Expanding Christopher Browning’s

concept of ‘ordinary men,’ two traditional

versions can be identified, variously

positing perpetrators as ‘ordinary

humans’ (subject to social dynamics) or

‘ordinary Germans’ (subject to cultural-

ideological indoctrination). Neither

explanatory model is sufficient. Timothy

Schroer’s “Ethos of Self-Control” provides

a synthesis that salvages the ‘ordinary

men’ thesis by integrating both ideology

and social context.

Were the Perpetrators of Nazi Atrocities Really ‘Ordinary Men’?

Konstantin Sietzy

Sietzy 1

“Everyone watched me. They all wanted to see what kind of impression this made on me, and how I reacted. Following

these scenes I was observed carefully. Everything I said was thoroughly discussed. I had to make a tremendous effort to

pull myself together in order not to show, not even once, in all the excitement after an incident, or to allow my inner doubts

and depressions to come out in the open. I had to appear cold and heartless during these events which tear the heart apart

in anyone who had any kind of human feelings. I couldn’t even turn away when deep human emotion rose within me.

Coldly I had to stand and watch as the mothers went into the gas chambers with their laughing or crying children.”

Rudolf Höß, Auschwitz Lagerkommandant 1940-43

Following Christopher Browning’s landmark 1992 monograph, portraying the perpetrators of national

socialist atrocities as ‘ordinary men’ (implicitly or explicitly) has become commonplace in Holocaust

studies. With increased temporal distance from the events themselves, debates on the perpetrators

of the Holocaust have de-politicised; and scholars such as Franklin Littell helped to further shift their

normative purpose from condemning to understanding and thence learning.1 The present state-of-

the-art is summed up in the words of Yehuda Bauer: “In principle, then, the Holocaust is a human

event, perpetrated for reasons that are, unfortunately, human and which can be explained, despite

great difficulty in doing so, for emotional, or practical, or whatever reasons.”2

Remaining within the ‘ordinary men’ paradigm, one can stretch Browning’s original

terminology to cover two broad trends in the literature. A number of scholars attempt to portray the

perpetrators of atrocities as ordinary men in the sense of ordinary humans – more or less denying

behaviour under National Socialism any idiosyncrasy, they explain atrocious action by pointing out

actors’ social contexts and the logics of group dynamics.

A second broad trend paints these actors as ordinary Germans – whether vindictive, such as

Daniel Goldhagen’s study of fanatical killers, or explanatory, as in Edward Westermann’s narrative of

Police Battalion 310, these studies seek explanations within the cultural and social framework of the

Third Reich.

Nevertheless, both views are subject to empirical limitations. Browning’s initial study hints at

the view that group logics did not unidirectionally push towards atrocities. This is confirmed in later

studies, most prominently perhaps Waitman Beorn’s investigation into the 4th

Fernfeldkabelkompanie’s conduct at Peregruznoe. Conversely, the idea of the Third Reich as a

collective cultural decent into pre-civilisation is decisively rejected by the participating actors

themselves; and historical portraits of some of the more prominent individuals confirms that these

actors formed no homogenous mass of ‘sudden barbarians’.

1 Bauer. 2 Ibid., 211.

Sietzy 2

A possible synthesis of group dynamics and ideology explanations is contained in Timothy

Schroer’s self-discipline hypothesis: he claims that a central factor in participating in atrocities (and in

preventing intervention when witnessing atrocities) was the belief that revulsion at human suffering

reflected a weak character and an inability to discipline one’s emotional side. Schroer posits that

German cultural particularities elevated self-control to the ultimate social virtue in a much more

explicit way than the implicit role it plays in Norbert Elias’s Civilising Process, which forms the

foundation for his theory. At the same time, group dynamics reinforced this trait, adding social

pressures to uphold the veneer of emotional imperviousness at three levels: the ordinary soldier was

watched by his comrades; commanders in leadership roles were watched by their subordinates and

forced to uphold a role model function; and at the institutional level, the Third Reich machinery itself

upheld this fundamental ‘German’ value-set by indoctrination and a set of signal incentives. In this

sense, then, the Third Reich’s atrocities were committed by ‘ordinary men’; the extraordinary scale of

their actions, though, was permitted and catalysed by a combination of an extraordinary path-

dependent cultural trend, and the extraordinary social context imposed by the war.

