Transcripts For CSPAN3 Legacy 20240703

This year schultz forum will focus on the holocaust in Eastern Europe and the legacy memory left behind by tumultuous time. You know, for this conversation. Alex ritchie comes to us from warsaw. But shes also served as a as this fellow with our institute. And so, you know, shes an insider, even though shes an outsider outsider. Hows that for fun . The dr. Browning. For those unaware, youll see, has the longest bio in the program, the easily the hes a he was the Frank Porter Graham professor of history at the university of north. From 1999 to 2014. Prior to that spent 25 years at Pacific University in tacoma, washington the author of eight books, but his latest book, you receive the advice International Book prize for holocaust. He serves as an Expert Witness in war crimes. But today the conversation will also center along around his book, ordinary men. Alex is characterized a book everyone should have on their bookshelf. So she didnt say that publicly. I said that publicly. So that over it. Lets give a warm welcome to alex and dr. Brown. Well, im very happy to say that publicly. Its just such an honor to have you here. Anybody whos had any thing to do at all with holocaust studie wor war two, history must certainly have come across chriss books. Im Holding Ordinary man, which is going to be the basis of our discussion, simply because chris has done so much work this field and and has written so much and lectured so many places and so on, that it would be impossible to actually even begin to cover his contribution to this field of study. I think ordinary men is one of those turning points and fact, we have a lot of scholars and amazing people, speakers who come through the world watching museum and theyve many of them written books but its very rare that you get a book that has really utterly changed the the field study and ordinary man is one of those books im just going to do a quick quote from your one of your lectures about the holocaust so stepping back just a little before we go into, ordinary men, you wrote, i believe that the holocaust was a watershed event in human history, the most extreme case of genocide that has yet occurred. What distinguishes it from other genocides are two factors. First, the totality and scope, the intent, that is, the goal of killing last man, woman and child throughout the reach of the nazi empire and second mean is employed, namely the harnessing of the administer of bureaucratic and technological capacities of a modern nation state and western scientific culture. Well, thats incredibly well and beautifully stated, but but tell us a little bit about how you came to holocaust studies and and some of the changes, generally speaking that have happened since the postwar, when it was barely known as a subject of inquiry and now. Yes. Well first of all, thank you very much for having me here. I was supposed to be here in 2005, but katrina said. No, and then i came in 2000, 12 to 1 earlier rendition of this meeting. And im very glad to back again. The history, the holocaust the history of World War Two have not always run parallel at the nuremberg trials. Of course there was focus on the atrocities of the nazis and the crimes against humanity, of which one part was the holocaust. But it wasnt fully understood how much of a priority that was of the nazis, the degree to which how central that was to hitler. And so it kind of faded from the picture. And while writings on nazi World War Two and histories of the third reich continued the holocaust more or less dropped out in its 1979. There was a major meeting german and british historians, german instructors who put on outside of london and the great hitler biographer kershaw. As a young student last june, he was just the beginning of his profession, went to hear this because he was in all of these senior people and he later wrote, you know, it didnt occur to me at the time. Only later that for two days they talked about the third reich and the structure of, the nazi germany, and nobody talked about the holocaust. It was just at the late seventies that this was beginning to change. Thats when we had decision to create the Holocaust Museum. Thats when the docudrama of the holocaust by the nbc came. Thats when the holtzman legislation to create an office of special investigations to finally begin to judicially pursue nazis in nazi collaborators in the states came so the late seventies was the turning point really place in 1969 i went to my professor in wisconsin and i was had read Ralph Hilbert book structure. The european and that was for me that was the conversion experience. I had an academic conversion. This is a topic too important not to study and so i went back to my my professor and said i would like to change focus, would like to do something. We didnt use the word holocaust. I did something on the nazi persecution of and i what topic it was, which was look into of these midlevel of bureaucratic groups who were so essential for they this bureaucratic administrative persecution. And his answer was, well, thats a very good topic, but i should warn you that no professional future. So in 1970, if you tried to look at any college catalog, any campus in our states, and you cannot course on the history, the holocaust, i think Ralph Hilbert, vermont, taught it in 1972 for the first time. I taught my first course on it at the Christian University in 75 and only in the eighties and nineties did this begin to pick up. And it was in the eighties when finally even german historians and others accepted that holocaust and World War Two are absolutely intertwined. You cannot understand the one without the other that they are a intertwined history and since then, of course, the field has burgeoned and the history, the holocaust history, World War Two have enriched each other in the sense that we realize how linked they are. But that was not the case for decades, World War Two. But its interesting you mentioned course, the great work by ronald holbrook, and he had trouble getting his work published and out in the open as back then and its such an incredible book but i think before with the exception of all hillgrove and maybe the the trials which changed where that a little bit before your work ordinary men the the sort of image of the lets say the ss or whatever what was only sort of cardboard cartoon characters almost the character of evil, you know, the black uniform and the deaths head and all this sort of thing and were probably psychopaths so we could easily and sleep in our beds at night because they nothing to do with us. They were they were were nazi horrors. They were a product, this terrible regime and completely from us. And i think the thing that was so terrifying about ordinary men and the reason that everybody must have it on the shelves is because all of a sudden they were ordinary men, you know, all of a sudden youre starting to do research. A