Two Affairs Flanking a Larger Complex

Golson, Richard J. Memory, The Holocaust and French Justice: The Bousquet and Touvier Affairs. University Press of New England, Hanover and London. 1996.

Two Affairs Flanking a Larger Complex

The compartmentalization in Memory, the Holocaust, and French Justice by Richard Golsan is commendable. Complicity of the French with the Germans in the prosecution of the Jewish is referred to as affairs, and the book culminates in the trial of Paul Touvier. This is particularly intriguing because he was among the last of the men who tortured and persecuted the Jews of France to be tried. He was ultimately freed.

It is useful to look for comparisons in his trial to that of René Bousequet. He died due to his involvement as the head of Vichy police. The argument he attempted to run was that he was unaware of the actions of the Germans in exterminating those who were deported (127). Touvier had a role more distinctly personal to the Jewish question.

As the head of the Milice, in trial a great part of the discussion lies on the veracity of the claims made against Touvier. Reminiscent of the larger question that lingers among all French, is the role assassinations and political repression enacted by this branch of Vichy enforcement played in German success. While France appears to be laudable in obstruction of justice, as Touvier argues in his specific case, the reality is that a rigorous contextualization of the domestic military conflict between the Gestapo, the Jews, and the Resistance shows a higher level of cooperation than in other nations. The question of justice further complicates this relationship, as an inferred interpretation from inconclusive statements leaves the danger of deeming the actions of the Gestapo in prosecution of the Resistance as illegal, some of which were not, and the actions of the Milice enacting brutality in its own name a legal act.

Golsan flanks this argument with two supplementary points. Firstly, in Holland, one of the highest rates of Jewish extermination in Europe was perpetrated by the Nazism (82). The nation was heavily occupied, and included some of the only public demonstrations against Germann treatment of Jews, as late as 1941, though. Secondly, in Hungary the Admiral Horthy refused to deport any Jews out of the nation for two years during the extermination. The Germans subsequently carried out among their most brutal operations in Hungary.

It can be seen to be apparent that results do not always imply effort. In the case of Touvier, one main argument for his release is that many of the times he killed Jews, he had saved others. There is a young jeweler who worked for the underground. Without other trouble, Touvier returns him safely home and does not raid the shop despite his economic incentive to do so (131). These are stories that obfuscate the full severity of his actions as an interrogatory function of German repression.

Golson does not attempt to tackle the question of the German occupation simply as a single historian, but draws on the work of others in order to create a tangible web at through which a single thesis is explored and reinforced. More importantly, analysis of the court documents releasing one guilty party and convicting another provide contrasting perspectives contemporary to the progression of the understanding of the war. In the trial of Bousquet, in addition to the plea of ignorance and perhaps contradictorily, the high survival rates of Jews in France is portrayed as a solvent to the edge of accusatory agents (81).

Finally, as with the larger movement in France regarding the French role in the Holocaust, Touvier relies in his argument on plain and simple denial. When faced with the accusations of a survivor, Louis Goudard, he simply claims they did not occur (139). As a prisoner with seven Jews, Goudard survived because he was not one and because they were. He also witnessed the torture of prisoners with cattle prods. Here the denial is not complete. “At first I was interrogated without the ‘machine’. Just blows everywhere. After that, there was the tub of water, the electric prods, then more blows, the needles under the fingernails.” Faced with this, Touvier replies in a quavering voice that there were no electric prods. There can be little doubt that had he been tried during the war a guilty verdict would have been reached.

Marginalization of Intelligentsia and Extermination of European Jewry in Nazi Germany

Paul Andreas Fischer

4/15/2015

Marginalization of Intelligentsia and Extermination of European Jewry in Nazi Germany 

The breakdown of academic institutions was felt throughout Germany. Despite Alfred Hitchcock’s assertion that “trading a few books” seemed well worth the military conquests made by Germans, the reality was that the nation was one in freefall and tatters, on a scale virtually unprecedented in the history of mankind. The elimination of the lower end of the “tail” on a natural bell curve through eugenics and euthanasia programs has been well publicized. However, the marginalization of the other tail, the intelligentsia, is less well understood. It will be necessary to work from the Nicosia and Huener anthology, Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany, in order to formulate a concise explanation for the exact method and procedure which resulted in a nation on the forefront of technological progress to become the mechanism for the most destructive killing machine in history.