Seeing atrocities through the prism of immediate social context allows soldiers to be

perceived as ‘ordinary men’ by analysing their subjection to dynamics innate to any group, such as

hierarchies and behavioural norms. Scholars rationalising Third Reich atrocities by setting them in

social context explanations frequently point out pereceivedly similar actions by other military forces

during the Second World War (and previous and subsequent wars). Browning cites John Dower’s

account of US soldiers’ conduct in the Pacific theatre, and Japan’s “rampage through Manila,” to

dismiss any assumptions that “atrocities were a monopoly of the Nazi regime.”3 The backdrop to the

special impact of group contexts in wartime is due to the fact that, in Schroer’s terms, “a military unit

in hostile territory paradoxically represents perhaps the ultimate development of the interdependent

social group.”4 Browning seconds this perspective, depicting “isolation, rejection, and ostracism [as] a

very uncomfortable prospect within the framework of a tight-knit unit stationed abroad among a

hostile population, so that the individual had virtually nowhere else to turn for support and social

contact."5 Thomas Kühne has further pointed out “the constitutive side of mass murder,” explaining

that the collective experience of atrocities per se welded groups together.6 His claim that “millions of

3 Browning, 160. 4 Schroer, 40. 5 Browning, 184. 6 Kühne, 1.

Sietzy 3

soldiers understood themselves as members of a pariah nation”7 is reflected in conversations among

prisoners of war.8

The abstract notion of group pressures had a very real impact on soldiers’ lives in multiple

ways. Hierarchies legitimised killings where these were ostensibly senseless or not immediately

connected to the objectives of racial war. Beorn is avid to point out that the majority of the killings

undertaken by members of the 4th Fernfeldkabelkompanie fell under this category. He cites the first

documented instance of an ‘atrocity,’ the shooting of a civilian at Roslavl, occurring under the direct

threat of violence by the shooter’s superior in case of refusal.9 In a more daunting example, Beorn

goes on to describe the conduct of 4th Company while stationed proximate to the Russian village of

Klemiatino. Particularly striking is an incident during which soldiers observed “’blinking light signals,’”

and, believing these to be in some indeterminate way conducted to aid partisan groups, rounded up

the entire town population, searched houses until they found a flashlight, and subsequently shot its

owner. That a flashlight could under no circumstances have produced sufficient luminosity to emit

such lights signals at the distance in question, or the subsequently discovered fact that “the so-called

‘blinking signals’ were in fact the headlights of passing trucks on the main supply route as they went

behind a small hill and then reappeared,” were not considered sufficiently worthy of contemplation

before taking the decision to end the life of an unarmed civilian.10

Similarly, specific social norms discouraged opting out of killings even where this was

permissible in a narrowly disciplinarian sense (see below). Browning convincingly explains that “by

breaking ranks, nonshooters were leaving the 'dirty work' to their comrades. Since the battalion had

to shoot even if individuals did not, refusing to shoot constituted refusing one's share of an unpleasant

collective obligation,” making it “in effect an asocial act vis-a-vis one's comrades.”11 At the same time,

“stepping out could also have been seen as a form of moral reproach of one's comrades: the

nonshooter was potentially indicating that he was 'too good' to do such things.”12

Nevertheless, group dynamics were not unidirectional in incentivising towards mass murder.

It has now become commonplace to assert that soldiers could and more importantly did opt out of

extermination operations. First mentioned by Browning, this theme is referred to by Beorn, Schroer,

and Westermann. “Testimonies on the 4th Company do include several examples of direct refusal to

7 Ibid., 7. 8 Cf. e.g. Neitzel and Welzer 122, 126, 135, 9 Beorn, 191. 10 Ibid., 193. 11 Browning, 184-185. 12 Ibid., 185.

Sietzy 4

participate.”13 This is significant in light of the presence, with Captain Fritz Fischer, of an unusually

harsh and ill-tempered fanatical superior; nevertheless, one sergeant refusing to participate in the

Peregruznoe massacre “stated that Fischer responded by calling him a coward and dismissing him.

