28, 43–45, 48, 49, 52, 72, 75, 82, 106, 176, 283 leadership, 16, 48, 66, 81, 86, 227, 249, 256, 258, 285, 286, 292 party, 29–31, 33, 34, 36, 43–45, 52, 53, 95 rise to power, 23 war crimes trials, 5 war criminals, 1, 277 welfare, 26, 30, 36, 68, 294

Nazi party, 17, 26, 27, 29–31, 33, 36, 44, 45, 52 Nazism, 27, 176, 265 origins, 23 Nebe, Artur, 104 Neck-shot, 136 Neitzel, Sönke, 49, 53, 54, 59, 258 Neoliberalism, 291 Neues Volk, 47 New Baseline (Cardiac) condition, 11 Night of the Long Knives, 34 Nisko, 66 Nobel Laureates, 28 Non-human technology, 4, 5, 7, 12, 14, 202, 280, 288 Norway, 67 NSDAP. *See* Nazi party Nuclear war, 295 Nuremberg, 35, 210, 249, 269, 271 Laws, 35, 43, 269 Nyiszli, 269

## **O**

Obedience studies. *See* Obedience to Authority experiments Obedience to Authority experiments, 1 Oberhauser, Josef, 192 Odessa, 56 Ohlendorf, Otto, 117 One best way, 2–4, 10, 77, 88, 130, 141, 181, 203, 279, 290, 291 Operation 14f13, 80, 114, 122 Operation Barbarossa, 81, 84, 87, 93, 95, 101, 102, 112, 117, 129– 131, 151, 284 Operation Harvest Festival, 201 Operation Reinhard, 17, 167, 182, 189, 193, 194, 197, 200, 201, 203, 211, 219, 221, 222, 224, 227, 228, 231, 233, 248, 255, 281

Order Police, 84, 86, 88, 94, 102, 108 Organization Schmelt, 180, 181 Ostjuden, 74 Ostland, 147, 179, 197 Ostrovec, Eugenia, 169 *Outline of Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene*, 25 Ozerov, Lev, 139

# **P**

*Palaces for the Mentally Ill*, 47 Palfnger, Alexander, 72, 73, 80 Palitzsch, Gerhard, 114 Participants, 1, 5–11, 13, 14, 16, 101, 108, 129, 152, 169, 225, 246, 249, 251, 277–279, 283–285, 292 Past experiences, 8, 9, 86, 278, 279 *Past history*, 2, 4, 9, 129, 279 Pearl Harbor, 144 Pearson, Karl, 24 Peer Administers Shock condition, 10, 175, 249 Peer pressure, 297 Penha-Blits, Mirjam, 200 Penney, J.C., 287 Performance motivation, 176 Persuasion phase, 6, 23, 225 Peters, Gerhard, 255 Peters, Rebecca, 71 Pfannenstiel, Wilhelm, 197 Phenol injections, 266 Pilot studies alone control condition, 6 First (student) series of, 6 group condition, 6 second series of, 8 Truly Remote, 8, 10, 13, 15, 279, 282, 288 Pinsk action, 106 Pinto, 287 plausible deniability, 37, 86

pledges of allegiance, 5 Pogroms, 23, 40, 262, 263 Pohl, Dieter, 137, 192 Pohl, Oswald, 69 Pokony, Adolf, 260 Poland Bialystok, 103 Czestochowa, 193 Krakow, 69 Lódź, 72, 73, 143, 145 Lublin, 66, 104, 115, 190, 193, 202 Poznań, 76, 174, 188 Radom, 193 Warsaw, 72–74, 79, 193, 199, 247 Police Battalion 105, 225 309, 103 322, 83 45, 139 Polish campaign, 66, 81, 84–86 ghettos, 72–74, 145, 203, 219, 264 government, 38, 50 Poniatowa, 201, 202 post-capitulation phase, 293 Pradel, Friedrich, 112 Predictability, 3, 4, 199, 202, 219, 228, 231, 233 Pripet marshes, 104, 105, 256 Pripet river, 147 Prods, 8, 13 special, 14 Productionists, 72, 73, 123, 172, 180 Project manager, 5, 11, 16, 140, 174, 176, 189, 280, 281 Protestant, 23, 59, 120 Prozi, Fred, 290 Prüfer, Kurt, 115, 146, 220, 223 Prützmann, Hans-Adolf, 104, 145