        This breakdown will be seen as responsibility for development of Nazi racial ideology, experimentation and opportunism as well as the consequences for breaches in scientific ethics, and the direct involvement of educated medical professionals in methodological killing as well as in development of the systems, social and scientific, which made this possible. Throughout, it will be analyzed through two lenses. Firstly, the crackdown on tobacco use and production in 1941-2 offers a pericope of cumulative radicalization and of the marginalization of those adequately qualified to hold academic posts in Nazi Germany while offering as well a tangible and previously underexplored explanation for why the final solution was not issued until 1942, and how during a wartime economy 10 percent of national insecticide production would be suicidally diverted to what Nazi leaders referred to as the Jewish problem. Then to expand from this, information will be offered on the destruction of medical and scientific institutions and the role leaders in medical and scientific professions played in using the threat of disenfranchisement to bully subordinates into compliance, use of cumulative radicalization to brainwash citizens to racial ideologies, and in the actual act of killing itself, from development of the newest techniques of mass murder and post-traumatic stress disorder minimization to the selection of prisoners to be killed.

The Final Solution to the Tobacco Question and Confluence to the Holocaust

        It is not currently known exactly how much nicotine from tobacco was used during the war years, but one can assume it was substantial; in the post-war years of 1945-50 2,500 tons of nicotine-based insecticide was used worldwide^[1]. While annual use of Zyklon B, the killing agent commercially sold as an insecticide, was almost thirteen times greater than the amount used to commit Holocaust, it has been shown that the purchases after 1941 (when gassing commenced) were made primarily at one time and constituted almost a quarter of national supply^[2]. Hand picked land is about fifty times less efficient than that treated with insecticide, and that is the sort of prohibitive cost which could have hindered Nazi leaders from recognizing their racial goals early in the regime.

        Battling tobacco was not new to the Nazi agenda, but before 1941 this policy had been couched in terms of anti-internationalist agendas. Hitler hoped to use the fact that Jewish Marxists in the professors’ rebellion of 1848 had advocated tobacco use, or at least fought religious anti-tobacco sentiments, as evidence of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy. It also reinforced racial ideology as he described tobacco as “the wrath of the Red Man against the White Man, vengeance for having been given hard liquor.”^[3] 

        Yet legal sanctions only began in 1938; until 1941 tobacco seemed to be safe against the prejudices of an academic system gone woefully and extensively awry. The Universal Tobacco Institute continued to operate, as did the hundreds of thousands of Germans the industry employed. Then, eerily close to the first testing of Zyklon B in concentration camps for victim gassing, a militant operation was launched to drive out the tobacco industry. “The Reich Institute for Tobacco Research in Forcheim, ear Karlsruhe, perfected methods to remove nicotine” during the war, which supplemented waste materials to be processed into insecticide for use by the agricultural industry.^[4] This was carried out with military efficiency, and while it cannot be known precisely when the change occurred, with estimates variable throughout the war, it can be said with certainty that between 1938 and 1948 tobacco use dropped from almost 130,000 tonnes to just over 30,000 tonnes.^[5] The industry would not recover to pre-war levels until 1965.

        While the act of smoking had thus far been viewed perhaps as a form of “passive resistance”,^[6] after this turning point it also became part of the Nazi’s ultimate ideological goal: racial purification. Convictions were never pressed against the seller of Zyklon B, the Degesch Administrative Board, and though all members were arrested for sometime, charges were dropped within weeks. The board members claimed to have no recollection of foreknowledge of the destination of the gas. Whether the same can be said for the anti-smoking campaigns which created such a surplus in the first place will unfortunately never be known. It can be known that there must have been someone with knowledge of the ideological value of the decision in order to move focus from the Physician’s League’s earlier role of spreading “biographical information about Jewish colleagues who were still practicing medicine” and cementing the scientific basis of the ideological claims of the party.^[7]

        However, the sudden prosecution of tobacco executives in Nazi Germany was not logically sound or based in science. Research consisted of handfuls of industrial workers who smoked “extremely heavy” amounts of tobacco correlated with data from questionnaires that were empirically useless, which can be seen repeated today in anti-smoking campaigns.^[8] Fortunately, what prevented modern science in the USA from following the same path as German scientists did on this matter was adjustment of tobacco studies for levels of exercise in 1999 and demonstration over the years of the actual effect of air pollution and how much air pollution can be generated by a cigarette. This resulted from a rigorous and thorough adherence to the scientific method which was sadly missing in Nazi controlled institutions, which pursued ideological goals before establishing a firm causal to correlative experimental proof. In addition to shooting the anti-tobacco campaigns full of holes, such adherence also could have easily shown fallacies in the logic of racial and euthanasia programs, as the groups played important social roles previously and with rapid industrialization and the entourage of dangerous chemicals had begun to play a technological role that far outweighed what little sadistic gains were made from “experimentation” on murdered victims.