[Yet] further, he testified that Fischer did not exert any pressure on him to comply after he refused.”14

It was not only the absence of social dynamics (in this case, of strict hierarchies) that could

encourage non-participation. Beorn shows that the existence of social subgroups could serve to

provide protective spaces defending their members against the overall pro-atrocity logic of group

dynamics. Clique formation could act as an insurance against social pressure on non-participants.

Soldiers formed such subgroups along particular “fault lines” that were not necessarily correlated to

their wartime experience – one example being the mutual support the unit’s Catholics provided

against the aggressive atheism among some of the committed NSDAP adherents.15 In effect, then, "the

idea of a unified 'group pressure' can be misleading. In fact, there was no single social group but rather

a shifting conglomeration of peer groups, interest groups, and cliques."16

A second confounding factor resulted from the nature of ‘group dynamics,’ which may be in

themselves dynamic, not static. While e.g. Westermann demonstrates that the composition of Police

Battalion 310 remained relatively consistent throughout its existence as an independent unit,17 Omer

Bartov has famously claimed that the rapid personnel exchange on the Eastern Front led to a

disintegration of socially cohesive “primary groups.”18

In essence, then, while the social pressure explanation has merit as a primary factor of

influence in the closely knit group context of soldiers’ wartime experience, the implications of this

influence are ambiguous, depending on the specific composition of the social context in question. It

serves well as a framework through which to analyse the atrocity-related behaviour of individual

military units, but it does not provide an overall explanatory model for why atrocities were committed

in the first place. Again, the 4th Feldfernkabelkompanie provides a model example, when Beorn

concludes that members of “4th Company seemed content to advocate for their beliefs selectively and

remain quiet on other issues.”19

Browning’s social context explanation was a thinly-veiled gibe at the overarching cultural

thesis proffered by Goldhagen in Hitler’s Willing Executioners. The fact that, even after Browning’s

13 Beorn, 201. 14 Beorn, 202; emphasis in original. 15 Ibid., 204. 16 Ibid., 203. 17 Westermann, 47-48. 18 Bartov. 19 Beorn, 205.

Sietzy 5

admittedly scholarly superior refutation, culturally-based theses did not meet a sudden end, does

justice to the insufficiency of the group dynamics theory. Thus, the second trend in the ‘ordinary men’

literature persists: soldiers are seen as ordinary Germans, their behaviour supposedly conceivable

when analysing it through the lens of the socio-cultural particularities of the Third Reich.

With Goldhagen’s study since refuted, the continuation of these theories nourishes itself from

the flipside of the social pressures argument: if soldiers could opt out of atrocities without facing

consequences, then why did so many opt in? Individual cruelty,20 fanatical commanders,21 or soldiers

voluntarily exposing themselves to extraordinary danger and discomfort as members of “hunting

platoons”22 highlight the persistent significance of this question.

While seeing anti-Semitism as the overarching paradigm defining the actions of an entire

society, as Goldhagen has done, is surely bound to fail as all unqualified reductionism must,

completely denying ideology any impact is equally ahistorical given its centrality to Third Reich society.

Westermann explicitly sets his study of Police Battalion 310 in contrast to Browning’s Police Battalion

101, showing that their fundamentally different ideological composition (prior to seeing any action)

resulted in a significantly different attitude to atrocities. Browning makes a point of the fact that “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 mould future mass killers,” such that they “did not

represent special selection or even random selection but for all practical purposes negative selection

for the task at hand.”23 Westermann, on the other hand, shows that “the story of Police Battalion 310

is far different from that of Browning's Reserve Police Battalion 101 … In June 1942, less than 20

percent of the men remained from the unit's tour in the Warthegau. Police Battalion 101 had in fact

become a 'pure reserve battalion.' … The [police] battalion [310] clearly remained a unit led by regular

police officers,” among which Westermann identifies a higher concentration of ideologically

indoctrinated members, following the restructuring of the Third Reich’s police forces between 1932-

1937 which affected the regular police forces far more strongly than the reserves.24

Westermann’s argument, in accordance, is relative: he does not question Browning’s

explanation for why PB 101’s members committed atrocities at all, but adds ideology to the

motivational mix to account for atrocious behaviour being more frequent (and more natural) amongst

his own subjects of study. His argument is further supported by the composition of the voluntary

20 Cf. e.g. Schroer, 41. 21 Cf. e.g. Beorn, 197. 22 Cf. e.g. Westermann, 49. 23 Browning, 164; emphasis added. 24 Westermann, 43-48.

