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The Hugo Valentin Centre Master Thesis A Comparative Study of the My Lai and Bialystok Massacres The Social Mechanisms of Perpetration and their Causal Determinants Emil Ditlev Ingemann Kjerte May 2015 45 Points Supervised by Dr. Tomislav Duli 29.798 Words Table of Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................. 5 Disposition .................................................................................................. 6 Theory and Method ................................................................................................. 8 Research Overview ..................................................................................... 8 Theoretical Framework ............................................................................. 12 Research Design ........................................................................................ 25 Method and Methodology ......................................................................... 28 Empirical Analysis ................................................................................................ 35 The Bialystok Massacre ............................................................................ 35 The My Lai Massacre ................................................................................ 54 Comparative Analysis ............................................................................... 71 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 95 References ............................................................................................................. 98 1 Figures and Maps Figure 1. Mechanisms as Black Boxes. .................................................................................... 13 Figure 2. Significant Variations in Milgram’s Experiment. ..................................................... 17 Figure 3. Positive and Negative Sanctioning. .......................................................................... 22 Figure 4. Officers and Non-Commissioned Officers in Police Battalion 309. ........................ 40 Figure 5. The Watchmen’s Occupational Background. ........................................................... 41 Figure 6. Map of Bialystok. ..................................................................................................... 46 Figure 7. The Rank and File’s Occupations. ............................................................................ 59 Figure 8. C Company Movements in Xom Lang and Binh Tay. ............................................. 65 2 Abstract This thesis offers a comparative study of the My Lai massacre perpetrated by American soldiers during the Vietnam in War and the massacre in Bialystok carried out by a police unit operating under the Nazi regime. Using theories from social psychology in combination with a careful scrutiny of sources from criminal investigations, it seeks to elucidate the social mechanisms of perpetration in the two cases and explores how their divergent macro-level contexts facilitated distinctions in the perpetrator’s behavioural patterns and motivations. The study demonstrates that despite commonalities at the micro level, the massacres were organized in distinctive ways, featured divergent perpetrator behavioural patterns and encompassed disparities in the number of abstainers due to different macro-level contexts. The thesis provides explanations for these case variations, and it argues that new insight into the phenomenon of perpetration can be gained by adopting a comparative perspective. 3 Acknowledgements Throughout this odyssey several persons offered vital assistance and deserve to be thanked. First of all, I would like to thank the Hugo Valentin Centre for financing my research trip to Ludwigsburg. In addition, I am grateful to my supervisor, Dr. Tomislav Duli , for the invaluable help and advices he has given me throughout the research and writing process. I also thank Professor Dieter Pohl for taking the time to discuss the selection of potential cases, and Dr. Imke Hansen for looking for survivor testimonies written in German in the Emanuel Ringelblum collection. Although her efforts did not bear fruit, this does not diminish my thankfulness. A note of gratitude should also be paid to the archivists at Landesarchiv NRW R who helped me with reading handwritten sources. Furthermore, I would also like to thank my friends Jeppe Hilge Thygesen and Kevin Hackley for valuable criticism and proof-reading of the preliminary draft. Finally, I thank my family for always being so encouraging. 4 Introduction Within the two last decades there has been a surge of interest in exploring genocide and mass violence from a micro level approach, and a focal point of attention has been the hands-on perpetrators, and the perennial question surrounding their motivation for murdering civilians. However, comparative studies at this level have not appeared in abundance. While macro- level genocide studies often are explicitly comparative, this perspective has not made much headway at the local level. When assessing the micro-level literature on perpetrators, political scientists Evgeny Finkel and Scott Straus have noted an absence of systematic comparisons across countries and time periods. Furthermore, they argue that micro-level perpetrator research would benefit from paying more attention to variation between cases and underline that it remains to be assessed if perpetrator group compositions and forms of motivation differ between genocides and violence of a lower magnitude.1 This paper strives to make a contribution to address this shortcoming. It will do so by analysing and comparing a massacre that took place in a counter-insurgency setting with an atrocity that took place amidst a war with a genocidal element. The first case is the infamous My Lai massacre. This atrocity happened on 16 March, 1968, in the context of an American military operation during the war in Vietnam where soldiers from C Company, 1st Battalion, 11th Brigade, Americal Division, murdered between 400 and 430 South Vietnamese civilians in the hamlet Xom Lang (referred to as My Lai 4 by the American soldiers) in the Son My village complex, Quang Ngai province. The second case is the massacre in Bialystok which took place on 27 June, 1941, in the initial phase of Nazi Germany’s self-proclaimed “War of Annihilation” against the Soviet Union; a campaign which marked the onset of the regime’s effort to systematically murder every single Jew within its sphere of interest. The perpetrators were servicemen from Order Police Battalion 309 who shot several Soviet prisoners of war and hundreds of Jews upon arrival in the city. The violence reached a chilling peaking point, when the policemen forced around 700 Jews into the city’s main synagogue where they were burned alive. Naturally, there are differences in the overall macro-level context surrounding these two atrocities. Without empirical disclosure, it should be clear that the American counter- insurgency strategy in Vietnam and the Nazi Regime’s exterminatory policies were not the 1 Evgeny Finkel and Scott Straus, “Macro, Meso, and Micro Research on Genocide: Gains, Shortcomings, and Future Areas of Inquiry”, Genocide Studies and Prevention 7, no. 1 (2012), 56, 61. 5 same in terms of the magnitude of the destruction. However, what remains less explored is if and how such macro-level differences also influenced perpetrators at the ground level. In light of this, the position taken is that the selection of cases from dissimilar contexts can aid in shedding new light on perpetration. To identify the factors which motivated the participants in the massacres to kill, the concept of social mechanism is invoked and has a central place in this study. The reason for this choice is that social mechanisms are useful to apply as analytical tools in narrative comparison as they can be applied to multiple cases. Accordingly, two motivational social mechanisms will be theorized and applied in the empirical analysis: obedience to authority and victim devaluation. Although these analytical entities already have a theoretical under- pinning within social psychology, I consider integrating them in a systematic comparative study a novel procedure. Ultimately, the principal research aim is to identity the causal determinants of the two social mechanisms, explore how the social mechanisms were affected by differences in the overall macro-level context, and to examine if some of their determinants are identical irrespective of such differences. Disposition Excluding the introduction, this study is divided into three chapters. The following chapter deals with theories and method and its first section offers an overview of the empirical field of perpetrator studies as a general introduction to the topic. In conclusion of this, I argue that new insights can be gained from adopting a comparative approach which so has far been lacking within this type of research. This will be followed by the theoretical framework. Here, literature mainly from the field of social psychology will be utilized to theorize the obedience to authority and victim devaluation social mechanisms alongside some conceptual clarifications. Furthermore, the research aim will be calibrated and reformulated into more specific research questions on the basis of the theories. This will be followed by the research design where the considerations which