group of people that had no there was there seems to be no predictive sense that they were going to turn into these these creatures. And im going to read again a small paragraph of the very beginning of the book. You start off in the early the very early hours of july 13th, 1942, the men of reserve Police Battalion 1 to 1 were roused from their bunks in the large School Building that served as their barracks, the polish town of world war ii. They middle aged family men of working and lower middle class backgrounds from the city of hamburg, considered old to be of use to german army. They had been drafted into the order. Police most were raw recruits with no previous experience in german occupied territory. They had arrived in poland less than three weeks earlier and you point out later, i think that they Police Battalion 1 to 1 turns out to have the fourth highest kill rate of any of the Police Battalions, even though they started later as these older men in terms of the mass murders that start to take place in poland and so on, so how did you come to these men . How did you come to this book . How did this the genesis of ordinary men come about . You know, i guess its to start with, as you say, after initial focus on the perpetrators of the holocaust which of course, the nazi leadership, the ss and the concentration who had been tried at the dachau trials right after the war, so was the the thugs at the bottom and fanatics at the top. And this was our basically image as it was portrayed in all sorts of movies too. This was these types you saw. When i was working, i was trying to in the other layers and certainly i would say in addition to the ideologues at the top, start with hitler and the nazis leadership motivation is a real issue theyre doing it because they believe in it. And you have this consistency of belief to action and then you have the the the experts, people there who the economy, the generals, the concord the territory, the doctors that are organizing the pseudo scientific apparatus behind making a racist official policy. And they all, after the war said, oh, were just apolitical, whatever. We know, in fact, that experts can be both ideologues, some and experts. And then you have these middle the problem solvers. And i did my dissertation on the jewishesof the German Foreign office a bunch lawyers who were basically in charge of getting allied and satellite countries to align their policies. Germany, they were the liaison between the german embassies in these countries. Eichmann in the ss. So i was working my way down. What was hard for the historian was to find the reality of the grassroots killers at the bottom. These other people. Written records, they file reports, they receive written and so you had a documentary trail for the for the the hands on killers at the very bottom. They didnt write many letters. They didnt leave diaries that they did. People destroyed them after the war, for the most part. So they were anonymous and my great windfall was when i going to the the Central Agency for investigation nazi crimes at limericks berg outside stuttgart. And i was working on a project in poland and i was looking at all of the indictments, all of the verdicts had in their collection of all german trials of sixties and seventies. And i came across the the, the reserve police returned 1 to 1. And what was absolutely striking were two things. First was the fact that clearly choice was given to the men at the beginning of first massacre when they go into the village abuse up to three weeks after they get to poland, they arrive at the village in the early morning. The major summons men around him at the edge of the village. He has to give their assignments and in the speech he has streaming down his cheeks. His voice is choking. Hes struggling to control himself. Body. And he tells his men they have a terrible to do. He would never ask them to do this his own. But these are the orders and above and then he goes on to give some rationales for it and the ending remarkably says those among who do not feel up to it, please step out and anybody who didnt want to kill unarmed women and children that they not have to and in the end about dozen step out openly. Many others later privately to their ncos, get themselves excused. But this was the clearest case id ever come across of choice. And the second thing that was remarkable about it was that the descriptions of the action most the trial records i had worked in, people are lined to cover each other. And thats because in the killing unit trials, einsatzgruppen in particular, and also their attempts at trying order Police Battalions earlier that almost succeeded. They knew who the officers were. They didnt know who the men were. And the officer lied for one another here had the roster of the battalion and they interviewed, interrogated 210 men, most of them rank and they had no interest in covering their officers. They gave the most graphic, horrific, horrifying descriptions of what they had done. They had never seen anything. It and the oral histories that these trial contained. So i went to hamburg and that opened ability to read through 30 volumes of testimonies by 210 men that we simply had never seen any kind collection to get into the minds of the grassroots killers, the people at the very bottom that didnt need written records were so extraordinary about how you how you then look at these groups of men is that you you start to divide them into categories of the of the enthusiastic killers of the people who dont try and get excused but dont really go out of their way to do much, almost sort of more like bystanders than than those people who try and get out of get out of these particularly violent actions. Although, as you mentioned, dont actually they still help to participate in the sense that they help round people up or do other things as well. That this was the thing that was so interesting because i just met ordinary men when i was doing work in the warsaw uprising following group of a unit from the top cop. Ss that was written again by disinterested politicians xaver, who was a prisoner, and he watched how ss interacted with one another and that with the sort of fanatic nazis who were going to go and kill everybody and they were very proud of themselves that they shot somebody really cleverly. And then there were those who just wanted to get home and, and were defeatist and were accused of defeatism. And then the ones in the middle and, it really struck me, having just read ordinary men when i was looking at this group of people, how, how you so very cleverly defined these these different groups and the other thing i thought was fascinating how you use social psychology in the psychology of, the group, maybe you can tell me a little bit about how you divided these this group into, these different categories. How was how was that process, what that was like . Yeah, certainly the one of the most