Sietzy 6

hunting platoons: relative to the overall make-up of PB 310, they were disproportionally staffed by

NSDAP members, especially Alte Kämpfer who had joined the party before 1933.25

Explanations relating the frequency and intensity of atrocious behaviour to the wider cultural

as opposed to immediate social context have led multiple commentators to identify a ‘barbaric’ nature

of German society in the Third Reich: "Mary Fulbrook asserts that under ‘any definition of ‘civilization’,

what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945 must be seen as an utter abomination’ … The

sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky, in his study of the concentration camp world, likewise writes that ‘the

concentration camp demolished the central concepts of civilization, the ideals of reason, progress,

freedom, and understanding.’”26 Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer imply that the period of 1933-45

presented a “breakdown of civilisation.”27

Nevertheless, cultural-ideological explanations face challenges in themselves. The perception

of a ‘barbaric’ or ‘uncivilised’ German culture stands is crassly out of sync with German self-

conceptions at all levels, significantly amongst perpetrators themselves, and with empirical

observations about the cultural range they spanned. This has been pointed out in the work of Michael

Wildt:

"Examining sources in which leading National Socialists engaged directly with the charge that Nazism amounted

to barbarism, Wildt shows that the Reich’s apologists rejected the accusation, although they were continually

troubled by it. Nazism, they insisted, sought to build a new civilization, and in doing so needed to act ruthlessly

against the real barbarians, the subhuman enemies of the Reich."28

Examples of this are also to be found distributed across all ranks in the conversations of POWs

transcribed by Neitzel and Welzer. In one symptomatic instance, a German soldier complains: “They

call us ‘German swine.’ Look at our great men, such as Wagner, Liszt, Goethe, Schiller, and they call us

‘German swine.’ I really can’t make it out.”29 An additional frequent theme is the contrast drawn

between German ‘civilised’ behaviour and the “barbaric” tactics of their Soviet opponents, reflected

in disdain for the presumably “’dishonest fighting style’” of the Red Army.30 In the ornate words of

Schroer, “Asiatic Bolsheviks assumed pride of place as the barbaric bugbear of the Nazi imagination.”31

Thus “the Bolsheviks figured in a particularly striking way as a foil to Germanness in Himmler’s

‘Reflections on the Treatment of Peoples of Alien Races in the East’ of May 1940.”32 Similarly, Timothy

25 Ibid., 49. 26 Schroer, 34. 27 Neitzel and Welzer, 13. 28 Schroer, 34. 29 Qtd. in Neitzel and Welzer, 120. 30 Cf. ibid., 91-93, 99, 268. 31 Schroer, 43. 32 Ibid.

Sietzy 7

Snyder supports the argument that ideology is a necessary, but “clearly not a sufficient explanation

for the Holocaust”33:

“If anti-Semitism could cause a Holocaust, then there ought to have been one in Germany before 1939. But

although a few hundred Jews were killed and roughly half the Jewish population emigrated between 1933 and

1939, nothing resembling an anti-Jewish mass killing operation took place in prewar Germany. Indeed, for every

Jew killed in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, about a hundred were killed in the Soviet Union… Just as there was no

Holocaust in Germany between 1933 and 1939, there was no Holocaust in eastern Europe during the half

millennium when the region was the world homeland of the Jews. This was not for lack of anti-Jewish

sentiment. Anti-Semitism was practically ubiquitous in eastern Europe; for precisely this reason it cannot

logically be seen as the crucial cause of an explosion of muderousness that began in summer of 1941.”34

