Their real motivation was probably a lot more trivial. The police officers in question enjoyed doing things they would never have been allowed to under normal circumstances. They wanted to experience what it felt like to kill without fear of consequences, to exercise total power and do something extraordinary and monstrous, free from the possibility of any negative consequences. This is what sociologist Günther Anders has called the “chance for unpunished inhumanity.” For some people, senseless murder was apparently a temptation that could hardly be resisted. Violence of this nature needs neither a motive nor a reason. It is its own motivation.
The surveillance protocols also contain descriptions of how German soldiers took part in mass executions, voluntarily or after having received an invitation to do so.247 These episodes, mind-boggling as they may be to us today, indicate that Nazi genocide by no means took part in secrecy and was not always viewed with horror and disgust. On the contrary, curious onlookers—local people, Wehrmacht soldiers, and members of the civilian administration—regularly turned up at the execution pits, turning exterminations into a semipublic spectacle with a high amusement value. In fact, in July 1941, Higher SS and Police Leader Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was forced to ban spectators at mass executions. His order read: “All male Jews between the ages of 17 and 45 who have been found guilty of plundering are to be shot in accordance with military procedure. The executions will be carried out at a distance from cities, villages and roadways. Their graves are to be leveled in such a fashion that they cannot serve as sites of remembrance. I expressly forbid photographs or spectators. Executions and graves are not to be made public.”248 Nonetheless, people continued to flock to executions, taking photographs, probably delighting in the obscene spectacle of helpless, naked women, and offering advice to and cheering on the shooters.249
The lure of a good show proved stronger than people’s fear of violating rules or disobeying commands. A Major Rösler described “soldiers and civilians… pouring in from all directions” to witness one execution: “Police were running around in dirty uniforms. Soldiers, some clad only in bathing trunks, congregated in small groups. And civilians, among them women and children, looked on.” At the conclusion of his report, Rösler declares that while he had experienced no shortage of unpleasantness in his life, he had never seen anything like this sort of bloodbath carried out in public on what amounted to an open-air stage. Something of that nature, Rösler complained, ran contrary to German values and ideals.250 But no amount of commands and instructions, it seems, could put an end to the problem of execution tourism. A conference of military administrators on May 8, 1942, decided that the murder commandos should make “amicable adjustments” and if possible carry out executions at night and not during daytime. But such measures had little effect. 251
It is useless to speculate about what may have attracted individual onlookers to defy the prohibitions and attend executions. Their motivations probably varied. Some probably sought out the thrill of witnessing a spectacular and surreal event that would have never been allowed to happen in normal life. Others were likely drawn by horror and disgust, perhaps mixed with a feeling of satisfaction that one was exempt from the fate others were suffering. What is more significant in the present context is the sheer phenomenon of audiences witnessing the mass murders. People being gunned down wholesale didn’t elicit the sort of repulsion that made people try to avoid witnessing it. Voyeurism and satisfaction at observing others’ misfortune are well-documented psychological phenomena that also occur in contexts other than the Holocaust. This is probably also the explanation for the prominence of descriptions of genocide in the surveillance protocols. If one could not witness an execution oneself, one could at least enjoy the vicarious thrill of a detailed description of what it was like.
A navy mechanic and POW named Kammeyer watched an execution in summer 1941 in Liepaja in today’s Latvia, while he was deployed on the Baltic coast:
