One day in November 1944, several children arrived at Auschwitz. We do not know from where they came or what their names were. They were Jewish children. As the truck slowed, one little boy holding an apple jumped off. His intention was not to run away; in his youthful excitement, he wanted simply to be first off the truck so that he could eat his apple. One of the SS men standing nearby, Wilhelm Boger, saw the boy next to the truck, enjoying himself. Suddenly Boger went over to the boy, grabbed his legs, and smashed his head against the wall. Then he calmly picked up the apple and went back to his office. About an hour later, a prisoner who had seen the boy’s murder was called to the office to assist in a translation issue. There, he saw Boger eating the child’s apple.1
American sociologist and Holocaust survivor Fred E. Katz notes that Boger’s gruesome killing of this innocent child for the apple had a theatrical quality to it: “He ate the apple in front of a witness to the murderous deed. It was no accident that Boger ate the apple when the witness was there to see it. He was flaunting his evil.”2
For that little boy, Boger’s act was the supreme example in his short life of the Nazi new order. We do not know what experiences the child had already lived through, but there is no doubt that at that moment, in those circumstances, SS officer Boger embodied the full horror of the Holocaust.
Questions about the Holocaust
Ever since revelations about the Holocaust first came to light, questions have abounded regarding the nature of those who perpetrated what was unquestionably the greatest criminal act of deliberate mass murder in history. Did the killers not possess a conscience? Were they all psychopaths? What type of society was the Germany that could plan and carry out this massive criminal act?
To address these and other questions, many studies have been made of those whose actions describe them as perpetrators of the Holocaust, looking at the phenomenon from a variety of perspectives. When all such studies are taken into consideration, however, certain facts remain constant—the primary one being that the so-called Final Solution of the Jewish Question (Endlösung der Judenfrage) was a massive state project at the heart of Nazi wartime race and population policy. When it comes to assessing responsibility for any crime, the key question is, who did it? In the case of the Holocaust, that figure runs into hundreds of thousands.
In the first place, it must be remembered that it was a Nazi government from Germany that was responsible for the Holocaust. Antisemitism was embedded directly into the DNA of Nazism and featured prominently in the party platform of 1920.3 There was always a compulsion to eliminate Jews from German life, although it is important to realize that Nazism did not automatically equate with genocidal mass murder. This was an aspiration that developed over time, as did the techniques—and the expertise—to achieve it.4
When the destructive phase of the Nazi assault on the Jews was initiated, no other country had developed racial policies as radical as those of Nazi Germany. The destruction of the Jewish people was never the policy of any other European country or government, and those who led the destruction were German Nazis. Adolf Hitler, as head of the Nazi government, was its prime mover. His views of the Jews as an “eternal race enemy,” coupled with his notions of inclusivity and exclusivity relating to the German Volk, could leave no one with any illusions as to his preferences.5
He could not, however, have achieved his aims relative to the Jews, or anything else, without the willing, and often-enthusiastic, support of others around him. The head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, and those in charge of the security services, Reinhard Heydrich and Kurt Daluege, created a tyrannical police state founded on issues of race, control, and violence. And the SS (Schutzstaffel) itself, an organization that began as Hitler’s personal bodyguard but mutated into one of the most powerful organizations in Nazi Germany, was the foremost agency of security, surveillance, and terror both within Germany and, later, throughout German-occupied Europe. Not only were members of the SS the most important actors in the destruction of the Jews of Europe but also the entire project was entrusted to Himmler and Heydrich and run as an SS campaign.
How Many Killers?
In view of that, it must be said that fully hundreds of thousands of people were directly involved in carrying out the Final Solution. The political leaders of the Third Reich were of course those who desired the entire operation, but the organizers and killers came from a variety of Nazi organizations. These were the praetorian guards of mass murder, forming the essential personnel running the extermination camps, operating the mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen), and administering the whole program.
In a remarkable documentary made in 2005, Danish filmmaker Ove Nyholm sought to learn the motivations of mass murderers at a time of war. Interviewing Serbian killers from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, he showed how such people, through their actions, acquired ancestors—the SS murderers of the Holocaust. He was, he said, attempting to plumb the depths of heartlessness. Quoting one of the Einsatzgruppen killers who was confronted by a victim just before being gunned down in a pit killing, Nyholm reached what he considered to be the quintessential justification of genocide. “You must die,” the SS officer said, “so that we might live.”6
Upon further reflection, Nyholm sought to ascertain the full extent of the killing culture: the density, in real world terms, of the murder cohort when charted on a map of Germany. He took the figure of 107,000 files relating to alleged Nazi war criminals held in the archives of the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes (Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen), in Ludwigsburg, Germany. Calculating the ratio of war criminals in relation to the total geographical area of the country (including lakes, mountains, and forests), he found an average of 2.4 perpetrators per square kilometer. “Seen from street level,” he concluded, “that’s less than 700 meters between each one; 688 meters, to be precise.”7
Leaders: Who Did It?