This schism in perception is borne out in empirical accounts of the range of the perpetrators, as

well as the range of opinion within the group of perpetrators (not simply within the general

population!). Jungius and Seibel recount the case of Dr. Kurt Blanke, playing a “key role” in Jewish

persecution in France.”35 Blanke, highly educated and a lawyer by profession, would have doubtlessly

self-identified as a Kulturmensch along these lines. Indeed he protested the 1938 Kristallnacht by

symbolically resigning his membership in the SA, which he had held since 1933.36 Jungius and Seibel

portray Blanke as archetypal for the significant role that even those members of the bureaucratic

apparatus lacking an ideological commitment to National Socialism played in the systematic

persecution of the Jews. They further emphasise a “cultivated distance” between such ‘bourgeois

functional elites’ and the, in their perception, “plebeian representatives” of SD, SA and SS.37 Such

perceptions of a brutish quality in National Socialism was by no means restricted to the upper echelons

of the civilian population; a W/T operator POW in Neitzel and Welzer’s account recounts a

conversation with “a Feldwebel who said: “This mass-shooting of Jews absolutely sickens me. This

murdering is no profession! Hooligans can do that.”38

In a separate paper, Seibel describes how elements of the German institutional apparatus became

complicit merely by continuing their pre-war everyday occupation:

“Residents' registration offices, housing offices, district courts, regional and local tax authorities, the

employment offices, the savings banks, and other financial institutions or the national railroad, and also local

authorities in the occupied areas, Wehrmacht troops and their headquarters in the rear military areas, Four Year

33 Snyder, 82; emphasis added. 34 Snyder, 81-83. 35 Jungius and Seibel, 293. 36 Ibid., 266. 37 Ibid., 267. 38 Qtd. in Neitzel and Welzer, 120.

Sietzy 8

Plan authorities or special representatives of various sorts placed their competencies and resources at the

service of the persecution and destruction policy of the Nazi regime.”39

Raul Hilberg corroborates this:

“The bureaucratic apparatus was led by lawyers, engineers, accountants, and other professionals. These

functionaries were modern men with clear eyesight and a necessary understanding of complexity. The railways,

which transported the Jews to their deaths, or the finance offices, which confiscated their property, or the

nearly two hundred private firms that were involved in the construction of Auschwitz, were not staffed by pure

anti-Semites, and neither were the urban police forces.”40

Importantly, neither author makes a claim that these institutions were not composed of anti-Semites;

rather, whether they were is largely irrelevant to their continued operation in service of the National

Socialist machinery.

Ultimately, therefore, National Socialist ideology is as ambiguous in its effect as the group

pressure explanation. Not all perpetrators of atrocities were unwavering in their ideological

commitment to National Socialism. Similarly, not all individuals subjected to (and accepting) anti-

Semitic and racial-superiority ideology were unambiguous in their opinions on the perpetrations of

atrocities. The ‘ordinary German,’ then, is still not a sufficiently defined domain coinciding with the

set of perpetrators of atrocities.

Schroer’s account of “the ethos of self-control” presents a synthesis between ideological and

group-centred explanations that may help to fill this gap. He posits that “the ideas of Norbert Elias in

The Civilizing Process can be usefully applied to the Third Reich to problematize the barbaric quality

of the regime and to illuminate the self-conception of an important segment of the perpetrators who

worked to build a racist utopia."41

Specifically, Schroer focuses on Elias’s core argument, “self-control” as “the quintessentially

civilized virtue.”42 Elias “claimed that the emergence of the modern state, with its monopoly on

legitimate violence, from its origins in the absolutist courts accounted in large measure for that

progressive socialization of the exterior and interior worlds of western Europeans.”43 At the same

time, Schroer conflates Elias’s theory with Zygmunt Bauman’s complementary account of social

39 Seibel, 220-221. 40 Hilberg, 723; emphasis added. 41 Schroer, 34. 42 Ibid., 35. 43 Ibid.

Sietzy 9

institutions as suppressing people’s natural predisposition to compassion,44 such that “in modernity,

people are systematically deprived of the chance to exercise their [natural] capacity to act morally.”45

Against this background, Schroer provides an explanation for how a population accommodating

a relatively small percentage of intrinsically violent personalities46 could become complicit on such a

complete scale:

“The weight of the evidence shows that the Nazi leadership and an important segment of the perpetrators of the

Holocaust saw themselves as controlling a human impulse to feel sympathy for suffering victims and repulsion

against killing fellow human beings. The Third Reich continually called upon the perpetrators to be ‘hard’ and to

resist their impulse to sympathize with their victims in the interest of building a new civilization.”47 48

Ostensibly, this renders the argument of the ‘ordinary men’ perpetrators tautological: if self-

control lies at the fundament of all civilisation, whence comes the specific relationship with atrocities

committed under National Socialism? Schroer here draws a fine but highly significant distinction

between the respective roles assigned to self-control: while implicit in the development of the

‘general’ civilised human being (according to Elias’s account), it becomes an explicit virtue in pre-war

German culture. What is important is the German self-conception of self-discipline as a constitutive

quality of ‘Germanness.’ Significantly, it is habitually referred to by German soldiers to demarcate the

difference between them and their ‘barbarian’ opponents (see for example the account of Red Army

battle tactics cited above).

