NOTES

Introduction

1. See letter of Jan. 30, 1943, StA Hamburg 147 Js 1957/62, ^pp. 523-524.

2. They departed from this admittedly vague standard, both in the ordinary language sense of being civilized and in Norbert Elias' social theoretical sense of imposing external and especially internal controls over emotional displays, including outbursts of destructive violence. See The Civilizing Process, 2 vols., (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

3. Definitional and substantive issues pertaining to the category of "perpetrators" are discussed in Chapter 5.

4. The literature's neglect of the perpetrators takes more subtle form than a mere failure to focus on them. Through conscious, half-conscious, and unconscious linguistic usage, the perpetrators often, and for some authors, typically, disappear from the page and from the deeds. The use of the passive voice removes the actors from the scene of carnage, from their own acts. It betrays the authors' understanding of the events and forms the public's comprehension of them, an understanding robbed of human agency. See Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer, "A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism," in Peter Baldwin, ed., Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), pp. 102-134, for a discussion of this tendency in the work of Martin Broszat, one of the most influential interpreters of the Holocaust and of Germany during the Nazi period.

5. We do not hesitate to refer to the citizens of the United States who fought in Vietnam to achieve the aims of their government as "Americans," and for good reason. The reason is just as good in the case of Germans and the Holocaust. The perpetrators were Germans as much as the soldiers in Vietnam were Americans, even if not all people in either country supported their nation's efforts. Customary usage for analogous cases, as well as descriptive accuracy and rectitude, not only permit but also mandate the use of "Germans" as the term of choice. Moreover, the Jewish victims conceived of the German perpetrators and referred to them overwhelmingly not as Nazis but as Germans. This usage does not mean that all Germans are included when the term "Germans" is employed (just as the term "Americans" does not implicate every single American), because some Germans opposed and resisted the Nazis as well as the persecution of the Jews. That they did so does not alter the identity of those who were perpetrators, or what we should properly call them.

A real terminological problem exists when discussing "Germans," because "Germans," particularly when contrasted to "Jews," seems to imply that the Jews of Germany were not also Germans. I have, with some misgivings, decided to call Germans simply "Germans" and not to use some cumbersome locution like "non-Jewish Germans." Thus, whenever German Jews are referred to as "Jews," their Germanness is implicit.

6. Many non-Germans contributed to the genocidal slaying of Jews, particularly various formations of eastern European auxiliaries who worked in conjunction with Germans under German supervision. Perhaps the most notable of these were the so-called Trawnikis, the mainly Ukrainian auxiliaries who contributed greatly to the decimation of the Jews living in the Generalgouvernement, by being parties to deportations and mass shootings and working in the extermination centers of Treblinka, Bełżec, and Sobibór. The Germans found willing helpers in Lithuania, Latvia, in the various regions of the conquered Soviet Union, in other countries of eastern and central Europe, and in western Europe as well. Generally speaking, these perpetrators have been neglected in the literature on this period. Their comparative study should be undertaken (and is discussed briefly in Chapter 15), yet it is not an integral part of this book, for two reasons. The first, already mentioned, is that the Germans and not the non-Germans were the prime movers and executors of the Holocaust. The second is a practical consideration. This book is already ambitious in scope, so its purview had to be restricted so as to be manageable. The study of non-German perpetrators, which would include a large number of people of many nationalities, is the fitting subject for another project. For a discussion of the disposition of ethnic Germans during the war, see Valdis O. Lumans, Himmler's Auxiliaries: The Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle and the German National Minorities of Europe, 1933-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); for the contributions of the "Trawnikis," the east European auxiliaries who manned the extermination camps of Bełżec, Treblinka, and Sobibór, and who killed and brutalized tens of thousands of Jews while deporting them from the ghettos of Poland or while shooting them themselves, see Judgment Against Karl Richard Streibel et al., Hamburg 147 Ks 1/72; for the Soviet Union, see Richard Breitman, "Himmler's Police Auxiliaries in the Occupied Soviet Territories," Simon Wiesenthal Annual 7 (1994): pp. 23-39.

7. See Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 3-30.

8. This is discussed in Chapter 3.

9. See Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, "The Holocaust in National-Socialist Rhetoric and Writings: Some Evidence against the Thesis that before 1945 Nothing Was Known about the 'Final Solution,''' YVS 16 (1984): pp. 95-127; and Wolfgang Benz, "The Persecution and Extermination of the Jews in the German Consciousness," in John Milfull, ed., Why Germany? National Socialist Anti-Semitism and the European Context (Providence: Berg Publishers, 1993), pp. 91-104, esp. 97-98.

10. See, for example, Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, 1932-1945 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1990), vol. I, p. 41; and C. C. Aronsfeld, The Text of the Holocaust: A Study of the Nazis' Extermination Propaganda, from 1919-1945 (Marblehead, Mass.: Micah Publications, 1985), pp. 34-36.

11. This is the subject of the "intentionalist-functionalist" debate discussed below. On the motivation for the decision to exterminate European Jewry, see Erich Goldhagen, "Obsession and Realpolitik in the 'Final Solution,' " Patterns of Prejudice 12, no. i (1978): pp. 1-16; and Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler's World View: A Blueprint for Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).

12. This was a consequence of Germany's military expansion.

13. This is a major focus of Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: New Viewpoints, 1973).

14. Naturally, it is the biographers of Hitler who wrestle most with this question. See, for example, Allan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974); Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (New York: Signet Books, 1977); Joachim C. Fest, Hitler (New York: Vintage, 1975); see also Hitler's own account in Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971). For two treatments of the Nazis' ascent to power, see Karl Dietrich Bracher, Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik (Villingen: Schwarzwald Ring Verlag, 1964); and William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945, rev. ed. (New York: Franklin Watts, 1984).

15. These are discussed in Chapter 5.

16. The focus on the gassing, to the exclusion of other features of the Holocaust, with the exception of a fair amount of attention that has been devoted to the Einsatzgruppen, justified the title of Wolfgang Scheffler's article "The Forgotten Part of the 'Final Solution': The Liquidation of the Ghettos," Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 2 (1985): pp. 31-51.

17. This is a common notion, whose most prominent exponent is Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews.

18. See Uwe Dietrich Adam's recent discussion, "The Gas Chambers," in François Furet, ed., Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), pp. 134-154. He opens the essay appropriately: "Even today certain false ideas and abusive generalizations about the existence, placement, functioning, and 'efficiency' of the gas chambers continue to circulate even in reputable historical works, and these lead to confusion and errors" (p. ¹34).

19. This is demonstrated by the literature's general, overwhelming failure to discuss the perpetrators in a manner which indicates clearly that many were not SS men; had this been understood, then it would have been emphasized as an important feature of the genocide.

20. It is astonishing how readily available material on this has been ignored; it is not even mentioned in virtually all of the standard works on the Holocaust, including the most recent treatments. This subject is taken up at length during the discussion of police battalions in Part III and in Chapter 15.

21. For the positions of the major protagonists, see Tim Mason, "Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism," in Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker, eds., Der "Führerstaat": Mythos und Realität (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), pp. 23-40; Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 3d ed. (London: Edward Arnold, 1993), pp. 80-107; and Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1987), pp. 31-51.

22. Hans Mommsen, "The Realization of the Unthinkable: The 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question' in the Third Reich," in Gerhard Hirschfeld, ed., The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), pp. 98-99.

23. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 4 vols., ed. Israel Gutman (New York: Macmillan, 1990), for example, which attempts to summarize and codify the state of knowledge about the Holocaust, and which provides statistics on an enormous array of matters, as far as I can tell, neither addresses the subject nor provides an estimate.

24. This is obviously a widely shared belief among the public that the perpetrators had the choice either to kill or to be killed. Few recent scholarly interpreters have made this assertion so baldly. For one, see Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans and the "Jawish Question" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), who says as much about the German army's cooperation in the genocide (p. 283).

25. See Saul Friedländer, History and Psychoanalysis: An Inquiry into the Possibilities and Limits of Psychohistory (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978).

26. See Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper Colophon, 1969). See also Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience: Toward A Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

27. This propensity is sometimes conceived of as having been historically formed. See Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Avon Books, 1965); and G. P. Gooch et al., The German Mind and Outlook (London: Chapman & Hall, 1945).

28. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1971). Hans Mommsen, in "The Realization of the Unthinkable," pp. 98-99, 128-129, follows related line of reasoning, as does Rainer C. Baum, The Holocaust and the German Elite: Genocide and National Suicide in Germany, 1871-1945 (Totawa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1981).

29. The most recent and most considered account of this sort is Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). Essentially, this is also Hilberg's position in The Destruction of the European Jews. Robert Jay Lifton, who has studied the German doctors at Auschwitz in The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), provides a psychoanalytic explanation for how professional healers could become killers, how otherwise decent men could perpetrate such evil. It too depends on situational factors and psychological mechanisms, and, its psychoanalytical bearing notwithstanding, falls into this category.

30. Mommsen, "The Realization of the Unthinkable"; Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung: Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1991); also Gordon, Hitler, Germans and the 'Jewish Question," p. 312.

31. This explanation is so untenable in the face of what the actual killers were doing, such as shooting defenseless people at point-blank range, that it need be mentioned only because some have seen fit to put it forward. Marrus, an exponent of this view, writes with unwarranted certitude: "As students of the Holocaust have long understood, the extensive division of labor associated with the killing process helped perpetrators diffuse their own responsibility." See The Holocaust in History, p. 47. To the (small) extent that this is true, it is a tiny part of the story and not, as Marrus appears to be contending, almost the whole of it.

32. A partial exception is the acknowledgment by Herbert Jäger, Verbrechen unter totalitärer Herrschaft: Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Gewaltkriminalität (Olton: Walter-Verlag, 1967), that some percentage of the perpetrators acted out of ideological conviction (pp. 62-64). Jager, however, does not believe that it was ideological conviction that moved most of the perpetrators (see pp. 76-78). On the whole, as the book's title, "Crimes under Totalitarian Domination," suggests, Jäger accepts the 1950s totalitarian model of Germany during the Nazi period (see pp. 186-208), employing concepts such as "totalitarian mentality" (totalitäre Geisteshaltung) (p. 186). This model—wrong in the most fundamental of ways and which continues to obscure for many the substantial freedom and pluralism that actually existed within German society—consistently misdirects Jäger's analysis, which in many ways is rich and insightful. For revisions and critiques of the totalitarian model's applicability to Germany during the Nazi period and of the general issues and debates in classifying Nazism, see Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, pp. 17-39. Hans Safrian, in the introduction to his recent study of those who worked under Adolf Eichmann to deport European Jewry to their deaths, has also called into question the historical consensus that antisemitism did not motivate the perpetrators, though he fails to develop this notion much beyond asserting it. See Die Eichmann-Männer (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1993), pp. 17-22.

33. Others have of course recognized and emphasized the importance of political ideology and antisemitism for the Nazi leadership's decision to undertake the total extermination of the Jews. For a wide-ranging discussion of this issue, see Eberhard Jäckel and Jürgen Rohwer, eds., Der Mord an den Juden im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Entschlussbildung und Verwirklichung (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1985); Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (New York: Bantam Books, 1975); Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), and Saul Friedländer's introduction to the book; and Klaus Hildebrand, The Third Reich (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984). Those who do take this position, however, either have not looked at the perpetrators or have denied that the perpetrators as a group were themselves moved by similar cognitions. Marrus, citing approvingly Hans Mommsen, speaks for the historical consensus in his historiographic The Holocaust in History: "Antisemitic indoctrination is plainly an insufficient answer, for we know [sic] that many of the officials involved in the administration of mass murder did not come to their tasks displaying intense antisemitism. In some cases, indeed, they appear to have had no history of anti-Jewish hatred and to have been coldly uninvolved with their victims" (p. 47). Erich Goldhagen is an exception to this general consensus, and although he has not published on the subject, he has emphasized in his course lectures and in our many conversations precisely the point being made here. Thus, while my claim might not sound so novel to some, it actually stands in contradiction to the existing literature.

34. For an overview of a number of cases from the recent and distant past, see Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

35. See Cecil Roth, The Spanish Inquisition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964); and Malise Ruthven, Torture: The Grand Conspiracy (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978). The Spanish in the New World were genocidally murderous towards the indigenous inhabitants, usually in the name of Jesus; see Bartolome de las Casa, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account (New York: Seabury Press, 1974).

36. See Clifford Geertz, "Common Sense as a Cultural System," in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

37. The crucial subject of how different starting assumptions bias conclusions by requiring different kinds of falsifying evidence is discussed in Chapter I. Generally speaking, the fewer data that exist on a given subject, the more prejudicial the assumptions will be. And since interpretations of the issue at hand often depend on readings of the actors' cognitions, for which the data is far from ideal, particular attention must be given to justifying the assumptions being used: incompatible assumptions about, say, the attitudes of Germans may each be "unfalsifiable"; data that allows for generalizing with confidence about large groups of Germans is often hard to come by, so most data can be deemed by someone holding a given assumption to be anecdotal and therefore not sufficient to falsify the initial assumption.

38. This is obviously hypothetical, yet thinking about it—particularly if the conclusion drawn is that boundaries did exist which the perpetrators would not have crossed—should lead to a consideration of the nature of the limits of their willingness to act.

39. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Summit Books, 1986), is one who attempts, not entirely successfully, to understand the Germans' cruelty (pp. 105-126).

40. Discussing and delimiting "cruelty" for the phenomena that collectively compose the Holocaust, or, more broadly, the Germans' persecution of European Jewry, is always difficult. The Germans' actions were so "out of this world" that they skew our frames of reference. Killing innocent people might be justly conceived of as being an act of cruelty, as would forcing people who are emaciated and debilitated to perform taxing manual labor. Still, these were ordinary—"normal" in the German context of the times—utilitarian parts of the Germans' jobs, so it makes sense to distinguish them from acts (in this context) of gratuitous cruelty, such as beating, mocking, torturing Jews or forcing them to perform senseless, debilitating labor for the sole purpose of immiserating them further.

41. Jäger, Verbrechen unter totalitärer Herrschaft, is aware of these issues, the discussion of which he pioneered in the published literature. See pp. 76-160. For another discussion of this issue, see Hans Buchheim, "Command and Compliance," in Helmut Krausnick et al., Anatomy of the SS State (London: Collins, 1968), pp. 303-396.

42. German cruelty towards Jews occurred not only during the killing operations. This is another reason why cruelty (and the other actions) are best conceptualized as variables analytically distinct from the killing itself.

43. The horror is significant for still another reason. Since Hannah Arendt, a dominant strand of interpretation has assumed or explicitly held that the perpetrators were "affectively neutral," devoid of emotion towards the Jews. All explanations which deny the importance of the identity of the victims at least potentially imply that the perpetrators' views about the victims, whatever they were, were not causally important. As if the wholesale killing of people alone were not sufficient to force the perpetrators to examine their views of their actions, having to confront the horror of their deeds would have made it virtually impossible for them to have no view of the desirability of the slaughter. The notion that the perpetrators were totally neutral towards the Jews is, I am willing to assert, a psychological impossibility. And if not neutral, then what did they think of Jews, what emotions did they bring to the mass slaughters? Whatever these cogitations and emotions were, how did they influence the perpetrators' actions? This line of thinking is meant merely to emphasize the need to investigate as thoroughly as possible the cognitions of the perpetrators, indeed their shared cognitions; for once it is admitted that they could not have been neutral towards their actions and the victims, then their thoughts and feelings must be taken seriously as sources of their actions.

44. See Max Weber, Economy and Society, eds. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 8-9.

45. Categorizing the killings and the killers is difficult. One question to ask in thinking about them is: What would an enabling order such as "Do what you can to kill Jews," which carried no sanctions and promised no rewards, have spurred each German to have done and why? Would he have sat immobile? Would he have worked towards their deaths in a perfunctory manner? Killed with efficiency? Or zealously pursued, with body and soul, the extermination of as many Jews as possible?

46. Obviously, in order to answer the questions guiding this inquiry, it is not enough to explicate the motivations of those who set policy or of those who worked at the pinnacle of the genocidal institutions. The elite's motivations and actions are, of course, important, so it is good that we know already a fair amount about many of them. For a few examples, see Waite, The Psychopathic God; Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991); Matthias Schmidt, Albert Speer: The End of a Myth (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984); and Ruth Bettina Birn, Die Höheren SS- und Polizeiführer: Himmlers Vertreter im Reich und in den besetzten Gebieten (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1986).

47. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), writes: "Structural constraint is not expressed in terms of the implacable causal forms which structural sociologists have in mind when they emphasize so strongly the association of 'structure' with 'constraint'. Structural constraints do not operate independently of the motives and reasons that agents have for what they do. They cannot be compared with the effect of, say, an earthquake which destroys a town and its inhabitants without their in any way being able to do anything about it. The only moving objects in human social relations are individual agents, who employ resources to make things happen, intentionally or otherwise. The structural properties of social systems do not act, or 'act on', anyone like forces of nature to 'compel' him or her to behave in a particular way" (pp. 180-181).

48. For an example of this kind of reasoning, see Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

49. This recommendation follows in the tradition of Weber's demand for achieving "Verstehen. See Weber, Economy and Society, pp. 4-24.

50. See Marrus, The Holocaust in History, p. 51.

51. Part of the reason that many have failed to understand the killers and the moving forces behind the Holocaust is likely that they have systematically, if not self-consciously, avoided coming to grips with the phenomenological horror of the genocidal killings. Reading most of the "explanations" reveals few gruesome scenes; when presented, they are typically followed by little analysis, the horror remaining unexplored, mute, as the discussion turns to other (often logistical) matters. When ghetto roundups and deportations, mass slaughters, and gassings are mentioned, they are frequently merely recorded as having happened. The horror of specific killing operations is not adequately conveyed, which makes it difficult to comprehend the compass of the horror for the perpetrators, the frequency of their immersion in it, and its cumulative toll on them.

Those who do take into account the horrors are the survivors and the scholars who focus on them. These people, however, have as a rule not concerned themselves with explaining the perpetrators' acts, except impressionistically and in passing. An interesting feature of scholarship on the Holocaust is how little overlap and intersec- tion there has been between those who write about the perpetrators and those who write about the victims. My work is not much of an exception in this respect.

52. Jäger, Verbrechen unter totalitärer Herrschaft, is an obvious exception to this, as is, to a lesser extent, Browning, Ordinary Men; Hermann Langbein, Menschen in Auschwitz (Frankfurt/M: Ullstein, 1980), also takes cognizance of the varieties of the perpetrators' actions.

53. Those who, like Browning in Ordinary Men, have failed to integrate their investigations adequately with the two higher levels of analysis.

Chapter 1

1. Gregor Athalwin Ziemer, Education for Death: the Making of the Nazi (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), pp. 193-194.

2. See Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1965); Jacques Soustelle, Daily Life of the Aztecs (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961), esp. pp. 96-97; and Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983).

3. See Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, vol. 1 of Freedom (New York: Basic Books, 1991).

4. Even though the various German states had not yet been politically unified, it still makes sense to speak of "Germany" when discussing many (though not all) social, cultural, and political matters, just as it is sensible to talk of "France," despite all of its regional and local variations.

5. Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria, 1933-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 370.

6. Dorothy Holland and Naomi Quinn write on this point in "Culture and Cognition," in their edited volume, Cultural Models in Language and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 3-40: "Our cultural understanding of the world is founded on many tacit assumptions. This underlying cultural knowledge is, to use Hutchins' words, 'often transparent to those who use it. Once learned, it becomes what one sees with, but seldom what one sees.' This 'referential transparency', we note in a previous section, causes cultural knowledge to go unquestioned by its bearer. At the same time, this transparency has posed an absorbing methodological problem for the analyst: how, and from what manner of evidence, to reconstruct the cultural models people use but do not often reflect on or explicitly articulate. The problem has remained central to cognitive anthropology, but approaches to it have changed" (p. 14). This statement is true both of shared cultural assumptions, which are articulated far less than their importance warrants precisely because people see no need to declaim cultural truths, as well as of the underlying cognitive models of thought, of which people are generally not aware.

7. Michael Kater, The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders, 1919-1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 263.

