Before getting into these complicated questions, perhaps what is most shocking is how ordinary and “normal” these people would have been before their absorption into the Nazi Party, given the context of the time period in which they lived. Most came from conservative nationalist backgrounds, not uncommon in Kaiser led pre-World War I Germany. Most were middle or upper class. Almost all were insecure men, with ordinary concerns. Petty jealousies, dreams of returning to a better Germany, outrage over the injustice of World War I and the Weimar Government which had taken away some of their status and power. Many had multiple love interests and a penchant for infidelity and affairs. No one in Hitlers inner circle or outer circle would have necessarily been considered particularly “abnormal” by their peers. We must remember that these people were not mustache twirling masterminds, or a criminal gang-they were ordinary people motivated by ordinary things. But they still committed acts of unspeakable evil. And almost none of these people showed any remorse before killing themselves or when put on trial after the war.
What did they all have in common? A firm conviction in one or more of the principles of Nazi ideology as put forward by Hitler. And a serious devotion to their leader. Again, Hitler set the table for everything to follow.
Consider Joseph Goebbells, the man behind all of Nazi Germany’s propaganda. Deemed too weak to fight in World War I, he grew up a bit of a loser and was a physical outcast. He attached himself to the more manly elements of Nazism and attached himself to Hitler. Like many weaklings, he projected strength at all times-whether it was book burnings, fighting against modern art, transmitting Nazi propaganda across print and radio, or creating antisemetic films like “The Eternal Jew” in 1940 which interspliced footage of the Warsaw ghetto with pictures of rats. Goebbells consistently dehumanized and justified violence and barbarities against Jews and sought to drive Hitler’s vision forward. Hitler set the table, and Goebells brought the table into the average German’s living room. His loyalty and admiration of Hitler lasted until his death. Shortly before he and his wife committed suicide, they murdered their 6 children. Their lives weren’t worth living in a world without Hitler. It’s hard to think of a way to more strongly express the concept of “loyalty to the Furor until death.”
Or consider Heinrich Himmler-leader of the feared SS. The prime focus of the paramilitary group under Himmler’s command was unconditional loyalty to Hitler. Another product of a relatively physically weak childhood, Himmler fought in World War I, although he probably didn’t see much combat. He did learn to see violence as a means to achieve political ends. Once installed as SS leader, Himmler met with Hitler hundreds of times. Logs were kept of a lot of their discussions (yes, Hitler kept meeting minutes at many of his meetings where he planned war crimes), including logs about the Holocaust. But Himmler was not simply a useful instrument of Hitler, he furthered Hitler’s vision by supplying new ideas, extending Nazi persecution to new groups, and overseeing the mass murder of millions. In Hitler’s People, Richard J. Evans tells a story of Himmler traveling all the way to Finland to collect 150 Jews to be brought back to Germany and murdered. Given the grand scale of not just the Holocaust, but World War II more broadly, this would seem like an insignificant waste of time, but there he was. You don’t do this type of thing without a serious loyalty to Hitler, and a firm conviction in antisemitic, racist Nazi ideology. Himmler put into action Hitler’s belief that ethnic Germans were in a racial war with inferior, less than human Jews or Eastern Europeans. In a speech to his men in 1943, Himmler said, referring to Russian or Czech civilians getting murdered by SS men, “Whether other peoples live in affluence or whether they perish from hunger interests me only insofar as we require them as slaves for our culture, otherwise it doesn't interest me. Whether 10,000 Russian women drop dead from exhaustion while they are digging a tank ditch, or whether they don't, interests me only insofar as the tank ditch is completed for Germany.”*** Remember this the next time someone tries to portray the Holocaust as humane, or praises the “good things” that Hitler did. Like many of Hitler’s acolytes, Heinrich Himmler committed suicide before he could be prosecuted.
Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production, provides another case of someone influenced by Hitler and Nazi propaganda, and then let loose to wreak barbarities on the world. Initially he was treated leniently by the Allies as a “good Nazi” for years following the war, because he denied knowledge of the Holocaust, blamed everything on Hitler, and said he was just an apolitical bureaucrat doing his job. What historians discovered later as the process of history continued and more documentation and evidence was uncovered, was that Speer hid his role in the Holocaust, hid and destroyed evidence, and lied incessantly at the Nuremberg trials after the war. Speer was an architect and engineer, and was directly in charge of the Nazi war economy. He constructed rails that victims traversed on the way to concentration camps, he built crematoria, created logistics and infrastructure for tens of millions of slaves or forced laborers, and he personally inspected concentration camps-giving managers and workers medals for their “excellent” Nazi performance.
Gertrude Scholtz-Klink was the head of the Nazi Women’s League. Her role was to transmit Hitler’s view of women to the rest of Germany, and prepare women to be “nurturing and loving” women in the Reich. Hitler believed that the role of the woman was simply to bear children for the Reich and increase the racial purity of Germany. Women were supposed to be domestic, supporting the war effort in a child rearing capacity. Interestingly, this view of women doesn’t necessarily neatly fit into the realm of traditional marriage roles. Almost all of the Nazis depicted in Richard J. Evans book conducted multiple affairs and never shied away from infidelity. There are even examples of Heinrich Himmler ordering his SS troops to impregnate as many women as possible as they marched east, all in the name of transmitting the German bloodline to the next generation.