Self-control was thus a cultural-ideological trait; yet it was catalysed by social context factors.

This can be displayed at three levels. At the level of the individual, in his function as a soldier, the

veneer of self-control needed to be maintained before one’s comrades. At the level of higher-ranking

officers, the necessity to maintain a role model function provided added expectations, further

contributing to the need to seem unflinching and resolute in the face of atrocities. Finally, at an

institutional level, army and SS leadership promoted the image of the ‘iron-willed’ German soldier,

rewarding (and sanctioning) behaviour accordingly. Therefore, individuals not upholding their self-

discipline faced social sanctions by their peer group; elevated expectations of role models selected

44 Hannah Arendt’s “animal pity”; cf. ibid. 45 Smith, endnote 4, chapter 8. 46 "The proportion of people who were psychologically inclined toward violence, discrimination, and excess totalled, as it does in all other social contexts as well, 5 to 10 percent." Neitzel and Welzer, 24. 47 Schroer, 35; emphasis added. 48 Perhaps one could criticise Schroer’s account on the basis of not addressing the argumentative tension between Elias’s Civilising Process relying on a Hobbesian view of pre-civilised humanity, and Bauman’s contradictory ‘animal pity’ view. As Schroer merely integrates the conclusions both draw from their different points of departure to illustrate his argument, though, this does not present a problem to his thesis per se. While it is perhaps bad philosophy, this by no means makes it bad history.

Sietzy 10

against individuals with weak self-control and therefore potential for scruples to rise through the

ranks; and signalling from above ensured that soldiers were constantly reminded of these two factors.

At the level of the individual soldier, Schroer singles out the case of Karl Kretschmer,

Obersturmführer with Einsatzgruppe 4a, present at the Babi Yar massacre of September 1941. His

thoughts documented in private letters to his wife, Kretschmer opined that “it is a weakness not to be

able to stand the sight of dead people; the best way of overcoming it is to do it more often.”49 In an

interesting empirical challenge to Kühne’s argument that “immediately becoming ‘the best of friends’

with men one had never known before proved to be a daily experience in the German army,”50

Kretschmer instead “expressed irritation to his wife at the lack of solitude,” leading Schroer to

conclude that “the strain … appears to have been magnified by the ethos of camaraderie in the SS and

the daily horrors perpetrated by its members."51 The self-discipline hypothesis also gives a new angle

to the phenomenon, reported by Browning, that “most, though not all, nonshooters intuitively tried

to diffuse the criticism of their comrades that was inherent in their actions” by pleading “not that they

were ‘too good’ but rather that they were ‘too weak’ to kill.”52 Perhaps this was not so much a phoney

excuse, as he presumes, but rather expressed a genuine sentiment of having failed by not upholding

one’s self-discipline.

Amongst individuals in a position of leadership responsibility, the infamous account of Rudolf

Höß, Lagerkommandant of Auschwitz 1940-43, is indicative (see the introductory quote). “Höß clearly

regarded himself as superior to the sort of person who enjoyed tormenting people,” expressing

“feelings of disgust for [a] man who had administered … beatings as a ‘coarse and depraved man.’”53

His biographical account has elicited bewilderment amongst its readers – how could a man responsible

for atrocities on the scale of Auschwitz (not without reason still the singular symbolic metaphor for

the overall Holocaust) express humanist sentiments such as compassion and disgust at suffering?

Schroer points out that “throughout his account, Höß emphasized the strain produced by his exercise

of self-control under the watch of others."54 The institutions of the Third Reich thus self-selected for

individuals with a superior ability to suppress their ‘animal pity’ in leadership positions. Once elevated

to a role of responsibility, the constant scrutiny of subordinates acted as a controlling mechanism to

perpetuate this behaviour.