8. Another example might be the opinion of the ordinary English person living in England during the nineteenth century about the inferiority of Blacks and Asians. The extent of such views' expression—especially on the part of ordinary individuals—certainly grossly underrepresented the degree to which they were held. And what small portion of that which was expressed has come down to us?

9. Rom Harré, Personal Being: A Theory for Individual Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 20. "Conversation" includes all linguistic production, whether oral or written, as well as symbols (which are always linguistically framed and interpreted, and therefore dependent upon the conversation, though at the same time a part of it).

10. Roy D'Andrade, "A Folk Model of the Mind," in Holland and Quinn, eds., Cultural Models in Language and Thought, p. 112.

11. See George Lakoff and Zoltán Kövecses, "The Cognitive Model of Anger Inherent in American English," in Holland and Quinn, eds., Cultural Models in Language and Thought, pp. 195-221.

12. D'Andrade writes: The "cultural model of buying something [is] made up of the purchaser, the seller, the merchandise, the price, the sale, and the money. There are several relationships among these parts; there is the interaction between the purchaser and the seller, which involves the communication to the buyer of the price, perhaps bargaining, the offer to buy, the acceptance of sale, the transfer of ownership of the merchandise and the money, and so on. This model is needed to understand [and to partake in] not just buying, but also such cultural activities and institutions as lending, renting, leasing, gypping, salesmanship, profit making, stores, ads, and so on." See "A Folk Model of the Mind," in Holland and Quinn, eds., Cultural Models in Language and Thought, p. 112.

13. Much of Erving Goffman's work consists of uncovering the cognitive models that, unbeknownst to us, structure and smoothly lubricate our face-to-face interactions. See The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1959) and Relations in Public (New York: Harper Colophon, 1971).

14. See Naomi Quinn, "Convergent evidence for a model of american marriage," in Holland and Quinn, eds., Cultural Models in Language and Thought, pp. 173-192.

15. Alexander George's discussion of an "operational code" is a partly successful attempt to conceptualize the building blocks of perception, evaluation, beliefs, and action for politics. See "The 'Operational Code': A Neglected Approach to the Study of Political Leaders and Decision Making," International Studies Quarterly 13 (1969): pp. 190-222. Benedict Anderson's exemplary work on nationalism, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), illustrates how a new cognitive model, "the nation," was created and, once culturally shared as common sense, came to shape the ways in which people understood the social and political world.

16. John Boswell, in The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon, 1988), demonstrates this for the historically highly variable treatment of children, and indeed for the very conception of the category of child. See esp. pp. 26-27.

17. This is Harré's argument in Personal Being. See also Takeo Doi, The Anatomy of Dependence (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1973), for the radically different character of Japanese psychology and individuality.

18. This has led many to want not to look, and to create accounts of human existence which deny the domain's importance altogether. While such a position may be comforting to some, and bring solace to those wishing for parsimony and seeming methodological power by removing from consideration the most intractable of variables, it creates an artificial and invariably misleading view of the world. For all the difficulty and explanatory frustration it yields, investigating what is in people's heads remains necessary no matter what the current methodological pyrotechnics may be.

19. Kershaw, for example, in Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, makes this distinction when evaluating the German people after Kristallnacht: "People's minds were increasingly poisoned against the Jews in at least an abstract way, the conviction was spreading that there was a Jewish Question" (p. 272).

20. Or if what is meant is that it is derived not from real-life experiences with Jews, but from culturally current prejudices, nothing is changed, because the beliefs are still used as a guide in relations with Jews.

21. For the nature and consequences of stereotypes, see Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (New York: Anchor Books, 1958). The notion of "abstract" antisemitism, and the distinction between it and "real" antisemitism, in fact, captures virtually nothing about the varieties of antisemitism that exist. It only dimly reflects the knowledge that people who are antisemites can also have Jewish acquaintances and "friends," just as many people who are deeply prejudiced against Blacks can maintain that a particular Black person is not such a bad sort. Scholars who employ a category like "abstract" antisemitism are confusing analytical dimensions, or rather do not recognize that people are capable of making exceptions to general rules, and that the exceptions are, in fact, rare ones, and of only tertiary significance, because the people making the exceptions think of millions of real live Jews in the terms laid down by their "abstract" antisemitism.

22. Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, p. 274; to some extent, he is following Michael Müller-Claudius, Der Antisemitismus und das deutsche Verhängnis (Frankfurt/M: Verlag Josef Knecht, 1948), pp. 76-78. Any analytical scheme must keep the cognitive and action dimensions distinct, which Müller-Claudius fails to do.

23. For a useful discussion and alternative dimensional analysis of antisemitism, see Helen Fein, "Dimensions of Antisemitism: Attitudes, Collective Accusations, and Actions," in Helen Fein, ed., The Persisting Question: Sociological Perspectives and Social Contexts of Modern Antisemitism (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987), pp. 68-85.

24. For the history of one such image, that of the "Jewish parasite," see Alexander Bein, "Der Jüdische Parasit," VfZ 13, no. 2 (1965): pp. 121-149. For a discussion of the logic of metaphors, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

25. This, of course, has been attempted in studies of antisemitism, most notably in T. W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).

26. See Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews; Malcolm Hay, Europe and the Jews: The Pressure of Christendom over igoo Years (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1992).

27. This is the crucial distinction in antisemitism, contrary to Langmuir's contention that it is when antisemitism becomes fantasy-based. See Gavan I. Langmuir, "Toward a Definition of Antisemitism," in Fein, ed., The Persisting Question, pp. 86-127. Many antisemitisms have become embedded in fantasy, yet, among other things, they issue in different actions and consequences.

28. See Allport's classic study, The Nature of Prejudice; for theories about the nature and sources of antisemitism, see Fein, ed., The Persisting Question; and Werner Bergmann, ed., Error Without Trial: Psychological Research on Antisemitism (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988).

29. An alternative explanation would have to be that people become antisemites because of economic jealousy and then invent all the fantastical charges leveled at Jews. See, for example, Hillel Levine's study of Polish antisemitism, Economic Origins of Antisemitism: Poland and Its Jews in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). Why would this occur, and by what mechanism do "objective" economic jealousies metamorphose themselves into unrelated and wild views of Jews? The explanation would have to account for this. Why do other intergroup antipathies, even those with a large component of economic competition, not also produce the array of accusations that are routine among antisemites? I know of no explanation of antisemitism which posits objective conflict as antisemitism's source that answers, or that possesses a theoretical apparatus capable of answering, these questions.

30. For an overview of the subject, see Walter P. Zenner, "Middleman Minority Theories: a Critical Review," in Fein, ed., The Persisting Question, pp. 255-276.

31. Bernard Glassman, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes Without Jews: Images of the Jews in England, 1290-1700 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975), p. 14.

32. Glassman, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes Without Jews, in fact, emphasizes the crucial importance of Christian sermonic material in spreading and sustaining antisemitism in England.

33. For the long list of expulsions of Jews, see Paul E. Grosser and Edwin G. Halperin, Anti-Semitism: The Causes and Effects of a Prejudice (Secaucus: Citadel, 1979), pp. 33-38.

34. For a social profile of German Jewry in 1933, see Avraham Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of German Jews, 1933-1943 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989), pp. 1-2.

35. Glassman writes about England during the period of expulsion: "Since there were so few Jews in England during this period, the average Englishman was obliged to rely upon what he heard from the pulpit, saw on the stage, and absorbed from the wandering minstrel and storyteller to form his opinions. This oral tradition, which was supplemented by various tracts and pamphlets, was an important source of information about Jews, and there was virtually nothing in society to counterbalance these forces that had the weight of centuries of Christian teachings behind them" (p. 11). The next chapter puts forth the argument that this account of England is far more applicable to Germany during its Nazi period than people imagine.

36. Trachtenberg persuasively argues this in The Devil and the Jews.

37. See Allport's discussion of scapegoats in The Nature of Prejudice, pp. 235-249.

38. "Antisemitic expression" (or some equivalent) is used to indicate the expression, either verbally or through physical acts, of antisemitism. "Antisemitism" is used to describe the mere existence of antisemitic beliefs. Many people harbor antisemitism, without it being expressed over long periods of time. Often students of antisemitism confuse the two, leading them to mistake the upsurge of antisemitic expression for an upsurge of antisemitism.

39. This is not to say that through the institutional adoption of antisemitism, particularly in politics, that the beliefs and emotions that move antisemites cannot be infused with a new intensity or molded into somewhat new forms. In fact, this often happens. For such embellishments and even transformations to occur, the existing core of the antisemitic creed must already be in place. Otherwise, the appeals would fall on deaf ears.

40. In eastern Europe and especially in the former Soviet Union, where traditional antisemitic expression had generally been banned under Communism from public institutions and fora, a tidal wave of antisemitic expression welled up from the bosom of society the moment that constraints on public expression were lifted. This development has a number of striking aspects: (1) no relationship exists between the number of Jews in the country and the intensity or character of the antisemitic expression ; (2) the fantastical images of the Jews and the hallucinatory accusations directed at them bear many marked similarities to those that were current before Communism made their public expression taboo; (3) antisemitism, its articulated content and its underlying cognitive models, was thus sustained, nourished, and transmitted to new generations by the family and by the other micro-institutions of society; (4) based on its expression under Communism, little evidence suggested the pervasiveness and depth of the antisemitism in these countries that obviously existed. See, for example, Newsbreak, Newsletter of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry.

41. Many have labored to demonstrate how our framework of assumptions interprets and creates reality for us. As far as I know, no one has worked to demonstrate how this same framework can be unexpectedly and rapidly tapped in such a way as to produce a radical alteration in sensibility and attendant actions. This has happened in many outbursts of violent persecution, murderousness, and genocide. This happened to Germans. Edward O. Wilson, in On Human Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 99-120, gives an evolutionary explanation for the sudden outbursts of aggression. This, of course, even if correct for aggression, does not shed light on rapid transformations of belief systems.

42. The most notable example is probably its upsurge at the outbreak of the First World War, when many Marxists discovered that, their internationalism notwithstanding, they had intense national feelings.

43. For a treatment of the relationship between nationalism and antisemitism, see Shmuel Almog, Nationalism and Antisemitism in Modern Europe, 1815-1945 (London: Pergamon Press, 1990).

44. D'Andrade's study, "A Folk Model of the Mind," in Holland and Quinn, eds., Cultural Models in Language and Thought, concludes that the culturally shared cognitive model of the mind can reproduce itself over centuries (p. 138).

Chapter 2

1. See Robert Chazan, "Medieval Anti-Semitism," in David Berger, ed., History and Hate: The Dimensions of Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1986), pp. 53-54.

2. Bernard Glassman, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes Without Jews: Images of the Jews in England, 1290-1700 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975), p. 152. He is writing here specifically about England, where antisemitism was actually far less virulent than in the Germanic areas of central Europe.

3. For an account of the elaborate Christian demonology of the Jews and of the endless ills attributed to their doing, see Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1986); for England, see Glassman, AntiSemitic Stereotypes Without Jews, esp. pp. 153-154.

4. See Chazan, "Medieval Anti-Semitism," pp. 61-62.

5. Quoted in Jeremy Cohen, "Robert Chazan's 'Medieval Anti-Semitism': A Note on the Impact of Theology," in Berger, ed., History and Hate, p. 69.

6. Cohen writes in "Robert Chazan's 'Medieval Anti-Semitism' ": "From the earliest generations of the Catholic Church, Christian clergymen deemed it a religious duty to polemicise against the Jews. Where the latter posed little or no immediate threat to the Church, or even in the complete absence of Jews, the Adversus Judaeos tradition continued to flourish; for the logic of early Christian history dictated the affirmation of Christianity in terms of the negation of Judaism" (pp. 68-69).

7. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, p. 79; and Chazan, "Medieval AntiSemitism," p. 50.

8. James Parkes, Antisemitism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), p. 60; see also Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 155; and Glassman, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes Without Jews, p. 153.

9. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, traces through the centuries central Christian images of Jews, each of which depended on this underlying cognitive model; see esp. pp. 32-43, 124-139, 191-192.

10. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews.

11. Quoted in Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, p. 18.

12. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, p. 186. For Luther's antisemitism, see Martin Luther, Von den Jueden und Iren Luegen, in Luthers Kampfschriften gegen das Judentum, ed. Walther Linden (Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1936).

13. Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, p. 245. Trachtenberg writes: "Little wonder, too, that Jews were accused of the foulest crimes, since Satan was their instigator. Chaucer, in his 'Prioresses Tale,' placed the ultimate blame for the alleged slaughter of a Christian child by a Jew upon 'our firste fo, the Serpent Sathanas, that hath in Iewes herte his waspes nest.' ... Everyone knew that the devil and the Jews worked together. This explains why it was so easy to condemn the Jews a priori for every conceivable misdeed, even if it made no sense" (The Devil and the Jews, pp. 42-43).

14. Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, p. 245; for a compilation of European antisemitic violence and expulsions, see Paul E. Grosser and Edwin G. Halperin, AntiSemitism: The Causes and Effects of a Prejudice (Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1979).

15. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, p. 12.

16. Malcolm Hay, Europe and the Jews: The Pressure of Christendom over 1900 Years (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1992), pp. 68-87.

17. My treatment of antisemitism focuses on its central tendencies. It does not present all of the qualifications, nuances, and exceptions that a longer discussion would. For reasons of space, it also does not engage the debates within the literature about the nature of nineteenth-century German antisemitism. Even among the works cited for substantiation, many disagreements exist. My understanding of nineteenth-century antisemitism, because it is informed by my theoretical and methodological positions, emphasizes the underlying continuity of German antisemitism, and asserts its ubiquity, more than any other accounts that I know, with the possible exception of Klemens Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps als soziale Norm durch die bürgerliche Gesellschaft Deutschlands (1875-1900)" (Ph.D. diss., Ruprecht-Karl-Universität, Heidelberg, 1963), on which I draw liberally; Rainer Erb and Werner Bergmann, Die Nachtseite Der Judenemanzipation: Der Widerstand gegen die Integration der Juden in Deutschland, 1780-1860 (Berlin: Metropol, 1989), esp. p. 11; and Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), who, perhaps because his analysis is primarily restricted to a small number of intellectuals and writers, has a different understanding of the nature of the continuity, which, like the rest of his account of German antisemitism, is not grounded in an analysis of the beliefs of other strata and groups in German society

18. Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," pp. 18-19.

19. See Eleonore Sterling, Judenhass: Die Anfänge des politischen Antisemitismus in Deutschland (1815-1850) (Frankfurt/M: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1969), pp. 117 and 126, and on liberals' use of the term, pp. 86-87; and Erb and Bergmann, Die Nachtseite Der Judenemanzipation, pp. 48-52. For the history of the concept of race, see Werner Conze, "Rasse," in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache Deutschland, eds. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Rein-hart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), vol. 5, pp. 135-178.

20. See Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 148-49; and David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 22-23.

21. Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, pp. 149-151.

22. Quoted in Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, p. 150.

23. Katz concludes: "The alienness of the Jews is a recurrent theme in anti-Jewish polemics." See From Prejudice to Destruction, p. 8 7.

24. Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," pp. 19-20. Rose makes a similar point, though he understands Germans to have conceived of the Jews as both the "symbol of everything that obstructs redemption" and the "actual practical obstacles to that redemption." See Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner, p. 57.

25. Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps"; Sterling, Judenhass; and Nicoline Hortzitz, "Früh-Antisemitismus" in Deutschland (1789-1871/72): Strukturelle Untersuchungen zu Wortschatz, Text und Argumentation (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1988), all make this point repeatedly.

26. This was Württemberg; Baden followed in 1809, Frankfurt in 1811, Prussia in 1812, and Mecklenburg, in a limited fashion, in 1813. See Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840, p. 29. For a general account of the course of the Jews' emancipation, and how many of the initial emancipatory provisions were later voided, see Werner E. Mosse, "From 'Schutzjuden' to 'Deutsche Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens': The Long and Bumpy Road of Jewish Emancipation in Germany," in Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson, eds., Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 59-93; and Reinhard Rürup, "The Tortuous and Thorny Path to Legal Equality: 'Jew Laws' and Emancipatory Legislation in Germany from the Late Eighteenth Century," Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 31 (1986): pp. 3-33.

27. For Bavaria, see James F. Harris, The People Speak! Anti-Semitism and Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Bavaria (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); for Baden, see Dagmar Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). For an account of the Hep Hep anti-Jewish riots of Würzburg, Frankfurt, and Hamburg, among other places, see Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, pp. 92-104.

28. See Shmuel Almog, Nationalism and Antisemitism in Modern Europe, 1815-1945 (London: Pergamon Press, 1990), pp. 13-16; and Peter G. J. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1964), pp. 226-233.

29. See Sterling, Judenhass, pp. 105-129; Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, pp. 51-104; and Hortzitz, "Fruh-Antisemitismus" in Deutschland.

30. Christian Wilhelm Dohm, Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (Berlin: Friedrich Nicolai, 1781).

31. Quoted in Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry , 1780-1840, p. 25.

32. Quoted in Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840, p. 25. In a similar vein, a paean to Joseph II's Austrian Edict of Toleration, which, while maintaining a strict conceptual and legal division between Jews and non-Jews, did remove important disabilities, praised Joseph II: "You make of the Jew a human being..." See Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner, pp. 77-79.

33. Quoted in Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840, pp. 30-31.

34. In practice, emancipation proceeded piecemeal in all of the German states, with some granting more rights to the Jews than others, and some later rescinding rights granted during the initial emancipation by the French. Thus, even after the Jews were "emancipated," legally, politically, and socially, they continued to be set off from other Germans as different and inferior. The cultural prejudices continued to be codified in law and practice. See Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840, p. 36.

35. Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840, p. 23; see also Erb and Bergmann, Die Nachtseite Der Judenemanzipation, for a discussion of the "dark side" of emancipation and the arguments that undergirded it (pp. 27-28 and the next three chapters). For a discussion of the reasons of state—derived from Enlightenment notions of the state, modernity, and citizenship—that led different German states to emancipate Jews (even despite their own ministers' acceptance of the prevailing cultural cognitive model about Jews as fundamentally and disagreeably "alien"), see Mosse, "From 'Schutzjuden' to 'Deutsche Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens,' " pp. 68-71, 84-87.

36. See Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1876-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 295-298.

37. Rose writes: "The particular danger of many German "pro-Jewish" writings lies in the fact that their virtues are often only the manifest aspect of a general system of argument, of which unseen vices are an integral part. When Dohm set out so laudably his argument for Jewish rights, he did so in terms that implicitly accepted deep-seated German perceptions of Jewish 'alienness.' " See Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner, p. 77.

38. This follows closely a paragraph in Sterling, Judenhass, p. 85. At the beginning of the 1840s, a German newspaper summed up the promise of emancipation, the "liberal" vision of a modern Jewry: Through emancipation, "Jewry would perish" and the "very essence of Jewry would be shattered and the ground in which their religion is rooted removed; it will thus wither of itself and the synagogues will turn into Christian prayer houses."

39. Sterling, Judenhass, pp. 85-86; see also Alfred D. Low, Jews in the Eyes of Germans: From the Enlightenment to Imperial Germany (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1979), pp. 246-247.

40. Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," pp. 109-112; and Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, pp. 257-259, 267-268.

41. Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany, p. 296.

42. Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," p. 39; and Sterling, Judenhass, pp. 68-87, 117, 126.

43. The material in the last two paragraphs is based on Sterling, Judenhass, pp. 143-144, 148-156, 161.

44. See Mosse, "From 'Schutzjuden' to 'Deutsche Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens,' " pp. 68-71.

45. For Christians' views of Jews, see Sterling, Judenhass, pp. 48-66.

46. For artisans, see Shulamit Volkov, The Rise of Popular Antimodernism in Germany: The Urban Master Artisans, 1813-1896 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), esp. pp. 215-229.

47. Sterling, Judenhass, p. 146.

48. Low concludes his study on German antisemitism, which concentrates mainly on the views of the political elite, intellectuals, and writers, with a devastating evaluation of its ubiquity in German society, observing that few Germans avoided "some extended anti-Semitic phase and many... never escaped its grip.... Numerous Germans remained for life prisoners of their prejudicial notions; others overcame them to some extent; few liberated themselves completely." See Jews in the Eyes of the Germans, pp. 413-414.

49. Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, p. 176.

50. Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," pp. 34-35; and Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, pp. 2-3.

51. For a discussion of the petition campaign, see Harris, The People Speak!, pp. 123-149, especially 123-126. Sterling points out that the value of the petitions as a guide to the views of Bavarians regarding Jewish rights was contested at the time by supporters of Jewish rights, who asserted that pro-rights petitions had been confiscated by the local authorities. The investigation by the Bavarian government concluded that not all regions or people in Bavaria were against Jewish rights, that many were indeed indifferent, unless their passions were inflamed by priests and other anti-Jewish agitators (Judenhass, pp. 160-162). The conclusion of the investigation, even though it held that the populace was not uniformly, poisonously antisemitic, indicates how antisemitic Bavarians were, precisely because agitators could so easily induce them to antisemitic expression.

52. Harris, The People Speak!, p. 166.

53. Harris, The People Speak!, p. 169.

54. Harris, The People Speak!, pp. 128, 132-137, 142.

55. Harris, The People Speak!, p. 142.

56. Harris, The People Speak!, p. 137.

57. Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, p. 268. In addition to general anti-Jewish movements, Germans mounted many campaigns to outlaw various Jewish practices, most notably shchitah, the ritual slaughtering of animals that is necessary for meat to be kosher. Campaigns against practices considered fundamental to (Orthodox) Jewish existence were symbolic attacks on Jews themselves; they declared that foundational features of Judaism and Jewish life violated morality by putatively causing animals to suffer needlessly. See Isaac Lewin, Michael Munk, and Jeremiah Berman, Religious Freedom: The Right to Practice Shchitah (New York: Research Institute for Post-War Problems of Religious Jewry, 1946).

58. In 1871, 512,000 Jews lived in the German Empire, composing 1.25 percent of the population. By 1910, the number of Jews had risen to 615,000, yet the Jewish portion of the by then more populous Germany had dropped to below 1 percent. See Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, p. 9.

59. Quoted in Hortzitz, "Früh-Antisemitismus" in Deutschland, p. 61.

60. Sterling, Judenhass, p. 51. The rendering of this "problem" in cosmological proportions followed from the threat which Germans saw the Jews to be posing to the moral order of society, an order which, to the Christian-minded, was bound up in the natural order, thereby making the threat one of global proportions.

61. Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," p. 20.

62. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, p. 71. The culturally borne notion that the Jews use Christian blood for ritual practices has an impressive pedigree dating back to the middle ages. See R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

63. See, for examples, Sterling, Judenhass, pp. 144-145; and Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," p. 44.

64. Sterling, Judenhass, p. 146.

65. Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," p. 38.

66. See Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," pp. 35-36, 47-71.

67. Quoted in Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, p. 150.

68. For an analysis of the changes, see Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps"; Hortztiz, "Früh-Antisemitismus" in Deutschland ; and Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction.

69. This is based on, among other sources, a reading of the material in Hortzitz, "Früh-Antisemitismus" in Deutschland; a particularly instructive expression of the anti-emancipationist sentiment was made by a Baden priest in the 1830s, who said that he would rather have cholera come to his community than the emancipation of Jews to his home (Erb and Bergmann, Die Nachtseite Der Judenemanzipation, p. 193).

70. Germans' conception of Jews as a "nation" with a specific, noxious "national character" is at the core of Rose's argument in Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner about the continuity and nature of modern German antisemitism (see esp. pp. 3-22). Rose, however, understands the predominance of this conception of the Jews as having become the core of German antisemitism before the time of the Jews' emancipation, without any fundamental subsequent alteration in the nineteenth century save the grafting onto it of the pseudo-scientific conception of race.

71. Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," p. 41.

72. Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," p. 71.

73. Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, p. 8.

74. Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840, p. 28; and Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner, pp. 12-14.

75. Sterling, Judenhass, p. 126. See also Erb and Bergmann, Die Nachtseite Der Judenemanzipation, pp. 48-52. They write that at this time, "in the popular press, a 'racism before racism' was present" (p. 50 ).

76. Quoted in Sterling, Judenhass, p. 120.

77. See Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," p. 34, on this point.

78. Steven Aschheim writes, "... the historical image of the Jew had never died in Germany and was available for exploitation in appropriate structural crises. Onto the traditional fear and distrust of the Talmud and ghetto Jew was grafted the notion of the modern Jew, characterless and destructive in intent." See Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), p. 78.

79. See Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, p. 50.

80. Pulzer succinctly, if imprecisely, captures the relationship between what he calls "pre-liberal, backward-looking" and "post-liberal mass-based" antisemitism: "The audience's vague and irrational image of the Jew as the enemy probably did not change much when the orators stopped talking about 'Christ-slayers' and began talking about the laws of blood. The difference lay in the effect achieved. It enabled antiSemitism to be more elemental and uncompromising. Its logical conclusion was to substitute the gas chamber for the pogrom." See The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, p. 70.

81. For an account of the charges, see Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," pp. 47-70.

82. Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," p. 51. The emphasis on the physiological, racial basis of the Jews' Jewishness became ever more pronounced in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Pictorial depictions of Jews regularly presented them in sinister and demonic forms. See, for example, Eduard Fuchs, Die Juden in der Karikatur (Munich: Albert Langen, 1921).

83. Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," p. 66.

84. Quoted in Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," p. 51.

85. See Sterling, Judenhass, pp. 113-114, 128-129.

86. Tal writes that "racial anti-Semitism and traditional Christianity, although starting from opposite poles and with no discernible principle of reconciliation, were moved by a common impulse directed either to the conversion or to the extermination of Jews." See Christians and Jews in Germany, p. 304. For a discussion of the relationship of various proposals for ridding Germany of Jews, see Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner, pp. 35-39.

87. Quoted in Sterling, Judenhass, p. 121.

88. Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," p. 68.

89. Quoted in Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, p. 50.

90. Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," p. 69. Here he is paraphrasing a number of different writers.

91. See the table that is the final (unnumbered) page of Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps." The following analysis of his data is my own.

92. To be sure, the eliminationist mind-set was capable of, and did consider, various courses of action. Eliminationist beliefs, like most others, are multipotential, the courses chosen depending on a host of other cognitive and non-cognitive factors. Here I merely wish to establish that the beliefs themselves—prior to and obviously independent of the Nazi state—tended strongly towards a genocidal "solution." For more instances, see Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," pp. 150-151; Hortzitz, "Früh-Antisemitismus" in Deutschland, p. 283; and Sterling, Judenhass, pp. 113-114.

93. Erb and Bergmann, Die Nachtseite Der Judenemanzipation, pp. 26-27.

94. Deutsche Parteiprogramme, ed. Wilhelm Mommsen (Munich: Isar Verlag, 1960), vol. 1, p. 84.

95. Mosse, in "From 'Schutzjuden' to 'Deutsche Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens,' " writes that during the 1880s and 1890s, "there can be little doubt that without [the state's] neutrality and [its] maintenance of law and order, where necessary by force, a wave of pogroms would have swept Germany with incalculable results" (p. 90). For a vivid account of a man bursting to assault Jews physically, but who was restrained by the limits imposed by the state, see Erich Goldhagen, "The Mad Count: A Forgotten Portent of the Holocaust," Midstream 22, no. 2 (Feb. 1976). Goldhagen writes: "Mere words, however, did not satisfy the Count—he thirsted for action. But the pleasure of striking at Jews physically was denied to him by the Imperial Government which, while condoning barking against Jews, would not tolerate the beating of them. Count Pueckler, therefore, chose to vent his passions through make-believe gestures. At the head of a troop of mounted peasants, whom he had especially arrayed for these occasions, and to the fanfare of trumpets, he would lead cavalry charges against imaginary Jews, striking them down and trampling them under foot. It was a spectacle affording a psychic equivalent for murder. It was also a remarkable prefigurement of the Final Solution" (pp. 61-62).

96. Werner Jochmann, "Structure and Functions of German Anti-Semitism, 1878-1914," in Herbert A. Strauss, ed., Hostages of Modernization: Studies on Modern Antisemitism, 1870-1933/39 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), pp. 52-53.

97. See Hans Rosenberg, "Anti-Semitism and the 'Great Depression,' 1873-1896," in Strauss, ed., Hostages of Modernization, p. 24.

98. Jochmann, "Structure and Functions of German Anti-Semitism," pp. 54-55 and 58.

99. Quoted in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, "Anti-Semitism and Minority Policy," in Strauss, ed., Hostages of Modernization, p. 30.

100. See Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848-1933 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), pp. 44-66.

101. Jochmann, "Structure and Functions of German Anti-Semitism," p. 48.

102. See George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), pp. 88-107.

103. Jochmann, "Structure and Functions of German Anti-Semitism," p. 58.

104. Wehler, "Anti-Semitism and Minority Policy," p. 30.

105. Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," p. 85.

106. See Pulzer, Jews and the German State, pp. 148-167.

107. By 1890, both the National Liberal Party and the Center Party were including antisemitic appeals in their political campaigns. Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps," p. 46.

108. The Erfurt Program of Böckel's Anti-Semitic People's Party began with an unequivocal declaration of its identity and central aspiration: "The Anti-Semite Party... aims at the repeal, by legal means, of Jewish emancipation, the placing of Jews under an Aliens' Law, and the creation of healthy social legislation." (For the Party's eighteen-point program, see Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, pp. 339-340).

109. Quoted in Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, p. 119.

110. Quoted in Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, p. 120.

111. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, pp. 121, 123. Of course, the Conservative Party stood for many other things, yet antisemitism in Germany was symbolically and conceptually intertwined with many other aspects of politics, including nationalism.

112. For a discussion of these issues, see Pulzer, The Rise of Political AntiSemitism, pp. 194-197. He points out that even the liberal parties, while not avowedly racist, had quietly come to accept antisemitism because, if nothing else, they realized that many of their supporters were antisemites (pp. 194-195).

113. Pulzer writes: "Insofar as they had impregnated wide sections of the population with anti-Semitic ideas, the anti-Semitic parties had not only succeeded in their object but worked themselves out of a job." See The Rise of Political AntiSemitism, p. 290.

114. This subject is discussed in Chapter 16. See Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, for a comparative treatment of the development of antisemitism in a number of European regions.

115. Erb and Bergmann, Die Nachtseite Der Judenemanzipation, agree that almost all Germans during the period of their study (1780-1860) to a greater or lesser degree held the "shared conviction in the perniciousness of the Jews" and that the exterminatory calls grew out of this common cultural model (p. 196).

116. Rosenberg, "Anti-Semitism and the 'Great Depression,' " pp. 19-20.

117. See Low, Jews in the Eyes of the Germans, for rich material from written expressions of antisemitism; for pictorial depictions of Jews, see Fuchs, Die Juden in der Karikatur.

118. Werner Mosse, "From 'Schutzjuden' to 'Deutsche Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens,' " writes: "In fact, during the decades that followed [emancipation] it became axiomatic—and not without justification—that the bulk of the population, particularly in rural areas where most Jews resided, disliked them and was hostile to their further emancipation" (p. 72 ).

Chapter 3

1. Klemens Felden, "Die Uebernahme des antisemitischen Stereotyps als soziale Norm durch die bürgerliche Gesellschaft Deutschlands (1875-1900)" (Ph.D. diss., Ruprecht-Karl-Universität, Heidelberg, 1963), p. 47.

2. See Werner Jochmann, "Die Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus in Deutschland, 1914-1923," in Gesellschaftskrise und Judenfeindschaft in Deutschland, 1870-1945 (Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1988), p. 99. Alex Bein, The Jewish Question: Biography of a World Problem (New York: Herzl Press, 1990), dates the upsurge in the use of the concept "Jewish Problem" to around 1880: "In the large number of writings that appeared at that time, the concept 'Jewish Question' was again primarily used by foes of the Jews, to whom the existence of the Jews and their conduct appeared at least problematic and perhaps even dangerous" (p. 20).

3. Jews' linguistic usage was also constrained by the cognitive and linguistic models of the day, so they too were compelled to include "Judenfrage" in their social lexicon as well as their printed one. "The Jewish Lexicon" of 1929 defined "Judenfrage" as "the totality of the problems arising out of the coexistence of the Jews with other peoples." This idiosyncratic, neutral definition denies the Jews' responsibility for the "problems" that the term's cognitive model ascribed to them. Even if the editors of this lexicon would not acknowledge and codify the true meaning of the term, when Jews heard or read the term, they, as members of this society, undoubtedly understood its full implication. See Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz, "Aus ein ander setzungen mit einem Stereotyp: Die Judenfrage im Leben Martin Niemöllers," in Ursula Büttner, ed., Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich (Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1992), p. 293. On the use of the term "Jewish Problem" by Germans and Jews, see Bein, The Jewish Question, pp. 18-21.

4. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Germans began to focus on the eastern European Jews who were living in Germany as revealing the essence of Jewishness. Steven Aschheim writes in Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982): "While the caftan Jew embodied a mysterious past, the cravat Jew symbolized a frightening present" (p. 76). "Race," in their minds, linked the eastern Jews to the German Jews. Thus, the eastern Jews "served as a constant reminder of the mysterious and brooding ghetto presence" and were seen by the antisemites as the "living embodiment of a fundamentally alien, even hostile, culture" (pp. 58-59), reinforcing the Germans' cultural cognitive model about Jews.

5. Peter G. J. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1964), p. 288. In keeping with the usage here, "Jewish Problem" has been substituted for "Jewish Question," which appears in the translation quoted.

6. See Jochmann's treatment of Germans' attacks on German Jews during the war in "Die Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus in Deutschland, 1914-1923," pp. 101-117; and Saul Friedländer, "Political Transformations During the War and Their Effect on the Jewish Question," in Herbert A. Strauss, ed., Hostages of Modernization: Studies on Modern Antisemitism 1870-1933/39 (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), pp. 150-164. The attacks were so vicious, their themes becoming cultural truisms during Weimar, that the Jewish community believed itself compelled to respond with statistical proof that belied the antisemitic charges. See Jacob Segall, Die deutschen Juden als Soldaten im Kriege, 1914-1918: Eine statistische Studie (Berlin: Philo-Verlag, 1921).

7. Quoted in Jochmann, "Die Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus in Deutschland, 1914-1923," p. 101.

8. Quoted in Uwe Lohalm, "Völkisch Origins of Early Nazism: Anti-Semitism in Culture and Politics," in Strauss, ed., Hostages of Modernization, pp. 178, 192.

9. Lohalm, "Völkisch Origins of Early Nazism," pp. 185-186.

10. The material in this paragraph is drawn from Lohalm, "Völkisch Origins of Early Nazism," pp. 186-189.

11. Heinrich August Winkler, "Anti-Semitism in Weimar Society," in Strauss, ed., Hostages of Modernization, pp. 201-202.

12. Quoted in Robert Craft, "Jews and Geniuses," New York Review of Books 36, no. 2 (Feb. 16, 1989): p. 36. In 1929, Einstein attested, "when I came to Germany [from Zurich] fifteen years ago, I discovered for the first time that I was a Jew. I owe this discovery more to gentiles than to Jews."

13. Quoted in Lohalm, "Völkisch Origins of Early Nazism," p. 192.

14. Jochmann, "Die Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus in Deutschland, 1914-1923," p. 167. The essay is a devastating assessment of the ubiquitousness of antisemitism throughout German society during Weimar.

15. Michael Kater, "Everyday Anti-Semitism in Prewar Nazi Germany: The Popular Bases," YVS 16 (1984): pp. 129-159, 133-134.

16. See Winkler, "Anti-Semitism in Weimar Society," pp. 196-198. The exception to this was the politically insignificant liberal German People's Party. Even the SPD did little to attack the Nazis' antisemitism. See Donna Harsch, German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), p. 70.

17. Franz Böhm, "Antisemitismus" (lecture of Mar. 12, 1958), cited in Werner Jochmann, "Antisemitismus und Untergang der Weimarer Republik," in Gesellschaftskrise und Judenfeindschaft in Deutschland, 1870-1945, p. 193.

18. Max Warburg, letter to Heinrich v. Gleichen of May 28, 1931, quoted in Jochmann, "Antisemitismus und Untergang der Weimarer Republik," p. 192.

19. The Nazi Party program is reproduced in Nazism, pp. 14-16.

20. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), p. 651.

21. Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 679.

22. It is hard to know, in the mix of the many factors that drew so many Germans to the Nazis, how important the Nazis' antisemitism was for their final electoral success. For analyses of Nazi electoral support, see Jürgen W. Falter, Hitlers Wähler (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1991); Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919-1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983; and Richard F. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). While the most powerful proximate causes for the turn to the Nazis were undoubtedly the pressing, spectacular issues of the day—the economic depression, the political chaos, and the institutional breakdown of Weimar—there is no doubt that Hitler's virulent, lethal-sounding antisemitism did not at the very least deter Germans by the millions from throwing their support to him.

23. For election results, see Falter, Hitlers Wähler, pp. 31, 36.

24. A number of general analyses of German antisemitism and attitudes towards the persecution of the Jews exist. Naturally, they do not all agree with one another or with the conclusions presented here. The most important secondary analysis is David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). It contains far greater empirical support for my positions than space permits me to offer here, and indeed puts forward aspects of the argument that I am making here, though significant differences remain between Bankier's understanding and mine. The absence from the book, for example, of a theoretical or analytical account of antisemitism or a more general discussion of the nature of cognition, beliefs, and ideologies and their relation to action leads Bankier to interpret the evidence in ways that can be contested. For a sample of the existing literature, see the many publications of Ian Kershaw, including "Antisemitismus und Volksmeinung: Reaktionen auf die Judenverfolgung," in Martin Broszat and Elke Fröhlich, eds., Bayern in der NS-Zeit (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1989), vol. 2, pp. 281-348; Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria, 1933-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), chaps. 6, 9; "German popular opinion and the 'Jewish Question,' 1939-1943: Some Further Reflections," in Arnold Paucker, ed., Die Juden im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland: The Jews in Nazi Germany, 1933-1943 (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1986), pp. 365-386; see also Otto Dov Kulka and Aron Rodrigue, "The German Population and the Jews in the Third Reich: Recent Publications and Trends in Research on German Society and the 'Jewish Question,' " YVS 16 (1984): pp. 421-435; Kater, "Everyday Anti-Semitism in Prewar Nazi Germany"; and Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Two published documentary sources which are repeatedly used in many of these studies are Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Sopade), 1934-1940, vols. 1-7 (Salzhausen: Verlag Petra Nettelbeck and Frankfurt/M: Zweitausendeins, 1980) (hereafter cited as Sopade); and Meldungen aus dem Reich, 1938-1945: Die geheimen Lageberichte des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS, ed. Heinz Boberach, vols. 1-17 (Herrsching: Pawlak Verlag, 198 4).

25. Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered: A Dossier of My Former Self (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1964), pp. 40-41.

26. Investigating the practically limitless examples of the quality and obsessiveness of the Nazis' racist antisemitism can begin with Hitler's Mein Kampf, see also the prominent Nazi theoretician Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hohelichen Verlag, 1944); for a more popular account, see Hans Günther, Die Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Munich: Lehmann Verlag, 1935). See also the vicious, lurid, racial antisemitism of Julius Streicher's newspaper, Der Stürmer, which at its greatest appeal had a circulation of 800,000, and a readership many times that number; the official Nazi Party newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, was also replete with racial antisemitism. For secondary analyses, see Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler's World View: A Blueprint for Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); and Erich Goldhagen, "Obsession and Realpolitik in the 'Final Solution,' " Patterns of Prejudice 12, no. 1 (1978): pp. 1-16. William L. Combs, The Voice of the SS: A History of the SS Journal "Das Schwarze Korps" (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), chronicles the virulent, unrelenting antisemitism of the official organ of the movement's praetorian guard.

27. For a discussion of "social death," see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), esp. pp. 1-14. The "social death" of Jews in Germany during the Nazi period is discussed in Chapter 5.

