Masters of Death The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of The Holocaust by Richard Rhodes Knopf, 335 pp., $27.50 AS RICHARD RHODES notes in “Masters of Death,” his riveting history of the Nazi death squads known as the Einsatzgruppen, gas chambers and crematoria have come to typify the Holocaust. The reality, however, is that poison gas was just one among several methods used by the Nazis to kill their Jewish victims. Early on in the extermination process, the main method of mass murder was firearms–and lethal privation. The Einsatzgruppen, numbering around three thousand men, were the primary instrument by which the Nazis murdered more than a half million Jews, from the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 through the winter of 1941-1942. In writing the history of the Einsatzgruppen, Rhodes (who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”) wants to probe the underlying causes that transformed Germans into mass murderers. In his 1999 book “Why They Kill,” Rhodes examined the work of Lonnie Athens, a criminologist who explored case histories of convicted murderers, and he derived from Athens’s research the notion of “violentization,” a theory that explains why people commit violent crimes. “Masters of Death” is Rhodes’s attempt to apply that idea to the Einsatzgruppen–challenging, along the way, the arguments of two seminal books on the motivation of the Nazi perpetrators: Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” (1992) and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” (1996). According to Athens, the violent socialization process that culminates in murder undergoes four stages, which he identifies as brutalization, belligerency, violent performance, and virulency (or chronic violent behavior). The stages follow sequentially and each stage has to be fully experienced before the subject advances to the next one. Although the stage of brutalization is inflicted on the subject, the later three stages result from decisions the subject makes. Athens rejected both nature and nurture as the cause for homicidal violence, arguing instead that people who engage in brutality against others choose to do so and are therefore responsible for their actions. Applying this to the Holocaust, Rhodes rejects the view of Browning, who argued that peer pressure was one of the main factors that drove Germans to engage in the atrocities. Citing case studies of 1,581 perpetrators involved in the Nazi genocide, Rhodes discovered that two-thirds were long-time Nazis and a third had been prewar extremists with violent backgrounds. Rhodes concludes that the reservists in Browning’s study of Police Battalion 101 were less likely to be Nazis, less steeped in violence than other police battalions, and therefore the exception rather than the rule. SIMILARLY, Rhodes discounts Goldhagen’s thesis that ascribed Nazi mass murder to “eliminationist anti-Semitism,” the belief that Jewish influence was so prevalent and destructive in Germany that most Germans felt Jews must be eliminated irrevocably from society. Rhodes rejects Goldhagen’s argument that in regard to Nazi anti-Semitism, “people must be motivated to kill others or else they would not do so.” In fact, contends Rhodes, motivation is not sufficient by itself to produce serious violence. “People must also have undergone prior violent experience. They must have learned to be violent and must have come to identify themselves as violent.” Without being conditioned to enact violence, he suggests, intense hatreds would simply take the form of discrimination, ostracism, and denunciation–the type of response characteristic of European anti-Semitism before Hitler. Rhodes concludes that the evidence does not support the theory that ideology causes violent behavior, though it may well justify it. And Rhodes is correct that the Einsatzgruppen units accompanying the German army into the Soviet Union were anything but ordinary Germans. With the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, the steps which culminated in the Holocaust began to take shape. The SS required large numbers of killers on the Eastern front to enact the “Final Solution.” Heinrich Himmler vetted the dossiers of the candidates for the Einsatzgruppen, selecting recruits from reserve police battalions and the German police forces who had been involved in the killing of civilians in Poland. Thus a high percentage of those recruited for the Einsatzgruppen had been, in Athens’s construct, violently socialized by the time they were recruited for duty in the Soviet Union. AS RHODES DESCRIBES the unbelievable brutality of the Einsatzgruppen as they callously executed Jewish men, women, and children, he also elicits for the reader the manner in which they were indoctrinated so as to relieve pangs of conscience that they might feel about the murders that they were about to commit. They were told, among other things, that all Jews were criminals, sub-humans, and the cause of Germany’s defeat in World War I. As for the murder of children, Rhodes cites Himmler’s address in 1943 justifying the killing of infants: “Then the question arose, what about women and children? . . . For I did not feel justified in exterminating the men–that is to kill them or have them killed–while allowing the avengers, in the form of their children, to grow up in the midst of our sons and grandsons.” In speech after speech to the Einsatzgruppen, Himmler conveyed the message that their concerns over the excessive murders were not only a normal reaction to wartime conditions, but proof of their humanity (the repugnance they felt about shooting unarmed civilians being a cause for congratulations, because it affirmed that they were civilized). At the same time, Himmler admitted that this type of killing was difficult for his men, and he sought to refine the killing process in order to shield the Einsatzgruppen squads from their victims, the sight of whom on occasion produced psychological breakdowns among the perpetrators. The gas chambers and crematoria in Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Auschwitz were thus the barriers that shielded the perpetrators from their victims. Rhodes’s “Masters of Death” is not for the squeamish. The author is unrelenting in describing the brutal manner in which the Einsatzgruppen moved from town to town in the Soviet Union hunting down Jews. With the aid of auxiliaries they enlisted among the Ukrainians, Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians, they engaged in one massacre after another. Rhodes makes the suggestion, at the end of “Masters of Death,” that World War I set the stage for the Holocaust: The piles of rotting corpses and the muddy, denuded landscape prefigured the killing pits and the death camps of the Third Reich. The war also produced tens of thousands of soldiers who were unable to comprehend why Germany surrendered and were vulnerable to the incendiary propaganda of the Nazis. That the war had indoctrinated them into the virulence stage of the violent socialization process also made them prime candidates for recruitment into the Nazi movement–and, subsequently, the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Jack Fischel is chairman of the history department at Millersville University in Pennsylvania and author of “The Holocaust and The Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust.”
