The Books and their authors

“A society that declares antisemitism with the full power of its lungs, with apparent heart and soul, might indeed be antisemitic”[1] Could the motivation for the Final Solution be so simple? Did the Nazis decide to murder six million Jews during the Holocaust simply because they were anti-Semitic, and they were waiting for the opportunity? There is a great deal of scholarship surrounding the topic and the orthodox opinion on the subject and it used to be that the Nazis were “only following orders.” This line of thinking is riddled with flaws; however, it would prevail as the accepted excuse for the Nazis’ behavior until Christopher Browning’s book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Browning’s contribution to the subject revised our modern perspective on exactly what happened in Nazi-occupied Europe. Within five years of Browning’s book, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published his interpretation as a response to Browning’s work, in Hitler’s Willing Executioners. A text that focuses heavily on anti-Semitism and the personal agency of the perpetrators that committed the crimes. Lastly, Jan T. Gross published his case study in 2001 titled, Neighbors: The Destruction of Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Gross investigates the facts surrounding a massacre that occurred in Poland during the war. Each of these authors contributes to the field of Holocaust studies; sometimes overlapping each other’s work and sometimes contradicting said work. The following will be an attempt to identify the motivations behind the Final Solution, using the scholarship of Christopher Browning, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, and Jan T. Gross.

The logical beginning of such a quest should start with the man who initially provoked this revision, Christopher Browning. Browning has experience teaching at Pacific Lutheran University, located in Washington state. [2] He has proven his worth as a scholar and a pioneer in the “bottom-up” research surrounding the Holocaust and Genocide studies. He won the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust three times and in 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [3] Ordinary Men is a case study that illustrates the culture behind the Order Police, in Nazi-occupied Europe in 1941.

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The Case Study

Browning begins by describing these “Ordinary Men.” It becomes evident that these men were quite common and held no specific value to the Nazi war machine other than their compliance. As Browning puts it, “They were middle-aged family men of working- and lower-middle-class background from the city of Hamburg. Considered too old to be of use to the German army, they had been drafted instead into the Order Police.”[4] Later in the book, Browning will give us more intimate details about these men; their ages, educations, etc. He states, “About 63 percent were of working-class background, but few were skilled laborers. … About 35 percent were lower-middle-class, virtually all of them white-collar workers.”[5] He continues to paint the picture, that these were mostly men who were not financially independent, moreover, their prospects for economic mobility were slim if existent at all.[6] Many men were indeed conscripted into service due to the extreme demand for manpower due to the war, but it is also true that men would volunteer out of patriotism or financial necessity.

It is important to understand exactly what this “Order Police” was, especially because both Browning and Goldhagen will cite them for their findings. The Order Police was created as a substitute for the army after WWI. When Germany lost the war, the Treaty of Versailles restricted Germany from possessing a competent military and thus the standard police force was transformed into a paramilitary group with greater responsibilities.[7] Browning reveals that these reserve men held varying responsibilities designed primarily for domestic defense. However, with the war ever-expanding, the duties of these men would follow suit. The numbers of the Order Police in their varying departmental differences expanded from 131,000 to 244,000 men between 1939 to 1941. [8] Such growth is a testament to the Nazis’ demand for assistance in both the war effort and their “Final Solution.” It is expected with such a demand and growth that these men would find themselves doing tasks that they did not sign up for.

On the second page of Ordinary Men, Browning promptly dispels the notion that the men were “Willing Executioners” and that they were fueled primarily by anti-Semitism. “Pale and nervous, with a choking voice and tears in his eyes, Trapp visibly fought to control himself as he spoke. The battalion, he said plaintively, had to perform a frightfully unpleasant task. This assignment was not to his liking; indeed, it was highly regrettable, but the orders came from the highest authorities.”[9] This quotation alone may feed into the canard that the men were “only following orders.” However, Browning continues, “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.”[10] While it is true that most of the men stayed and performed their duty, some retreated from the evil that had been assigned to them. Some of the men outright abandoned their detail while others played along and pretended to follow orders. Whenever these men were discovered, a bolstering effect would propagate the unit. Their work was perceived to be difficult and in a “macho” fashion, the ordinary men that became killers were idealized for their commitment and patriotism.[11]