28. For an account of the assaults of these initial months, see Rudolf Diels, Lucifer Ante Portas: Zwischen Severing und Heydrich (Zurich: Interverlag, n.d.).

29. This national boycott had been preceded at the beginning of March by local boycotts in at least twelve German cities. See Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society, p. 102.

30. Why I Left Germany, by a German Jewish Scientist (London: M. M. Dent & Sons, 1934), pp. 132-133. The author, who was able to read the writing on the wall, fled Germany in 1933. The atmosphere of virtually universal hatred for the Jews left him no hope that conditions for the Jews would improve or even stabilize. Afterwards, he ruminates on how widely shared the moral and actual culpability for the anti-Jewish atmosphere and policies ought to be spread. " 'Are the people as a whole responsible for every crime committed in their name?' I asked myself. A voice within me answered: 'In this case the entire nation is responsible for a government it has brought into power, and which, in a full knowledge of what is happening, the people cheer loudly whenever an act of violence or an injustice has been committed' " (p. 182).

31. Avraham Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of German Jews, 1933-1943 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989), p. 17.

32. For a general account of this, see Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: New Viewpoints, 1973), pp. 43-105; and Reinhard Rürup, "Das Ende der Emanzipation: die antijüdische Politik in Deutschland von der 'Machtergreifung' bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg," in Paucker, ed., Die Juden im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland, pp. 97-114; for the economic exclusion and strangulation of the Jews, see Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation; for the medical profession, see Michael Kater, Doctors Under Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 177-221.

33. Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, p. 68; Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, pp. 56-57.

34. Bankier writes: "Although in general the public recognized the necessity for some solution to the Jewish problem, large sectors found the form of persecution abhorrent." See The Germans and the Final Solution, p. 68.

35. Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, pp. 69-70.

36. Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, pp. 142-143.

37. Cited in Fritz Stern, Dreams and Delusions: National Socialism in the Drama of the German Past (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), p. 180.

38. For a listing of the many legal prohibitions and restrictions under which Germans compelled the Jews of Germany to live, see Joseph Walk, ed., Das Sonderrecht für die Juden im NS-Staat: Eine Sammlung der gesetzlichen Massnahmen und Richtlinien—Inhalt und Bedeutung (Heidelberg: C. F. Müller Juristischer Verlag, 1981).

39. Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society, p. 105.

40. Kater, "Everyday Anti-Semitism in Prewar Nazi Germany," p. 145.

41. Marvin Lowenthal, The Jews of Germany: A Story of Sixteen Centuries (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1938), p. 411.

42. This characterization is from a Würzburg Jew's 1934 letter of complaint. Quoted in Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society, p. 105.

43. Why I Left Germany, by a German Jewish Scientist, p. 82.

44. For an account of many of the events described in this paragraph, see Kater, "Everyday Anti-Semitism in Prewar Nazi Germany," pp. 142-150.

45. Quoted in Kater, "Everyday Anti-Semitism in Prewar Nazi Germany," pp. 144-145.

46. Konrad Kwiet and Helmut Eschwege, Selbstbehauptung und Widerstand: Deutsche Juden im Kampf um Existenz und Menschenwuerde, 1933-1945 (Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1984), ^p. 44.

47. Gellately describes the similar effects of similar violence in Franconia, concluding that the Jews in Germany "left the country, especially the rural areas, primarily out of a fear of violence to their persons or property. News of a beating, arrest, or damage to property travels fast in the rural and small-town milieu." See The Gestapo and German Society, p. 103.

48. This account follows closely Herbert Schultheis, Die Reichskristallnacht in Deutschland: Nach Augenzeugenberichten (Bad Neustadt a.d. Saale: Rotter Druck und Verlag, 1986), pp. 158-159. For a similar story of yet another town, Ober-Seemen, see pp. 159-160.

49. Wolf-Arno Kropat, Kristallnacht in Hessen: Der Judenpogrom vom November 1938 (Wiesbaden: Kommission fur die Geschichte der Juden in Hessen, 1988), p. 245.

50. See Kater, "Everyday Anti-Semitism in Prewar Nazi Germany," p. 148, on this point.

51. These violent urges, however, had specific targets, not merely randomly selected ones. An SA song, frequently sung, expressed the murderous wishes which the SA men harbored for Jews:

When Jewish blood spurts from the knife
All is fine and dandy
Blood must flow thick as hail.

Could anyone in this institution or anyone who only heard this or other blood-thirsty Nazi songs have doubted that these were people, that this was a movement that meant lethal business? How could someone have supported such a movement without sharing the Nazified understanding of the nature of Jews?

52. Kater, "Everyday Anti-Semitism in Prewar Nazi Germany," p. 142.

53. Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society, p. 109.

54. For an account of the barring of Jews from bathing facilities, see Kater, "Everyday Anti-Semitism in Prewar Nazi Germany," pp. 156-158; see also Nazism, p. 531, for a Bavarian police report about one spontaneous demonstration in 1935 by German bathers demanding that Jews be banished from their pool.

55. This is Kater's conclusion, "Everyday Anti-Semitism in Prewar Nazi Germany," p. 154.

56. Kater, "Everyday Anti-Semitism in Prewar Nazi Germany," pp. 150-154, and Doctors under Hitler, pp. 177-221.

57. See, for example, Arye Carmon, "The Impact of Nazi Racial Decrees on the University of Heidelberg," YVS 11 (1976), pp. 131-163.

58. Quoted in The Jews in Nazi Germany: A Handbook of Facts Regarding Their Present Situation (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1935), pp. 52-53.

59. See Ingo Müller, Hitler's Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 92.

60. Müller's book, Hitler's Justice, provides ample evidence in support of this view. Many judges also clearly shared the more general racial biologism that was widespread in Germany, which led them to support the Nazis' lethal eugenics policies (pp. 120-125).

61. Otto Dov Kulka, "Die Nürnberger Rassengesetze und die deutsche Bevölkerung im Lichte geheimer NS-Lage- und Stimmungsberichte," VfZ 32 (1984), p. 623.

62. For the text of these laws, see Nazism, pp. 535-537. For discussions of the Nuremberg Laws and of Germans' attempts to define a Jew more generally, see Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, pp. 43-53; and Lothar Gruchmann, " 'Blutschutzgesetz' und Justiz: Zur Entstehung und Auswirkung des Nürnberger Gesetzes vom 15. September 1935," VfZ 31 (1983): pp. 418-442.

63. Quoted in Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society, pp. 109-110; see also pp. 108-111. Gellately notes that although some middle-class people thought the laws to be somewhat extreme, by and large they received them quite favorably. For a fuller discussion of Germans' reactions, see Kulka, "Die Nürnberger Rassengesetze und die deutsche Bevölkerung im Lichte geheimer NS-Lage- und Stimmungsberichte," pp. 582-624.

64. Klaus Mlynek, ed., Gestapo Hannover meldet ...: Polizei- und Regierungsberichte für das mittlere und südliche Niedersachsen zwischen 1933 und 1937 (Hildesheim: Verlag August Lax, 1986), p. 524. This report was prompted by the people's rage following the killing of a Swiss Nazi leader by a Jew.

65. Sopade, July 1938, A76.

66. Sopade, July 1938, A78.

67. Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, pp. 83-85.

68. See Walter H. Pehle, ed., November 1938: From "Reichskristallnacht" to Genocide (New York: Berg Publishers, 1991), especially the essays by Wolfgang Benz, Trude Maurer, and Uwe Dietrich Adam; for a regional study, see Kropat, Kristallnacht in Hessen.

69. Avraham Barkai, "The Fateful Year 1938: The Continuation and Acceleration of Plunder," in Pehle, ed., November 1938, pp. 116-117.

70. Kropat, Kristallnacht in Hessen, p. 18 7.

71. Kropat, Kristallnacht in Hessen, p. 66-74, 243-244.

72. Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, p. 86. One Communist underground leaflet explained: "Catholics were horrified to see that the burning of synagogues was frighteningly similar to the attacks of the Hitler gangs against the bishops' manses in Rothenburg, Vienna, and Munich."

73. Kropat, Kristallnacht in Hessen, p. 243.

74. Bernt Engelmann, In Hitler's Germany: Everyday Life in the Third Reich (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), p. 138.

75. Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, pp. 267-271; Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, pp. 85-88; and Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society, p. 122.

76. Kershaw writes: "A widespread hostility to the Jews, uncritical approval of the anti-Semitic decrees of the government, but sharp condemnation of the pogrom because of its material destruction and the tasteless hooligan character of the 'action' perpetrated by 'gutter elements' characterized the reactions of considerable sections of the population. Even many anti-Semites, including Party members, found the pogrom itself distasteful while approving of the root cause of it and of its consequences." See Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, p. 26 9.

77. See Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation, p. 136.

78. Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, p. 87.

79. Hermann Glaser, "Die Mehrheit hätte ohne Gefahr von Repressionen fernbleiben können," in Jörg Wollenberg, ed., "Niemand war dabei und keiner hat's gewusst": Die deutsche Öffentlichkeit und die Judenverfolgung 1933-1945 (Munich: Piper, 1989), pp. 26-27.

80. Alfons Heck, The Burden of Hitler's Legacy (Frederick, Colo.: Renaissance House, 1988), p. 62.

81. Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, p. 147.

82. Maschmann, Account Rendered, p. 56.

83. This is Erich Goldhagen's term.

84. See Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, pp. 77-78. For the legal treatment of "race defilement" in one region of Germany, see Hans Robinsohn, Justiz als politische Verfolgung: Die Rechtsprechung in "Rassenschandefällen" beim Landgericht Hamburg, 1936-1943 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1977).

85. The account of this paragraph closely follows Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, pp. 122-123.

86. Even if some might have formally abjured "racism" as being against the universalist teachings of the Church, they accepted the central tenet of the "racist" view (which had inherent eliminationist implications), namely that the Jews could not be redeemed.

87. Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, p. 122. See also Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 285-286; and Richard Gutteridge, The German Evangelical Church and the Jews, 1879-1950 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 233.

88. Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, p. 122.

89. This is, of course, excepting the continued existence of Jews exempted because of mixed marriages or because of mixed parentage, those in concentration camps within German borders, and the eventual return of tens of thousands of Jews at the end of the war via the death marches (which are treated in Chapters 13 and 14).

90. Anna Haag, Das Glück zu Leben (Stuttgart: Bonz, 1967), entry for Oct. 5, 1942. It is difficult to understand why Bankier, who also recounts this episode, concludes that "incidents of this sort substantiate the contention that day-to-day contact with a virulent, antisemitic atmosphere progressively dulled people's sensitivity to the plight of their Jewish neighbours" (The Germans and the Final Solution, p. 130). The incident, like so many others, provides evidence not of dulled sensitivity, but of the nature of the Germans' deeply held beliefs and their willingness to express them. That any but a small number of Germans ever possessed "sensitivity to the plight of their Jewish neighbors" during the Nazi period is an assumption which cannot be substantiated, and which, in my reading of it, is undermined by the empirical evidence which Bankier presents throughout his book.

91. Gerhard Schoenberner, ed., Wir Haben es Gesehen: Augenzeugenberichte über Terror und Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich (Hamburg: Rütten & Loening Verlag, 1962), p. 300.

92. Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, p. 135.

93. Karl Ley, Wir Glauben Ihnen: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen und Erinnerungen eines Lehrers aus dunkler Zeit (Siegen-Volnsberg: Rebenhain-Verlag, 1973), p. 115.

94. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Berlin Underground, 1938-1945 (New York: Paragon House, 1989), p. 83. Kershaw writes: "Evidence about knowledge of the fate of the Jews is, therefore, overwhelming in indicating that the availability of that knowledge was widespread." See "German Popular Opinion and the 'Jewish Question,' 1939-1943," p. 380. For a November 1942 internal report of the Nazi Party Chancellery on the news that abounded in Germany about the slaughter of Jews, see Peter Longerich, ed., Die Ermordung der Europäischen Juden: Eine umfassende Dokumenation des Holocaust, 1941-1945 (Munich: Piper, 1989), pp. 433-434. The notion that few in Germany knew of their country's systematic slaughter of Jews is clearly contravened by much evidence, which makes it all the more surprising that this myth continues to be believed and propagated. For a treatment of this subject, see Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, "The Holocaust in National-Socialist Rhetoric and Writings: Some Evidence against the Thesis that before 1945 Nothing Was Known about the 'Final Solution,' '' YVS 16 (1984): pp. 95-127; and Wolfgang Benz, "The Persecution and Extermination of the Jews in the German Consciousness," in John Milfull, ed., Why Germany? National Socialist Anti-Semitism and the European Context (Providence: Berg Publishers, 1993), pp. 91-104, esp. 97-98; for a contrary view, see Hans Mommsen, "What did the Germans Know about the Genocide of the Jews?," in Pehle, ed., November 1938, pp. 187-221.

95. Marlis Steinert, Hitlers Krieg und die Deutschen: Stimmung und Haltung der deutschen Bevölkerung im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Düsseldorf: Econ Verlag, 1970), pp. 238-239; and Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, pp. 133-137, where he also discusses some cases in which Germans expressed sympathy for the Jews. Bankier sees many of the Germans as having been "indifferent"—"deliberately indifferent," as he emphasizes—"to a criminal act" (p. 137). As I discuss at length in Chapter 16, the concept of "indifference" is undertheorized and inappropriately applied to Germans during the Nazi period, who could not but have had views about and attitudes towards the many aspects of the persecution of the Jews, including their deportation.

96. While Catholics in general abandoned Jewish converts to Catholicism, much of the highest Church leadership remained faithful to the doctrine of baptism. See Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, pp. 28 4-287.

97. Quoted in Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, p. 163; see pp. 162-166 for further evidence that the Catholic Church adopted and preached the idiom of race (even if it continued to defend the primacy of God's divine law over the racial laws of humanity).

98. Sopade, Jan. 1936, A18.

99. Sopade, Jan. 1936, A17.

100. Kershaw writes: "The feeling that there was a 'Jewish Question', that the Jews were another race, and that they deserved whatever measures had been taken to counter their undue influence, and should be excluded from Germany altogether had [by 1938-1939] spread ominously." See "German Popular Opinion and the 'Jewish Question,' 1939-1943," p. 370. See Bankier's discussion of German workers' antisemitism, in The Germans and the Final Solution, pp. 89-95. His account of workers is more differentiated than the brief one presented here, yet his conclusion supports my own: "It is small wonder that workers reacted to antisemitic measures in the same way as other sectors of German society. More surprising is what also emerges... from...Sopade surveys: that the Nazi regime did succeed in getting significant portions of the working class to identify with Jew-hatred and even to endorse antisemitic policy" (p. 94).

101. Gutteridge, The German Evangelical Church and the Jews, 1879-1950, pp. 35, 39. Even in apology, after the war, the profound antisemitism could not always be suppressed. Bishop August Marahrens preached: "In matters of belief we may have been far removed from the Jews, a succession of Jews may have caused grievous harm to our people, but they ought not to have been attacked in inhuman fashion" (p. 300). (The grammatical construction is worth commenting upon: the Jews do the Germans harm, yet the perpetrators, namely "we" or "the Germans," drop from the clause describing the inhumanity which the Jews suffered.) The cultural cognitive model of Jews does not disappear quickly. For excerpts of the antisemitic 1948 Council of Brethren of the Evangelical Church of Germany's "Word on the Jewish Question" (... "In crucifying the Messiah, Israel has rejected its election and vocation [as the Chosen People] ..."), see Julius H. Schoeps, Leiden an Deutschland: Vom antisemitischen Wahn und der Last der Erinnerung (Munich: Piper, 1990), p. 62.

102. Wolfgang Gerlach, Als die Zeugen schwiegen: Bekennende Kirche und die Juden, 2d ed. (Berlin: Institut Kirche und Judentum, 1993), pp. 30ff.

103. Klaus Gotto and Konrad Repgen, eds., Die Katholiken und das Dritte Reich (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1990), p. 199.

104. Quoted in Gerlach, Als die Zeugen schwiegen, pp. 32-33.

105. Werner Jochmann, "Antijüdische Tradition im deutschen Protestantismus und nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung," in Gesellschaftskrise und Judenfeindschaft in Deutschland, 1870-1945, p. 272. Jochmann writes that in the years preceding Hitler's assumption of power, Protestant antisemitism was so great that "all appeals of Jews to the Christian conscience were ineffectual." When a rabbi from Kiel, for example, appealed in May 1932 to the local Ecclesiastical Office for some cooperation in working against the ever-intensifying, already powerful antisemitism, his letter did not even receive a reply (pp. 272-273).

106. Quoted in Gerlach, Als die Zeugen schwiegen, p. 42.

107. Wolfgang Gerlach, "Zwischen Kreuz und Davidstern: Bekennende Kirche in ihrer Stellung zum Judentum im Dritten Reich" (Ph.D. diss., Evang-Theologischen Fackultät der Universität Hamburg, 1970), endnotes, p. 11.

108. Gerlach, Als die Zeugen schwiegen, p. 43.

109. Quoted in Schoeps, Leiden an Deutschland, p. 58.

110. Friedrich Heer, God's First Love (Worcester: Trinity Press, 1967), p. 324.

111. Bernd Nellessen, "Die schweigende Kirche: Katholiken und Judenverfolgung," in Büttner, ed., Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich, p. 265.

112. Quoted in Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, p. 294.

113. Nellessen, "Die schweigende Kirche," p. 261.

114. Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, pp. 291-292; Gutteridge, The German Evangelical Church and the Jews, esp. pp. 153, 267-313; and J. S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933-1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1968), pp. 261-267.

115. Saul Friedländer, Pius XII and the Third Reich: A Documentation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), p. 115.

116. Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, p. 282. The Church complained only that complying with the law was overtaxing priests, who received no offsetting remuneration.

117. Heer, God's First Love, p. 323.

118. For Protestants, see Johan M. Snoek, The Grey Book: A Collection of Protests Against Anti-Semitism and the Persecution of Jews Issued by Non-Roman Catholic Churches and Church Leaders During Hitler[']s Rule (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1969); for Catholics, see Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, p. 293; for France, see Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), pp. 262, 270-275.

119. Not one German Catholic was excommunicated either while or after committing crimes as great as any in human history. See Heer, God's First Love, p. 323.

120. See Schoeps, Leiden an Deutschland, p. 60.

121. Stewart W. Herman, It's Your Souls We Want (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1943), p. 234. Herman also mentions explicitly the slaughter of Lithuanian and Latvian Jewry.

122. Gerhard Schäfer, ed., Landesbischof D. Wurm und der Nationalsozialistische Staat, 1940-1945: Eine Dokumentation (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1968), p. 158.

123. Kirchliches Jahrbuch für die Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, 1933-1944 (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1948), p. 481. Their racism was explicit: "Since the crucifixion of Christ to the present day, the Jews have fought against Christianity or abused and falsified it for the attainment of their selfish aims. Christian baptism does not alter at all the racial character of the Jew, his affiliation to his people, or his biological being." This does not mean that all members of the Church hierarchy conceived of the Jews in racial terms; on this point, differences existed within the churches, and undoubtedly, much confusion and vagueness characterized their views as the old dominant type of antisemitism was eroded by the new cultural model. See Gutteridge, The German Evangelical Church and the Jews, pp. 35-90, for a discussion of this issue. While essential points of congruence and identity existed between the two worldviews—hence the great attraction of Nazism to the Christian establishment and laity—fundamental disagreements also existed, disagreements which were repressed, denied, skirted, or harmonized in a variety of ways.