striking things about the record was the vivid descriptions first day massacre. And it clearly was traumatic mean these men had not been prepared. This came as a surprise nothing had had in their experience for most people. This is the first time they ever fired a gun in another being and so they many of the men break down during the course of the day and. There was organized in the most amateurish in a in a unprofessional way of the were rounded up in the village and then they were taken by truck to the of the forest. Theres no grave already dug. The men in the shooting squads go up to the truck and meet the person theyre going to kill face to, face, pair off, march side by side the forest where the person to be killed has to lie down. And the killer then blows their head apart as short by short with a rifle. So theyre covered in blood and then the brain matter. The people they have just shot at point blank range and then they go back to meet face to face. The next victim that theyre going to kill. I mean, everything the einsatzgruppen learned is that you wanted to get as much distance between and killer. You wanted to make it as impersonal as possible. And here, because they were total amateurs, they had never done this was total improvization. They did just the opposite. They made the most individual face to face killing. And it was a horrific experience for the men. What was even as i say, as shocking as that is how quickly they move beyond that and how soon became routine and that the descriptions then become much more general until finally they cant even keep of which massacre, what town theyre in and what massacre theyre carrying. The first ones are very vividly described. It becomes a blur. But what become clear is as as you referred to, is that the seem to sort them out into these three groups. One group called the eager killers. And sad to say theyre people who learned to enjoy killing other human beings. They volunteer for the firing squads, volunteer for the hunts to go out and for who are hiding and they come back to lunch and they regale themselves with stories of what they had done and joke about this and. They are a core minority, not a majority of the battalion by any that they are the core driving group. Then you have a intermediate group that doesnt volunteer. Ask to do this, but will never. No. When theyre assigned and i call them the accommodate ers they just accommodate themselves to whats going on. And then there is group at the other end which i call the evaders that basically they take up the offer that they dont have to shoot they still are involved in the other actions and the roundups in the ghettos and the cordons around the shooting sites so they enable the shooting but they excuse themselves from the single most brutal part of the killing action which is calling the trigger and shooting somebody directly or interest strongly. I found when the for the evaders the way in which they in a sense didnt rupture the bonds of comradeship of the unit is that they asked to be excused they wouldnt say this a terrible thing were doing they wouldnt criticize policy. They would say, i am too weak. So price they would pay for the small maneuver room to not take part in the shooting with their comrades while not reproach seeing their comrades or criticizing the government early not seeming to want to take on the onus of the reason they cant do it is not that theyre, but that im too weak. And that, of course, insidiously the killers as the tough guys and them as the weak guys. You got this interesting moral inversion. The people with the moral autonomy not take part are the weak things in and the conformist to go along and kill are the tough guys and the models of what considered the exemplar, the norms the exemplary behavior of the battalion. And thats the thing thats thats so striking about the whole nazi regime and particularly you get into the camps or to the ss or things like the killings is the inversion of morality, as we would understand in other novels in auschwitz is in the first the first minutes you go there, you realize that everything you thought you stood for and that was valued was turned on. Its head. And the bad was good and good was bad. But the other thing that weve all seen much after the war and weve seen masses, this is the sort of pretense that, well, i had to do this. I was following orders. I hadnt i would have been in trouble. And you saying in your book, in fact, that that this theres a general problem with this explanation, how were quite simply in the past 45 years know defense attorney or defendant in any of the hundreds of postwar trials has been able to document single case in which refusal to obey in order to kill unarmed civilians resulted in the allegedly inevitable dire punishment so that leads me to the next the next question, which is shocking is it so often used as as a justification for what they did, which how then do you how then do you explore this . And you decided not to use psychology or a psychopath theology because that concentrates on on the on the individual and and and and you were basically saying that these men didnt go in as sort of psychopaths before they went in or anything. Its not something you could identify before but that you use social psychology to try and understand how the group. Dynamic actually encourages these men to act in certain that they would never have acted if they were on their own. And in other words, it is things like the camp system or the buddy system, a unit or whatever it is that encourages these men to act in ways that would never have been conceivable in normal civilian life. And indeed, they can back to normal civilian life, pretending that this episode never happened. So how did come to that . Yeah, basically i work through all of the intel on the interrogation and figured out the chronology and wrote the narrative. And only after that i then said, why did do it . Why didnt they take up the majors offer . And the traditional had been individual psychological issues. What what made people different from us and of course, you had had the psychiatrists in the cells several that wrote about that. And you had other attempts looking at war shock tests that were given to a bunch ss that had been in denmark and whatever. And the whole approach was somehow these people were psychologically abnormal and that was their psychopathology explains why they could do it. None of us ever possibly do it. But these are middle aged conscripts randomly selected on the streets, hamburg, in the middle of the war without, indoctrination without any particular higher percentage of nazi membership. As i said, one homburg was one of the less than justified cities, most of them from the working class, which was the least supportive group for the nazis. And as middle age they were too young to have been brutalized. World war one and too old to have been raised in the nazi bubble of hitler