The Nazi Women’s League took part in organizing women’s roles as teachers in school classrooms and Nazi training sessions, cooking meals for Party events, preparing meetings for Nazi leadership, organizing getaways and vacations with the German Labor Front, and more. Women across the Reich worked in the wartime bureaucracy as concentration camp workers, secretaries and nurses, administrators, members of the T4 program to forcibly euthanize “undesirables,” denunciators of neighbors, looters of the property of those same “undesirables,” and found numerous ways to show a vast range of support for the Nazi regime. While Nazi Germany was undeniably the most hyper masculine regime of a large modern state in history, that doesn’t mean that women were helpless victims of the male supremacist regime. In fact, many like Gertrude Scholtz-Klink played just as active a role as men, promoting the very ideology that wouldn’t allow them to have political rights or rise to top levels of power. Ultimately Scholtz-Klink ended up being an important player in the regime. She didn’t kill anyone or direct policy, but she absorbed Nazi ideology and presented it to millions of women in a misleading light. She denied and covered up and lacked any remorse, praising Hitler and how great he was for Germany till the end. She served only 2.5 years in jail for her part in Nazi Germany.
How about the lower level soldiers or members of the SS who did a large amount of the actual killing? After the war, many would defend themselves by saying they were just doing their job, or just “following orders.” Some actually defended themselves by reissuing the Nazi propaganda designed to desensitize them to the killing, saying that the killings were actually “humane” given the racial inferiority of their enemies, or the massive threat of the enemy. This made following orders that much easier. But what does “just following orders” even mean? Everybody ultimately had a choice, and they chose to do the killing. There are very few documented cases of any soldiers or members of the SS being directly punished for refusing to kill Jews or take part in the Holocaust in some way.
A large part of the explanation for how these lower level killers were able to take part in atrocities is explained by Christopher Browning’s excellent book “Ordinary Men,” where he outlines how the power of the situation led ordinary men to commit atrocities due to universal human psychological explanations like conformity, obedience to authority, fear of standing apart from the group, and desensitization to the killing. In Browning’s argument, basically “the situation” played a huge role in the killings, meaning that hypothetically any “ordinary man” from any time period could become a killer under the right circumstance. Richard J. Evans doesn’t seem to necessarily disagree with this, but thinks that more emphasis needs to be placed on Hitler and Nazi ideology for paving the road to the “situation” that ordinary Germans found themselves in.
Most of the lower level killers were young men. They took part in World War I either in person, or were absorbed or at least desensitized to the Jewish stab in the back conspiracy after the war. They generally all hated the Treaty of Versailles, and learned a total war approach to politics as a result of World War I and it’s aftermath. Most were middle or lower class, mostly coming from conservative backgrounds. Many took part in the violent Nazi rise to power as Brownshirts. Or they stood by and became numb to the use of violence to achieve political ends. They all received significant Nazi ideological and antisemitic training, learning racial hygiene as the nexus of all military operations. Combining this with the violence many of them experienced on the Eastern Front allowed for violence to become an easy answer to political questions. Enemies, both military and racial, were consistently dehumanized. Full institutional power and authority was given over to acts of violence, leading to a disinhibiting influence. And all of this was orchestrated from the top down. By Hitler and the Nazi inner circle. So the situation absolutely played a role in the killings, but so did Nazi ideology and the historical context that was particular to post-war Germany.
At the Nuremberg trials after the war, Nazi leaders defended themselves with similar excuses to “just following orders.” Alfred Rosenberg, chief Nazi philosopher and editor of the party’s daily newspaper “The Racial Observer,” defended himself by saying he was a “mere theoretician-“ never dreaming his racial and dehumanizing words would be put into action. Franz Von Papen, the Chancellor of Germany who handed the state football off to Hitler in 1933, tried a different defense at the International War Crimes Tribunal. After Hitler took over the government, Von Papen stayed in the state apparatus, eventually becoming ambassador to Austria, preparing the way for it’s annexation into the German Reich. Von Papen thought that he could control Hitler, and said in his defense that he thought he should remain in Hitler’s circle in order to exercise a moderating influence on him. Historian Richard J. Evans, exercising a unique contempt in a book filled with descriptions of war criminals, says what he thinks of this “moderating influence” defense when he says “During his time as ambassador to Austria, the Nuremberg race laws were passed, Jewish businesses were Aryanized, and antisemitic persecution intensified. As he was entering Vienna with Hitler immediately after the Anschluss, overwhelmed by the historic grandeur of the moment, Jews were being rounded up across the city, robbed, beaten, and forced to clean pro-independence graffiti off the walls and pavements with toothbrushes dipped in acid. Many thousands were taken off to Dachau, to be subjected to the sadism and brutality of the SS camp guards. Occupying a well-informed ambassadorial office in Ankara, he did his best to support the German war effort as millions of Jews were being shot into pits, herded into starving ghettos, and taken off to the gas chambers of Treblinka, Auschwitz and other extermination camps. None of this is even mentioned in his memoirs. But there is no way that he cannot have been aware of it.”^ So much for moderation.
Another defense at Nuremberg was an attempt to argue that the whole basis of the Nuremberg trials was simply political revenge. Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician and the man in charge of “Aktion T4” exemplified this bizarre defense. Aktion T4 was a Nazi Eugenics program, influenced by Racial Hygiene, which rounded up “undesirable” people (including disabled people) and killed them with injections of poison or by locking them into gas chambers. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were killed in this way from 1939-1945 (the program started before the war began). Nazi propaganda portrayed victims as financial burdens on the state, and an effort to cleanse the Reich of racial impurities. Karl Brandt literally personally injected children with poison, with the express goal of murdering them. He then showed absolutely no compassion or acknowledgement of basic humanity at his trial. In the ultimate “bothsidesism,” he blamed the entirety of the T4 program on the Allied Powers and demonstrated a shocking lack of humanity. An allied Psychologist was talking about another Nazi war criminal when he said this, but it applies to Brandt too. A man with “a complete lack of consideration for human values and human rights.”^^ Brandt’s jurors seemed to agree, and his life ended mid-sentence on the gallows as his executioner pulled the floor out from under him, tired of Brandt’s blathering.
