Ours is a curious age of narcissism and self-flagellation, an excuse culture of exhibitionists in which the high priests—Oprah and Dr. Phil—invite us to advertise our sins and remorse in the klieg lights of their studio confessionals. The essence of this public ethos is found in words not coined but made famous by the Rev. Oprah: “Denial is not just a river in Egypt.”
With our supreme self-absorption comes historical myopia. We think we invented denial. This same vanity, crossed with savvy marketing and contempt for history, produced the ludicrous notion of a “greatest generation”—and a bestseller for Tom Brokaw. With a straight face, Brokaw suggested that the soldiers who fought in World War II represented a generation of Americans somehow superior to those who stood with Washington at Valley Forge, with Lee and Grant in Virginia, nobler than the doughboys who died in Flanders fields—worthier than the generation of Americans who marched with King, were beaten and jailed for registering voters in the South, and gave lives and limbs to a misbegotten task in Vietnam.
That is some pretty audacious nonsense, but Brokaw and other contemporary peddlers of altered reality must bow before the perpetrators of the Holocaust—the architects and true masters of denial. Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich lasted only twelve years. He dreamed of a “Garden of Eden” in the East, free of Jews, and left a desert littered with skulls. The Führer also left behind accomplices—from the high command in Berlin to distant command posts in Ukraine—who in courtrooms in Kharkov and Nuremberg produced the greatest exercise in collective denial ever recorded.
The Nazi killers were nothing if not creative. Their denial was expressed to different degrees, on a variety of levels, from simple denial of documented physical facts to tortured denial of legal principle and philosophical truth.
For example, at one darkly comic extreme—the Sgt. Schultz “I know nothing” position—was Walter Haensch, an Einsatzgruppe commander who claimed that he first learned of the mass murder of Jews in 1947 when he was told by an interrogator at Nuremberg. Never mind that the Einsatzgruppe’s own field reports placed Haensch at sites in Russia where 3,400 people were shot between Jan. 16 and Feb. 14, 1942. Haensch blithely insisted he was in Berlin at the time for a birthday party and dental appointment.
At the opposite extreme was Otto Ohlendorf, the charismatic, intellectually combative commander of Einsatzgruppe D who admitted to supervising the murder of 90,000 Jews, and welcomed the opportunity to adamantly deny legal guilt. Killing violated his personal beliefs, Ohlendorf said, but duty required him to follow orders from a superior. In a display of mental gymnastics worthy of a perfect 10, Ohlendorf argued that killing Jews was an act of war, not a crime against humanity (genocide), because Hitler’s military plan called for wiping out Judeo-Bolshevism, not Jews per se.
“Killing children was militarily necessary, too, he claimed, because they posed a possible security risk, especially when they reached adulthood and could avenge the death of their parents,” historian Hilary Earl wrote.
Ohlendorf also hoped to mitigate his crimes in the eyes of the court by noting that “My mission was to see to it that this general order for executions would be carried out as humanely as conditions would permit.” It was strictly forbidden to mistreat victims before they were shot. Taking personal possessions from victims or forcing them to undress was not permitted (so we’re to conclude the tons of luggage, clothing, and shoes were “donated” by victims?). Any shooter found to be enjoying the experience would be barred from participating in future executions—the Nazis’ idea of tough love. Alas, Ohlendorf’s “humane” executions went unappreciated by the court and he was sentenced to death.
The judges at Nuremberg were regularly driven to distraction by the fictions and prevarications of the defendants. Einsatzgruppe commander Paul Blobel, who appeared to have been separated at birth from Rasputin, oversaw the epic slaughter at Babi Yar—34,000 persons, mostly Jews, shot in two days. He offered a fantastical rationale which was met with cold outrage by Judge Michael Musmanno, the seventh of eight children born to Italian immigrants in a small town near Pittsburgh.
Blobel: All the German people know, your Honor, that an order was given by General Eisenhower that for every one American killed, two hundred Germans are to be shot.
Musmanno: Do you say that every German and every defense counsel here knew of such an order?
Blobel: I am convinced that many of the defense counsel knew of this order.