This shocking figure tells only part of the story, for there were many thousands of others involved for whom files were not kept. SS and police commanders, together with those commanding the Einsatzgruppen, directed the clearing of ghettos and villages, the concentration of inhabitants in open spaces, and then the systematic shooting of men, women, and children in the killing fields of the occupied Soviet Union. In occupied Poland, SS leaders established factories of death, killing centers equipped with gas chambers that enabled mass murder to take place as if on an assembly line.
And it was not only members of the SS and police who were actively enmeshed in the implementation of the Final Solution. Until a short time ago, the German army had, for several decades, projected the image that it was not directly caught up in the killing of Jews; its sole responsibility was always (so the argument went) one of military combat. More recent scholarship, however, has shown conclusively that the Wehrmacht made its contribution to the Final Solution in the Soviet Union and that the SS was far from alone.8 This involvement, it must be added, sometimes extended to the highest levels of the military, while letters and photographs sent home by frontline German soldiers often documented atrocities—either those they had witnessed or those in which they had themselves taken part.
Perhaps the most important agent of death was the SS, formed in 1923 as a specialized unit of 50 men to act as Hitler’s personal bodyguard. After Hitler’s failed putsch of November 11, 1923, the SS was banned, but it was reconstituted under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler as a racially elite unit in 1929. The inspiration for his restructure might have come from Himmler’s own Roman Catholic upbringing and his admiration for the military-style discipline and obedience of the Jesuit order.9 Himmler conceived of a paramilitary organization consisting of members of high moral caliber, honesty, and decency who would be committed to the Nazi vision and agenda and thoroughly antisemitic in orientation. Its infamous black uniform and Totenkopf, or “Death’s Head,” insignias were introduced in 1932. By 1933, it was a force of more than 200,000 men.10 Under Himmler’s guidance, the SS not only developed the Nazi concentration camp system but also took responsibility for staffing the camps, instituting the discipline policies within them, and planning how best to exploit the prisoners as slave labor.11
From the summer of 1941 onward, the SS took control of the annihilation of Europe’s Jews, first through the Einsatzgruppen and then, after 1942, through the extermination camps located in Poland. Thus, those primarily responsible for the murder of European Jewry in the various slave labor, concentration, and death camps came from the ranks of the SS. After the war, at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the SS was formally declared a criminal organization and compulsorily disbanded. Himmler committed suicide on May 23, 1945, but the overwhelming majority of SS members were never brought to trial. A very large proportion, in fact, lived out full lives and died in their beds, some at an advanced age.
Many Nazis of high rank (although not Hitler or Hermann Göring, for long the second most powerful man in the Third Reich), as well as many members of the SS, were well educated. Josef Goebbels held a PhD from the University of Heidelberg; Heinrich Himmler studied agronomy at the Munich Technische Hochschule (now the University of Technology, Munich); Hans Frank, appointed governor-general of occupied Poland, was a lawyer, as were a majority of the 15 attendees at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s leading race ideologue, possessed a PhD in engineering from a university in prerevolutionary Russia. Three out of the four commanders of the Einsatzgruppen operating in the Soviet Union had earned doctorates, and the list goes on. These were all part of a genocidal project that formed a central platform of the Nazi state.
It is remarkable, moreover, how frequently many of the actual killers on the ground encountered each other throughout the war. Schooled in murder during the early days of the Nazi movement, they became experts in their craft, and as experienced specialists, they could often be found close by to each other—at meetings, in the camps, or in their numerous deployments. Indeed, often they succeeded each other in a range of different assignments.
While an immediate response to the question of who the perpetrators of the Holocaust were might settle on the person of Adolf Hitler, it must always be borne in mind that within Nazi Germany, all sectors of society played their role in planning, facilitating, and executing the Final Solution.
Enablers: Who Made It Possible?
If the leaders of the Holocaust and their followers in the vanguard of the genocide can be considered under the heading of “who did it?” then those we can term “enablers” could comfortably fall into the category of “who made it possible?” A broad cross section of German society fits under this classification, which was top heavy with well-educated professionals: bankers, professors, doctors, journalists, transport workers, engineers, judges, authors, teachers, lawyers, and civil servants. The range of those who aided and abetted the killers was as wide ranging as the German social fabric itself. Carrying out the Final Solution required cooperation from people in all walks of life and was far from being just an SS or military project. Not everyone was necessarily aware of the full extent of the role they were playing, but all fitted into the bigger picture, and few questioned what the logical outcome of their actions could be.
