Preface
They were handsome, brilliant, clever and cultivated. They
were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of humans. This book
attempts to tell their story. It is based on my doctoral thesis, written
between 1997 and 2001. This studied a group of eighty university graduates,
economists, lawyers, linguists, philosophers, historians and geographers, some
of who pursed academic careers while simultaneously devising doctrines,
carrying out surveillance, or gather intelligence on German or foreign affairs
within the repressive organizations of the Third Reich, especially the Security
Service (SD) of the SS. Most of them were, from June 1941, involved in the Nazi
attempt to exterminate the Jews of East Europe, as members of the mobile
commando units known as Einsatzgruoppen
and dedicated to slaughter.
My initial ambition was to retrace what the German historian
Gerd Krumeich called an Erfahrungsgeschichte,
a history of the actual experience of these men, so as to understand how the
framework of their lives might have shaped their (monstrous) system of
representations. This is where I was able to profit most fully from the
heritage of the historians of the Great War: I tried to study children’s
wartime lives as a crucial experience, scarred by a collective narcissistic
would that was interpreted in the apocalyptic and eschatological terms.
Secondly, I wanted to grasp Nazi activism as a cultural
reaction to this first experience, and study it in the light of the
anthropology of belief. In other words, I tried to analyse Nazism as a
consoling, soothing system of beliefs: the coherence of its discourses and
practices is underlined by the analytic tools I use, and embodied in the life
stories and careers that I narrate.
This left the experience of the terrors wrought during the
journey to the east: the genocidal practices of the Einsatzgruppen and their participation in Germanization and
population displacement –policies that were fraught with utopian and murderous
tensions. Finally, I sought to conclude my study by investigating how these men
faced up to defeat and their judicial defense and fate after the war.
A World of Enemies
Every war opens up a breach in the slow unfolding of works
and days. Of course, it leaves certain times and spaces untouched: but,
directly or indirectly, it affects all the protagonists. In Germany, the war which
broke out in 1914 was no exception.
Children – with a few rare exceptions – were neither combatants nor laborers.
Thus, the future SS members played practically no part in the German war
effort. They were, however, spectators. They were central actors in family
relations disrupted by the departure of the menfolk.
When war was declared,
there were demonstrations of support, but seriousness and gravity were the dominant
note rather than warmongering elation. A positive response was to be found
elsewhere, in the sprawling suburbs, where most of the middle classes to which
belonged the vast majority of the group we are studying were concentrated. So
their own families probably experienced going to war as an occasion for wild
enthusiasm and a sense of determination. Though they never mentioned it later,
one is able to see the ‘spirit of 1914’, a crystallization of the basic volkisch (ethno-nationalist) desire to
unify the nation, a desire which the members of the group were later to share uncompromisingly.
It is, then, surely permissible to speculate that, in spite of the silence they
would observe on the outbreak of war in their later writings, this period may
have left an enduring impression on them.
Every suggests that the loss of men sent to the front,
whether this loss was definitive or only temporary, was a mass trauma, The German
Empire lost 2 million soldiers, so 18 million family members were directly
plunged into mourning and some 36 million in more distant circles of
sociability. Then there were the food shortages, nowhere more intensely felt
than it Germany. The distinctive food intakes of the middle-classes- meat, fish
and fat – more or less disappeared from market stalls and fuelled a flourishing
black market. From 1916 onwards the Germans felt that they were literally
earning their ‘daily bread’ by the sweat of their brows. Hunger, bereavement,
the sense of fighting for one’s daily survival- these were the three main
elements in children’s experience of the Great War.
German society, like other wartime European societies,
developed system of representations to give meaning to the conflict. Once they were
at war, the Germans considered the combats to be profoundly defensive in nature.