        Ultimately the medical profession had the highest level of Nazi Party, SS, and SA membership among professions at the time. This involvement was spurred onwards by promises of job prospects and respect, but retained with the overwhelming death, first of eugenics then war and then industrial murder. It was encouraged at a young age, even in university with characters like Karl Astel who, a “vocal Anti-Semite and high-ranking SS officer, Astel was also a militant anti-smoker and teetotaler who banned smoking at the University of Jena and soon became known for snatching cigarettes from the mouths of students who dared to violate the ban.”^[9] Turning a blind eye to the Hippocratic Oath and medical ethics became only too easy as more and more professionals felt they owed their sick success to the regime.  

Fascism and Medicine: Cure-all Against Sound Logic

        The insistent role of fascism in the medical field had played into earlier euthanasia and eugenics programs which crippled the national understanding of many diseases by eliminating (to use statistical, and not qualitative language) the null values in society; “physicians, dentists, pharmacists - selected those destined for the gas chambers” which reinforced the random brutality of what occurred to those in charge as well as overwhelmed subordinates, and psychological sadism or mental illness did play a role, it is not necessary to look farther than the experiments of Mengele or others to see this. The lack of professional discernment for qualifications and ethics also enabled later reinforcement of racial ideology which evolved from old wives’ tales at the formation of the Reich into a pseudoscience by marginalizing the influence of doctors and professionals whose careers were staked in understanding these ailments or the impact of pollutants which are now known to cause them. With no small irony “the same academic research institutions that gave birth to modern medicine and medical science and medical education also fostered what was to become the greatest program of human destruction in the history of humankind.”^[10]

        This had already begun in 1936 with a nationwide eugenics and euthanasia program which resonated with calls for racial purification and touched on trends being tested in other nations with sterilization. A poster in support of the program read “We are not alone!” but left out the destruction to German society, starving babies, and industrial contamination which followed. While in other nations, intact academic institutions recognized the social and technological value of these populations, the defunct academic system in Germany allowed the same demagoguery to dominate in the medical system as had already consumed the political system. The two worked seamlessly to support each other and ensure that radicalization of the population occurred.

        As Germany prepared for war, medical licenses or approbations were provided with increasingly lower levels of training and as a reward for party membership or loyalty. With the declaration of war doctors began to receive emergency medical licences, or notapprobations, and membership in the SS was admirable. They were deployed, medical professionals of all stripes, to select healthy prisoners, in which there was unanimous compliance. All that separated the doctors was unique sadism on the behalf of a few. This was an organization of death, and the mission and goal was the destruction of Germany’s foes. Compounded by the madness of murder perpetrated on a systemic scale, sadistic doctors found themselves with an open licence, not just in medicine, but in all matters life, death, and pain in between. Examples of torture include radiological scanning with lumbar punctures uniquely painful, “psychological” experiments in which prisoners were simply poisoned with sausages, and violently induced blindness and other disease.

        Fortunately, the experimentation did not pan out for German scientists, and the pressure to produce increased. Rather than a return to the hypothesis or theorems being tested (or in practice in this case), which would have been necessitated by scientific method, this was pursued by an economical doubling down on the same old concepts previously rejected. Two things made this decision incontrovertible for Nazi leaders at the time: the coming declaration of war in 1938 and availability of nicotine-based insecticide. Without these catalysts, it is likely that the ivory tower would have provided the protection needed to ensure success in reversing the fundamental fallacies in logic which resulted in some of the greatest tragedies ever seen.

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[1] Ujváry, István. "Nicotine and other insecticidal alkaloids." In Nicotinoid Insecticides and the Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptor, pp. 29-69. Springer Japan, 1999, 2.

[2] Hayes, Peter. From cooperation to complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich. Cambridge University Press, 2007, 296.

[3] Nicosia, Francis R., and Jonathan Huener. "Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany: Origins, Practices." Legacies (2004), 51.

[4] Nicosia, Francis R., and Jonathan Huener. "Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany: Origins, Practices." Legacies (2004), 49.

[5] Forey, Barbara, Jan Hamling, John Hamling, Alison Thornton, and Peter Lee. "International Smoking Statistics Web Edition A Collection of Worldwide Historical Data Germany." P N Lee Statistics and Computing Ltd. October 24, 2011. Accessed April 16, 2015, 10.

[6]  Nicosia, Francis R., and Jonathan Huener. "Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany: Origins, Practices." Legacies (2004), 52.

[7]  Nicosia, Francis R., and Jonathan Huener. "Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany: Origins, Practices." Legacies (2004), 79.