Among the leaders in the corporate world were the owners and managers of major industrial and commercial enterprises who sought to profit from Nazi programs of Aryanization, persecution, and, indeed, extermination of the Jews. Many of the major German corporations were running short of labor to carry out the day-to-day work in which they were engaged; they did not hesitate to use slave labor, even from concentration camp inmates who were being worked to death under extraordinarily brutal conditions. Nor could many of these same corporations resist theft—of ideas, premises, artwork, and client lists—from Jewish (or formerly Jewish) companies. The actions of the German corporate sector deserve scrutiny, and in some cases, the motives and behavior of individuals relating to the Holocaust have been examined here. A comprehensive treatment, however, still awaits its author.
After the war, it was recognized that many people involved in the murder process had volunteered eagerly to be part of it. Others, however, always saw themselves as simply obeying orders, such as several members of Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of 500 middle-aged, lower- and lower-middle-class family men from Hamburg, who were drafted into the so-called Order Police and were active in murdering up to 38,000 men, women, and children in Eastern Europe in 1942 and 1943. A variety of hypotheses can be proffered regarding their behavior: wartime brutalization, racism, segmentation and routinization of their tasks, careerism, obedience to authority and orders, ideological indoctrination, conformity, quasi-military status, and a sense of elitism. No single explanation, however, provides an all-embracing answer, and this can be extrapolated beyond this single unit.12
Moreover, throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, many others enjoyed the power Nazi authority gave them. Some also exploited the situation for personal gain. While leaders can be classified under the heading of “who did it?” and enablers under that of “who made it possible?” collaborators in other lands certainly earned the caption “who helped?”
Collaborators: Who Helped?
Non-German collaborators were to be found in every country, and the Nazis relied upon them to carry out their terrible acts against individuals and communities across Europe. Further, one did not have to be a German to be a Nazi. This was made clear through the experiences Jews had with the Arrow Cross Party in Hungary, the Hlinka Guard in Slovakia, antisemitic Poles who denounced Jews to their German occupiers, Vichy French officials and police, Ukrainian collaborators who often dominated the guard detachment in the extermination camps, and so on. Each state responded differently to the Nazi extermination program, with significant variations in the level of cooperation.13
The Nazis, moreover, traded on local animosities and prejudices when it came to the question of collaboration. They were happy for the French to do their dirty work for them; indeed, the Vichy regime hastened to act against its Jews before being required to by the Nazi occupiers. In Croatia, homegrown excesses were so extreme that the Nazis invited their Croat allies to tone down the vehemence of their actions. Romanian brutality against Jews in the occupied Crimea shocked German observers. And in Latvia and Lithuania, the Nazis sought to deflect responsibility for their antisemitic activities by arranging for native collaborators to undertake pogroms on their behalf.
The term “quisling,” meaning a person who collaborates with an enemy occupying force (or, more broadly, a synonym for the word “traitor”), originated in the person of Vidkun Quisling, the main Norwegian collaborator with the occupying Germans. There were a variety of such people in the countries occupied by the Nazis, particularly in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands in Western Europe and in Ukraine and the Baltic States in Eastern Europe. The countries allied with Germany also played their part in the destruction of the Jews, notably Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Croatia. Italy introduced antisemitic laws in November 1938, although these were never embraced by the Italian population at large.
In many of the countries that might be considered German satellites—whether occupied or allied—a variety of auxiliary forces were brought into the anti-Jewish project, and in some cases, their actions were the equal (at least) of Nazi barbarities. The degree to which collaborators supported, facilitated, or were accessories to the Holocaust varied. Some people took part enthusiastically in killing operations, and some enlisted in the Waffen-SS for active service due to strongly held convictions about Nazi ideology.14 Indeed, full Waffen-SS divisions—French, Croatian, Danish, Norwegian, Bosnian, Latvian, Dutch, Ukrainian, Belgian, and many others—were created in lands occupied by the Nazis and then deployed to fight on behalf of Nazi Germany. Collectively, these numbered in the hundreds of thousands, adding enormously to the pool of available manpower from whom the Germans could draw. Other collaborators acted from additional motives, which could be monetary, careerist, or based in a fear of retribution. From time to time, genuinely held opportunistic motives surfaced; on other occasions, collaborators were prompted to act in especially violent ways owing to unmet sociopathological needs.
In short, the Holocaust was visited upon the Jews of Europe by a wide variety of messengers, whether Germans or not.
The Holocaust and Its Perpetrators
This book looks at just a bare handful of these people. Most are men from Germany and Austria; some are women; some are collaborators from other countries. All were motivated by a longing to destroy a Jewish presence in Europe (if not the whole world), and all possessed the ability to choose between life and death, between participation and avoidance.