124. Some would undoubtedly argue that these men did not know of the extermination, and point to their statement that the Jews should be banished from the German domain as an indication that this was not an endorsement of genocide. The notion that they were ignorant of the ongoing killing is difficult to accept, given how widespread the knowledge of mass extermination already was, and given the many channels of information that were available to the Church leaders, which made them often among the best-informed people in the country. By the time of their proclamation, word of the systematic slaughter of Jews was out in Germany. The Germans had already killed hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Soviet Union (the direction in which the Church leaders, employing the Nazi euphemism of the day, would "banish" the Jews). Millions of German soldiers in the Soviet Union knew of the genocide, since so many of the killings had been perpetrated out in the open, in the midst of army personnel, and since the army itself had been a full partner in the killings. The extermination was also known to the army's legion of priests and pastors, who undoubtedly reported back to their superiors. Bishop Wurm, who was in constant contact with other bishops, makes it indisputable that knowledge of the killings had reached Church leaders. In the context of Hitler's repeated, open declaration of his exterminatory intent, moreover, it is highly unlikely that Church leaders of this stature would have used, in a carefully crafted collective proclamation, the phrase "severest measures" if they had not meant extermination. The subsequent phrase "banished from German lands" in this context was but a euphemism for killing of the sort that was in standard usage, and understood by all Germans involved in the genocide. The camouflaging language rules of the regime dictated that the genocide not be called what it was in public and even in most official correspondence. So phrases like "resettlement," "sent to the East," became the ordinary code words and synonyms for extermination. Since Germany was at war and could not then banish the Jews anywhere, as these churchmen well knew, the only way to banish the Jews was to kill them.

125. Martin Niemöller, Here Stand I! (Chicago: Willett, Clarke & Co., 1937), p. 195. In this sermon, Niemöller also attacks the Nazis (without naming them) by likening them to the Jews! How evil are these Jews? They are responsible, in Niemöller's view, not just for "the blood of Jesus and the blood of all his messengers" but for still much more, namely for "the blood of all the righteous men who were ever murdered because they testified to the holy will of God against tyrannical human will" (p. 197). Niemöller serves as an exemplar of the committed anti-Nazi who was a committed antisemite.

126. Niemöller, unlike most German antisemites, took an ethical stance that led him to caution against taking retribution on the Jews, which, in his view, justly could be done only by God. After saying this, however, he continued with vituperative condemnation of the Jews who, among other things, would be cursed for eternity for having crucified Jesus. For a discussion of Niemöller's antisemitism, see Gutteridge, The German Evangelical Church and the Jews, pp. 100-104.

127. Quoted in Harmut Ludwig, "Die Opfer unter dem Rad Verbinden: Vorund Entstehungsgeschichte, Arbeit und Mitarbeiter des 'Büro Pfarrer Grüber' " (Habil., Berlin, 1988), pp. 73-74.

128. Quoted in Schoeps, Leiden an Deutschland, p. 58. In a 1967 letter, Barth confessed "that in personal encounters with living Jews (even Jewish Christians!) I have always, so long as I can remember, had to suppress a totally irrational aversion..." Karl Barth, Letters, 1961-1968 (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1981), p. 262.

129. Snoek, The Grey Book, p. 113.

130. Jochmann, "Antijüdische Tradition im deutschen Protestantismus und nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung," pp. 273-74.

131. Schoeps, Leiden an Deutschland, p. 61.

132. Quoted in Gutteridge, The German Evangelical Church and the Jews, p. 304. In a 1945 sermon, Niemöller similarly condemned the thoroughgoing antisemitism of the Church. If the fourteen thousand Evangelical pastors in Germany, he said, had recognized "at the beginning of the Jewish persecutions ... that it was the Lord Jesus Christ Who was being persecuted ... the number of victims might well have been only some ten thousand" (pp. 303- 304). As Niemöller understood, the unwillingness of the Christian leadership to speak out and work on behalf of Jews was not primarily for fear of the regime, but for a more fundamental reason: the men of the cloth did not condemn the eliminationist measures that were being pursued in their own name.

133. Report of Aug. 7, 1944, quoted in Christof Dipper, "The German Resistance and the Jews," YVS 16 (1984): p. 79.

134. Quoted in Dipper, "The German Resistance and the Jews," p. 78.

135. Quoted in Dipper, "The German Resistance and the Jews," p. 79.

136. In der Stunde Null: Die Denkschrift des Freiburger "Bonhoeffer-Kreises, "ed. Helmut Thielicke (Tübingen: Mohr, 1979), pp. 147-151. For a discussion of the status of this proposal, see Dipper, "The German Resistance and the Jews," p. 77.

137. The characterization of the resistance presented here is substantiated by Dipper, "The German Resistance and the Jews." See esp. pp. 60, 71-72, 75-76, 81, 83-84,91-92.

138. Kwiet and Eschwege, Selbstbehauptung und Widerstand, p. 48. For the extent of working-class antisemitism and support of the eliminationist program, see Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, pp. 89-95.

139. Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, notes this phenomenon among the working class, writing that many self-conceived non-Nazis "nevertheless agreed with the drastic curtailment of Jews' rights and their separation from the German nation. Even a good many socialists who disapproved of the Third Reich's brutal methods believed that 'it is not so terrible to treat the Jews in this manner' " (P. 94)-

140. See Chapter 11 for a more extensive discussion of this topic.

141. Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society, p. 251.

142. Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society, pp. 216-252.

143. Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society, pp. 226-227.

144. Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society, p. 252.

145. Quoted in Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society, pp. 248-249.

146. Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society, pp. 242-243. He says that it was especially religious Germans who uttered such criticism.

147. Quoted in Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society, p. 226.

148. Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, pp. 205-208. See also Jeremy Noakes, "The Oldenburg Crucifix Struggle of November 1936: A Case Study of Opposition in the Third Reich," in Peter D. Stachura, ed., The Shaping of the Nazi State (London: Croom Helm, 1978), pp. 210-233. A still more bitter struggle over crucifixes occurred between April and September 1941 in Bavaria, coincident with the beginning of the Germans' genocidal killing of Jews. The struggle ended in a resounding defeat for the regime. See Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, pp. 340-357. The protesters, although violently opposed to the Nazis' religious policies, made their ideological support for the regime's most general goals clear enough, with frequent expressions of their passionate anti-communism and, less frequently, of racism. One anonymous postcard sent to the Bavarian Minister President echoes the axiomatic attribution of blame to the Jews for Bolshevism, while expressing its support for the regime: "The campaign against Jewish Bolshevism is in our eyes a crusade...." It was signed "The Catholics of Bavaria" (Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, p. 356).

149. Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, p. 17.

150. See Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, pp. 66-110.

151. Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, p. 90.

152. See Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, pp. 20-26.

153. Kershaw's book, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, relies heavily on these reports. The reports, reproduced in the seventeen-volume Meldungen aus dem Reich, 1938-1945, contain a deluge of statements expressing disagreement with governmental policies and discontent on an enormously wide variety of subjects.

154. Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, p. 8. This and much other evidence indicate that the degree of intimidation that existed for ordinary Germans during the Nazi period has generally been exaggerated.

155. See Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 111 ff.; Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: Euthanasia in Germany c. 1900-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 162-180; Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, pp. 334-340; Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, pp. 263-267; and Ernst Klee "Euthanasie" im NS-Staat: Die "Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens" (Frankfurt/M: Fischer Verlag, 1983), pp. 294-345. The regime's killing of "life unworthy of living," though formally suspended, did continue with greater concealment in a program known as "Aktion 14f13." Still, Germans' moral opposition to and political protest against these murders led to the sparing of many Germans' lives.

156. Germans' opposition to the killing of the mentally ill and the handicapped was, of course, a consequence of their rejection of important aspects of Nazi biological racism. As far as these Germans were concerned, the victims were German people, possessing the right to life and to decent care that such membership brought. This is a salient example of the inability of the Nazi regime to transform Germans' deeply rooted beliefs and values and to get them to acquiesce in a policy merely because the state deemed it to be appropriate and necessary. This example alone belies the "brainwashing" thesis regarding antisemitism that is popular among interpreters of this period.

157. See Nathan Stoltzfus, "Dissent in Nazi Germany," The Atlantic Monthly 270, no. 3 (September 1992): pp. 86-94.

158. For a discussion of the substantial influence of public opinion on the regime's policies, see Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, pp. 10-13.

159. Bankier also makes this point in The Germans and the Final Solution, p. 27.

160. See Ian Kershaw, The "Hitler Myth " (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), esp. p. 147.

161. Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, pp. 176-177. Similarly, he concludes that widespread Protestant abhorrence of the Nazis' anti-Christian character and policies went hand in hand with enthusiastic support of many of the national political goals which they shared with the Nazis (p. 184). Kershaw also concludes that vocal middle-class discontent with policies of the regime was perfectly compatible with, indeed was often accompanied by, enthusiastic support for Nazism (pp. 131, 139).

162. A major, if not the major, source for such statements of discontent, namely the Social Democratic Party's reports on Germany (Sopade), should be read with circumspection for two related reasons. The Party's agents were obviously eager and ideologically disposed to finding among the German people—especially among the working class—evidence of dissent from the Nazi regime and its policies. It is even more likely that the writers of the reports were prone to make the interpretive mistakes, discussed presently in the text, that historians of the period have made when trying to make sense of Germans' criticism of the eliminationist enterprise, such as it was. They were likely to misinterpret criticism of specific policies as being synonymous with a rejection of antisemitism and of the eliminationist goals in general. If historians, with schooled analytical and interpretive skills, have made this mistake, then it is no surprise that these hopeful Social Democratic reporters would also err in this manner. Therefore, the general evaluative and interpretive judgments to this effect that can be found in the reports should be seen to be far less reliable than the particular episodes that the agents report, on which they presumably based their evaluations. These positive general evaluations and interpretations have already been filtered through their distorting lenses, lenses which held that the draconian Nazi terror dictatorship was repressing the majority of the German people. The individual episodes that the agents report—the less interpretively tainted, "raw" data—gener— ally conform to one of the forms discussed presently in the text, and therefore do not substantiate the overly eager positive general interpretations that the Social Democrats occasionally offered that cast doubt on Germans' antisemitism. It should be noted that these reports also contain much to suggest explicitly that antisemitism was rife among the German people, including general statements to this effect. Some of this has been presented earlier in the chapter.

163. See, for examples, Hans Mommsen and Dieter Obst, "Die Reaktion der deutschen Bevölkerung auf die Verfolgung der Juden, 1933-1945," in Hans Mommsen and Susanne Willems, eds., Herrschaftsalltag im Dritten Reich: Studien und Texte (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1988), pp. 378-381.

164. Mlynek, ed., Gestapo Hannover meldet... , p. 411.

165. Analogous criticism was voiced against the brand of antisemitism that Der Stürmer purveyed in every issue. Regular protests against its quasi-pornographic, lurid antisemitic accounts and caricatures came from the most inveterate antisemites and Nazis of all ranks, because they found Der Stürmer's antisemitism obscene and concluded that it was endangering the moral health of Germans, especially of German youth. Das Schwarze Korps, the official organ of the SS, the most ideologically radical of all Nazi papers and naturally also a virulently antisemitic one, in June 1935 upbraided Der Stürmer in an article entitled "The Antisemitism That Causes Us Harm." Even the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, who presided over the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews, was repelled by the character of its antisemitism. Clearly, the objection to aspects of Nazi antisemitic expression or policy did not logically or, as a matter of fact, generally mean a rejection of eliminationist antisemitism itself. See Kommandant in Auschwitz: Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen des Rudolf Höss, ed. Martin Broszat (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1963), p. 112.

166. Heinz Boberach, "Quellen fur die Einstellung der deutschen Bevölkerung und die Judenverfolgung, 1933-1945," in Biittner, ed., Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich, p. 38.

167. It was not unknown, after bombing raids, for Germans to assault Jews whom they came upon in the street. See Ursula Büttner, "Die deutsche Bevölkerung und die Juden Verfolgung, 1933-1945," in Büttner, ed., Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich, p. 78.

168. Sopade, Feb. 1938, A67.

169. For some general ethical statements by the German Catholic leadership against killing, see Burkhard van Schewick, "Katholische Kirche und nationalsozialistische Rassenpolitik," in Gotto and Repgen, eds., Die Katholiken und das Dritte Reich, p. 168; and Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, pp. 291-292.

170. Schäfer, ed., Landesbischof D. Wurm und der Nationalsozialistische Staat, 1940-1945, p. 162.

171. Schäfer, ed., Landesbischof D. Wurm und der Nationalsozialistische Staat, 1940-1945, p. 312. Wurm's confessional statements, it should be emphasized, were not merely artful constructs concocted for the sensibilities of his audience. They represented his true beliefs. See Gutteridge, The German Evangelical Church and the Jews 1879-1950, pp. 186-187, 246.

172. Nur. Doc. 1816-PS, IMT, vol. 28, p. 518; see also pp. 499-500.

173. For an overview, summary, and examples of the sources and data on the Germans' attitudes towards Jews and their persecution, see Boberach, "Quellen fur die Einstellung der deutschen Bevölkerung und die Judenverfolgung ; 1933-1945," pp. 31-49. Space does not permit me to analyze in greater detail the statements of Germans that have been interpreted by many to mean that Germans were not antisemites or did not approve of the eliminationist program. Most such criticisms can easily be shown to have been of the non-principled sort that I have just summarized, examples of which I have already discussed in this chapter (during the treatment, for example, of Kristallnacht, the churches, and the resistance to Hitler). In fact, as I have shown with these examples, the comparatively rare misgivings that Germans did express so often betray them to have been eliminationist antisemites.

174. For a discussion of some such people, see Wolfgang Benz, "Überleben im Untergrund, 1943-1945," in Wolfgang Benz, ed., Die Juden in Deutschland, 1933-1945: Leben unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1988), pp. 660-700. Karl Ley, a schoolteacher, who inscribed into his diary his opposition to the eliminationist persecution of the Jews, knew himself to be so isolated in his views that he recorded, at the late date of December 15,1941, that he had just discovered that he was not all alone in his opposition; someone else finally expressed her own condemnation of the persecution. See Wir Glauben Ihnen, p. 116.

175. Boberach's interpretation that the evidence on the German public's antisemitism indicates less widespread antisemitism than my reading of it runs afoul of this striking difference in Germans' utterances regarding non-Jewish foreigners and Jews, which he himself notes in the concluding paragraph of his essay on the subject. See "Quellen für die Einstellung der deutschen Bevölkerung und die Judenverfolgung, 1933-1945," p. 44. For some examples when Germans' did express sympathy, see Konrad Kwiet, "Nach dem Pogrom: Stufen der Ausgrenzung," in Benz, ed., Die Juden in Deutschland, 1933-1945, pp. 619-625.

176. For an illustrative compendium, see C. C. Aronsfeld, The Text of the Holocaust: A Study of the Nazis' Extermination Propaganda, from 1919-1945 (Marblehead, Mass.: Micah Publications, 1985).

177. For a discussion of injury done to people's dignity, see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 112-115.

178. Since J. L. Austin's discussion of "speech acts" in How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 196 2), the sharp distinction between "speaking" and "acting" has been broken down. Speech, especially speech which intends to persuade or to do harm, is action as much as raising one's hand in anger is. Thus, verbal violence, with its acknowledged capacity to do great harm, is really to be seen as on a continuum with physical acts of violence. In fact, certain violent promises (such as a known murderer's threat to kill someone) would undoubtedly be seen as being more harmful than certain acts of physical violence.

179. "Die Unlösbarkeit der Judenfrage," quoted in Ludger Heid, "Die Juden sind unser Unglück!: Der moderne Antisemitismus in Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik," in Christina von Braun and Ludger Heid, eds., Der ewige Judenhass: Christlicher Antijudaismus, Deutschnationale Judenfeindlichkeit, Rassistischer Antisemitismus (Stuttgart: Burg Verlag, 1990), p. 128.

180. Ludwig Lewisohn, "The Assault on Civilization," in Pierre van Paassen and James Waterman Wise, eds., Nazism: An Assault on Civilization (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1934), pp. 156-157.

181. Dorothy Thompson, "The Record of Persecution," in van Paassen and Wise, eds., Nazism, p. 12. The British newspaper The Times made some similar observations in November 1935: "Unless some attempt is made in high quarters to check the ferocity of the anti-Semitic fanatics," the Jews "will be condemned, as it were, to run round blindly in circles until they die. This is the process to which the term 'cold pogrom' has been applied." Quoted in Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society, pp. 108—109. See Heer, God's First Love, p. 323, for another prediction of the Jews' extermination.

182. Quoted in Gerd Korman, ed., Hunter and Hunted: Human History of the Holocaust (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 89.

183. For discussions of Kittel's lecture, see Robert P. Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 55-58; and Ino Arndt, "Machtubernahme und Judenboykott in der Sicht evangelischer Sonntagsblätter," Miscellanea: Festschrift für Helmut Krausnick zum 75. Geburtstag (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), pp. 27-29.

184. Quoted in Gerlach, Als die Zeugen schwiegen, p. 112.

185. Even Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution, who recognizes the widespread nature of racist antisemitism in Germany and its eliminationist conclusions, writes: "The Nazis' exhortations to endorse their solution to the Jewish question thus failed" (p. 156).

186. See Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, p. 370.

187. Heck, The Burden of Hitler's Legacy, p. 87.

Chapter 4

1. Because this chapter presents a new interpretation of known developments and of existing data, I do not feel obliged to cite in great detail the primary sources, the contending positions of others, or even arguments (and the data) that could be adduced against my line of interpretation. They are well known in the literature. The notes to this chapter thus provide minimal references to the works that contain information on the events discussed here—even if these works' interpretations often conflict with my own.

2. For Hitler's enormous popularity and the legitimacy that it helped engender for the regime, see Ian Kershaw, The "Hitler Myth" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), esp. p. 258.

3. For a summary of the various positions that have been taken on this topic, as well as a judicious evaluation, see Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 3d ed. (London: Edward Arnold, 1993), pp. 59-79.

4. For treatments of this subject, see Edward N. Peterson, The Limits of Hitler's Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), and Dieter Rebentisch, Führerstaat und Verwaltung im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner Verlag, 1989).

5. For persuasive accounts supporting this conclusion, see David Bankier, "Hitler and the Policy-Making Process in the Jewish Question," HGS 3, no. 1 (1988): pp. 1-20; see also Avraham Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of German Jews, 1933-1943 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989), on the development of Jewish policy in the 1930s, and Christopher R. Browning, "Beyond 'Intentionalism' and 'Functionalism': The Decision for the Final Solution Reconsidered," The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 120-121, on the 1939 to 1942 period.

6. Reginald H. Phelps, "Hitlers 'Gundlegende' Rede über den Antisemitismus," VfZ 16, no. 4 (1968): p. 417. It is worth noting that the word that Hitler used for "removal" is "Entfernung," which also means, euphemistically, "liquidation," as in killing. Hitler sarcastically said that they would "grant" the Jews the right to live (as if this needed to be said) and would happily let them live among other nations.

7. See Eberhard Jäckel, ed., Hitler: Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905-1924 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), pp. 119-120. Hitler's words have been preserved in notes taken at the meeting by an agent of the intelligence service of the police.

8. The concept of "social death" is taken from Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), esp. pp. 1-14. The character of the social death of Jews is discussed in the next chapter.

9. Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation, p. 25.

to. Barkai shows convincingly that the arguments which maintain that the anti-Jewish measures proceeded in fits and starts, and that they were often pushed along by pressure created at the local level, are untenable. Instead, the major elements of the anti-Jewish legal, social, cultural, and economic measures were decided upon in Berlin, and were being applied and tightened throughout the 1930s, proceeding at a consistent, if not always entirely even, pace. See From Boycott to Annihilation, esp. pp. 56-58, 125-133. For Hitler's role in this, see Bankier, "Hitler and the Policy-Making Process on the Jewish Question."

11. Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation, pp. 25-26.

12. See Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation, pp. 54-108, 116-133.

13. For a compilation, see Joseph Walk, ed., Das Sonderrecht für die Juden im NS-Staat: Eine Sammlung der gesetzlichen Massnahmen und Richtlinien—Inhalt und Bedeutung (Heidelberg: C. F. Müller Juristischer Verlag, 1981).

14. For a discussion of these matters, see Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: New Viewpoints, 1973), pp. 43-53; and Lothar Gruchmann, " 'Blutschutzgesetz' und Justiz: Zur Entstehung und Auswirkung des Nürnberger Gesetzes vom 15. September 1935," VfZ31 (1983): pp. 418-442.

15. Nazism, p. 1109.

16. See Philip Friedman, "The Jewish Badge and the Yellow Star in the Nazi Era," in Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1980), pp. 11-33.

17. Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation, pp. 142-143.