[8]  Nicosia, Francis R., and Jonathan Huener. "Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany: Origins, Practices." Legacies (2004), 47.

[9]  Nicosia, Francis R., and Jonathan Huener. "Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany: Origins, Practices." Legacies (2004), 50.

[10]  Nicosia, Francis R., and Jonathan Huener. "Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany: Origins, Practices." Legacies (2004), 94.

Desensitization, Fear, and the Promise of Courage in Ordinary Men

Desensitization, Fear, and the Promise of Courage in Ordinary Men

Paul Andreas Fischer

History of the Holocaust

3.23.2015

Desensitization, Fear, and the Promise of Courage in Ordinary Men

Reserve Police Battalion 101 was a unit of police officers tasked with the extermination and deportations of certain populations of Jews and Poles in Nazi controlled areas, beginning with the massacre at Józefów. These men had no prior experience in warfare or killing, and could have been described as incompetent for regular military service. In Christopher Browning’s accounts of what happened, two salient explanations of their behaviour surface: desensitization, and the promise of commendation for courage in the killing process. This paper will examine these in detail, and draw on other sources to emphasize that these acts of terror were instigated and carried out through fear. In addition some basic information on the events that transpired and the men responsible will be offered.

Initial Discomfort of Battalion 101

The battalion was made up of policemen and deployed early in the occupation of Poland. There was little to no fore-knowledge of the nature of the activities they would be responsible for. Their duties primarily consisted of escort and evacuation of Polish political prisoners at the beginning, and Gypsies and Jewish prisoners as well. Eventually, the orders came to liquidate certain groups, and they became the instruments of mass killing. At the time of their actions in the massacres, many were haunted, but few dropped out. The trinkets that were confiscated from victims before execution-style killings did little to quell the images of being face to face with them before shooting .

Only twelve of the five hundred assigned to the atrocious acts opted out in the first shooting of over 1000 Jews. Eventually, less than 20% are estimated to have found a way to evade their duty. In interviews with surviving perpetrators, one describes his determination to shoot with the others as a fear of appearing “cowardly” while commanding officers humiliated those unable to perform the actions. It is clear that these group dynamics were a contributing factor to the successful elimination of the Jews. Some of those who did not drop out had internalized the fascist ideology of the Nazi party, and admitted later that it was a long time before they realized there had been anything wrong with what they had done.

This retrospective lack of guilt shows that the willingness to kill did not occur without protest or as the result of long-term cumulative radicalization, but caused psychological damage to the German soldiers. “It was a tenacious, remorseless, ongoing campaign in which the “hunters” tracked down and killed their “prey” in direct and personal confrontation.” The campaign also developed as the extermination continued, soldiers became more and more efficient and indifferent to their task. Germans had been told that these people were not human, but policemen still found themselves physically sickened. There is an eyewitness account of the Major Trapp, the leader of the battalion who was both responsible for the atrocities as well as one who sympathized with soldiers who could not carry out killings, weeping like a child and he later confides to a driver that if the actions are ever revenged, “then have mercy on us Germans.” He was later executed in war trials, a grim realization of his early prophetic remorse.

The apprehensiveness was not shared by others in command; Captain Hoffman reproached his unit that they had not, “proceeded energetically enough” and company doctors were on hand to instruct the manner of inducing death immediately. This was not quite enough to spare the soldiers the psychological harm, and they emerged from the woods “spattered in blood and brains.” Trapp would later release Jews rounded up after execution squads did not arrive in a timely fashion, which showed a commitment to his lack of comfort in following the abhorrent orders. Later massacres would be carried out after guard duty in work camps, allowing Germans to become more accustomed to the concept of killing Jews, and they became increasingly efficient.

Source of Courage, the Promise of Commendation and the Selbschultz

Some of the courage from soldiers was in the nationalism they felt for Germany, whether they saw the Jews as people or not, most did accept the view that these people were enemies of the state. This was reiterated at the massacre at Serokomla in May 1940 where acts were perpetrated by “vigilante-style units known as Selbschultz (“self-defense”),” and the events of resistance, such as when Poles ambushed Jobst, a German, or armed free camps of Jews and Polish political prisoners often were met with shocking brutality and retaliatory killings. For helping Jews, a village could be massacred or random killings perpetrated such as occurred when “strangers and temporary residents of Talcyn on the one hand, and those without sufficient means of existence on the other,” were randomly selected for retaliation, and 180 Jews were also slaughtered.