The Grey Zone

Browning’s investigation into the Order Police reveals that the men were fueled by duty, peer pressure, anti-Semitism, greed, and propaganda. Browning borrows from Primo Levi’s term, the “Grey Zone,” when he describes the motivations of the men as “multi-layered.”[12] In no way does Browning intend to belittle the impact of propaganda or anti-Semitism, he speaks to that in his “Afterward” in response to Goldhagen’s critiques later on. Browning’s discoveries created a paradigm shift in the field; the idea that genocide comes from a grass-roots movement and that there is more involved than just men following orders is an inconvenient truth with which we must contend. Such scholarship introduces agency in the actions of the perpetrators and the deeply disturbing truth behind his claims about the nature of evil. He shares a quote from Ervin Staub, “… The evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.”[13] Then he follows it up with this horrifying claim, “If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?”[14]

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The Germans were waiting for someone like Hitler

Following Browning’s work, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen wrote his book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. The book evolved from his doctoral dissertation, which was awarded the American Political Science Association’s Gabriel A. Almond Award for best dissertation in comparative politics. Goldhagen then won the highly prestigious Democracy Prize and is currently an Associate Professor at Harvard University.[15] Hitler’s Willing Executioners is heavily informed by Ordinary Men and even uses the same source material. Goldhagen reaches many of the same conclusions as Browning but emphasizes the role of anti-Semitism and the men’s agency. The book’s thesis is exactly what the title implies: the Nazis killed the Jews because they wanted to, and they have been eagerly waiting for the opportunity to do so.

Hitler’s Willing Executioners is conveniently broken down into six parts, they are as follows:

Part I – Understanding German Antisemitism: The Eliminationist Mind-set

Part II – The Eliminationist Program and Institutions

Part III – Police Battalions: Ordinary Germans, Willing Killers

Part IV – Jewish “Work” is Annihilation

Part V – Death Marches: To the Final Days

Part VI – Eliminationist Antisemitism, Ordinary Germans, Willing Executioners. [16]

Before the notes section, the book is 474 pages long and one who reads these parts that have been listed may identify three distinct themes; anti-Semitism, eliminationism, and the Germans were willful murderers. Goldhagen is explicit and direct with his language throughout the book. A fourth and not-so-hidden theme is the motif of combativeness towards Christopher Browning. So much so that Browning responds in his “Afterward” writing, “But the differences are seldom so stridently argued and cast in such an adversarial framework as in this case.”[17] What Browning is referring to as “adversarial” is how Goldhagen repeatedly attacks Browning’s intensions, scholarship, and competence throughout both the written pages of Hitler’s Willing Executioners and the dedicated Notes section. An example of such notes:

Browning’s assertion that “a minority of perhaps ten percent—and certainly no more than twenty percent—did not” become killers (Ordinary Men, p. 159) is not supported by the evidence. His initial extrapolation that at the Józefów killing, between 10 and 20 percent of those assigned to killing details excused themselves, as was discussed earlier, is itself highly suspect. Even if this extrapolation were correct (and the men excused themselves from killing for principled reasons and not, as the evidence suggests, because of weak stomachs), the evidence does not indicate that these men (or others) continued to refuse to serve in subsequent operations as executioners by shooting Jews.[18]

Goldhagen vs. Browning

Goldhagen uses phrases like “impossible,” “not supported by evidence,” and “avoid” when discussing Browning’s work, which, motivated Goldhagen in the first place to write his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. It becomes noticeably clear that Goldhagen is heavily invested in the subject and finds that Browning is giving excuses for the perpetrators. Between the title of the book, the titles of the parts, and the tone throughout the text, it becomes clear that Goldhagen is transfixed on his interpretation of exactly what happened throughout Europe, and he is not interested in being told otherwise.