18. Quoted in Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), p. 154.

19. See Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), pp. 621-625 for Hitler's views on how the Jews mobilize the other great powers against Germany.

20. For opposing interpretations, see Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933-1939 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1972); and Hans Mommsen, "The Realization of the Unthinkable: the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question' in the Third Reich," in Gerhard Hirschfeld, ed., The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986).

21. For accounts of Kristallnacht, see Walter H. Pehle, ed., November 1938: From "Reichskristallnacht" to Genocide (New York: Berg Publishers, 1991); and Herbert Schultheis, Die Reichskristallnacht in Deutschland: Nach Augenzeugenberichten (Bad Neustadt a.d. Saale: Rotter Druck und Verlag, 1986).

22. Given the immediate announcement of such intentions and Hitler's January 30, 1939, speech (discussed below), it may well have been that Kristallnacht was understood to have initiated the new, more deadly eliminationist phase.

23. Das Schwarze Korps, Nov. 24, 1938, quoted in Breitman, The Architect of Genocide, p. 58.

24. Nur. Doc. 1816-PS, IMT, vol. 28, pp. 538-539.

25. Genocidal thinking was clearly in the air, especially that which the SS breathed. Breitman has shown that within the SS, the turning to the explicitly exterminationist variant for "solving" the "Jewish Problem" was already under way before the war. See The Architect of Genocide, pp. 55-65.

26. Mr. Ogilvie-Forbes to Lord Halifax, Foreign Secretary, on Nov. 17, 1938, quoted in C. C. Aronsfeld, The Text of the Holocaust: A Study of the Nazis' Extermination Propaganda, from 1919-1945 (Marblehead, Mass.: Micah Publications, 1985), p. 78, n. 280.

27. On January 21, 1939, Hitler told the Czech Foreign Minister the same thing. See Werner Jochmann, "Zum Gedenken an die Deportation der deutschen Juden," in Gesellschaftskrise und Judenfeindschaft in Deutschland, 1870-1945 (Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1988), p. 256.

28. Nazism, p. 1049.

29. Jochmann, "Zum Gedenken an die Deportation der deutschen Juden," in Gesellschaftskrise und Judenfeindschaft in Deutschland, 1870-1945, p. 256.

30. For an account of the so-called Euthanasia program, see Ernst Klee, "Euthanasie" im NS-Staat: Die "Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens"(Frankfurt/M: Fischer Verlag, 1983).

31. Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 177-185; see pp. 95-117 on the regime's sterilization of around four hundred thousand people deemed unfit to propagate.

32. Werner Jochmann, ed., Adolf Hitler: Monologe im Führer-Hauptquartier, 1941-1944 (Hamburg: Albrecht Knaus Verlag, 1980), p. 293.

33. As implausible as it is, this seems to be the belief of all those who maintain that Hitler first developed the desire to exterminate European Jewry sometime in 1941.

34. For accounts of these years, see Browning, "Nazi Resettlement Policy and the Search for a Solution to the Jewish Question, 1939-1941," in The Path to Genocide, pp. 3-27; Breitman, The Architect of Genocide, pp. 116-144; and Philippe Burrin, Hitler and the Jews: The Genesis of the Holocaust (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), pp. 65-92.

35. See Ian Kershaw, "Improvised Genocide? The Emergence of the 'Final Solution' in the 'Warthegau,' " Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., no. 2 (1992): pp. 56ff; and Browning, "Nazi Resettlement Policy."

36. See Helmut Heiber, ed., "Der Generalplan Ost," VfZ6 (1958): pp. 281-325; and Browning, "Nazi Resettlement Policy."

37. Nazism, p. 1050; and Christopher R. Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office: A Study of Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland, 1940-1943 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978), p. 38.

38. Jochmann, ed., Adolf Hitler, p. 41.

39. For Hitler's geostrategic considerations during these years, see Klaus Hildebrand, The Foreign Policy of the Third Reich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 91-104; Norman Rich, Hitler's War Aims: Ideology, the Nazi State, and the Course of Expansion (New York: Norton, 1973) vol. 1, pp. 157-164; for a contrary view, see Gerhard L. Weinberg, "Hitler and England, 1933-1945: Pretense and Reality," German Studies Review 8 (1985): pp. 299-309.

40. Nur. Doc. 3363-PS, quoted in Nazism, p. 1051.

41. See Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, pp. 144-156; Helge Grabitz and Wolfgang Scheffler, Letzte Spuren: Ghetto Warschau, SS-Arbeitslager Trawniki, Aktion Erntefest (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1988), pp. 283-284; and "Ghetto," Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, ed. Israel Gutman (New York: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 579-582. For a dissenting view, see Browning, "Nazi Ghettoization Policy in Poland, 1939-1941," in The Path to Genocide, pp. 28-56.

42. See Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, pp. 125-174; Czeslaw Madajczyk, Die Okkupationspolitik Nazideutschlands in Polen, 1939-1945 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag Berlin, 1987) pp. 365-371; Browning, "Nazi Resettlement Policy," pp. 8ff.; and "Denkschrift Himmlers über die Behandlung der Fremdvölkischen im Osten (Mai 1940)," VfZ 5, no. 2 (1957): p. 197.

43. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 149. (The final sentence is my translation.)

44. Seyss-Inquart report, Nov. 20, 1939, Nur. Doc. 2278-PS, in IMT, vol. 30, p. 95. The quotation from the report is a paraphrase of the District Governor's words. For discussions of these issues, see Philip Friedman, "The Lublin Reservation and the Madagascar Plan: Two Aspects of Nazi Jewish Policy During the Second World War," in Roads to Extinction, pp. 34-58; Jonny Moser, "Nisko: The First Experiment in Deportation," Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 2 (1985): pp. 1-30; Leni Yahil, "Madagascar—Phantom of a Solution for the Jewish Question," in Bela Vago and George L. Mosse, eds., Jews and Non-Jews in Eastern Europe, 1918-1945 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974), pp. 315-334.

45. Browning, "Nazi Resettlement Policy," is certainly correct that this period should not be seen as an interlude (pp. 26-27), yet his interpretation of the period's significance is to be doubted.

46. Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation (New York: Stein & Day, 1977), writes: "Nowhere in the ghettos was it possible to sustain life on the allotted rations. Not only were the normal rations infinitesimal—many ghettos, as mentioned, received no food whatsoever for long stretches of time, and large quantities of supplies unfit for human consumption were delivered" (p. 104). For an overview of the conditions in ghettos, which were already deadly, see pp. 149-155.

47. It is probably also not a coincidence that March and April 1941 saw the ghettoization of the Jews of the Generalgouvernement, as a preparatory phase for Barbarossa and for the systematic onslaught against the Jews that was to begin at the same time. For the pattern of ghettoization, see Grabitz and Schemer, Letzte Spuren, pp. 283-284.

48. There is enormous controversy over when Hitler took the decision to slaughter Soviet Jewry and all of European Jewry. Richard Breitman also dates Hitler's decision as having occurred during this period. See The Architect of Genocide, pp. 153-166, 247-248, and his subsequent article "Plans for the Final Solution in Early 1941," German Studies Review 17, no. 3 (Oct. 1994): pp. 483-493, for additional evidence that the decision to exterminate European Jewry had been taken by early 1941. For some of the now extensive discussion of this issue and dissent from the position presented here, see Browning, The Path to Genocide, esp. "Beyond 'Intentionalism' and 'Functionalism'" and "The Decision Concerning the Final Solution," in Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), pp. 8-38; and Christopher R. Browning, "The Euphoria of Victory and the Final Solution: Summer-Fall 1941," German Studies Review 17, no. 3 (Oct. 1994), pp. 473-481; and Burrin, Hitler and the Jews, esp. pp. 115-131.

49. Breitman, "Plans for the Final Solution in Early 1941," pp. 11-12. Breitman argues persuasively that this "Final Solution project" could not have been anything but the program of systematic extermination which began that summer and fall (pp. 11-17).

50. Max Domarus, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, 1932-1945 (Munich: Süddeutscher Verlag, 1965), vol. 4, p. 1663.

51. That was at the anniversary celebration of the Beer Hall Putsch, where Hitler reminded his listeners: "I have ... again and again stated my view that the hour would come when we shall remove this people [the Jews] from the ranks of our nation" (quoted in Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler's World View: A Blueprint for Power [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981], p. 62).

52. As far as I know, no one has pointed out the change in locution in Hitler's repetition of his January 30, 1939, "prophecy," or its significance. In still later references to the initial speech, he repeated the notion that he would have the last laugh, appearing to be particularly peeved that people had not believed him when he had declared his intention to annihilate the Jews in the event of war. For his November 8, 1942 , speech, see Aronsfeld, The Text of the Holocaust, p. 36.

53. For the agreement, see Brauchitsch Directive, April 28, 1941, Nur. Doc. NOKW-2080; Walter Schellenberg, 11/26/45, 3710-PS; and Otto Ohlendorf, 4/24/47, NO-2890; for the army's thoroughgoing complicity in the slaughter of Soviet Jewry, see Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges: Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, 1938-1942 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981), pp. 205-278; and the many publications of Jürgen Förster, including "The Wehrmacht and the War of Extermination Against the Soviet Union," YVS 14 (1981): pp. 7-34.

54. There is much conflicting testimony about who attended and what transpired on the different occasions. For a summary of some of the material, see Indictment Against Streckenbach, ZStL 201 AR-Z 76/59 (hereafter cited as Streckenbach), pp. 178-191; for the positions of the two main protagonists in this debate, see Krausnick and Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungsktieges, pp. 150-172, and "Hitler und die Befehle an die Einsatzgruppen im Sommer 1941," in Eberhard Jäckel and Jürgen Rohwer, eds., Der Mord an den Juden im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Entschlussbildung und Verwirklichung (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1985), pp. 88-106; and Alfred Streim, Die Behandlung somjetischer Kriegsgefangener im Fall Barbarossa (Heidelberg: C. F Müller Juristischer Verlag, 1981), pp. 74-93; "Zur Eröffnung des allgemeinen Judenvernichtungsbefehls gegenüber den Einsatzgruppen," in Jäckel and Rohwer, eds., Der Mord an den Juden im Zweiten Weltkrieg, pp. 107-119, and "The Tasks of the SS Einsatzgruppen," Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 4 (1987): pp. 309-328; for the exchange between Krausnick and Streim, see Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 6 (1989): pp. 311-347; for a different attempt to synthesize the inconsistent material, see Browning, "Beyond 'Intentionalism' and 'Functionalism,' " pp. 99-111; for Burrin's reading of the evidence, see Hitler and the Jews, pp. 90-113.

55. This was codified in Heydrich's July 2, 1941, written order to the HSSPF. See Nazism, pp. 1091-1092. In keeping with the general practice of not putting into writing explicit orders for the extermination of Jews, preferring to pass the orders on orally, this order referred only to those killings that were more related to seeming military necessity.

56. The issue of what orders were given to the Einsatzgruppen, by whom, and when, has become highly contentious among scholars. The many arguments and facts necessary for a full discussion of alternative interpretations cannot possibly be addressed here. See note 54 above for references to the debate, and note 74 below for references to new evidence.

57. Indictment, Streckenbach, p. 261 .

58. See Walter Blume, ZStL 207 AR-Z 15/58, vol. 4, p. 981. He says that operational details were not given to them at the time, so that they did not know how they were to carry out their orders. They expected to receive the instructions later.

59. "Official Transcript of the American Military Tribunal No. 2-A in the Matter of the United States of America Against Otto Ohlendorf et al., defendants sitting at Nuernberg Germany on 15 September 1947," pp. 633, 526.

60. Einsatzbefehl No. 1, June 29, 1941, and Einsatzbefehl No. 2, July 1, 1941; Heydrich also suggested this in his July 2, 1941, order to the HSSPF in the Soviet Union.

61. Member of Einsatzgruppe A, quoted in Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, eds., "The Good Old Days": The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders (New York: Free Press, 1988), p. 81.

62. Alfred Filbert, Streckenbach, vol. 11, pp. 7571-7572; see also his statement in Streckenbach, vol. 6, pp. 1580-1585.

63. The pattern of Einsatzgruppen killing in the first few weeks is haphazard. Some Einsatzkommandos perpetrated significantly larger massacres than others. Even a single Einsatzkommando sometimes treated the Jews of different cities and towns substantially differently. The means of killing, whether employing local auxiliaries or doing the killing themselves, also varied. The logistics and techniques of killing differed across Einsatzkommandos. Finally, the time of escalation to very large slaughters and the wholesale inclusion of Jewish women and children also varied. I see no way to account for all of the variation unless the Einsatzgruppen leaders or the HSSPF, under whose jurisdiction they operated, had discretion over the manner of implementing an already announced general extermination order. That they must have had such discretion makes the notion still more plausible that initially they were to habituate their men to killing, and, after this had been done, to proceed with a stepwise escalation of the slaughter. That such attempts at habituating the men occurred elsewhere, such as in Galicia in November 1941—when there is no doubt whatsoever that an order for total extermination had already been given—shows that the Einsatzkommandos' failure to kill all Jews at once does not constitute evidence that Hitler had not yet given a comprehensive extermination order. Similarly, even after the Europe-wide extermination program was under way, the Germans did not immediately kill the Jews of every country, region, and community—just as they did not immediately kill all the Jews of the Soviet Union. To expect them to have done so either in the Soviet Union or in the rest of Europe is unrealistic. For the initial habituating killing in Nadvornaya, Galicia, see Judgment Against Hans Krüger et al., Schwurgericht Münster 5 Ks 4/65, pp. 137-194, esp. 143. For overviews of the killing operations of the Einsatzgruppen, see Krausnick and Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, pp. 173-205, 533-539; and The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads' Campaign Against the Jews in Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union, July 1941-January 1943, ed. Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector (New York: Holocaust Library, 1989).

64. On the issue of manpower, see Browning, "Beyond 'Intentionalism' and 'Functionalism,' " pp. 101-106; and Yehoshua Buchler, "Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS: Himmler's Personal Murder Brigades in 1941," HGS 1, no. 1 (1986): pp. 11-25.

65. Indictment Against A.H., StA Frankfurt/M 4 Js 1928/60, p. 15.

66. They discovered, among other things, that shooting was ultimately not a preferable means of killing, because it was too gruesome and psychologically burdensome for the men. Hence the transition to gassing as the primary means of slaughter. See Judgment Against Friedrich Pradel and Harry Wentritt, Hannover, 2 Ks 2/65, p. 33; and Mathias Beer, "Die Entwicklung der Gaswagen Beim Mord an den Juden," VfZ 35, no. 3 (1987): pp. 403-417.

67. For an account of such a staged "pogrom" in Grzymalow, Ukraine, when the SS armed Ukrainians and sent them on a rampage through the town, see Judgment Against Daniel Nerling, Stuttgart 2 Ks 1/67, p. 17; for the extensive German-directed "pogroms" in Latvia, see Judgment Against Viktor Arajs, Hamburg (37) 5/76, pp. 16-26,72-107, 145; and Indictment Against Viktor Arajs, Hamburg 141 Js 534/6o, pp.22-25,73-89.

68. For an overview of the Einsatzgruppen killings, see Krausnick and Wilhelm, Die Truppe der Weltanschauungskrieges, pp. 173-205, 533-539. On Kovno, see pp. 205-209; on Lemberg, see pp. 186-187.

69. The Bialystok killing is treated at length in Chapter 6 below. For Lutsk, see Alfred Streim, "Das Sonderkommando 4a der Einsatzgruppe C und die mit diesem Kommando eingesetzten Einheiten während des Russland-Feldzuges in der Zeit vom 22. 6. 1941 bis zum Sommer 1943," ZStL 11 (4) AR-Z 269/60, "Abschlussbericht," pp. 153-158. The Einsatzgruppen "Operational Situational Report USSR No. 24," July 16, 1941, states incorrectly that Ukrainians did the shooting (Einsatzgruppen Reports, p. 32). The information contained in these reports is often misleading or incomplete. Although they remain an invaluable source, Burrin, Hitler and the Jews, is wrong in maintaining "that these reports are generally complete and precise" (p. 105). In composing them, the Germans often had purposes other than the truth guiding them. Paul Zapp, the commander of Einsatzkommando 11a, testified at his trial that the Einsatzkommando commanders had received instructions to disguise their genocidal operations in their operational reports because of the danger that they might fall into enemy hands (from Erich Goldhagen's notes of Zapp's testimony on Feb. 17, 1970, during the trial of Zapp and other members of Einsatzkommando IIa). In this Lutsk killing, the Germans wanted to present the slaughter as being Ukrainian revenge for the crimes that the Jews had allegedly perpetrated against Ukrainians, so the Germans substituted for the facts the fiction that Ukrainians had done the killing. Those who rely on the situational reports, as Burrin and Browning ("Beyond 'Intentionalism'and 'Functionalism' ") do, without immersing themselves in the more complete materials in the records of the postwar legal investigations, interpret the events based on the Germans' willfully and substantially distorted record of what transpired.

70. Breitman, The Architect of Genocide, pp. 190-196.

71. For the logistics of this, see Browning, "Beyond 'Intentionalism' and 'Functionalism,' " pp. 106-111.

72. My conclusion is based on extensive (though not exhaustive) reading in the investigation and trial materials at ZStL of all the Einsatzgruppen, including the voluminous investigation and trial of Kuno Callsen and other members of Sonderkommando 4a, ZStL 204 AR-Z 269/60, which contains over fifty volumes and ten thousand pages of materials. But for considerations of space, I would have included a separate chapter here on the Einsatzgruppen. An exception to the general conclusion stated here occurred in Einsatzkommando 8. After the war, some of its men told of their anger upon learning in mid-July that they would also have to kill Jewish women and children. The new task of the new operational phase was what had disturbed them. But even here it was clear to them that from the beginning they had been carrying out an explicitly genocidal order by killing the Jewish men. See Judgment Against Karl Strohhammer, Landgericht Frankfurt 4 Ks 1/65, p. 10.

73. W.G., Streckenbach, vol. 11, p. 7578. His account and Filbert's, discussed above, confirm one another.

74. It is surprising that no one has yet adduced this crucial evidence, which is in some ways far more significant than the testimony of the Einsatzgruppen leaders, on which others have relied exclusively. For but a small sampling of the additional substantiating evidence on this point, see: for Einsatzgruppe A, WM., Streckenbach, vol. 7, p. 7088; for Einsatzkommando 8, C.R., Streckenbach, vol. 7, p. 7064, and Judgment Against Strohhammer, Landgericht Frankfurt 4 Ks 1/65, p. 9; for Einsatzgruppe C, K.H., Streckenbach, vol. 8, p. 7135; for Sonderkommando 4b, H.S., Streckenbach, vol. 18, pp. 8659-8660; for Sonderkommando 11a, K.N., Streckenbach, vol. 12, p. 7775. It is particularly significant that the commander of Police Battalion 309 (discussed in Chapter 6) announced to his company commanders, before the attack on the Soviet Union, that Hitler had given an order (Führerbefehl) for all of the Jews in the Soviet Union to be exterminated—men, women, and children. At least one of the company commanders soon thereafter announced the order to his assembled men. See Judgment Against Buchs et al., Wuppertal, 12 Ks 1/67, pp. 20—30; H.G., ZStL 205 AR-Z 20/60 (hereafter cited as "Buchs"), pp. 363-364; A.A., Buchs, p. 1339R; and E.M., Buchs, p. 1813R. Thus, even before the attack, knowledge of the genocidal decision had already been communicated beyond the restricted circle of the Einsatzgruppen. Whatever plausible or implausible (in my view, implausible) motivations have been imputed to the Einsatzgruppen commanders for their alleged postwar fabrication of an initial general extermination order, such motives cannot plausibly be ascribed to their subordinates, whose dominant motivation has always been to deny their knowledge of the genocidal character of their activities. Many men from the Einsatzkommandos, including commanders, deny—incredibly and against all the evidence—that they ever knew of any genocidal intent or that they killed Jews.