youth. Hitler schools, whatever their formative period was. The weimar republic. They had other standards by which to measure what the nazis were doing. If youd wanted to select a group least likely to become killers, the nazis, it would have been working class people from hamburg, 40 years old. And this what i had so psychopathology was not going to work. And so i then said your social looking at what changes peoples behavior and Group Actions how is it how are people behavior shaped and changed by virtue of being in a group . And what is a Group Dynamic . And thats where i got into the work dealing with conformity with role adaptation and with deference to authority that, thered been a series of psychological experiments in the fifties and sixties. Milgram is the most wellknown zimbardo prison experiment. Stanford prison experiment, less known as the solomon asch conformity. But those once they came to the illumined, did what the narrative had already created. I didnt write the book under the influence of that, but having written a narrative that helped make it make sense. Yeah. So thats i ended the last chapter that looked into some of the explanations i thought didnt work. Yes. And tried to show how this matched and helped to explain that people who would never do any of this on their own as they would have their behavior altered by virtue of being a member of a group and in this kind of this a occupation unit in foreign territory the 500 men in this unit, their only societal, the whole population out there is is the enemy. So that conformity norms of the battalion are exploding, only intensified compared to, say, a civilian living the streets of hamburg. So that conformity roll out imitation efforts authority to be part of this group are all magnified and this makes greater power terrifying because of course this. The implication of this is that if you get any group of us and you put in a circumstance like that, we might ourselves turn into these horrible killers and were not just talking about some sort of minor crimes. Were talking about mass murder of most vile kind, which youve just described. And of course, when the book came out, it was very, very well received. Generally. But there were some controversies and and i guess i would like to maybe briefly mentioned the gold hagen precisely because he was of the opposite belief that actually in a way this sort of pre determinism that comes the history of anti semitism in germany which predisposed these to behave in this way. In other words, the rest of are kind of off the hook because we didnt grow up in lousy germany or nazi germany. And you were arguing actually the reasons for becoming this are very much more complex. They to do with ideology, but they also have to do with circumstances and group. Yeah, in a sense he wasnt in individual psychopathology, was saying all germans are psychopathology because of their misinformed culture over centuries. So they were culturally determined. Yes, but we had in a sense are two sort of focal points. The arguments that we had. One was he what he called the anthropological and ideological position, what the german culture predetermine these people to do and the beliefs they held and was a multicultural one, but was often because we like to create bipolar worlds to make things simple. I was called the situational and the, you know. And of course argued your ideology. And sometimes is part of it, just not all of it. But one of the things that came out after and this that i thought was most fruitful was the inside of social psychologist Leonard Neumann says that in fact, you cannot separate ideology and situation because situations arent given as the same to everybody. Thats in a situation we read the situation, we interpret, we construct it depending upon the cultural lenses we wear so that german middle aged police from hamburg come to poland and they will read that situation differently than an italian soldier would have done, or an american soldier to certain extent. In some places they would be the same. Many others they would not. So it was a false binary to to say we have either an ideological explanation or we have a situation one. Or the other point which we differ. It really was the methodology, the evidence and he was so i mean, obviously many of the the men being interrogated didnt tell the truth that they lied. They covered up for themselves. And so the issue is, do you use as evidence, testimonies in which there was a huge motive beyond, all the normal frailties of human memory and using testimony any time for historical events when its in a judicial setting where they have a huge incentive to lie about what they themselves had done and he the position while you only use the evidence where the person is so and selfincriminating that you dont doubt that he basically as he put it admitted they gave themselves heart, mind and soul to hitler and that then you can trust that and anybody else you use is going to dupe you. And he said, i got to i was too stupid to read the evidence. Well. And i was taken for a ride. My argument was fact. We have three bands of evidence. You had the total liars who are so transparent. Neither here i use that material. You had this selfincriminating evidence that nobody would say that and had done it. And then you had that metal of evidence that tells some of the truth some of the time, but not all of the truth all of the time. And in particular, while they might not tell the truth about what had done, would tell the truth about what the unit had done, which were destroying was absolutely indispensable. Yeah. So i came up with a portrayal of the battalions behavior that had a spectrum of behavior. And because he had used only one band of testimony describing only those kinds of people, he came up with a monolithic picture of the and basically youre if your hypothesis is that then nazi the germans did this because they were all nazi ideologues who believe that and then the only evidence you will use is the ones who reveal to be nazi fanatics and Everything Else is shut out. You have a methodology that can do no other than confirm a hypothesis. The evidence of almost a test. And it is you cant. Exactly. Yeah. So we had a methodological dispute, but it may be not as it may. The book really becomes one of the founding sort of keystone ones and you do of perpetrator study as i mentioned, you do well homework and then maybe the eichmann trial and a few other things have happened to tip to take us along that path. But the idea that you start to look at Something Like nazi history from the eyes of the perpetrators opens up a whole new field of study effectively, but then throws up all those questions of what you trust. Can you trust survivor memoirs . Can you trust eyewitness testimonies . How can you trust them . How do you use these sources . But tell us a bit about this perpetrator study somehow your work fit into this and i yeah well several