Newspapers, political commentaries and soldiers letters constructed the image
of a conflict into which Germany had found itself thrown unwillingly, and
fighting for its safely alone. The war was a question of security: final
victory was necessary to break the strategy of encirclement set up by the
Allies and ‘attack was the best form of defense.’ As the result partisan attacks
behind German line in Belgium but especially
after the Cossack invasion of East Prussia and the panic that ensued, the fate
of Germany was seen to be at stake, faced as it was with a ubiquitous enemy
distinguished by the inhumanity of its fighting methods –an inhumanity that was
viewed at least in part from an essentially
ethnic and biological hostility.
Although it was defensive, the Great War was all the same
endowed with great expectations. War was an ordeal in the medieval sense, and
that paved the way to a new era: this was one of the themes that gave meaning
to the conflagration, on the front lines as well as behind them. For example,
the historian Friedrich Meinecke resorted to the metaphor of the Roman Ver Sacrum, the ritual human sacrifice prefiguring the fertility of a
new spring, as a way of expressing the mass deaths of the Flanders battlefields,
“For us, their sacrifice means a new sacred spring for the whole of Germany.”
God is now forging out great paths for world history,” wrote
one young soldier to his mother, “we are the chosen ones, the chosen tools.
Should we really, truly be happy at this? Around me everything is verdant and
blossoming, the birds are exuberant and joyful in the light. How much more
grand and beautiful will be the spring that follows the Great War!”
In this gigantic struggle against an enemy that was at least
partially branded as barbarous and bestial, and utterly pitiless, the fate of
the nation was being decided. In many well-off, cultivated homes that
constituted, sociologically speaking, the heart of the German consent to the
conflict, the war thus became the site of a derivative form of millenarian
utopia.
These issues were too important in the eyes of those involve
for their children to be shielded from them. The pedagogical efforts made by
the society thus took the form of a discourse of legitimization of the conflict
that was handed down to children by their parents and toy manufactures and to adolescents
in primary and secondary schools; textbooks, exercise books and lectures all
started to discuss the war and transmit a heroic sense of morality.
In spite of the high profile of the conflict and efforts at
mobilization deployed by the state, however, the members of our group who had
the opportunity to relate their childhood experiences of war did not in fact do
so. In entering the SS or getting married they were almost all impelled to set
down their life story – a mixture of curriculum vitae and personal text in
which were described the narrators’ family backgrounds, their academic studies
and sometimes even their emotional worlds. Even if only in cursory form, these Lebenslaufe should logically contain their
wartime experiences. But only five of them make any mention of these, and even
this is often a passing reference –to a father’s death, exodus or captivity.
While the traumatic experience of war is not for the most part mentioned, this
silence does not mean that the experience was insignificant. Quite the opposite:
silence is not a lack of something, but a sign –a sign of trauma. The origin
and as well as the consequences of the Great War –the question of responsibility-
were often discussed quite passionately – but not its actual progress nor the
defeat itself. This was an attitude close to psychological repression.
Whereas as the intellectuals in the individuals in this
study were mostly silent about their experiences in the their Lebenslaufe very often mention an active
participation in one or other phases of the troubles that shook Germany after
1918; the culture of war born from 1914-18
was preserved in tact. Even as students they were active in combating
the communists, separatists and social democrats who threatened to “sabotage
national union”, to ‘gobble-up and exterminate the German people’. The kernel of
their images and representations of ‘the time of troubles’ was a quasi-apocalyptic
anguish shaping a belief in the imminent disappearance of Germany, as a state,
of course, but also as a biological entity.
This was doubtless the very essence of the initial traumatic experience of the members of our group, an experience so painful that it made it practically impossible for them to describe their childhoods at all. Once they had become adults, they could rekindle their wartime lives by means of the Abwehrkampf, or defensive struggle, and thus manage at least partly to objectify it...
[This Abwehrkampf was
also a way that SS officers justified their genocides in East Europe and Russia
and was carried on in the defenses that at least of few of them were required to
make at Nuremberg and subsequent war crimes tribunals.]
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