75. "Abschlussbericht," ZStL 202 AR-Z 82/61, vol. 5, pp. 795-843. The shared (though differently elaborated) argument of Browning, "Beyond 'Intentionalism' and 'Functionalism'" (p. 102), and Burrin, Hitler and the Jews (pp. 105-106, 113), that in the first weeks, in Browning's words, "the overwhelming majority" of the Einsatzkommando victims were "the Jewish male leadership and intelligentsia"—which, according to the argument, conformed to Heydrich's July 2 order—is untenable. It is belied glaringly by the deeds of the Einsatzkommandos (and of police battalions), and by the detailed accounts given by their men describing who and how they killed, and also their understanding of their task. The Germans often were rounding up and killing Jewish men, plain and simple, not the Jewish leadership and intelligentsia (which is an elastic and virtually meaningless category that should be taken about as seriously as a guide to reality as the many other deceptive locutions that the Germans used regarding the annihilation of European Jewry). That the Germans may have sometimes restricted their initial killing to the "elite" is not the significant fact (since their killing operations were not yet everywhere comprehensive anyway). That they routinely killed "non-elite" Jewish men is crucial, however, for it reveals the genocidal scope of their orders. Browning and Burrin have been misled by taking the purposely deceptive locutions of the Einsatzgruppen's reports literally. See, for example, for Einsatzkommando 8, the testimony of K.K., ZStL 202 AR-Z 81/59, where he discusses in detail their rounding up of the Jews of Bialystok at the beginning of July (vol. 6, pp. 1228-1229). For an example from Sonderkommando 4a, see Judgment Against Kuno Callsen et al., ZStL 204 AR-Z 269/60, pp. 161-162. Even the very first Einsatzkommando killing of June 24 in Garsden was of all the Jewish men whom they could find. See F.M., ZStL 207 AR-Z 15/58, vol. 2, p. 457. Such early indiscriminate genocidal slaughters of Jews was perpetrated not only by Einsatzkommandos but also by police battalions. In Bialystok, on July 13, a few days after the massacre by Einsatzkommando 8, Police Battalion 316 and Police Battalion 322 implemented the standing order, which their regimental commander had issued two days earlier, to round up and shoot the male Jews of the region between the ages of seventeen and forty-five. They netted three thousand or more in Bialystok. Burrin, Hitler and the Jews, against the evidence of the character of this and other enormous killing operations, accepts the Germans' camouflaging language—namely that this order mandated that they should kill the Jews in this age range who were looters — as if this were what the order had really meant (p. 111). The German court trying this case dismissed the notion that the order pertained to looters as "an obvious sham justification, a transparent camouflage of the true purpose of the killing order." See Judgment Against Hermann Kraiker et al., Schwurgericht Bochum 15 Ks 1/66, pp. 144-178, esp. 153-155; and Indictment Against Hermann Kraiker et al., Dortmund 45 Js 2/61, pp. 106-108. This order does not show what Burrin believes it to show, but precisely the opposite, namely that there was an extermination plan. Police Battalion 307's slaughter of six thousand to ten thousand Jews in Brest-Litovsk in the first half of July is another example of out-and-out genocidal killing. Browning and Burrin's line of argumentation also does not take into account the wholesale slaughter of thousands that the Germans perpetrated (some with local aid) in the Baltics (including women and children) and in Ukraine. Many of these killings, even large ones, such as in Krottingen, did not make it into the Einsatzgruppen's Operational Situation Reports. Browning and Burrin present them as "pogroms" and pass over them quickly in their analyses, even though the Germans actively organized, aided, supervised, and even participated in the killing operations. A Lithuanian, P.L., for example, describes the Germans' announcement that the Jews, including women and children, were to be killed, and then the commission of the deed in Krottingen by Lithuanians under German supervision (ZStL 207 AR-Z 15/58, pp. 2744-2745). The scope and comprehensiveness of the German-organized killing in the Baltics indicates that the Germans were, in the first few weeks of the attack on the Soviet Union, already carrying out the genocidal policy which Hitler's prior decision had initiated. For substantiation of this, see ZStL 207 AR-Z 15/58.

76. The notion that Hitler would have begun systematically to slaughter Jews on a grand scale, and then stopped, defies everything we know about Hitler's psychology, his style of conducting war (which is how he conceived of his conflict with the Jews), not to mention his understanding of how to neutralize the putative Jewish menace. Therefore, Hitler's decision to slaughter Soviet Jewry was the crucial historical moment.

77. Breitman, "Plans for the Final Solution in Early 1941," shows that in early 1941 an extermination program for all of European Jewry—and not just Soviet Jewry—had already been ordered and was being prepared. Browning, "Beyond 'Intentionalism,'" also sees the contemporaneity of the decisions, yet he dates them at mid-July (p. 113).

78. For a reconstruction of the events, see Browning, "Beyond 'Intentionalism,'" pp. 111-120. He believes the change to have been not operational, but strategic.

79. Ohlendorf's fear was more that the men would become brutalized and rendered unfit for civilized society. While this was not the case for the overwhelming majority, some did find having so much blood on their hands nerve-wracking. For an example, see Daniel Goldhagen, "The 'Cowardly' Executioner: On Disobedience in the SS," Patterns of Prejudice 12, no. 1 (1978): pp. 1-16.

80. On the Germans' use of gas vans in the field, see Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein, and Adalbert Rückerl, eds., Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 52-72.

81. In fact, the Germans continued to shoot Jews en masse throughout the war. It is not at all obvious that gassing was a more "efficient" means of slaughtering Jews than shooting was. There were many instances in which shooting was clearly more efficient. The Germans preferred gassing for reasons other than some genocidal economic calculus. Understanding this suggests that, contrary to both scholarly and popular treatments of the Holocaust, gassing was really epiphenomenal to the Germans' slaughter of Jews. It was a more convenient means, but not an essential development. Had the Germans never invented the gas chamber, then they might well have killed almost as many Jews. The will was primary, the means secondary

82. See Browning, "Beyond 'Intentionalism' and 'Functionalism,' " pp. 111-120.

83. For a discussion of this issue, see Czeslaw Madajczyk, "Concentration Camps as a Tool of Oppression in Nazi-Occupied Europe," in The Nazi Concentration Camps: Structure and Aims, The Image of the Prisoner, The Jews in the Camps (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1984), pp. 55-57.

84. For the minutes of the meeting, see Nazism, pp. 1127-1135. Who can doubt that had the Germans won the European war and succeeded in slaying all of European Jewry, then Hitler would have commissioned Himmler to draw up plans for the annihilation of the remaining Jews of the world, chiefly those in North America? According to the logic of those who write as if intentions do not exist until evidence of actual concrete plans and preparations can be found, it would have to be assumed that Hitler certainly had no wish to exterminate the rest of world Jewry even when the Wannsee Conference codified his plan to annihilate European Jewry.

85. The topics in this paragraph are treated at length in Part IV

86. Randolf L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), vol. 2, pp. 792-793.

87. See Part V.

88. Quoted in Jäckel, Hitler's World View, pp. 65-66.

89. For different interpretations, which place emphasis on "Hitler's fluctuating moods," see Browning, "Beyond 'Intentionalism' and 'Functionalism,'" pp. 120-121; and Burrin, Hitler and the Jews, pp. 133-147.

90. Letter to Adolf Gremlich of Sept. 16, 1919, quoted in Ernst Deurlein, "Hitlers Eintritt in die NSDAP und die Reichswehr," VfZ 7 (1959): pp. 203-205.

91. It is noteworthy that Hitler used the word "prophecy." A prophecy is not a mere wish; it is a divining of a likely future. Goebbels and others also saw it as having been a prophecy and not empty bravado. After a meeting with Hitler on August 19, 1941, Goebbels referred explicitly back to the "prophecy," recording in his diary that it "is being fulfilled in these weeks and months with a definiteness that strikes one as almost uncanny. In the East, the Jews must pay the price, in Germany they have already paid it in part and will have to pay still more in the future" (in Martin Broszat, "Hitler und die Genesis der 'Endlosung': Aus Anlass der Thesen von David Irving," VfZ 25, no. 4 [1977]: pp. 749-750).

92. I can think of no other instance in history in which a national leader proclaimed an intention with regard to a matter of this magnitude with such evident conviction and, true to his word, carried out his intention, and then historians assert that his words should not be taken literally, that he had had no intention of doing what he announced for the whole world to hear (an announcement to which he later repeatedly and emphatically referred). This interpretive turn regarding Hitler is indeed a curious matter. Perhaps there would be some shred of a justification for maintaining this curious position if the deed had been out of character for the man. Yet Hitler was an enormously murderous man—in thought, in speech, and in deed. His character was to dream of killing his enemies and to try to turn his dreams into reality.

93. Lothar Gruchmann, "Euthanasie und Justiz im Dritten Reich," VfZ 20, no. 3 (1972): p. 238. Indeed, Hitler had stated clearly, as early as 1931, that he saw war as an opportunity for a final reckoning, saying that, should the Jews produce another war, the war would result unexpectedly for the Jews. He would "crush" "World Jewry." See Edouard Calic, Ohne Maske: Hitler-Breiting Geheimgespräche 1931 (Frankfurt: Societats-Verlag, 1968), pp. 94-95.

Chapter5

1. The definition of "perpetrator" roughly corresponds to the definition used by the courts of the Federal Republic of Germany for determining whether or not someone was liable for "complicity" in the murder of Jews. For a concise discussion of this issue, see Judgment Against Wolfgang Hoffmann et al., Landgericht Hamburg (50) 20/66, p. 243. The focus here is on the Germans' persecution, torture, and slaughter of Jews, and not on their maltreatment and killing of other people. A number of reasons lie behind this decision. Whatever the Germans' other brutalities, killings, and crimes, the Jews were central to the prevailing German worldview, to the development of German politics, to the construction of the death factories of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chelmno, as was no other victim group. In fact, no other people occupied nearly as central an ideational place in the public and private lives of Germans, or in their continent-wide murderous enterprises. A second reason for treating the Jews separately is, as the ensuing discussion shows, that the Germans consistently treated them differently and worse than other peoples. The Jews were sui generis in the Germans' eyes, and so it makes good analytical sense to treat them similarly here, though elucidative comparisons with other victim groups are periodically presented.

2. Exceptions must be made for individuals in the German institutions that housed Jews who refrained from the general brutality that characterized them, such as guards who were kind to Jews or those who really had nothing to do with Jews, such as some cooks. See Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, eds., "The Good Old Days": The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders (New York: Free Press, 1988), p. xxi, for a different conception of "perpetrator."

3. The main reason for an expansive definition has been given. A corollary benefit of the definition is that it captures an essential element of Germany and the Holocaust—to wit, that so many people were involved, connected to, and knowledgeable about the mass slaughter. A more narrow definition of "perpetrator" would create too great a distinction between those who, say, were in Einsatzkommando execution squads and those who stood guard in ghettos or manned deportation trains. After all, Germans moved easily from one role to the next. For the vast majority, chance, not acts of volition, determined who among a group of socially indistinguishable Germans would or would not find himself in an institution of killing. Definitions are inevitably "persuasive," so care must be taken that the manner of a definition's persuasion is desirable and defensible.

4. I know of no serious account of the Holocaust that fails to devote concerted attention to the gas chambers, yet many treat the mass shooting of Jews and other significant aspects of the Holocaust's perpetration either in a perfunctory manner (with the exception of the Einsatzgruppen killings in the Soviet Union) or not at all. Even Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: New Viewpoints, 1973), slights such killings (see, for example, his section on the deportations from Poland, pp. 308-345). The Germans killed somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of their Jewish victims by means other than gassing, and more Germans were involved in these killings in a greater variety of contexts than in those carried out in the gas chambers. For estimates, see Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, ed. Israel Gutman (New York: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 461-463, 1799; and Wolfgang Benz, Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1991), p. 17. The imbalance of attention devoted to the gas chambers needs to be corrected.

5. See, as representative of the vast literature on the camps, the over-seven-hundred-page conference volume The Nazi Concentration Camps: Structure and Aims, The Image of the Prisoner, The Jews in the Camps (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1984), from which very little can be learned about the perpetrators (with the exception of Robert Jay Lifton's contribution on the doctors in Auschwitz). The recent volume, Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), does have a section on the perpetrators, yet it contains only a sociological profile of the camp's personnel, another essay on the doctors, and separate essays on the commandant, Rudolf Höss, and on Josef Mengele. Aside from the demographic and personnel data, the volume contains scant information about the perpetrators, let alone sustained analysis of their actions and motivations. A few important exceptions to the neglect of the perpetrators in the camps exist, including Adalbert Rückerl, Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungslager im Spiegel deutscher Strafprozesse: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1977); and Hermann Langbein, Menschen in Auschwitz (Frankfurt/M: Ullstein, 1980), pp. 311-522.

6. For an account of the institutions of killing, see Heinz Artzt, Mörder in Uniform: Nazi-Verbrecher-Organisationen (Rastatt: Verlag Arthur Moewig, 1987); see also Richard Henkys, Die Nationalsozialistischen Gewaltverbrechen: Geschichte und Gericht (Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag, 1964); for a treatment of those who worked in Eichmann's office, see Hans Safrian, Die Eichmann-Mdnner (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1993), and in the foreign office, see Christopher R. Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office: A Study of Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland, 1940-43 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978).

7. Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges: Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, 1938-1942 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981). For an earlier, briefer treatment, see Alfred Streim, "Zum Beispiel: Die Verbrechen der Einsatzgruppen in der Sowjetunion," in Adalbert Rückerl, ed., NS-Prozesse: Nach 25 Jahren Strafverfolgung (Karlsruhe: Verlag C. F. Müller, 1971), pp. 65-106.

8. See, for example, Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). This is a fine study of the Warsaw ghetto, yet from it little can be learned of its German keepers.

9. The recently published Encyclopedia of the Holocaust has no entry for police battalions and but a brief and unilluminating entry for the Order Police. They are barely mentioned in such standard works about the Holocaust as Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews ; Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (New York: Bantam Books, 1975); or Leni Yahil's recent mammoth work, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), discusses police battalions only sporadically and in passing, even though the success of Aktion Reinhard was greatly owing to their participation. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), has contributed greatly to our knowledge of the genocidal activities of police battalions, though, because its primary focus is on one battalion, it too does not provide a systematic or comprehensive account. A smattering of other, less substantial material has also recently been published.

to. In recent years, some good publications have appeared, including Ulrich Herbert, Fremdarbeiter: Politik und Praxis des Ausländer-Einsatzes' in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches (Berlin: Verlag J. H. W. Dietz Nachf.: 1985); Ulrich Herbert, ed., Europa und der "Reichseinsatz": Ausländische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangene und KZ-Häftlinge in Deutschland, 1938-1945 (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1991); Das Daimler-Benz Buch: Ein Rüstungskonzern im "Tausendjährigen Reich" und Danach, ed. der Hamburger Stiftung fur Sozialgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Nordlingen: ECHO, 1988); and Klaus-Jörg Siegfried, Das Leben der Zwangsarbeiter im Volkswagenwerk, 1939-1945 (Frankfurt/M: Campus Verlag, 1988).

11. See Krausnick and Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges; Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941-1945: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare (London: Macmillan, 1985); Ernst Klee and Willi Dressen, eds., "Gott mit uns": Der deutsche Vernichtungskrieg im Osten, 1931-1945 (Frankfurt/M: S. Fischer Verlag, 1989); Theo J. Schulte, The German Army and Nazi Policies in Occupied Russia (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1989); Jürgen Förster, "Das Untermehmen 'Barbarossa' als Eroberungs- und Vernichtungskrieg," im Militärgeschichtlichen Forschungsamt, Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, vol. 4 (Stuttgart: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 1983), pp. 413-447; Alfred Streim, Sowjetische Gefangene in Hitlers Vernichtungskrieg: Berichte und Dokumente, 1941-1945 (Heidelberg: C. F. Müller Juristischer Verlag); and Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen, 1941-1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1978).

12. We need to learn more about the people who joined the SS, what their lives in its various branches were like, what their views of the world were, and the like. We need a "thick description" of them. For two existing major works on the subject, see Bernd Wegner, The Waffen-SS: Organization, Ideology and Function (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990); and Herbert F. Ziegler, Nazi Germany's New Aristocracy: The SS Leadership, 1925-1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

13. Early in my research, I decided that deriving a good estimate of the number of people who were perpetrators would consume more time than I could profitably devote to it, given my other research objectives. Still, I am confident in asserting that the number was huge. By far the best resource for developing such an estimate is the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen in Ludwigsburg (ZStL), which has coordinated and been the clearing-house for investigations and prosecutions of Nazi crimes since its founding at the end of 1958. Its name catalogue section (Namenskartei) of the main card catalogue (Zentralkartei) contains 640,903 cards (as of December 20, 1994) for those people who have been mentioned or have given testimony in investigations. The unit catalogue (Einheitskartei), which contains the names of people who were or were suspected of having been members of an institution of killing, has 333,082 cards covering the 4,105 units and agencies that the legal authorities have pursued. Tabulating the number of people who were actually involved in the various institutions would be a lengthy task, because the number of cards in the "unit catalogue" is not a perfect guide to the number of people who served in each institution, or who altogether worked in the institutions of killing. Many of the lists are (often woefully) incomplete; yet they also include duplicates, non-German perpetrators, and the names of people who were not members of the institutions (just being mentioned in someone's testimony gains an entry for an individual). Moreover, some of the institutions and the people in them were involved or suspected of having been involved in crimes other than the killing of Jews (such as in the so-called Euthanasia program). Even if the substantial problems associated with deciding how to classify individuals or groups of individuals did not exist (owing to various kinds of indeterminacy), simply ascertaining how many people belonged to each of the genocidal institutions would be a laborious, time-consuming task. And there are clearly a large number of institutions that have never been investigated at all.

14. Herbert, Fremdarbeiter, p. 271.

15. Gudrun Schwarz, Die nationalsozialistischen Lager (Frankfurt/M: Campus Verlag, 1990), p. 221. For example, it is not known how many ghettos existed in Belorussia or in Ukraine (p. 132). It should be noted that the camps varied enormously in size, from the vast Auschwitz complex to those in which the Germans incarcerated but a few dozen people.

16. See Schwarz, Die nationalsozialistischen Lager, pp. 221-222, for a summary of the number of camps in each of the different categories.

17. Aleksander Lasik, "Historical-Sociological Profile of the Auschwitz SS," in Gutman and Berenbaum, eds., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, p. 274. Lasik shows that a significant minority of them were ethnic Germans (pp. 279-281) who had thrown their lot in with Nazism.

18. Wolfgang Sofsky, Die Ordnung des Terrors: Das Konzentrationslager (Frankfurt/M: Fischer Verlag, 1993), pp. 341-342, nn. 20, 18.

19. Sofsky, Die Ordnung des Terrors, p. 121.

20. See Krausnick and Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, for a discussion of their initial strength (p. 147).

21. This is a low estimate because it is highly likely that still more police battalions participated in the genocidal killings, and because the average strength of five hundred used for this calculation is likely to be low (many battalions had more men, and personnel rotations took place). This subject and the sources for the estimate are discussed in Chapter 9.

22. Yehoshua Büchler, "Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS: Himmler's Personal Murder Brigades in 1941," HGS I, no. I (1986): p. 20. Büchler estimates that they killed at least one hundred thousand Jews. If anything, this is a conservative figure.

23. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 198 2), esp. pp. 1-14. "Social death" is to be distinguished from being "civilly dead," namely when people are not granted or lose certain civil rights, such as the right to vote. Social death is a qualitatively different phenomenon.

24. For two typologies of camps, see Schwarz, Die nationalsozialistischen Lager, pp. 70-73; and Aharon Weiss, "Categories of Camps—Their Character and Role in the Execution of the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question,'" in The Nazi Concentration Camps, pp. 121-127.

25. See Falk Pingel, Häftlinge unter SS-Herrschaft: Widerstand, Seblstbehauptung und Vernichtung im Konzentrationslager (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1978), pp. 30-35, for the early history of camps.

26. Schwarz, Die nationalsozialistischen Lager, p. 72.

27. Schwarz, Die nationalsozialistischen Lager, p. 222. Some of them were undoubtedly quite small and relatively inconspicuous.