49 Ibid., 38; emphasis in original. 50 Kühne, qtd. in Beorn, 203. 51 Schroer, 38; emphasis added. 52 Browning, 184; emphasis added. 53 Schroer, 37. 54 Ibid., 36.

Sietzy 11

Finally, at the institutional level, concern with soldiers faltering in their discipline existed for

both ideological and practical reasons. In specific instances, this could even go so far as to incentivise

against atrocities:

“SS-Untersturmführer (Second Lieutenant) Max Täubner was convicted by an SS court in May 1943 under

section 147 of the Military Penal Code of ‘abuse of his leadership duties,’ expelled from the SS, and confined to

prison for allowing himself to be ‘drawn into committing cruel actions … which are unworthy of a German man

and an SS officer’ in actions against the Jews.”55

Importantly, the court justified its conviction not via the criminal nature of killing Jews per se (which

on the contrary it explicitly applauded), but by criticising that “the accused jeopardized the discipline

of the men,”56 making this a clear instance of the institutional tier exacerbating the pressures present

at the individual and leadership tiers. Browning agrees, postulating that where violent outbursts

happened, “they did not represent official government policy … such atrocities still represented a

breakdown in discipline and the chain of command. They were not ‘standard operating procedure’.”57

Chillingly, viewing this in light of Schroer’s hypothesis, Browning’s only mistake is rhetorical: he is

wrong to conflate a breakdown in the chain of command with a breakdown in discipline. Atrocities

committed as a result of individuals losing their nerves were sanctioned. Atrocities committed within

the reference-frame of virtuously controlling one’s ‘animal’ instincts of compassion and pity were

lauded.

In conclusion, while both necessary to understand the motivations of the individual

perpetrators in specific circumstances, neither group dynamics explanations nor those relying solely

on socio-cultural context can fully explain the atrocities committed by various levels of the National

Socialist killing machine. Schroer’s account of the cultural elevation of self-discipline, combined with

an analysis of the social context factors that may have facilitated its impact on the killings, provides a

potentially fruitful synthesis. The Nazi war of atrocities, then, was perhaps committed by ‘ordinary

men’ in the most horrifying of senses: criminal violence required neither a special emotional pre-

disposition, nor the active pressure of group leaders and unit commanders. Instead, it was the

perfectly logical conclusion of a set of ‘ordinary’ behavioural incentives: not offending one’s comrades,

promotion, and being a ‘good citizen’ according to the internal norms of one’s society.

55 Schroer, 41. 56 Ibid. 57 Browning, 160.

Sietzy 12

Bibliography Bartov, Omer. “The Destruction of the Primary Group.” Bartov, Omer. Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis,

and War in the Third Reich. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. 29-58.

Bauer, Yehuda. “On the Place of the Holocaust in History.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies (1987):

209-220.

Beorn, Waitman. “Negotiating Murder: A Panzer Signal Company and the Destruction of the Jews of

Peregrueznoe, 1942.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies (2009): 185-213.

Browning, Christopher. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.

New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1992.

Hilberg, Raul. “The Goldhagen Phenomenon.” Critical Enquiry (1997): 721-728.

Jungius, Martin and Wolfgang Seibel. “Der Bürger als Schreibtischtäter. Der Fall Kurt Blanke.”

Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (2008): 265-300.

Kühne, Thomas. Belonging and Genocide: Hitler's Community, 1918-1945. New Haven: Yale UP,

2010.

Neitzel, Sönke and Harald Welzer. Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying. The Secret Second World

War Tapes of German POWs. London: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Schroer, Timothy L. “Civilization, Barbarism, and the Ethos of Self-Control among the Perpetrators.”

German Studies Review (2012): 33-54.

Seibel, Wolfgang. “A Market for Mass Crime? Inter-Institutional Competition and the Initiation of the

Holocaust in France, 1940-1942.” Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior (2002): 219-

257.

Smith, Dennis. Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2013.

Snyder, Timothy. “Commemorative Causality.” Modernism/modernity (2013): 77-93.

Westermann, Edward B. “'Ordinary Men' or 'Ideological Soldiers'? Police Battalion 310 in Russia,

1942.” German Studies Review (1998): 41-68.