APPENDIX 1

A NOTE ON METHOD

As important as it is to lay bare the general and theoretical considerations that guide this book's inquiry, it is equally necessary to specify other considerations of method that have given shape to this investigation of the perpetrators.

Because the scope of what we do not know of the perpetrators and of the Holocaust is so large, and because of the consequent need to be selective, this book covers only some of the institutions of killing. It makes no pretense of providing a comprehensive history of the Holocaust. Its cases derive not from considerations of narrative fluency and comprehensiveness, but of their appropriateness for answering certain questions, for testing certain hypotheses. The book's intent is primarily explanatory and theoretical. Narrative and description, important as they are for specifying the perpetrators' actions and the settings for their actions properly, are here subordinate to the explanatory goals.

The hypothesis that I believed most likely to be borne out, upon embarking on the empirical research for this study, was that the perpetrators were motivated to take part in the lethal persecution of the Jews because of their beliefs about the victims, and that various German institutions were therefore easily able to harness the perpetrators' pre-existing antisemitism once Hitler gave the order to undertake the extermination. I therefore chose to investigate institutions and particular cases of those institutions which would in a variety of ways isolate the influence of antisemitism in order to assess its causal efficacy. Should the hypothesis be erroneous, then the cases chosen here would have clearly confounded it. The three institutions analyzed in depth are police battalions, "work" camps, and death marches, each of which, as it happens, has been greatly neglected.

A further consideration informed the choice of cases and samples. Two different target populations are the object of this study: the population of perpetrators and the German people themselves. This is a study of the perpetrators of the Holocaust and simultaneously of Germany during the Nazi period, its people and political culture. Thus, the institutions treated here are intended to do double analytical duty. They should permit the motivations of the perpetrators in those particular institutions to be uncovered, and also allow for generalizing both to the perpetrators as a group and to the second target group of this study, the German people. Much of what is said here about methods therefore pertains both to the perpetrators and to the larger population of Germans.

This study subjects the competing hypotheses discussed earlier to empirical scrutiny, drawing on a variety of cases, including, occasionally, comparative material from non-German actors and other genocides. It draws on my research on a large number of different kinds of units and institutions engaged in the Holocaust: over thirty-five police battalions involved in mass killings; all eighteen Einsatzkommandos, which were the killing squads set up for the extermination of Soviet Jewry; a number of different ghettos and concentration camps; "work" camps; Auschwitz and the other death camps; and a dozen death marches that took place in the waning days of the war. ¹ So even though the case chapters are devoted to only a few police battalions, "work" camps, and death marches, my conclusions are buttressed by a still more extensive fund of knowledge. The chapters of Part VI, which bring together the lessons learned from the cases, selectively draws on material from other cases. An effort, though, has been made not to poach from other cases, for the temptation to pick and choose propitious material from a large number of cases should be resisted so as to avoid bias in the conclusions. My research has been guided by the belief that examining the men (and women) working in different kinds of institutions with different kinds of tasks would provide a comparative perspective on the perpetrators that would yield insights unobtainable by focusing on one kind of institution.'

Of the many units I have researched, the ones I decided to study most intensively tended to share a number of characteristics, although not every unit shared each one. Chief among them were units in which it could be proven conclusively that the men knew that they did not have to kill. As long as the threat of coercion might have existed, it would be hard to assess whether or not other motivations were operative. I also concentrated on units that were engaged in repeated face-to-face killings, where they confronted their victims and were parties to unspeakably gruesome scenes of spattered blood, bone, and brain matter, over an extended period of time because, for a variety of reasons, the actions of people who were vocational killers of this sort rather than episodic ones make greater explanatory demands. Of the units that satisfied the first two criteria, I focused a great deal of attention on those that were also made up of the men who seemed by their backgrounds to be the least likely candidates for becoming willing executioners. This is one reason for the emphasis on police battalions, many of which were composed of "ordinary" Germans. It is these people, and not Hitler's most fanatical followers, whose actions are most difficult to explain and therefore test most severely any explanation. So any explanation has to be able to account for their participation, and if it can do so for them, then it is likely to explain the actions of Hitler's more zealous acolytes, who presumably would have been far more willing than less enthusiastic followers to carry out a given policy whatever it was.