things and then happened once we studied a lot of other order Police Battalions and we can begin to fill in thats the only one anymore. Yeah it turns out they were were in a sense the forgotten perpetrator, which they were a huge part of the manpower this. And so we recovered that history and we looked at it at the Grassroots Level and tried to get sources that would help us on that. So now we do have some letters and things of that sort that are very useful and rare cases where. You have somebody who was an eyewitness that is not a perpetrator. Most unique one is oswald rufai, who was a who had fled from south asia to lithuania. And then when the germans get who fled to belarus, about 17 years old, he speaks perfect polish, perfect german without a yiddish accent, like from the east. And hes intercepted by the Police Captain in the town of mira. And the Police Captain says, who are you . And well, ive lost my papers. And he says, well, im a a son of a mixed married polish. German marries. And of course, he has no accent and neither. So that was believable and then he says, good, i need translator because the German Police stations would be set up in my town and i have to talk to my german counterpart. So here is a passing sleeping in house of the belgian russian Police Captain. By night and by day at the right hand side of, the German Police sergeant, the commander of the Police Station, conducting all of his with the native population and taking meals in the German Police station and i fortunately got meet him. We were both witnesses at a trial in england of mere Police Captain actually was the magistrates it never went to trial because he then got sick and died. And then i interviewed him in haifa shortly before he died. But rufai. And rice, you know, there were this group of policemen and there was this group that were just the terrible fanatics, the killers. And then there was this group that was simply do as they were told. And then there were the group that would go on expeditions against and it was treated if they had the right to not that they would always go on anti partizan, but if they wouldnt go on and they and they killing , they were allowed not to and as you said, they considered that dirty something. They were ashamed of. So you had this zigzag actually the three Part Division that had laid out from reading. But this time from the eye of a jewish eye witness living with his people for eight months. So we have found other kinds of sources. Once we knew what we were looking for. And yeah, so personally because i was the very beginning of the topography of terror back in 1986, 87, when it was being built. And this whole concept that was new then, that you would actually build a museum or institution to look at the war. And particularly from the german perspective, from the eyes of the, of the perpetrators and and yet, of course, it just threw up the question as to how you use these materials and. Can you can you rely on them so how how now, obviously with your experience of a Police Battalion to one and how you dealt with those testimonies and and so on and also the other ones youve mentioned how, how Much Research how how is that now taken in the research of the perpetrators from the perspective of the perpetrators using these sources . And are we up more and more things that that when you started doing this werent available. Yeah, well certainly of us who are doing this kind of work have to thread that needle of you have to emphasize as the people you were studying. But you certainly cannot sympathize with the people who are studying. And there are some think that in a sense his almost crossing a more line even to attempt to get into their mind to try to understand them. So in doing this ive always insisted that to explain is not to excuse to understand is not to forgive you have to understand for the sake of understanding. You have to explain for the sake explaining. And we cant history if we dont do that. You do to put yourself in the place. The people you are studying, even if they are horrible people that you try to sort out why things happened the way they did. They others i think think thats just developed as the search for ways in which people identified with the regime the ways in which they worked out the two to go along with this moral inversion it perhaps should get to the question answer. Let me just tell this one last story, because this is an important one, because this involved a military unit. Verma up to assess the victims are serbians, not. And the Army Commander is an austrian, a german and. This is in in serbia, in the late summer of 1941, after the tito was captured, about 300 german soldiers are holding hostage. They cant get them. And the german First Response is massive retaliatory shootings. And that just in fact does not stop it. It is pouring gasoline on the fire. So the austrian commander, general burma issues this order that theyre going to have a sweep of the this this whole region with considered partizan infested and he gives this order you must be very clear this is going to be a punitive strong expensive to them and that that thus you must punish the whole populace. There is no distinction between combatants and noncombatants. This is a partizan area. The punishment is 12 totally on the entire population. So telling them it can be no distinction between combat in the non combat, which is what war was moral or based on and just war tradition. He then goes on to say, those of you that feel might feel humanitarian. You should keep in mind that to soft towards the enemy is, to sin against the of your comrades. So he uses religious language, sin. So hes setting up a world again. As i say, this is the army not the ss. The victims are not. There serbs. The commander is an austrian. And youre in this and in this inverted world. Where to not kill armed men and children is evil and is a sin against, your comrades. And to shoot unarmed women and children is a virtue. And you just totally inverted the world. I see. We we are. Weve got a few minutes left, but just one final question before we throw it over to the to the audience for questions is just just a question about postwar justice. So many of these people away with it by exactly saying they were either bureaucrats or they were not really involved or they lied, as you say. Whats your feeling . Just i know youve been involved in a couple of war crimes, important war crimes trials and thats also been part of your your world. So just very brief note on on what you think about the way in which that was handled after the war. General yeah. I mean in general, the number of perpetrators so vastly exceeds any judicial remedy that its a hugely asymmetric whole thing if youre looking at individual justice, what did accomplish i think were two things. One is that the principle that in fact you can be held accountable and in certain cases people were held accountable, not just