There were many Germans in the courtroom. Musmanno asked Blobel to find one who would confirm the Eisenhower story. Not a single hand went up. Musmanno demanded that Blobel apologize for besmirching the good name of General Eisenhower, who had earned the respect of friends and foes alike. Blobel meekly complied.
Musmanno had a similarly testy exchange, at a higher level of intellection, with Ohlendorf over his unquestioning acceptance of an order to murder—just because it was an order. Would he question the morality of an order to kill his own sister, Musmanno asked. Ohlendorf at first refused to answer what he considered a trick question. But since his defense was based on strict obedience to orders, Ohlendorf finally said that, yes, he would have murdered his sister if ordered.
Musmanno also engaged in a mini-Socratic dialogue with Einsatzgruppe commander Willy Seibert, also sentenced to death.
Musmanno: Let us suppose you received an order directly from Hitler that you were to execute the chief of the Einsatzgruppen. Would you execute that order?
Seibert: No, I would not have carried it out.
Musmanno: Well, then, suppose you received an order to shoot a twelve-year-old Jew? Would you shoot him?
I think we, as outside observers, can say that both Ohlendorf and Seibert were lying. The scenario presented to Ohlendorf of course was theoretical, but would a man who took pride in “humanely” murdering Jews pull the trigger on his own sister? Not likely. As for Seibert, it’s hard to understand his indecision—or perhaps poor memory. The point-blank shooting of Jewish children was quite common. You don’t get to six million by sparing twelve-year-olds.
Because his trial in Jerusalem was held nearly fifteen years after Nuremberg and was covered extensively by the now widespread medium of television, Adolf Eichmann became—and remains—the Nazi poster boy for the “just following orders” defense. Eichmann testified about the Wannsee conference outside Berlin in January 1942, at which the Nazi High Command decided on the total annihilation of European Jews by gas (half a million Jews already had been shot in Ukraine). Finally having all the Nazi elites “on board” the death train was a great relief to the outranked Eichmann, who served as recording secretary at the conference.
“At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I was free of all guilt,” he testified. “Who was I to judge? Who was I to have my own thoughts in this matter?”
The “following orders” mantra was used like table salt on potato pancakes from the top to the bottom of the Nazi war machine, starting with the three mid-level officers chosen by the Soviets for the first war crimes trial in Kharkov in 1943. Later, at Nuremberg, the German generals were asked why they so blindly followed Hitler’s orders to commit acts they knew to be war crimes. General Alfred Jodl said it was “not the task of a soldier to act as judge over his supreme commander. Let history do that or God in Heaven.” Far down the line of command, at the level of sergeant in American terms, Unteroffizier Peter Maiguart, a circus acrobat before the war, repeated the company line, but with more lurid details:
“Our rifles were pointed at the back of the Jews’ heads. I had to shoot a young teenage girl. In German she said to me, ‘How can you murder people?’ I answered, ‘Orders.’ Then I shot her. Altogether I shot twenty-four people that day, maybe more. Others shot more.”
It has been argued that soldiers such as Maiguart followed orders to murder because refusal to do so would mean their own execution or exile to a concentration camp. However, there is a very basic flaw in this argument, noted historian Christopher Browning.
“In the past 45 years no defense attorney or defendant in any of the hundreds of postwar trials has been able to document a single case in which refusal to obey an order to kill unarmed civilians resulted in the allegedly inevitable dire punishment,” Browning wrote in Ordinary Men, his 1992 study of German Reserve Police Battalions which performed many of the same killing tasks as the Wehrmacht and Einsatzgruppen.
To the contrary, Browning and other historians have documented many cases in which German soldiers and officers refused or begged off orders to murder and were given a pass. Sometimes they did not even have to ask. Browning tells the story of conscience-stricken Major Wilhelm Trapp, leader of Reserve Police Battalion 101 sent to execute the Jews of a small Polish village.