28. For a discussion of this, see Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978).

29. For representative examples, see Konnilyn G. Feig, Hitler's Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), and the essays in The Nazi Concentration Camps. Sofsky, Die Ordnung des Terrors, is an exception to seeing the camps in such instrumental terms, yet the book's analytical attempt is greatly flawed because, among other reasons, it wrests consideration of the camps from their proper context of German society and generally treats them as if they were isolated islands.

30. For a general account, see Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein, and Adalbert Rückerl, eds., Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 73-204; for the memoir of a Jewish survivor who worked in the extermination facilities of Auschwitz, see Filip Muller, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (New York: Stein & Day, 1979).

31. Pingel, Häftlinge unter SS-Herrschaft, p. 186.

32. This is why using the term "concentration camp" as the generic term for camps is misleading, unless it is explicitly stated that the term encompasses the other kinds of camps. See Chapters 10 and 11 for a treatment of the themes mentioned here.

33. See Sofsky, Die Ordnung des Terrors, p. 135, for a chart representing this. The chart is problematic both in its placement of Jews (as I discuss in Chapter 15, they were not mere "subhumans") and in its characterization of the "life-death" continuum, which was not a continuum, but an array of widely discrete and changing values.

34. For a discussion of this subject, see Pingel, Häftlinge unter SS-Herrschaft, pp.91-96,133-134.

35. For general analyses, see Joel E. Dimsdale, ed., Survivors, Victims, and Perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust (Washington: Hemisphere, 1980), chaps. 4-10; for an analysis of the condition and social life of prisoners in Auschwitz, see Langbein, Menschen in Auschwitz, pp. 83-128.

Chapter 6

I. No general history of the Order Police during the Nazi period has yet been written, not even one that treats the institution's history aside from its participation in mass murder. Karl-Heinz Heller, "The Reshaping and Political Conditioning of the German Order Police, 1935-1945: A Study of Techniques Used in the Nazi State to Conform" (Ph.D. diss., University of Cincinnati, 1970), focuses on the indoctrination of the Order Police. The volume Zur Geschichte der Ordnungspolizei, 1936-1945, containing Georg Tessin, "Die Stabe und Truppeneinheiten der Ordnungspolizei," and Hans-Joachim Neufeldt, "Entstehung und Organisation des Hauptamtes Ordnungspolizei," is inadequate as an historical work.

2. BAK R19/395 (8/20/40), p. 171.

3. ZStL 206 AR-Z 6/62 (hereafter cited as JK), p. 1949.

4. Police battalions had varying designations depending on their membership. The ones composed mainly of career policemen were designated "police battalions"; those composed mainly of reservists were called "reserve police battalions"; newly created formations were called "police training battalions" during their training period. Among them distinctions were also made according to the age of each battalion's members. Battalions initially with older men were numbered 301 to 325 and were known as "Wachtmeisterbataillonen. (Police battalions numbered under 200 were generally reserve police battalions, though a number of the 300-level ones were as well.) It should be noted, though, that from the beginning the manpower composition of battalions often defied their official designations; as the war proceeded, these formal distinctions grew ever more meaningless, owing to changing membership. I have decided to refer to them all generically as "police battalions."

5. BAK R19/395 (8/20/40), p. 175.

6. A report with the findings of the inspection of three police battalions in May of 1940 (BAK R19/265, pp. 168-169) reflects the neglect that the Order Police found itself suffering. See also BAK R19/265 (5/9/40), p. 153.

7. BAK R19/395 (11/20/41), pp. 180-183.

8. See, for example, Tessin, "Die Stabe und Truppeneinheiten der Ordnungspolizei," pp. 14-15.

9. BAK R19/311 (6/26/40), p. 165.

10. BAK R19/265 (5/23/40), p. 168. Similarly, in May 1940, five police battalions (including number 65 from Recklinghausen, and 67 from Essen) had only two-thirds to four-fifths of the reserves that they needed. The inspection report explained that "in general, the recruitment situation for police reserves is very strained." See BAK R19/265, p. 157.

11. See BAK R19/265 (12/22/37), pp. 91ff.

12. BAK R19/265 (5/9/40), pp. 150-151.

13. See, for example, one representative ideological course for the men of the Einzeldienst, BAK R19/308 (3/6/40), pp. 36-43. As this order indicates, the training for police battalions stocked with non-reservists differed slightly. A subsequent order of January 14, 1941, presented more detailed instructions for ideological training, including the page numbers of the pamphlets that were to be used for the discussion of each subject. This order illustrates how paltry the education was, and how unlikely it was that the schooling would have a lasting effect on the men. For the entire ideological training, only sixty-five pages of material were detailed (with an added unspecified number of pages from two pamphlets about the peasantry). A number of topics had fewer than four pages of written material. Under the category of "The Jewish Problem in Germany," only two pages of material (one from each of two different pamphlets) were specified, hardly sufficient to alter a person's views of Jews. See BAK R19/308 (12/20/40), p. 100.

14. See the discussion of their ideological training in Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), pp. 176-184. He discusses in more detail the material regarding Jews that was presented to the men. Although he judges the indoctrination to have been more substantial and effective than I do, he too concludes that this material was not instrumental in moving the men to take part in genocidal killing (p. 184).

15. See BAK R19/308 (2/8/41), pp. 267-268. It is fair to suppose, with the frequent dispersal of a battalion's men over a region and with all of the demands, problems, and distractions of the field, that the instructional meetings worked out far less well than even these orders imply. See also BAK R19/308 (6/2/40), pp. 250-254; for the instructions on the ideological education of the men in the Einzeldienst, see pp. 252-253.

16. For the role of Party membership in promotion, see BAK R19/311 (6/18/40), pp. 145-147, 149.

17. The material that exists on police battalions is scattered throughout Germany's justice system. Virtually nothing of value on their killing operations is in the Bundesarchiv Koblenz. I have endeavored to uncover all the material on police battalions at the ZStL, which, though considerable, is by no means comprehensive. Just compiling a listing of the legal investigations which have dealt with police battalion crimes was a difficult task. I cannot claim to have mastered the material on police battalions, because I had to start from square one on material that is dauntingly voluminous. Indeed, I would be surprised if I have not overlooked some of what the ZStL possesses. I have read through investigations that have dealt with over thirty-five police battalions. On some, like Police Battalion 101, have read thousands of pages; on others, but a few hundred. The quality, not just the quantity, of the pages is, moreover, very uneven. About some battalions scant information (even about the outline of their activities) is available; about others a great deal exists, although rich detail about the actions of the Germans in them is generally lacking even for the best-documented battalions. So the analysis here is not comprehensive, though it draws on an extensive empirical base. The role of police battalions in the Holocaust deserves to be the subject of a large book.

18. See Ruth Bettina Birn, Die Höheren SS- und Polizeiführer: Himmlers Vertreter im Reich und in den besetzten Gebieten (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1986); and ZStL 204 AR-Z 13/60, vol. 4, pp. 397-399.

19. See Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges: Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, 1938-1942 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981), p. 46; Alfred Streim, "Das Sonderkommando 4a der Einsatzgruppe C und die mit diesem Kommando eingesetzten Einheiten während des Russland-Feldzuges in der Zeit vom 22. 6. 1941 bis zum Sommer 1943," ZStL 11 (4) AR-Z 269/60, "Abschlussbericht," p. 36; and Tessin, "Die Stäbe und Truppeneinheinten der Ordnungspolizei," p. 96.

20. ZStL 204 AR-Z 13/60, vol. 4, pp. 402-403.

21. ZStL 202 AR 2484/67, pp. 2397-2506. More than these eleven police battalions operated in the occupied Soviet Union. For example, Police Battalions 11, 65 (discussed below), and 91 were active there.

22. The battalion commander, Major Weis, convened his officers before the attack and informed them of Hitler's orders to kill all Soviet commissars and annihilate Soviet Jewry. The commander of First Company, Captain H.B., communicated this to his men before the onslaught. Other company officers may have done the same, though the testimony does not reveal this. See ZStL 205 AR-Z 20/60 (hereafter cited as Buchs), A.A., Buchs, p. 1339r; J.B., Buchs, p. 1416, and J.B., ZStL 202 AR 2701/65, vol. 1, p. 101; K.H., Buchs, p. 15651; H.G., Buchs, pp. 363-364, and H.G., ZStL 202 AR 2701/65, vol. 1, p. 96; R.H., Buchs, p. 681; and the self-contradictory testimony of E.M., Buchs, pp. 1813r, 2794-2795, 764; also Judgment Against Buchs et al., Wuppertal, 12 Ks 1/67 (hereafter cited as Judgment, Buchs), pp. 29-30, 62. It is worth noting that Browning, Ordinary Men, fails to mention this most fundamental fact in his account of the battalion (pp. 11-12). It flatly contradicts his assertion (discussed here in Chapter 4, note 70) that no explicit genocidal order had already been given.

23. E.Z., Buchs, p. 1749.

24. See the statements of two survivors, S.J., Buchs, p. 1823; and J.S., Buchs, p. 1830.

25. Judgment, Buchs, p. 43.

26. Judgment, Buchs, p. 42; and J.J., Buchs, p. 1828r.

27. Judgment, Buchs, p. 44.

28. See A.B., Buchs, p. 2875, and TC., Buchs, pp. 2877-2878.

29. Judgment, Buchs, pp. 51-52. Browning's contention that this slaughter "was the work of an individual commander who correctly intuited and anticipated the wishes of his Führer" is difficult to accept. See Ordinary Men, p. 12. Does this mean that Major Weis took it upon himself to initiate the slaughter of many hundreds of Jews? Saying that he "intuited and anticipated" Hitler's wish implies that Weis did not receive the order to slaughter Soviet Jews, although he clearly did—a fact of which the men, even the rank and file, of this battalion were aware and to which they testify. (See note 22 above.) They even had to carry out the killing operation in the face of strenuous objections from the military, which had jurisdictional priority in this area. Also, the Germans perpetrated similar licentious slaughters in many cities on captured Soviet territory. "Intuition" played no causative role in them. Additionally, Browning's discussion of this killing operation, including the characterization of it as having begun as a "pogrom" which then "quickly escalat[ed] into more systematic mass murder" (p. 12), might suggest the mistaken notion that the killing of these Jews was not planned from the beginning of the operation.

30. Judgment, Buchs, pp. 52-54.

31. For the spontaneity of the Germans' burning of the synagogue, see E.M., Buchs, pp. 1814r-1815.

32. H.S., Buchs, p. 1764.

33. The court estimates the number to have been at least seven hundred (Judgment, Buchs, p. 57). The Indictment puts it at a minimum of eight hundred (Buchs, p. 113). Jewish sources place the number at around two thousand. A survivor estimates that 90 percent of the victims were men and 10 percent were women and children. See J.S., Buchs, p. 1830; also, see I.A., Buchs, p. 1835.

34. Judgment, Buchs, pp. 56-58. The Germans forced at least two Jews, a man and a woman, into the building after it was already ablaze (See L.L., Buchs, p. 1775).

35. Judgment, Buchs, p. 59. The latter's wish was to a great extent fulfilled. The fire spread from the synagogue to nearby buildings. The Germans allowed much of the Jewish portion of the city to burn down, with more Jews perishing in these flames. They also prevented firefighters from extinguishing the flames, which spread to other dwellings in the Jewish district in which additional men, women, and children burned to death (Judgment, Buchs, p. 59; and E.Z., Buchs, pp. 1748r-1749).

36. See, for example, J.B., Buchs, p. 1415. Browning's statement that they and other men of 300-level battalions were "volunteers" (Ordinary Men, p. 10) can be misunderstood. Typically, men were called up to duty, or anticipated that they would be and opted for this police duty over other military or security services duty. So they should not be called "volunteers" without qualification. For this police battalion, see, for example, H.H., JK, p. 1091; and A.A., JK, p. 1339r. In light of Browning's treatment of Police Battalion 101, which is discussed here in the next two chapters, it is worth noting that these Germans' commentaries—expressing joy at the sight of the genocidal fire—are curiously absent from his account of this slaughter. See Ordinary Men, pp. 11-12.

37. Judgment, Buchs, p. 60.

38. To my knowledge, Police Battalion 65 has not been discussed in the literature on the Holocaust. The source for it is JK.

39. Many testimonies and surviving photographs document the savagery and openness of these killings. For a few examples, see Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess, eds., "The Good Old Days ".- The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders (New York: Free Press, 1991) pp. 28-37.

40. P.K..JK, pp. 945-946.

41. Verfiigung, JK, pp. 2120-2124.

42. For a summary of the testimony and of much of what is known about the killings in Šiauliai, see "Sachverhaltsdarstellung," JK, pp. 1212-1214. G.T. describes one killing in which he helped bring the Jews to the killing pits (JK, pp. 1487-1488).

43. The Lithuanians probably identified the Jews, since this was the typical pattern (as the Germans themselves did not know who the Jews were). Also, the company's sergeant major told one reservist that they had had to carry out the executions themselves because the Lithuanians had proven themselves to be too brutish (grausam) in their manner of killing (H.H., JK, p. 1152).

44. J.F, JK, p. 849.

45. H.K., JK, p. 733. K. says that the Šiauliai killings were done by the professional policemen among them, as were most of the killings during the fall (pp. 732-733). He says that this man, W., died shortly thereafter during the battles around Cholm. Whether or not he actually killed again is unknown.

46. J.F., JK, p. 849. These posters were, however, inaccurate, for Jews remained in Šiauliai for some time to come. Nevertheless, they expressed a yearning for the announced end, the total purging from the city of Jews.

47. Claims have, of course, been made by individual men in this battalion that they were coerced or that they refused to kill. One that is noteworthy asserts that, after having refused to participate in the killing in Šiauliai, the man was told by his sergeant that he had better think it over by evening. The sergeant called the man to him before evening and, learning that the man still refused, told him that he at least could bring the Jews to the killing site. The man says that he did not believe he could refuse this order. This account, unlike most others, sounds truthful, for the man tells his interrogator that he can ask the sergeant himself, who will confirm his story. He says that after this killing in Šiauliai, he participated in no others. If the story is indeed true, it is particularly noteworthy in that this man gives no hint that others in the battalion shared his attitude or attempted to refuse to participate in the killings. For material relevant to the issue of coercion, see G.T.,JK, pp. 1487-1488; H.M., JK, p. 773; and Verfagung, JK, pp. 2196, 2209-2210, 2212-2214, 2138-2139.

48. For a summary of what is known of these killings, see Verfugung, JK, pp. 2120-2171.

49. H.K.,JK,p.733.

50. Verfügung, JK, pp. 2168-2170. H.H. reports having seen a sign, "Luga Jew-free!" (Luga Judenfrei!) (JK, p. 1152).

51. Verfügung, JK, p. 2157.

52. Verfügung, JK, pp. 2159-2162.

53. Verfügung, JK, pp. 2166-2168.

54. Given the demonology about Jews undergirding their actions, these Germans appear to have been ready, if not eager, to believe that Jews were ubiquitous, so that they required but meager proof in order to conclude that someone was a Jew. Sometimes, a suspicion was sufficient, as an episode from this battalion's stock of memories, this one from a reservist, illustrates: "From the town of Iwanowskaja I can report as an eyewitness that S., who was then a reservist, beat to death a prisoner of war or a deserter only because the name Abraham appeared in his papers. At the end, an army officer appeared on the scene; however, he came too late" (E,L., JK, p. 783). Naturally, nothing happened to this brutal killer, who, because of repeated exploits, became known for his sadism. This man was the father of nine children born between 1924 and 1940.

55. In the value-inverted world of Germany during the Nazi period, naming a genocidal undertaking after someone—in this case, the assassinated Reinhard Heydrich—was to honor him.

56. For an account of Aktion Reinhard, see Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); for the Lublin District, see Dieter Pohl, Von der "Judenpolitik" zum Judenmord: Der Distrikt Lublin des Generalgouvernements, 1939-1944 (Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang, 1993).

57. Indictment Against K.R., ZStL 208 AR 967/69 (hereafter cited as KR), pp. 53-55.

58. For the two different chains of command, see Indictment, KR, pp. 19-22.

59. R.E., KR, pp. 36-37.

60. R.E., KR, p. 37.

61. Indictment, KR, pp. 85-86.

62. Indictment, KR, p. 89.

63. Indictment, KR, p. 103; R.E., KR, p. 39.

64. See Indictment, KR, pp. 104-105; and Browning, Ordinary Men, p. 132.

65. The history, manpower composition, and essential features of the third battalion of Police Regiment 25, Police Battalion 67, do not diverge from those of the other two battalions in any significant way that would contradict the thrust of the analysis. See ZStL 202 AR-Z 5/63.

66. JK, pp. 2075-2076.

67. H.K., JK, p. 732.

68. Verfügung, JK, p. 2202.

69. See, for example, Verfügung, JK, p. 2240.

70. A.W., JK, p. 1089.

71. The assertion by the perpetrators that they did not have any idea that "resettlement" meant killing, and that when they deported Jews (even when they themselves accompanied the Jews to the death camps), they were unaware that the Jews were slated for death, is spurious, though widespread. The evidence to the contrary (aside from common sense), is voluminous. For a definitive statement on the subject, see, for example, Indictment, KR, p. 90; the former clerk of the KdO Lublin staff testifies: "By 'evacuation' one understood the evacuation of Jews to camps or ghettos. From rumors and hearsay, I knew at that time that the Jews who came into a camp were in some way killed there. Details of this were, however, unknown to me. Of gassing in particular I heard something only later" (R.E., KR, p. 35).

72. J.F., JK, p. 1086.

73. Verfügung, JK, pp. 2199-2202. One participant says that before and during the killing, the killers received Schnapps. The use of alcohol during executions is difficult to verify or disprove. The men in killing institutions often put forward conflicting claims on this point. It cannot be doubted that there were times when Germans consumed alcohol before or during killing operations, not to mention after their work was done.

The killing was discussed frequently among the men, although we know little of what they said. One of the perpetrators, a thirty-three-year old reservist from Dortmund, drafted in August 1939, relates the following about the killings around Cracow:

Among the men, it was always said that Third Company divided itself for
the operations against the Jewish people in the following manner:
First Platoon: Shovel holes [Löcher schaufeln].
Second Platoon: "Mow them down" ["Legt um"].
Third Platoon: Cover them up and plant trees [Schaufelt zu und pflanzt
Bäume]."

This is, of course, a fanciful description of what happened. Since the different platoons rotated duties, the Germans almost never dug the graves themselves (either having local auxiliaries or the Jews themselves do it), and they certainly did not plant trees over the graves. Still, from this story three things emerge: the Germans talked about the killings enough for lore to develop around them; they tried to give some form to their killing activities (which were frequent) that would integrate them better into the normal routines of non-killing days; in their talk about the killings, they crowned them with the fanciful creation of life and beauty: the planting of trees, which unwittingly betrays their lack of disapproval of the genocidal killing, and their common (note that this was the lore about Third Company) conception of the killing as a regenerative, redemptive, and beautifying enterprise. See H.K., JK, p. 734.

74. Verfügung, JK, pp. 2207-2209. It must be noted that this killer maintains that he and his comrades all disapproved of the killing, and that they had been threatened by their battalion commander should they refuse to do their duty. See Appendix 1 for a discussion of why such claims must be discounted.

75. See Verfügung, JK, p. 2207. The occasional testimony about the posting of killing operations on bulletin boards discusses it as if it had been nothing more remarkable than the posting of ordinary guard duty.

76. Verfiigung, JK, pp. 2260, 2269-2275.

77. See Shmuel Krakowski, The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942-1944 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1984). The Germans were often aided by local Poles who led them, with information and as guides, to the hideouts of Jews.

78. Verfiigung, JK, pp. 2277-2287.

79. Verfugung, JK, pp. 2078-2079, 2288-2299.

80. The men of police battalions contributed to the slaughter of a large portion of the Jews whom the Einsatzgruppen killed, numbering over one million. They also helped perpetrate the slaughter of a good portion of the Jews in the Generalgouvernement, numbering around two million, as well as Jews from other areas of Europe. See the chart listing some major police battalion killings in Chapter 9.