## **Q**

Querner, Rudolf, 147

## **R**

Rana Plaza garment factory, 287 Ravensbrück, 260 Realists, 38–40, 79, 259 Red Army, 102, 137, 188, 209, 260 Red Cross, 230 Reder, Rudolf, 198 Rees, Laurence, 58, 89, 92, 122, 212, 231, 237, 271 Re-establishment of the Career Civil Service Act, 33 Reich Central Offce for Jewish Emigration, 40 Reichleitner, Franz, 195, 200 Reich Security Main Offce, 110 Criminal Technology Institute, 110 Reichstag, 26, 31 Reich Work Cooperative for Institutional Care, The, 78 Reitinger, Gerald, 81 Relationship condition, 10, 290 Remote condition, 248 Reserve Police Battalion 101, 201 Responsibility ambiguity, 12–15, 151, 154, 232, 245, 250, 252, 262, 281, 282, 288, 291, 296 Responsibility clarity, 13, 154, 281 Riga ghetto, 145, 150, 159 Ritter, Robert, 43, 206 Ritzer, George, 3, 5, 9, 18, 199, 282 Robotic car production, 4 Röhm, Ernst, 30–35 Römer, Felix, 264 Rosenberg, Alfred, 160 Rosenblum, Elinor, 11 RSHA. *See* Reich Security Main Offce Rule of anticipated reactions, 37, 72, 153 Rules and regulations, 2, 4, 9, 14, 279 Rumbuli forest, 145, 181 Russell, Nestar, 15, 18, 296 Russia. *See* Soviet Union Rzgów ghetto, 173

## **S**

SA, 30, 32–34 Sachsenhausen, 112 Saller, Karl, 44 Sardinenpackung shooting technique, 139 Schäfer, Hans Dieter, 36 Schleunes, Karl, 1, 39, 54, 56, 93 Schmidt, Helga, 35 Schmitt, Carl, 34 Schneider, Carl, 43 Schön, Waldemar, 73 Schuchart, 171 Schücking, Annette, 142 Schueppe, Wilhelm Gustav, 266 Schulz, Erwin, 121 Schumann, Horst, 261 SD, 83, 266 Seibert, Willy, 118, 124 Sękiewicz, Mieczysław, 173, 174 Seraphim, Peter-Heinz, 43 Sereny, Gita, 57, 120, 213, 236, 265, 266, 268 Sergei, 139 Serial killers, 71 Seydelmann, Gertrud, 226 Shock generator, 7, 11, 13, 18 Siberia, 157 *Sins against Blood and Race*, 47 *Sins of the Fathers, The*, 47 Sipo, 83 Skills of observation, 8 Slacked lime, 174, 188 Smoleń, Kazimierz, 92

Sobibor, 156, 192–195, 197, 198, 200, 201, 210–212, 247, 248, 262, 272 Sonderkommando, 83, 134, 183 4a, 105, 139, 161 6, 116 Sonnenstein, 78, 80, 122 Soviet Invasion, 17, 81–83, 85, 88, 92, 94, 135, 151, 259, 281 Jewry. *See* Jews POWs, 114 Soviet Union Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), 137 Novgorod, 134 Stalingrad (Volgograd), 224, 225 Spartans, 24 Special Treatment, 79 Speer, Albert, 223, 235, 267 SS forces, 17, 72, 81, 83, 85, 101, 119, 129, 256 Leadership, 17, 84–87, 101, 103, 106, 107, 117, 118, 129, 153 Main Administration and Economic Offce, 69 Main Economic and Administrative Department, 220 Waffen, 83, 149 Stahlecker, Franz, 102 Stalin, Joseph, 152 Standard operating procedure, 184, 187, 197, 219 Stangl, Franz, 192, 195, 199, 211, 213, 237, 246, 247, 249, 251 Stark, Hans, 171 Star of David, 197, 242 Starvation, 70, 72, 74, 80, 88, 151, 172, 203, 287 State Police, 83 Sterilization, 25, 38, 182, 259–262, 264, 271

Storjohann, Uwe, 46, 58 Stormtroopers. *See* SA Strain inducing force, 9 Strain Resolving Mechanisms, 7, 8, 14, 18 Streicher, Julius, 33, 38, 267 Strength through Joy Program, 35 Strong believers, 38, 40, 42, 45, 75, 78–80, 86, 88 Stutthof camp, 242 Subhumans, 30, 52, 75, 92 Suchomel, Franz, 191 Sudetenland, 41 Sweatshop, 287, 288 Switzerland, 25