“The male Jews of working age were to be separated and taken to a work camp. The remaining Jews—the women, children, and elderly—were to be shot on the spot by the battalion,” Browning wrote. “Having explained what awaited his men, Trapp then made an extraordinary offer: if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step out.”1
Only one man stepped out. The rest carried out the bloody orders that day and on many subsequent days, giving the lie to “putative duress,” the notion heard repeatedly from Germans in the dock that they followed criminal orders out of reasonable expectation of punishment if they refused. As Browning notes, after Major Trapp’s tearful offer of immunity, “putative duress did not exist in the battalion”—yet the killing went on without any shortage of killers.
Major Wilhelm was not alone in offering immunity to his men. In her study of auxiliary police units in the Soviet Union, Meredith Meehan writes: “Despite the common misconception that executioners were often ‘ordered to shoot or be shot,’ there is almost no evidence to support this allegation. In fact, one auxiliary noted that, ‘It was made clear to us that we could refuse to obey an order to participate in Sonderaktionen (special actions) without adverse consequences.”2 This reflected growing awareness in Berlin that point-blank executions were exacting a crippling psychological toll on the shooters. Why else, in planning consummation of the Final Solution, would they switch from bullets in Ukraine to gas in Germany and Poland?
Exemptions were issued from the earliest days of the Nazi Holocaust in Soviet territories. The first traceable killing order of Operation Barbarossa, writes historian Konrad Kwiet, was issued on June 23 or 24, 1946, in Berlin by Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo, to SS-Major Hans-Joachim Böhme, head of an Einsatzkommando unit in the East Prussian city of Tilsit. Ultimately, the unit conducted some six thousand executions. Not a single member of the unit hesitated to shoot Jewish men, Kwiet writes, but some drew the line at women and children.
“In late summer of 1941, after a bestial murder of women and children, a police officer declared, ‘I am not doing that again in the future.’ Böhme responded: ‘You will be put in an SS uniform, and you will receive an official order,’ adding later, ‘Fine, you can leave, you do not have to do this—you have a wife and children.’ No one who protested against the murder of Jews or who disobeyed a killing order was ever sentenced to death by the special SS and Police courts. As a rule, such persons were demoted, transferred, or dismissed.”
A prominent example was Erwin Schulz, an Einsatzgruppe commander in Ukraine who asked to be relieved of his duties in the summer of 1941 after receiving orders to increase executions, which might require Schulz himself to kill. The word came down from Himmler that all Jews not engaged in work were to be executed, including women and children. “I was shattered when I heard this piece of news and I had absolutely no doubt that I could never carry out such an order,” Schulz said years later in court. He was released from his duties without penalty.
The true face of the Einsatzgruppen was not the anguished Erwin Schulz but rather the smugly remorseless Ernst Biberstein, a Protestant minister before the war. When asked by the president of the tribunal why—as a professed man of God—he did not provide spiritual balm to those about to be executed, Biberstein replied without hesitation, “Mr. President, one does not cast pearls before swine.”
By the same token, it would be wrong to conclude from examples of the Nazi version of conscientious objection—refusal to quicken the pace of executions—that the German military was rife with reluctant killers. There are many more stories of soldiers who not only followed orders to kill but relished the task, sometimes creatively as with the wine cellars of Artyomovsk. They were guilty of a crime not in the books: aggravated genocide.
“Most men accepted their orders automatically and soon got used to the work,” concluded the editors of The Good Old Days. “Some were positively addicted to it and ‘could not get enough of it.’ Ordinary soldiers of the Wehrmacht who came to watch would sometimes ask to join in, borrowing guns to share in the sport, shooting Jewish children as they ran like hares.”3 A witness to a mass execution in Minsk said the shooters “seemed merry while sitting on top of the execution pits with machine guns and behaved as if they were at a wedding party.”