The concept of Jews as enemies of the state was harder to justify with the execution of small children. The least effective strategy was early mass-murder. As the soldiers gained experience, they gained efficiency, for “distancing, not frenzy and brutalization is one of the keys to the behaviour of Reserve Police Battalion 101.” This was a cold, calculated attempt to dull the human conscience to mass murder. One soldier tried to justify his actions by casting himself as the liberator or redeemer of their souls. Most disturbing, however, is the role of career ambitions.

The perpetrators in the Battalion were not prosecuted until long after the war, and it was not until the 1960s that attention was given to the massacre of Jews. Many soldiers retained positions in police forces after the war, according to Browning, and “career ambitions must have played an important role.” While on one hand they were faced with the prospect of deployment to a battlefield many in the battalion were totally unprepared for, on the other hand the carrot of promise of recognition and career advancement was dangled temptingly in front of the policemen.

In the event that soldiers or officers evaded duty, they could be given career threatening dismissal or other reprimands. For the romantic Hoffman, who suffered stomach cramps from psychological pain, but exhibited enthusiasm for the process, even bringing his bride to deportations, his career was ended after failing to appear at important events. The promise of courageous commendation tempered and amplified by fear, what some might describe as a cowardly obedience, helps to explain why these actions took place, but to understand how cigarette salesmen, tailors, and working-class middle-aged men could become some of the most brutal murderers in history, it is necessary to look to the desensitization process in the policemen.

Fear and Desensitization of German Policemen

The policemen had internalized some of the Nazi propaganda by this time, but “by virtue of their age, of course, all went through their formative period in the pre-Nazi era” and they saw their victims as contemporaries; it must have been difficult to follow orders and look them in the eyes before shooting them. Later instructions were given to shoot them in the backs of their necks, as they toppled into graves, or even have them lie down next to dead bodies as they were shot. Wounded were often buried alive, according to an eyewitness. This can be seen in another example of mass killing as well.

In Indonesia, political squads were responsible for killing around 2.6 million people, and a film, The Act of Killing, recounts many similar problems and psychological issues presented. Political action squads moved from shootings to strangulation as a primary method of murder, and some men were responsible for the murder of thousands of innocents as well. Use of intoxicating substances played a role, in battalion 101, “alcohol was made available to the policemen” so many soldiers’ memories are vague and their actions were marked by extreme intoxication. In Indonesia as well, the squads drank and used black market drugs to keep their mind away from the atrocities. This is relevant because it shows some of the necessary and persistent ingredients to reaching the critical mass of compliance in order to secretly carry out authoritative tasks such as those assigned to these groups.

As killings moved towards extermination with the final order to exterminate in 1942, the German police battalion was not responsible for direct killing as much as deportation to death camps. The actions became less barbarous, but the ultimate end was far more sinister. To soldiers, “after Józefów, the roundup and guarding of Jews to be killed by someone else seemed relatively innocuous.” This meant incidents of soldiers going mad in the woods or shooting their ceiling in barracks during nightmares began to lessen or cease. Yet still, “one action followed another in unremitting succession”; soldiers must have found their own part unbearable to live with. As in Indonesia, it would be a long time before the government or perpetrators themselves would inform them they had done something explicitly wrong.

At the end of the book there is discussion given to the various methods of radicalization. The radicalization was not something that could have happened in a single hour long indoctrination session, but must have been the result of cumulative societal prejudice. In experiments, when ordered by a doctor, 30 or 40% of participants would electrocute their subjects, depending on whether or not they were watched. It is a testament to how proliferation of the racial ideology of the Nazis were in Germany that these numbers in policemen asked to carry out even greater acts of terror and mass murder were raised to 80%, and under some commanders 100%. It also speaks to the role that authority plays in assigning the role of enemy to an innocent.

What Made Monsters of Men

While one would think it takes more than simple carrots and sticks, the use of promise of a career advancement and threat of dismissal to make monsters of men. The harrowing story recounted here shows that this is not the case. Using simple propaganda, desensitizing actions and substances, along with an effective demonstration of necessity, the nadir of human morality was exposed. Neither fresh recruits (few had prior experience in German occupied territory), nor seasoned veterans could carry out this sort of task easily, but given the instruction, humans most unanimously will, a chilling concept.

The holocaust gives a sense of the gravity and importance of government. Subsequent studies argue that every human has the capability to display all of the symptoms of totalitarianism, and that democracy is a precious thing which must be guarded jealously. Failure to take liberty seriously and export of democratic ideology does not just preclude a reversion to fascism, but a radicalization of authoritarianism. In these rank and file policemen, only around 25% were party members in 1942, yet they became part of the most terrifying tool of destruction known to man.