In Nazi Germany

Chapter 3 “Ordinary Christians” in Nazi Germany

Robert P. Ericksen

In 1992, Christopher R. Browning provided us with a new term, “ordinary men,” and a powerful concept about the willingness of those ordinary men to participate in the heinous crimes of the Nazi state. For nearly half a century after the collapse of Nazi Germany, scholars in Europe and North America had hoped, or even assumed, that Nazi killers represented some type of distorted commu- nity: children schooled after 1933 in Nazified schools; adolescents politicized in the Hitler Youth; enthusiastic members of the Nazi Party, exposed for years only to an atmosphere of hateful antisemitism and brutal politics; or simply individuals possessed of a flawed personality.1 Browning then discovered a group of men who murdered at least 38,000 Jews at close range with a bullet in the back of the neck. They also coordinated the apprehension and transport to Treblinka of at least 45,000 additional Jews, so that these 500 men were respon- sible for approximately 85,000 of the six million murdered Jews.2 The murderers Browning discovered did not seem to fit earlier ideas about likely killers.3 Most were in their middle years, already adults before Hitler came to power. Most lived in or near Hamburg, not known as an especially Nazified region. Most remained safely at home from 1939 to 1941, not eager to contribute to Hitler’s war against Poles, Scandinavians, Belgians or the French, nor did they volunteer for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Finally, few of these men had a significant connection to the Nazi party or any Nazi organization. However, when they were drafted into a reserve police battalion newly

1 See Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Rev. Ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2017), 165-67, for his assessment of the “flawed personality” argument. 2 Ibid., Appendix, Table 1, “Number of Jews Shot by Reserve Police Battalion 101,” and Table 2, “Number of Jews Deported to Treblinka by Reserve Police Battalion 101,” 293-94. 3 Browning’s concluding chapter, entitled “Ordinary Men,” includes this statement on p. 164: “By age, geographical origin, and social background, the men of Reserve Police battalion 101 were least likely to be considered apt material out of which to mold future mass killers. On the basis of these criteria, the rank and file – middle-aged, mostly working class, from Hamburg – did not represent special selection or even random selection but for all practical purposes negative selection for the task at hand.”

© Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019 | doi:10.30965/9783657792665_005 44 Chapter 3: “Ordinary Christians” reformed in 1942 and sent to Poland, they were asked to murder Jews.4 Even when told they could choose not to participate, at least 80-90 percent of these men were willing to commit mass murder in a close and personal manner.5 Browning’s book caused the world of Holocaust scholarship to round a corner, to grapple with the ordinariness of at least some Nazi killers. Browning’s concept of “ordinary men” has been a widespread theme in Holocaust Studies ever since his book made its splash in 1992. It obviously rests upon the notion, widely accepted inside and outside Germany since 1945, that the Nazi mass murder of Jews and other innocent victims was not ordinary but extra-ordinary and unacceptable. It was criminal. It was horrific. It was beyond any possible justification. Therefore, these acts must have been com- mitted by people similarly horrific and criminal. The Nuremberg Trials played to this idea by labelling the main killing organization, the SS, a criminal group. Postwar Germans of all stripes implicitly affirmed the horror of Nazi crimes by claiming, honestly or not, that they never had been Nazis. In cases where party membership or pro-Nazi behaviour seemed unambiguous, many would claim they used membership as a cover, but had never been “real” Nazis.6 I will now consider “ordinariness” as it helps explain our understanding of Nazi Germany since Ordinary Men.

The Christopher R. Browning Cohort and Early Stages of Holocaust Studies

Christopher Browning has described how he was “converted” to the study of Holocaust history in 1969, long before such a field existed. With an MA in hand and ready to do his first college teaching, he had agreed to teach a course on German history. Certain that his one undergraduate course on the subject, plus

4 For the composition of Reserve Police Battalion 101 by the time of its deployment in June 1942, see ibid., 44-45. 5 Ibid., 159. 6 I found this frequently in my study of denazification at Göttingen University. See, for example, Robert P. Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), especially 219-23, dealing with Professor Friedrich Neumann, Rektor at Göttingen, 1933-1938, and Professor Artur Schür- mann, the leading Nazi among the professors and Gaudozentenbundführer for Lower Saxony. Each pleaded his own case by insisting that he was using his position just to protect the university against the real Nazis. See also pp. 202-18 for discussion of Professor Klaus-Wilhelm Rath, once described as part of a “terror group” at Göttingen (along with Schürmann), who proved a particularly intransigent claimant of his secret opposition to the regime (against all evidence, it would seem).