A number of police battalions satisfy all the criteria. Surprisingly, these units, until two recent books,³ have hardly even been mentioned in the literature on Nazi genocide, and until I began my research (before these books appeared), I too was unaware of the scope of their actions and, naturally, their significance for understanding this period of German society and politics. Many police battalions were units of men drawn haphazardly into them (they were drafted), who had no special ideological training, no particular military background, who were often older, in their mid-thirties, and who were family men—not the pliable eighteen-year-olds that armies love to mold. Furthermore, these units ended up in killing operations not by design, but by chance. In sending these men to kill, the regime proceeded as if any German was fit to be a mass executioner. All of this is treated in great detail in Part III.

The rationale for studying "work" camps was to subject the operative hypothesis to its toughest test. Institutions devoted to economic production, whose calling card is rationality, should have been the least susceptible to the influence of a preexisting ideology—in this case, to antisemitism. If it turned out that the functioning of "work" camps could be explained only by taking into account the existence of antisemitism among the responsible Germans, then this would be powerful evidence for the primary importance of antisemitism in explaining the Germans' actions. Naturally, were this hypothesis not borne out in this case, then it would have to be jettisoned, qualified, or complemented by other ones. The camps studied most intensively were those around Lublin during a later phase of the Holocaust when the Germans were permitting Jews to remain alive in Poland ostensibly only to extract labor from them. This was the time and these were the circumstances when "work" camps should have been most purely for work, and so, in studying them, it should be easiest to isolate the capacity of German antisemitism to undermine, if indeed it did, the rational operation of institutions of labor.

The death marches of 1945, when Germans marched Jews around the European and German countryside in flight from allied armies, among other things, allow the perpetrators' actions to be examined at a time when, because they were under virtually no supervision, they could choose most freely to act as they wished, and when, because Germany was imminently to become a defeated, occupied, and perhaps punished country, killing and brutalizing Jews actually imperiled their captors. The death marches permit the perpetrators' actions and motivations under conditions of virtual autonomy and, consequently, the degree of their devotion to the mass slaughter to be assessed. Under these conditions, those not devoted to the suffering and deaths of Jews should have desisted from harming them. The death marches therefore subject the hypothesis that the perpetrators were motivated by their own antisemitism, by their attendant belief in the justice of the slaughter of the Jews, to a different kind of difficult test.

The cases chosen here can be conceived of as different kinds of "crucial cases," namely cases chosen on the basis of explanatory variables that are most likely to confound my proposed explanation. They are therefore also the cases which would most firmly lend credence to that explanation, if it can account for them.⁴ The cases have the further virtue of allowing for the isolation of the various factors that could plausibly explain the perpetrators' actions and thereby permit for a necessary degree of analytical clarity.

I decided to study selected entire institutions and their personnel, rather than take some scientific sample of perpetrators from a larger number of institutions (though for the purposes of studying the backgrounds of the perpetrators, samples were taken from different institutions). The perpetrators, I reasoned, could not be understood, their actions could not be explained, if wrested from their institutional contexts. It makes little sense to view them as individuals disembedded from their immediate social relations. Without studying the units in which they operated, too little would be learned about the character of their lives for a proper assessment of their motivations. Institutions of killing (such as police battalions, Einsatzkommandos, camps of different kinds, and death marches) differed from each other, as did different units within each type of institution, in a host of ways. Studying some scientific sample of individuals from many units would efface the institutional, material, and social psychological circumstances of the Holocaust's perpetration.

A second reason for choosing entire units is that not enough is known about the actions of most individuals in order to make it sensible to base a study on such a methodology. While a fair amount can be unearthed about the overall character and patterns of action in given institutions of killing, no such robust knowledge can be acquired about the vast majority of individuals who would form the sample of such a research strategy. The perpetrators about whom much is known are an unrepresentative group of people who were intensively investigated by the Federal Republic of Germany's legal authorities because, generally speaking, they were in command positions or, by their actions, distinguished themselves as having been especially brutal. These people are no doubt of great interest, and the knowledge we have of them is used here, but because they are an unrepresentative group, they cannot provide the basis for answers to the general empirical and theoretical questions of this book.

