Let us summarize. German descriptions of all aspects of the Holocaust—from the ghettos to the mass executions to the extermination camps—not only characterized but judged the behavior of those involved. The same was also true for stories about Jewish capos, even though they were not acting of their own free will. The trope of “blaming the victim”244 is well known from studies on the psychology of prejudice and functions by blotting out the circumstances under which people act, reducing behavior entirely to personality factors. This mechanism is active in all sorts of prejudices against underprivileged or discriminated groups, so it is hardly surprising that it should have played a role in a situation of such completely one-sided violence and extreme social stereotyping. It occurs in descriptions of how women were raped or how those about to be executed behaved. Past experiences are narrated as though the storyteller were describing an experiment on lab animals, without mentioning the conditions under which the experiment was carried out.
This perspective, which completely ignored the conditions one side created in explaining the behavior of their victims, can be related back to a frame of reference in which “the Jews” belonged to a completely different social universe to the tellers of the stories. Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, for instance, was excellently informed about the conditions under which his inmates died—he himself created them. Yet even Höss assumed this perspective in his recollections when he spoke of so-called special commandos—camp inmates forced to bring victims to the gas chambers and take them back out again once they had died:
HÖSS: Equally bizarre was the entire behavior of the special commandos. They all definitely knew that, after the action was over, they would suffer the same fate as the thousands of their racial comrades whose extermination they had aided. Yet they diligently participated, much to my amazement. Not only by never telling the victims about what was about to happen, but by offering them help in the removal of clothes or by using violence against those who resisted. Then there was the leading away of those who didn’t remain calm and physical restraint during executions. They led the victims in such a way that the latter could not see the soldier standing ready with his weapon, so that the soldier could level it, unnoticed, at the back of their heads. They acted much the same with the ill and the feeble, who could not be brought to the gas chambers. Everything was done as a matter of course, as though they themselves were the executioners.245
Let us move on now to two aspects of soldiers’ behavior that have thus far been largely ignored by the literature on the Nazi war of annihilation and the Holocaust. Wehrmacht soldiers from various units and of divergent ranks occasionally took part in mass executions, even though they were not ordered to and formally had little to do with “Jewish actions.” Daniel Goldhagen, writing about one of the few known cases of this sort, concluded that Germans in general were motivated by a kind of exterminatory anti-Semitism. Goldhagen focused on a Berlin police unit, consisting of musicians and performers, that was sent to the front to entertain troops in mid-November 1942. They asked the commander of a reserve police battalion in the German town of Luckow if they could take a turn shooting Jews at an upcoming execution. Their request was granted, and the entertainers spent the following day amusing themselves by murdering people. Holocaust historian Christopher Browning also mentions this incident.246 But the question remains: did the Germans in question need anti-Semitic motivation to find killing fellow human beings an entertaining pastime?