the leaders at nuremberg, but certainly the trials in the sixties and seventies in germany and then even the trials in australia, canada, england later, i that would insist, you know, even if its 50 years later, you dont away with if we can find you. Yeah. And the second is that it was a remark double truth finding fact, finding process, lots of people who i come as an historians, i dont want to talk to you, but when youre brought into the Police Station and interrogated, you dont have a choice. And so they judicial investigators have the capacity to compel what is a vast mountain of oral history. And what if we did get the convictions, the punishments that we might have been even remotely to the crime for historians . We did get the that at least help us to understand it as a historical event. Well, i cant thank you enough, chris its just been a fantastic conversation. So thank you very, very much. We could go on forever. But i now know that jeremy is hovering in the back. If any of you have questions, could you please put your hands up . Thank. Both will go to your right towards the very back. Please please. Thank you both for your for your work and for your presence tation. As to what you said at the beginning of your remarks, i graduate it in 1973 with a degree in history and there was no course in the holocaust or anything resembling it in in our catalog and also both my father and my father law served in the in the european theater ended the war in germany and according to what they told me neither of them ever met a nazi but at least according to what the people they met told them. But my question is related to your to what you were talking about when the german generals started publishing their memoirs in the fifties. I think it would get dairy. And in may and einstein, some of the others and started the myth that the holocaust was all related those crazies in the ss nothing to do with the verbal act and that were just good german soldiers patriots. Why were western historians many of them so susceptible to believing that. Well well, certainly, as you say, the german generals they had after the war, the same the thing was that hitler made all the mistakes. The ss committed all the crimes and all the victories were won by the smart and that was sort of and they were cold, clean government that they fought a conventional war by. The conventional rules and. That they had fought it honorably, which as we have unpacked it, even nuremberg and certainly the second successor trials. Of course, you had the eastern generals trial in the balkans trial, which smashed those myths. But many people then just incorporate that into their outlook. One, we were now working with the new bundeswehr as a partner and they dont and that we were germany was being part of the cold war on our side so we had motives to basically want to bring the germans on board and to accept their protestations of how they had fought the war. I think there was also a degree of of professional courtesy from officer corps to another that if a german general said he did this american interrogator ears were fairly deferential, that that they didnt treat them in the way that they did somebody in the ss who might be being interrogated that time. So there we hadnt we had no motive to search under that i guess as as and so that that got a pass that it should not have gotten and it was certainly certainly among scholars that was being under run through the sixties and seventies and eighties, particularly americans, americans scholars in germany, the real point comes with the socalled bear market exhibit in the 1990s is put together with diaries, letters, photos to from the occupied territories, mostly russia, but also serbia and elsewhere that just showed just how totally incorporated into the the nazi war project that the vermont was from the officer at the top to the rank and at the bottom. And there is no Clear Division between hitler nazis and the ss the one hand and the vermonts on the other that there was much more in common separated them in terms of how they behaved particularly the Eastern Front just to add to super quick note that the for example the burma who were responsible for some horrific crimes without the ss for example the capture and murder of the soviet prisoners of war. That was the hammer and the and the objects in their intent to murder the intellect and intelligence in poland for a lot of those crimes or the crimes against the also were committed by the wehrmacht. So it wasnt just the ss went in and did the did the dirty deeds. Yeah. Ive also often asked my students have gone to a thought experiment that was a war had come to an end that hitler had been assassinated in the spring of 1942 and the war had come to an end at that point, the greatest crime of nazi would have been the 2 to 2 and a half million soviet prisoners of war that had died at that point just before the ghetto clearing in poland. And the final solution soon becomes the single most lethal killing project, the nazis. But that wasnt the case up until the spring of 1942, and certainly the biggest killing operation much more than the safety for the mentally or physically handicapped was the masks deaths of the soviet p. O. W. S in the first nine months of war on the Eastern Front. Next question is to your left. Towards the back, please. Thank you. This presentation has been a real eye opener for me. I have for bullet points that id like to just ask. You can handle as many as you have the time for. Please. So my first is what happened . Battalion 101 after they finished their in. Was it the ukraine, belarus, poland in . Poland second. Second. What to the men of that battalion after the war, were they any of them prosecute aided and brought to justice . Are aside from given this statement. Third was there a religious prominence did well many of them protestants or catholics none or whatever does that that have any reflection or or influence on their actions or attitudes. And finally, did you interview any of these people or just review their transcripts . Thank you. Let me take them in reverse order one. I couldnt interview them because in order to get access to german court records, i had to promise not to use the names and addresses, contact anybody and their families. And if i had, i would have lost my court clearance. They were that time, of course, either in their late eighties and, early nineties, even if they were alive, because was doing this work in 1989, 1990. So that for two reasons would not have worked. Secondly, of the 210 men who i had testimonies from, only one mentioned that they were upset by what they were doing because they considered themselves a christian. Religion does not to have played any role in shaping behavior. They this was overwhelmingly a protestant battalion. Hamburg in north germany is an overwhelmingly protestant city. Were some catholics in it . But it is protestant, is ethos. The men