About anti-Semitism, Goldhagen writes, “The one that assumes that a long-standing cultural orientation evaporated, or the one that demands that the subject be investigated and before antisemitism is declared to have dissipated, that the process by which it allegedly occurred be demonstrated and explained?”[19] Goldhagen makes a valid point. Anti-Semitism was engrained not only in Germany but throughout Europe predating the Enlightenment. Throughout the sections on anti-Semitism specifically, Goldhagen not only asserts his perspective but insists that it is the primary reason for every instance noted throughout the book. The issue with this assertion particularly, is that no one has claimed the contrary. Anti-Semitism throughout Europe is common knowledge, it is as if Goldhagen is fighting against an opponent of his imagination.

The “Eliminationist Mindset”

Outside the subject of broad anti-Semitism and feuding with Browning, Goldhagen delivers on two additional points. The “Eliminationist mindset” and those facts surrounding “Jewish Work.” Regarding the Eliminationist mindset, Browning did not explore this topic throughout his case study. Goldhagen reminds us, “Hitler’s often non-interventionist leadership style created a great deal of leeway for subordinates, often in different institutions and with somewhat different ideas, to design the policies.”[20] Meaning. the men did what they wanted to. And as Goldhagen repeats throughout the text, “they wanted to eliminate the Jews.” Not just to steal from them or deport them, but to remove the Jewish presence from the planet itself. That claim may sound hyperbolic but Goldhagen states emphatically, “The moment that the opportunity existed for the only ‘final solution’ that was ‘final,’ Hitler seized the opportunity to begin to bring about his ideal of a world forever freed of Jewry and made the leap to genocide.”[21] Unfortunately, Goldhagen was right and he spends most of his book showing that the Nazis wanted to destroy the Jewish people in what he calls, the “Eliminationist mindset”.

Goldhagen presents the details of the Nazi’s demand for labor as a hybrid torture and murder mechanism. He writes, “A widespread, deeply rooted, though little-remarked-upon notion in the German and, more generally, in the European antisemitic tradition, possessing an intense quality in the Nazified German mind, was that Jews shirk physical work, and, more generally, that they do not do honest work.”[22] Essentially, Goldhagen is attributing anti-Semitism to the work camps.

This is something that Browning fights back against. If it is true that the Nazis were only using the Jews in work camps to torture them and that the goal was to kill them (there), then why did the Nazis take Soviet POWs? Browning states, “In short, both economic rationale and superior orders mandated that the Soviet POWs be kept alive and put to useful labor. 10,000 Soviet POWs arrived in Auschwitz in October 1941 and were sent to Birkenau. By the end of February, four months later, only 945 were alive— a survival rate of 9.5 percent”[23] That means that even when they were ordered to keep the prisoners alive, they ended up dead at the same rate or worse than their Jewish counterparts. This is an example of how cruel the work camps were in nature, not because of anti-Semitic stereotypes, revenge, or an improvised killing method. There were improvised killing methods which included gas vans, death marches, and mass shootings; but the work camps were designed because the Nazis needed work to get done – their able-bodied male population was busy fighting on the Western Front, the Eastern front, the African theater, and conducting a thinly veiled secret war; “The Final Solution”.  Simply put, there was a lot of work to do, and the Nazis needed some people to be alive to do it.