The particular cases from each institution chosen here depended on the criteria mentioned as well as on the availability of sufficient data. A problem in studying the perpetrators is the unevenness of the extant material. Contemporary documents which illuminate in sufficient detail the perpetrators' actions, or anything at all about their motivations, barely exist. About some institutions of killing, including some of the cases discussed here, virtually no contemporary documents of any kind have survived. Therefore, the primary material for this study has been drawn mainly from materials amassed during the Federal Republic of Germany's postwar legal investigations of Nazi crimes, which reside in the German justice system. These investigations are the major, indeed the indispensable, almost sole source for studying the executioners, yet they remain greatly underutilized. They contain the relevant documents that could be found and obtained, and, more important, extensive interrogations of the perpetrators themselves as well as of surviving victims and bystanders.⁵ From these interrogations and testimonies, a detailed portrait of life within an institution of killing and of the history of its members' actions can often be constructed. Since frequently a number of people, sometimes people positioned differently in relation to the execution ditch, give testimony about the same events, the opportunity exists to check and cross-check accounts. This often produces mutual verification and clarity, though at other times it leads to contradictions, which cannot be resolved except logically and according to the judgment of the interpreter.⁶ Fortunately, when such unresolvable discrepancies do occur, especially over the number of Jews whom the Germans deported or killed in a given operation, they are generally not especially significant for analytical purposes.⁷

This rich, illuminating postwar testimony is also a problematic source. Aside from memory's natural deficiencies in portraying events often of over twenty years past,⁸ the perpetrators have powerful motivations for concealing, evading, dissimulating, and lying. Their testimony is replete with omissions, half-truths, and lies. They, it should not be forgotten, were giving testimony to police interrogators and other legal authorities about crimes which were considered by their own society, the Federal Republic of Germany, and by the world at large to be among the greatest in human history. Many perpetrators had spent the two to three decades prior to their testimony denying to others, whether by silence or prevarication, the degree of their involvement in the genocide. Even when they could not completely hide that they had given their bodies to the slaughter, they in all likelihood denied that they had given to it their souls, their inner will and moral assent. To do otherwise was to de- clare to family, and friends, to their growing children, to their now disapproving society: "I was a mass murderer and am (or was) proud of it." After years of habitual repression and denial, they found themselves facing the legal authorities, forced to confront their deeds, long buried from the conversation of their daily lives. Is it any surprise that they would not now be eager to declare to their interrogators that they had been mass murderers and that they had approved of their actions, even perhaps enjoyed them? They could also not have been sure that they would not themselves be held accountable for their crimes. Motivations for lying, for not announcing that they were among history's greatest criminals, were powerful indeed. And indeed it is easy to demonstrate that they do lie rampantly, by word and by omission, in order to minimize their physical and cognitive involvement in the mass slaughters. Because of this, the only methodological position that makes sense is to discount all self-exculpating testimony that finds no corroboration from other sources.⁹

Attempting to explain the Germans' actions, indeed just writing a history of this period, by relying on their self-exonerating testimony would be akin to writing a history of criminality in America by relying on the statements of criminals as given to police, prosecutors, and before courts. Most criminals assert that they have been wrongly accused of the crimes. They certainly neglect to volunteer information about other criminal acts that they may have engaged in, of which the authorities are ignorant. If they are unable to deny plausibly their material culpability, then they find whatever ways they can to attribute responsibility for the crimes to others. If asked, whether in court or by the news media, then they ordinarily profess, even with great conviction and passion, to abhor the crimes which they, despite their protestations, have committed. When facing the authorities, as well as the general society, criminals lie about their actions and their motivations. Even after conviction, even after the evidence has been presented which convinces a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that a person is guilty, criminals habitually proclaim their innocence. Why should we think that those who were complicit in one of the greatest crimes in human history should be more honest, more self-incriminating?

To accept the perpetrators' self-exonerations without corroborating evidence is to guarantee that one will be led down many false paths, paths that preclude one from ever finding one's way back to the truth. On the other hand, were such self-exonerations indeed true, a variety of other evidence supporting them should have come to light. It rarely does. As the chapters treating the perpetrators lay out in depth, had the perpetrators really disapproved of the mass murder, had they really been opposed to participating in it, then many ways to express this were available to them—the spectrum ran from outright refusal to kill, to expressing disapproval and opposition either symbolically or in discussion with comrades¹⁰—that entailed few, if any, costs to the perpetrators.¹¹