The willing, even enthusiastic, participation by ordinary soldiers and mid-level officers was instrumental to smooth operation of the Nazi killing machine. “It quickly became apparent that even at the lowest levels in the chain of command there would be no resistance to the shooting orders,” wrote Konrad Kwiet. “On the contrary, the rank and file of the murderous apparatus offered through their actions the clearest evidence of the feasibility of the Final Solution.”4
Himmler unwittingly helped lay the foundation for post-war denial in December 1941 when he ordered that massacres during the day were to be followed by gemütlich evenings—social gatherings—which amounted to brainwashing, or conscience-cleansing, sessions. Psychiatrists would have had a field day with Himmler had he not committed suicide shortly after being captured by Allied troops in 1945. While the after-parties ostensibly were intended to foster bonding and loyalty among officers, Himmler appeared to be addressing, perhaps subconsciously, his own oft-stated revulsion for the slaughters. He became agitated and turned “white as cheese” while witnessing the shooting of Jews at Minsk early in Operation Barbarossa. At least in word, Himmler seemed more repulsed than many of the men who carried out his orders.
“It is the holy duty of senior leaders and commanders personally to ensure that none of our men who have to fulfill this burdensome duty should ever be brutalized or suffer damage to their spirit and character in doing so,” he stated in his gemütlich order, adding that it was “impermissible” to discuss “facts and related numbers” from the day’s events at such gatherings. “It should be an evening on which they sit and eat at table in the best German domestic style, and music, lectures, and introductions to the beauties of German intellectual and emotional life occupy the hours.”
This exactly describes the gatherings to which my Jewish mother and her sister were often summoned during the year they spent in Nazi-occupied Kremenchug in central Ukraine. Masquerading as non-Jews after escaping the ravines of Drobitsky Yar near their home in Kharkov, Zhanna and Frina made their way west to Kremenchug, where they served in a troupe of locals organized by Nazi commanders to keep their troops entertained. Some evenings, they were “invited” to dine with Wehrmacht field officers and Gestapo in their private quarters, and then to play for them—Bach, Beethoven, Chopin.
There were other practices and events that aided the killers in building emotional armor to deflect pangs of conscience or actual accountability for their crimes. One was the concept of Blutkitt, or “blood cement,” the result of group involvement in crimes such as shootings. The family that killed together stayed together. If everyone was guilty, no one was guilty. Physical as well as emotional distance from the crime made the Nazi conscience grow fonder of denial.
“The physical retreat from the Eastern occupied territories enabled the perpetrators to disassociate themselves psychologically from their crimes and facilitated their more or less smooth integration … into postwar German society,” wrote historian Jürgen Matthäus. “Even decades after the war, few of those former SS and policemen who became suspects or defendants in court cases displayed signs grasping the significance of what they had done in the East.”5
For those who ended up in the dock at Nuremberg, denial was just a river in Egypt. Their emotional armor could protect the killers from themselves—their own demons and consciences, if they had not totally atrophied from disuse—but not from the blunt force of law that pierced the armor and exposed their specious rationalizing about obedience to orders.
“The Charter of this tribunal recognizes that one who has committed criminal acts may not take refuge in superior orders nor in the doctrine that his crimes were acts of states,” said Robert Jackson, chief U.S. counsel, in his opening statement at Nuremberg. If those dodges were allowed, Jackson added, it would result in “immunity for practically everyone concerned in the really great crimes against peace and mankind.”
In a lovely coup de grâce of karmic justice—of what goes around and comes around—the final nail in the Germans’ legal coffin came from their own military code.
“If the execution of a military order in the course of duty violates the criminal law, then the superior officer giving the order will bear the sole responsibility,” Jackson said, quoting from the German code. He continued: “However, the obeying subordinate will share the punishment … if he has exceeded the order given to him, or if it was within his knowledge that the order of his superior officer concerned an act by which it was intended to commit a civil or military crime or transgression.”
The German Military Code thus effectively indicted every German soldier who had shot an unarmed Jew, slammed a Jewish baby against a rock, or filled a synagogue with the sick and insane and set it ablaze. But it was the officers who sent them to kill—on orders from Hitler, they reminded everyone in court—who faced justice at Nuremberg. Jackson made it clear the buck stopped with them. “Their responsibility is correspondingly great and may not be shifted to that fictional being, ‘the state,’ which cannot be produced for trial, cannot testify, and cannot be sentenced.”
The defendants, however, could be tried and sentenced—and they were. In the end, both their crimes and their guilt were—undeniable.