Christian Jungersen - The Exception

There is the talented, self-assured officer who enjoys driving his car standing up, like a general. He brings his young bride on a honeymoon trip to Poland and invites her along to a ghetto operation, but his men strongly object to a woman being allowed to watch what they do.

There is the group of entertainers from Berlin, whose members beg to be allowed to join a Jewish action and do some of the killing. The battalion officers permit this.

There is the stench, carried in the wind blowing in over the town of Lublin as thousands of Jewish bodies are burnt on the outskirts.

There is the care taken by some of the soldiers when they receive orders to kill their own ‘kitchen-Jews’. They avoid raising any suspicion and go to quite a lot of trouble to shoot their servants suddenly from behind and at close range, so they won’t suffer or experience the dread that other Jews were exposed to.

Responsibility towards colleagues

Before the publication of Browning’s book, obedience to authority was regarded as the primary mechanism that allowed ordinary Germans to turn into mass murderers, a conclusion based partly on the experimental results of Stanley Milgram and others.

Browning’s account changes this view. His research indicates that by far the stronger influence is a sense of responsibility to comrades, which made the men carry on regardless. More than anything, the members of the ‘Jewish action’ battalion wanted to avoid being regarded as weaklings. Also, the killings were widely detested, which meant that backing out marked you out as selfish, someone who lacked team spirit — after all, you were handing your share of the killings over to your colleagues.

‘Eager killers’

As time went on, some of the men became so intensely engaged in the killing sessions that they ‘overreacted’ to new orders. They would beat up their victims for no reason at all, or amuse themselves after a drunken evening by driving into a town to shoot at live, moving targets. In the phrase used within this area of research, they developed into ‘eager killers’, Browning’s term for ‘excessive perpetrators’.

One example is the 48-year-old officer who, in the early stages, would always see to it that his men got out of harm’s way when another Jew-killing excursion was due. Later his behaviour changed dramatically. During the ‘Jewish actions’ he often drank as heavily as the Eastern POWs did before they were sent down into the mass graves. He became even more brutal than the battalion’s two young SS captains and forced his men to carry out acts of degrading cruelty, such as commanding old Jews from a town ghetto to undress and crawl naked across the forest floor, or telling his men to beat their elderly victims with sticks cut from the trees.

Internationally there is still insufficient data to state with any certainty what proportion of perpetrators is prone to excess. But Browning’s calculations do coincide with the results of a social-psychology experiment known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. Also, confirmation of the cited figures will be part of the argument in a forthcoming book by the Danish researcher and DCGI user Torben jørgensen:

10–20 % of perpetrators try to obtain transfer to other duties;

50–80 % do as they are told;

10–30 % develop into eager killers and run riot, intoxicated

by torture, rape and murder.

The future

The research into the nature and behaviour of the perpetrators of genocide is still hampered by too little hard information. There is little statistical justification for extrapolating conclusions based on data from twenty-two senior party members and one battalion of reservists to the analysis of mechanisms driving millions of human beings.

The Holocaust is, undoubtedly, the genocide that has been most thoroughly investigated. Even so, the gaps in our understanding are huge and the unexplored archival material is vast. Many of the 7,500 guards at Auschwitz were interrogated, but the records have not yet been examined.

Recent research has continued along the lines suggested by Christopher Browning. One approach is that of regional studies, i.e. a precise analysis of a selected region. This opens up opportunities to investigate interactions between the Nazi Party and local police, military, local administration and business.

To date, very little work has been carried out on the collaboration between the Nazis and the populations of often strongly anti-Semitic East European countries under German occupation. Now that the archives of the former Soviet Union are available to researchers, many new investigations are under way.

It may seem odd to prioritise work on the behaviour of individual Germans in the context of exterminations carried out sixty years ago, when other genocides, for instance in the Soviet Union and in China, have cost more lives yet remain virtually unexamined. However, there is no other genocide in known history that is as thoroughly recorded, with archival material that is both extensive and accessible. The expectation is that continued research will provide insight well beyond Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, and can be applied to other, less documented genocides.

Above all, such heightened understanding could and should be used to prevent similar catastrophes in the future, events that mankind has been enduring for too long and would prefer to forget.

This article is based on several sources. The most important are:

Becoming Evil. How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing by James Waller (Oxford University Press, 2002)

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning (HarperCollins, 1992)

A second and final article on the subject ‘The Psychology of Evil’ will appear in the next issue of Genocide News. It will present a selection of investigations by social psychologists into the minds of genocide perpetrators .

‘I didn’t want to burden you with this before. It’s my job to do the worrying, after all.’

Paul looks serious. He stands in front of the low bookshelf with back issues of Genocide News , his arms crossed over his chest, his feet solidly planted well apart — the posture of a commanding officer demonstrating the serious nature of his speech to the troops. He has asked Anne-Lise to join the others in the Winter Garden.

‘I need to bring you up to speed. The lawyers in the Ministry of Finance have started work on a new bill that’s going to make our Centre part of the Danish Institute for Human Rights.’

He pauses deliberately.

Anne-Lise has no idea how the others will react, but secretly she feels that the news of a merger with DIHR is like divine intervention on her behalf. The move could be her prize for holding out in this inferno. She could keep the vital aspects of her job and be in daily contact with a whole new set of colleagues who might turn out to be as congenial as her former ones at Lyngby Central Library.

But she knows she mustn’t show any signs of relief.

Paul’s forehead is wrinkled with concern. ‘It explains why I’ve been to so many meetings recently.’ He sighs and his face momentarily takes on a guilty expression. ‘You’ve surely wondered what’s been keeping me away so often. But then, you must know that I won’t let them ruin our Centre. I’ll fight them with everything I’ve got.’

Malene is there, her first day back since being ill. She’s applied an excessive amount of make-up, at least too much for daytime. ‘Paul! It’s such dreadful news!’ she whines.

Iben and Camilla follow her lead.

‘What can we do to keep the Centre as it is?’