#### **T**

T4, 76–80, 110–112, 114, 122, 167, 168, 172, 174, 183, 190–192, 194, 203, 207, 251, 252, 260, 261, 266, 272 Tarantino, Quentin, 59 Tenth Regiment of the 1st SS Brigade, 103 Tesch & Stabenow, 147 Theresienstadt, 180 Tiergartenstraße 4. *See* T4 Tillerson, Rex, 294, 295 Toland, John, 56, 247, 265 Topf & Sons, 115, 146 Training Journal of the Order Police, 178 Transportation Ministry, 143 Trawniki, 201 Treaty of Versailles, 27, 29, 41, 50 Treblinka, 192–195, 197–200, 202, 212, 248, 255, 262 Truly Remote Pilot, 8, 9, 13, 15, 279, 288

## **U**

Ukraine Berdychiv, 138 Belaya Tserkov, 149 Kamianets-Podilsky, 137, 140 Kiev, 139 Lwów, 109 Rovno, 132 Ukrainian auxiliaries, 139, 149 United States Government, 26 Indiana, 25 South Dakota, 60 Virginia, 26 University of Munich, 44 Upper class, 25, 35, 36 Upper Silesian labor camp, 220 Ural Mountains, 155

#### **V**

van Pelt, Robert Jan, 53, 54, 89, 92, 122, 123, 204, 211, 228, 234–237 Victim docility, 199, 212, 213, 228, 242, 244 Vietnam, 134 Special Forces, 134 Visser't, Willem, 249 Volume 1, 1, 5, 11–13, 19, 71, 74, 118, 247, 277, 283, 288 von Brauchitsch, Walther, 65 von dem Bach-Zelewski, Erich, 104–109, 148, 150, 152 von Galen, August, 167, 203 von Grawitz, Ernst-Robert, 259 von Hindenburg, Paul, 31, 32, 34 von Kleist, Ewald, 137 von Moltke, Helmuth, 142 von Papen, Franz, 31–34

von Ribbentrop, Joachim, 37, 267 von Schleicher, Kurt, 31, 55 von Verschuer, Otmar Freiherr, 43

#### **W**

Waffen. *See* SS Wagner, Eduard, 81 Wagner, Richard, 24 Walther, Lieutenant Colonel, 133 Wannsee Conference, 143, 178, 179, 182, 183, 189, 203, 206, 207, 250 Warsaw ghetto, 73 uprising, 90, 156, 247 Wartheland, 66, 76–78, 80, 172, 174, 178, 184 Weber, Max, 2, 3, 141, 154 Web of obligation, 8, 106 Wehrmacht, 31, 32, 39, 41, 50, 65, 66, 68, 70, 81, 84, 102, 103, 132–134, 137, 138, 141, 142, 149, 188, 224, 248, 263 221st Security Division, 103 High Command, 81 Weimar, 25, 26, 30, 36, 75 government, 25, 26 Republic, 25, 30, 36, 55, 75 Weiss, Major, 103 Wellers, Georges, 255 Welzer, Harald, 53, 54, 59, 120, 155, 258, 270, 272 Wentritt, Harry, 112

Werner, Kurt, 142 Werner, Paul, 110 Westermann, Edward, 107 Western Europe, 28, 188 White Ruthenia, 134, 146 Widmann, Albert, 76, 110–112, 169 Williams, John, 9, 37, 87, 129, 265 Willikens, Werner, 36 Wirth, Christian, 77, 190–193, 195, 197, 199, 202, 203, 210, 255, 281 Wistrich, Robert, 246 Wizard of Oz, The, 60 Wolff, Karl, 108 Women Only condition, 11 Working class, 25, 29, 30, 226, 293 World War One, 25–27, 30, 34, 41, 83, 84, 159 World War Two, 17, 37, 43, 47, 49–51, 59, 65, 69, 74, 178, 201

# **Y**

Yale University, 58, 285

## **Z**

Zagórów ghetto, 173 *Zone of Indifference*, 14, 50, 59, 76, 85, 106, 113, 153 Zyklon-B, 113, 114, 146, 147, 183, 213, 223, 224, 230–232, 242, 243, 245, 253–256, 259