in the battalion stayed finishes killing of in the fall 43, after which there were no in poland, except those in hiding. It remained and was overrun. The russians in 44 after the war. Those that got if you had been a lower working class person and you now had police experience. What did you want to do for it arise in career . You tried to join the place so the Hamburg Police is where many of these people end up with the end of the war. Not all of them. I mean, go back to their old jobs, but a and is not unusual for every town in germany where there was some Contact Person that got into the place he often hired old cronies from his place station in lublin or belgrade or somewhere else. And you can actually have a map, you can cluster where the nazi police are World War Two were had friends to get them back into the place in the postwar so when the is sent central agents for nazi crimes discovered this unit and they discovered it because they were investigating the ss and Police Headquarters in lublin and they did that by talking to the motor truck drivers. Where did you take the units to . And they said, oh, by the way, we didnt only take ss people shooting actions, there were these uniformed people from hamburg that love their wonderful major who they call papa trump. So they sent a team to hamburg to investigate very quickly discovered they could not use the Hamburg Police to investigate the unit because these people were in the Hamburg Police. So they created a special commission and. There were two or three utterly able, extraordinarily able german jurists that carried out the investigation, one of the most thorough and best conducted german judicial investigation. So i read through dozens, dozens of them and got an indictment. And so in 1972, most of these interrogations went on the sixties i think of like 15 of the men are indicted in and come trial in 1972 a small of them are convicted and given token sentences. The problem, of course, is what number one is. I think it was to i think in the first session with Rob Hutchinson the problem postwar german trials. The german law was not adequate to deal with mass murder they used they didnt want to use post facto allied doctrines of crimes against humanity. They used the 1940 criminal code and it was very restricted in what was first degree murder. Everything other first degree murder or accessory to first degree murder. We have standards. The statute of limitations. So they had a very blunt instrument to inadequate to deal the nature of the crime. They were trying to try and a handful the 15 were actually convicted given a very low prison sentence. The District Attorney who was preparing a much larger trial of others, then just dropped those cases, saying, whats the point if even in this first group we get minimal convictions of a handful . As for the men, when they came back as someone to the regular professions, others went into the police. What not seem to have bothered any of them is what we might call posttraumatic stress. That they went about their normal lives. And in the interrogations taken in there in the mid sixties, how 20 years after the event, some of the men remarked, you know, now that i am forced talk about this and to dredge this up now i am having nightmares. The power of repression was such that they could bury this deep for 20 years and not think about it. And then finally theyre hauled in and forced to talk about it and are dealt are being interrogated by a very able, knowledgeable interrogator who can squeeze out to them what they can get. Then some of them begin to have the the the are upset by the memories theyre having. Nonetheless that is not expressed in terms of overwhelming the tones. The interrogations are selfpity it is in 1942 i was given the dirtiest job in the third reich and i went did that job in a beautiful way 20 years later. Theyve changed rules and now im hauled into court as a potential criminal, poor me, i am so unlucky. Theres never a word. The victim thats just not on the radar screen anywhere. It is just drenched in selfpity. Thank you. The next question is going to be to your left, about half way back, please. Thank you for your presentation. My is about the women in the camps how the women selected were sexual favors demanded. What did they do in the camps were more men selected than women and is there a good book written by a woman who was actually in a camp. Yes, certainly both within germany. Robins brook is the main nazi concentration for women and there are both memoirs of prisoners studies by scholars who have looked at a large range of sources of testimony that are written ravensbruck. So one, if youre interested in that, i would say go to google our amazon search extra around and google Robbins Brook and. I think youll find a lot of sources on that auschwitz had a womens camp to madonna, had a womens so within a sound not all of the concentration camps were womens camp sections. And they had a cadre of guards that were in charge of the prisoners there. And there were always many more men prisoners and women prisoners in terms of Political Prisoners being arrested or keeping people for labor, men or were used in the slave labor camps and in the camps. Report prisoners always in much, much greater numbers. Certainly many of the had bordellos where prisoners that were considered attractive are forced to serve. And so there is a lot of Sexual Violence certainly on the Eastern Front either in camps or otherwise. The old story that while no sexual rape did not take place because of the german laws about race and gender race mixing that at least one thing the nazis didnt do was have lots of rape. We know thats wrong. Now, enough research has been done that we know that was a great deal of Sexual Violence in the camps, in the areas occupation and was a huge amount of bartered sex because the germans had food and many of these areas are being pillaged and so that for german soldiers they had a the leverage you say to find sexual gratification without a great deal of difficulty and somebody called it i guess you call extorted sex but certainly saw an equal relationship its not consensual sex which its not only unequal but wasnt that theyre not physically, you know, seized and thrown down or not forced into a bordello but there simply is sexual relations result from very unequal status of one of thats one of the areas that research has picked up fairly recently is to try to look at the various aspects and of sexual some of the nazis came much later than it should have because again of the blind spots we has was sort of taking nazis at their word that. They didnt commit race mixing. And in fact, we know that not true. Yeah. And also, you would be everything about the peoples of central Eastern Europe where they were to be treated like animals the would be murdered that and the and the women you even even the women who were brought in as slave even very young girls were