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Ordinary Men
This book is currently unavailable
456 printed pages
- Publication year
- 2017
Quotes
- bblbrxhas quoted4 years ago
Why does it matter which of our portrayals of and conclusions about Reserve Police Battalion 101 are closer to the truth? It would be very comforting if Goldhagen were correct, that very few societies have the long-term, cultural-cognitive prerequisites to commit genocide, and that regimes can only do so when the population is overwhelmingly of one mind about its priority, justice, and necessity. We would live in a safer world if he were right, but I am not so optimistic. I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce “ordinary men” to become their “willing executioners.” - bblbrxhas quoted4 years agoThe Germans presided over the death of some 2 million Soviet POWs in the first nine months of the war—far more than the number of Jewish victims up to that point. The death rate in these POW camps far exceeded the death rates in the Polish ghettos prior to the Final Solution. The fact that the Nazi regime changed its policy to murder all Jews and changed its policy not to starve all Soviet POWs is more a measure of the ideology, priorities, and obsessions of Hitler and the Nazi leadership than of the attitudes of German society. The staggering fatality rate of Soviet POWs in the first months suggests above all the regime’s capacity to harness ordinary Germans to murder limitless numbers of Soviet POWs if that had remained its goal. The continuing mass death of Soviet POWs into the spring of 1942 demonstrates that killing institutions are not turned off and the attitudes and behavior of their personnel are not altered instantly, even when policy changes.
- bblbrxhas quoted4 years agoMany scholars of the Holocaust, especially Raul Hilberg, have emphasized the bureaucratic and administrative aspects of the destruction process.5 This approach emphasizes the degree to which modern bureaucratic life fosters a functional and physical distancing in the same way that war and negative racial stereotyping promote a psychological distancing between perpetrator and victim. Indeed, many of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were so-called desk murderers whose role in the mass extermination was greatly facilitated by the bureaucratic nature of their participation. Their jobs frequently consisted of tiny steps in the overall killing process, and they performed them in a routine manner, never seeing the victims their actions affected. Segmented, routinized, and depersonalized, the job of the bureaucrat or specialist—whether it involved confiscating property, scheduling trains, drafting legislation, sending telegrams, or compiling lists—could be performed without confronting the reality of mass murder. Such a luxury, of course, was not enjoyed by the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, who were quite literally saturated in the blood of victims shot at point-blank range. No one confronted the reality of mass murder more directly than the men in the woods at Józefów. Segmentation and routinization, the depersonalizing aspects of bureaucratized killing, cannot explain the battalion’s initial behavior there.
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