Browning Strikes Back

The provoked Browning strikes back against Goldhagen in his “Afterward” section. It is understandable why considering the animosity throughout Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Browning focuses on a specific detail that cannot be ignored. Goldhagen omitted facts to prove his thesis. This is a serious claim that Browning is making but he cites several instances that are not limited to the following:

But he omits a similar case of gratuitous, voluntaristic killing by Reserve Police Battalion 101 when the victims were Poles… Nonetheless, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 shot all the elderly Poles and set the village on fire before returning to the cinema for an evening of casual and relaxing entertainment[24] Concerning their attitude to the killing itself, he stated that ‘the men did not carry out the  Jewish actions with enthusiasm…. The men were all very depressed.’[25] One final example of tendentious selectivity of evidence. Goldhagen consistently emphasizes that the perpetrators ‘had fun’ killing Jews and that these ‘men’s accounts of conversations that they had while in the killing fields suggest … that these men in principle approved of the genocide and their deeds.’ A typical example of this is his account of Sergeant Heinrich Bekemeier’s squad conducting the ‘Jew hunt’ in Łomazy after the massacre.[26]

The Łomazy incident is a completely different depiction based on the same source materials.

Jan T. Gross

The last of the three “bottom-up” scholars, is Jan T. Gross and his case study of the Polish town, of Jedwabne. Gross is an American sociologist, born in Poland in 1947, he drafted his book four years after Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, was written in 2001, and at the time, Gross was a Professor of Politics and European Studies at New York University.[27] Gross expands on Browning’s claim that the “Final Solution” was improvised in nature, that the perpetrators were greedy, and that the killers varied in their degrees of anti-Semitism. Like Goldhagen, Gross describes the events on July 10^th, 1941, in detail, leaving little to the imagination. He continues by asserting, with evidence, that the Christian Polish citizens chose to kill their Jewish neighbors and that the Nazis had extraordinarily little to do with it. Gross then introduces new concepts to the study: The political tension of living under both Communists and Fascists, a population in denial, the role of the Catholic Church, and what the future may hold.

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Before discussing the details surrounding the massacre, it is important to understand the nature of the town before the war. “According to census figures of 1931, the town population then totaled 2,167, and over 60 percent of the inhabitants identified themselves as Jews… In 1933 there were 144 craftsmen officially registered in Jedwabne, including 36 tailors and 24 shoemakers. Services and crafts were mostly Jewish occupations, and undoubtedly many more plied some trade but were too poor to afford a license”[28] That means that most of the town was Jewish and that the Jews held most of the positions of skilled labor. It also means that the remaining 40 percent of the population was living in a rural Polish town with little to no means of economic mobility or opportunity, especially during and after the Great Depression. The Christian population in Jedwabne shared many characteristics with Browning’s “Ordinary Men.” Does Gross often refer to these Poles as “Ordinary Men,” a nod to his predecessor? Or perhaps “Ordinary Men” is an accurate term.

The Jews were seen as Communists

Despite being a majority, the Jews were constantly fearful of pogroms that occurred both in and around the town periodically. Annually, around Easter especially, it was not uncommon for the Christian population to rise and attack the Jewish community. Such action was instigated by the Church with the “God-Killer” narrative.[29] The Church held and continues to hold a vast amount of influence over the people in Poland. Because of this, the Jews in Jedwabne in 1941, felt that they were protected when they were assured by the local Bishop that no harm would come to them. The days of pogroms and violence have ended and there could be peace for the Jews in Jedwabne.[30] This promise inevitably would be broken, condemning the Jewish community to death.

Politics played a key role in the escalation and polarization of the citizens before the massacre. Poland was split between the Nazi Germans and the Soviet Communists in the “Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact,” essentially, the Germans and the Russians agreed to split Poland and not kill each other.[31] What this meant for the people in Jedwabne was that their freedom had been stolen from them and that they had become occupied by the invading Communists. The Communists were foreign and in this case they were. It is also understood that the Jews were foreign despite their residence in the town for generations. The Jews would be identified as Communists or at least to be collaborating with the Communists, which angered the Polish Christians.[32] After Hitler breaks the treaty with Stalin and invades Russia, the town would be “liberated” by the Nazis. “The Polish population immediately cozied up to the Germans. They built a triumphal arch to greet the German army decorated with a swastika, a portrait of Hitler, and a sign: “Long live the German army, which liberated us from the horrible grip of the Judeocommune!” The first question hooligans asked was: Is it permitted to kill the Jews? Of course, the Germans gave a positive answer. And immediately afterward they started to persecute the Jews.”[33]