It was this that separated them from Jews who shared in the killing process—those singled out, for example, as members of the Jewish Councils (Judenräte) or Jewish police in ghettos or kapos in the concentration camps. For them, life choices did not exist, and in that sense, they could not be viewed as complicit. In most cases, they did not even have control over their daily activities. They certainly had no control over the time, place, or manner of their death, and they were both persecuted by the Nazis and punished by other Jews owing to their involvement.
The Holocaust was a period in which the most revolting mass atrocities were committed by humans against other humans. Who were the perpetrators of these crimes? For the mother forced to choose between two children on the ramp at Auschwitz, it was that Nazi soldier forcing the choice; for the adolescent girl torn from the embrace of her little sister because she was old enough to work while the younger girl was not, it was an SS officer; for the old man beaten to death by the roadside by a Nazi soldier because he couldn’t move fast enough when ordered to, it was a Nazi soldier; and for the newlyweds who were forced into the squalor of the ghetto where the bride watched her husband die of starvation and disease only to die herself immediately afterward, the Holocaust was represented by those who had brought them into this condition. Elsewhere, local variants of all these scenarios were played out. Some had extensive support; some did not.
But everywhere, regardless of the level of enthusiasm from leaders, enablers, or collaborators, Jews were always vulnerable to discrimination, denunciation, deportation, and, ultimately, extermination. As Rabbi Hugo Gryn, a survivor of Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, and Mauthausen, recalled about the Holocaust, “It was the most terrible revelation about the principle of evil. . . . We were its victims, and we know who the perpetrators were. And Europe, it seems to me, was a bystander. And this is the essence of the tragedy.”15
Notes
1. Bernd Naumann. Auschwitz: A Report on the Proceedings against Robert Karl, Ludwig Mulka and Others before the Court at Frankfurt. New York: Praeger, 1996, p. 133; quoted in Fred E. Katz. Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguilings of Evil. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993, p. 88.
2. Ibid.
3. See Document 1, this volume.
4. In an otherwise extensive literature, see especially Karl A. Schleunes. The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933–1939. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1970; and Christopher R. Browning. The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Browning has also written some useful essays on this topic in Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985.
5. The libraries of books written about Hitler over the past 80 years have all had something to say about his attitude toward the Jews, and this is not the place for a detailed excursus into Hitlerania. One very good study (with an excellent accompanying bibliography) is Richard Weikart. Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Indispensable in this context is Ian Kershaw. Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Two other useful works are Philippe Burrin. Hitler and the Jews: The Genesis of the Holocaust. London: Edward Arnold, 1994; and Gerald Fleming. Hitler and the Final Solution. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985.
6. Anatomy of Evil (Ondskabens anatomi), Angel Films, dir. Ove Nyholm, prod. Janne Giese, 2005.
7. Ibid.
8. Wehrmacht involvement in the Holocaust has been demonstrated in a number of key studies. See, for example, Omer Bartov. The Eastern Front, 1941–45, German Troops, and the Barbarisation of Warfare. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986; Omer Bartov. Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991; Jeff Rutherford. Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front: The German Infantry’s War, 1941–1944. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014; and Geoffrey P. Megargee. War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.
9. A definitive biography of Himmler can be found in Peter Longerich. Heinrich Himmler. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
10. The most recent history of the SS is Adrian Weale. Army of Evil: A History of the SS. New York: NAL Caliber, 2012. For the intellectual underpinnings of the SS, see also Christian Ingrao. Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine. Cambridge: Polity, 2013.
11. Two recent studies on the SS and the camps are essential. For the early Nazi period, see Kim Wünschmann. Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015; and for an overall history of the camps, see the magisterial study by Nikolaus Wachsmann. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. A very useful set of essays can be found in Jane Caplan and Nikolaus Wachsmann (eds.). Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories. London: Routledge, 2010.
12. For a pioneering closer examination of the Reserve Police Battalions, see the celebrated study by Christopher Browning. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Guenter Lewy has recently examined some of the other Reserve Police Battalions; see his Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
13. A vast amount of literature exists on collaboration during the Third Reich. Excellent short histories can be found in Rab Bennett. Under the Shadow of the Swastika: The Moral Dilemmas of Resistance and Collaboration in Hitler’s Europe. New York: New York University Press, 1999; and István Deák. Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance, and Retribution during World War II. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2015.
14. See, for example, Christopher Hale. Hitler’s Foreign Executioners: Europe’s Dirty Secret. Stroud, UK: The History Press, 2011.
15. Rabbi Hugo Gryn, in Auschwitz and the Allies, BBC Films, prod. Rex Bloomstein, 1982.