Ostland

Ostland, a book by David Thomas, published in 2013, is a strange amalgam of fact and fiction.  It is at the same time the most penetrating psychological study of the mindset of the hands-on functionaries of the killing squads of the Holocaust that I have ever come across.  There is nothing particularly new in it, yet the way in which it knits together existing evidence and insights into a consistent picture is absolutely fascinating.  It is also a totally harrowing read.

The main and most interesting point it deals with is the way in which the practitioners sought to insulate themselves from the reality and psychological consequences of what they were doing.  They did this by clinging to the idea of duty as being the thing most paramount.  And duty meant obedience to orders.

And there is an element in the German makeup that seems inured to obedience.  Anybody who has stood at a pedestrian crossing in Germany or Austria, with no traffic coming for hundreds of yards in either direction, and watched as the natives wait patiently for the lights to change, would have an inkling of this.  It is an element that predates the Nazis, although they laid a special emphasis on it.

For the officers and men of the killing squads, save where they were by nature sadists and psychopaths, this extreme concept of duty became the justification, both during and after the war, for all they did.  It was the comfort blanket that they used to hide from themselves the knowledge of their personal weakness.

I use the term ‘weakness’ in a selective sense.  It is not a weakness unique to those who became mass murderers, but is common to us all.  The Nazi’s developed several psychological techniques to make possible the killing regime that they desired.  The SS were trained in hardness and duty with a view to carrying out tasks that in general were as yet unexplained to them.  But it was discovered that, despite all the training, when men were informed in advance of what was expected of them many of them demurred.

Gitta Sereny, in her biography of Albert Speer, writes: ‘There was a three-week SS orientation course in Pretzsch near Leipzig in May 1941, at the end of which a number of officers who had been appointed leaders of the Einsatzgruppen destined for Barbarossa, horrified by what they had learned, managed to get themselves transferred.’

The answer to this for the leadership, as least as far as the intermediate ranks were concerned, was often to keep them in ignorance until the last possible moment, when suddenly they found themselves, a bottle of vodka in one hand and a revolver in the other, standing behind a row of naked people in the killing line.

Rather like lobsters poised above a pot of boiling water, they found themselves suddenly confronted by a situation that, no matter how they reacted to it, was certain, even through just the knowledge of it, to change them forever.  All their automatically imbibed assumptions about themselves and their society and human nature and decency and religion and God would in those first few moments be burned away.  Even if they turned their backs and ran away from it, they could not escape, nonetheless, being unutterably changed.  In such a situation, it might be argued, the easiest reaction was to just shoot.  And in the fact of firing that first shot, they were forever caught.

It is no wonder that such men clung so fervently to the idea of duty as a way of justifying themselves and as an attempt to protect themselves against the psychological and spiritual consequences of what they were doing.  Some were deliberately ostentatious in their attempts to underline the fact that they were only doing their duty, a duty that otherwise was personally unpleasant to them, signalling this (and this really is the absurdity of it all) through taking strong exception to any gratuitous extra cruelties being inflicted on those about to be killed.

The other side of the coin was the necessity to shore up the idea of duty as an iron law, as the iron law which must be obeyed before any other.  This was to be done by a deliberate denial of mercy.  Even the most emotionally debilitating killings had to be endured, for to show mercy, to make exceptions, was to undermine the concept of duty as the law that had to be obeyed above all others, and at the same time rob the perpetrators of the fig-leaf of self-justification that they clung so fiercely to.

In my earlier blogs I quoted from Himmler’s speech to the Gauleiters in Posnan in 1943:

 ‘The hard decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the face of the earth.  For the organisation which had to carry out this order, it was the most difficult one we were ever given. . . . I think I can say that it has been carried out without damaging the minds or spirits of our men and our leaders.  The danger was great and ever present.  For the difference between the two possibilities . . . to become cruel and heartless and no longer to respect human life, or to become soft and succumb to weakness and nervous breakdowns . . . the way between Scylla and Charybdis is appallingly narrow.’

Yet the fact is that this ideologically contrived version of duty proved inadequate to the purpose of protecting men against the consequences of their actions.  One of the main reasons for the building of the extermination camps was the evidence of the psychological toll that the direct killing of men, women and children was having on the perpetrators.  Indeed, the Nazis sought to describe the creation of the gas chambers as a ‘humanitarian’ measure, except it was a humanitarianism intended to benefit, not the victims, but the killers in the field.

The central character of Thomas’s book is Georg Hauser, a real life perpetrator, who had previously been a decorated police detective.  Hauser, like so many of the others who survived the war—indeed he himself became a policeman again after the war, and ended up a chief of police—clung to the end to the idea that he had only been doing his duty.

And this is understandable.  It was the single fragile wall that stood between him and the certainty of total psychological and moral collapse.  Yet the effort of maintaining it must have been an agony, the reality constantly slopping over and around it in nightmares and in those moments of letting his self-discipline slip.

He had been presented, no matter how difficult the circumstances, with a choice, and rather than strength had found only weakness.  It is a terrible self-judgement to have to live with.