hitler even bragged about in his table talk that they would check to see or not they were virgins and he would bandy about the the figures and so on. But this is just this use of of these women as as as is worse than animals. They were simply to be used. And then, of course, many sent to be slave laborers or whatever sexual abuse was. As we now know, the next questions up front to your left, please. Chris, thank you for of the insights youve shared with us. Unfortunately, we live in a world today where we see echoes of what youve written about. Think of russian behavior for in ukraine. Now, what part of your story is a german story and what part is and how do you think about when you see atrocities that, at least at a certain surface level, what youve written about in places ukraine today, how do you approach those issues as a historian of, this particular period . Yes, thank you. I mean, we always try to sort out the general and the particular to in a sense, show the more the more general side of things. When i was i spent several years at the Holocaust Museum in dc, one year of which there was a rwandan psychiatrist there often also hagen, jumana and, he was a very unusual situation. He was half hutu, have tutsi. So he in a sense was anyway, anybody sort of you know look at both sides. It was him. He had one sister who was in jail as a genocide. One sister had been killed as a hutu so the family itself had been both part perpetrator and victim and after the genocide had gone into the refugee camps on the uganda border to try to see to degree his profession could help heal the terrible psychological scars of of the genocide. There was also a prison in that town where a number of the genocide were being held and. He decided that he could use professional experience to to come to bear on this. And ask permission to go into the prison, to talk to the prisoners. And he sent a questionnaire to all of them that, basically asked them to selfreport the degree of their incrimination in killing and surprise. Certainly a fair number were very open about how deeply implicated they were. Obviously by the sample he got back of incriminated people was not complete because some people would have denied it. But the sample he had was going to be pretty pure because not many people were going incriminate themselves as they hadnt been deeply involved. So it is that to that group of sort of selfconfessed, deeply incriminated genocide there he gave a second survey instrument as he called thinking trying to think every kind of question to try approach every kind of motive that he conceive of and this very survey came back, he said it was a result unlike he had ever seen in any of his professional. And that was almost everything, a flat line, no correlations and. Then two clusters of questions that just jumped off the page and huge peaks. The first cluster that simply leapt above the line in terms of correlation or questions that had to deal with dehumanization of the victim. Did they think people they had killed were human beings . You know, they were cockroaches. They were vermin, whatever that they did frame their killing of other human beings as murder because their victims had been sufficiently dehumanized the ideological framing of what they had done was sanitation or, selfdefense, not murder and. The second cluster of questions had to do with issues of self esteem, how they what they did because they wanted to be thought of in the eyes of their comrades, that they had excelled in their job, had led their killing unit. They had always done more than required. Theyd always gone the extra machete chop, the extra mile, so that they would be valued by and and and and held the esteem of their comrades. So in a sense, they were both the ideological dimensions, the dehumanization, victim and the dynamics of the group. Just as insatiable appetite for self esteem and esteem in the eyes of their comrades, which i found basically paralleled, you know, the kinds of things i was seeing and one on one. So the dynamic may have been very different victims in them, but different ideology. But you had an ideological, a Group Dynamic that seemed to match a killing unit in as opposed to a killing unit of the nazis in europe. So i in then looking at other kinds of genocides, ive taught courses on comparative genocide. Ive always argued that if a regime authoritarian regime in power truly want to commit genocide, it will never fail for the the inability to find a sufficient of willing executioners that will not be the bottleneck that you will find people to pull the trigger. If thats your goal is and that regime was failed to commit mass because they cant find anybody to pull the trigger. Is there in germany is there anything german or german of in the choice of the victim that the nazi regime for hitler and this of course permeates the regime is that the is at is the source of all evil history as a race struggle. And so germans other races struggle against each other for lehmanns realm. But the subhuman element that threatens germany is capacity to successfully the endless struggle for labors around more territory means. You have more people with you, you have a bigger army which means you can conquer, conquer, get more labors around the threat to. That is anything that might weaken germanys capacity from within to wage that eternal war. And the threatens that quote, blood poisoning, polluting the blood of the germans because the axiom was pure blood, good mixed blood weak. They never questioned that that just was assumed as is how things worked. And the second was the are the purveyors of the subversive ideas and subvert a persons peoples ability to basically wage a no holds barred endless battle. And of course for the nazis, the great conspiracy theories the won are the founders christianity. Turn the other cheek. Love thy neighbor like yourself, i think could be opposite of the nazis more that its liberalism, equality before the law. Thats a jewish invention and bolshevism workers of the world unite anything that subtract it from concentration on the absolute sovereignty the german people, as opposed to any of universalism that included anybody else, subverts the german will to fight by any means forever. And all of that is attributed to various jewish conspiracies. And so the is the heart of everything behind every problem the nazis face. Theres always a jewish to explain it. So holocaust in that sense is, is an outgrowth of of german antisemitism and european antisemitism. And of course it is in germany that a utterly antisemitic regime, europe comes to power. There are many in other parts of europe, but they dont set up a dictatorship to the extent that hitler did. Ladies and gentlemen dr. Alexandra richie, dr. Thank. Im brad warthen and welcome to the new debrief. Were here to listen to Dennis Dupuis tell about his experiences in vietnam, where he served two tours. Tours as a helicopter pilot