The Polish did not need Propaganda

That permission was all it took for the Polish Christians to strike against their neighbors. As stated previously, there were different actors with differing motivations and the assault was improvised in nature. It is Gross’ opinion that the Christians acted initially out of greed. He states, “Given our growing awareness of the importance of material expropriation as a motivating factor in the persecution of the Jews all over Europe, I would think it very probable that the desire and unexpected opportunity to rob the Jews once and for all—rather than, or alongside with, atavistic antisemitism—was the real motivating force that drove Karolak and his cohort to organize the killing.”[34] Karolak was the mayor of the town. One would think that a mayor would act in the best interest of the town where he resided, but it is also true that more than likely he believed that he was doing just that. The anti-Semitism ran so deep that it infected all aspects of life within Europe, even as far out as rural Poland, a land without the propaganda from the radio, Hitler, or the Nazis.

The role of anti-Semitism cannot be understated. Just as Goldhagen had written about in his book, the Polish citizens hated the Jews, they were waiting for an opportunity to steal from them and ultimately, kill them. When the opportunity arose, they took it. To Browning’s credit, not everyone acted with the same level of intensity, but there were more than enough to destroy Jedwabne. Gross cites the meeting that occurred before the decision to act, “When the Germans proposed to leave one Jewish family from each profession, local carpenter Bronisław Szleziński, who was present, answered: We have enough of our own craftsmen, we must destroy all the Jews, none should stay alive. Mayor Karolak and everybody else agreed with his words. For this purpose, Szleziński gave his barn, which stood nearby. After this meeting, the bloodbath began.”[35] Gross describes the violence in detail, the men, women, and even newborn babies were murdered. When they discovered that the killings took too long, they gathered as many Jews as they could into Szleziński’s barn and set it on fire.[36]

The Poles went “Overboard”

The violence was so horrific that the Germans said that the Poles went, “overboard.”[37] It would come to reason that the Polish would blame these horrible acts on the Nazis, but in this case, they do not. Repeatedly Gross cites instances in which Polish citizens accept responsibility for what happened on July 10, 1941. Bolesław Ramotowski is but one of these examples, she says, “I want to stress that Germans did not participate in the murder of Jews; they just stood and took pictures of how Poles mistreated the Jews.”[38] Edward Śleszyński, the son of the man who volunteered to use their barn; states, “In the barn of my father, Bronisław Śleszyński, a lot of Jews were burned. I did not see it with my own eyes since I was in the bakery on that day, but I know from people who lived in Jedwabne at the time that Poles conducted this deed. Germans participated only in photographing.”[39] To the Church’s credit, it was the local clergy that stopped the pogrom.[40]

Jan Gross’ case study contributes in a way that neither Browning nor Goldhagen’s work can. Gross raises the question of collective responsibility. For many Polish citizens, they would rather reject the fact that the massacre ever happened. Gross raises the question, “Can we arbitrarily select from a national heritage what we like and proclaim it as a patrimony to the exclusion of everything else?” he continues rhetorically stating, “Hence, Polish music, most deservedly, is proud of ‘our’ Chopin; Polish science of ‘our’ Copernicus; and Poland thinks of itself as a ‘bastion of Christianity …’” [41] Gross is hopeful that the younger generations will be able to face their nation’s dark past. He attributes this revelation to the fact that the youth when he authored the book in 2001 was not as emotionally invested as their parents or grandparents.[42]

The “Only following orders,” excuse is dead.

In conclusion, Christopher Browning, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, and Jan T. Gross, each contributed to the scholarship on the Holocaust and the motivations behind the Final Solution. Whether it be by introducing new concepts to the field, expanding on previously understood notions, or simply exposure, each author delivers pieces of the story that we should interpret moving forward. The motivations provided throughout this scholarship include duty, peer pressure, propaganda, polarization, greed, free labor, permission from institutions of authority (the government and the church), opportunity, and complacency. Anti-Semitism is a large part of the story, but there was much more. The historical revision that Browning initiated changed the way we think about perpetrators and collaborators. The days of accepting the claim “they were just following orders” are long gone. Browning may have introduced this new concept, but Goldhagen and Gross emphasize that the people involved had a will of their own and they used it to murder the Jews. Browning leaves us with this inconvenient truth:

“I must recognize that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader— both were human— if I want to understand and explain the behavior of both as best I can. This recognition does indeed mean an attempt to empathize. What I do not accept, however, are the old clichés that to explain is to excuse, to understand is to forgive”[43] (Browning, xx).

In short, we are not the paragons of morality that we claim to be. Even an educated population like the Germans has fallen to the ills of corruption. As humans, we remain vulnerable to such contagions.

References

Browning, C. (1992). Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York, NY: Harper Collins. Browning describes the motivations behind the Final Solution as “layered.” He points out that different people acted differently when faced with complex decisions. His interpretation is starkly opposed to Goldhagen’s in that he does not believe that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were simply “Willing Executioners.” 

Goldhagen, D. J. (1997). Hitler’s Willing Executioners. New York, NY: Random House. Goldhagen uses the same sources as Browning and concludes that the Nazis did what they did because they wanted to and because they could. There is a dispute between Browning and Goldhagen when it comes to the particulars surrounding the Order Police. Goldhagen puts a heavy emphasis on the importance of anti-Semitism, personal agency, and the ideology of eliminationism. It is Goldhagen’s view that the Nazis saw an opportunity to eliminate the Jews once and for all and he supports that claim heavily throughout the text.

Gross, J. T. (2001). Neighbors: The Destruction of Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gross investigates the details surrounding a massacre that took place in the Polish town Jedwabne on July 10th, 1941. He concludes that the Christian Polish citizens acted independently with the primary motives of anti-Semitism, greed, and revenge. In the same tradition as Goldhagen and Browning, he does not accept the excuse that the perpetrators were “following orders” and he proves it with eyewitness testimony and confessions.

PowerPoint / Google Slides

End Notes

[1] Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Hitler’s Willing Executioners. (New York: Random House, 1997). 30.

[2] Christopher Browning. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. (New York: NY Harper Collins, 1992). 351.

[3] Christopher Browning. 351.

[4] Christopher Browning. 1.

[5] Christopher Browning. 47.

[6] Christopher Browning. 48.

[7] Christopher Browning. 3.

[8] Christopher Browning. 5-6.

[9] Christopher Browning. 2.

[10] Christopher Browning. 2.

[11] Christopher Browning. 141.

[12] Christopher Browning. 215.

[13] Christopher Browning. 167.

[14] Christopher Browning. 189-190.

[15] D.J. Goldhagen. 455.

[16] J.D. Goldhagen. ix-x.

[17] Christopher Browning. 191.

[18] J.D. Goldhagen. 551.

[19] J.D. Goldhagen. 31.

[20] J.D. Goldhagen. 133.

[21] J.D. Goldhagen. 161.

[22] J.D. Goldhagen. 284.

[23] Christopher Browning. 205.

[24] Christopher Browning. 213.

[25] Christopher Browning. 214.

[26] Christopher Browning. 214.

[27] Jan T. Gross. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. (Princeton: Princeton University Press., 2001). 5.

[28] J.T. Gross. 16.

[29] J.T. Gross. 19.

[30] J.T. Gross. 42.

[31] J.T. Gross. 21.

[32] J.T. Gross. 33.

[33] J.T. Gross. 33.

[34]J.T. Gross. 69.

[35] J.T. Gross. 4.

[36] J.T. Gross. 5.

[37] J.T. Gross. 40.

[38] J.T. Gross. 47.

[39] J.T. Gross. 47.

[40] J.T. Gross. 3.

[41] J.T. Gross. 89-90.

[42] J.T. Gross. 116.

[43] Christopher Browning. xx.