February 20, 2000
Hitler's Silent Partners
How much responsibility did ordinary citizens bear for the Holocaust?
First Chapter: 'Nazi Terror'
By BARRY GEWEN
The Gestapo, Jews, and
By Eric A. Johnson.
Illustrated. 636 pp. New York:
Basic Books. $35.
he great virtue of ''Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans'' is the high degree of levelheadedness and common sense, backed by painstaking research, it brings to questions that unfailingly provoke agitated debate. Who was responsible for the Holocaust? What were the motives of the perpetrators? To what degree were ordinary Germans guilty of the crimes committed in their name?
Eric A. Johnson, a professor of history at Central Michigan University, explains that, broadly speaking, the history of the Nazis and the Holocaust has gone through three phases. Until the end of the 1960's the Third Reich was generally viewed as a tightly run, top-down monolith, with Hitler controlling everything through the Nazi Party and an apparatus of terror and intimidation centered on the Gestapo. This Orwellian picture was revised in the 1970's and 80's as historians began to focus on everyday life under the Nazis. Totalitarianism, it turned out, was less total in practice than in theory. Far from being monolithic, the government was divided and inefficient, and there was considerable dissent and disunity among average Germans; the Third Reich, it was said, could never have survived the death of the charismatic Hitler.
In the 1990's attention shifted again -- probably inevitably, given the work of the preceding two decades -- to the role and responsibility of ordinary Germans in the destruction of European Jewry. Now it was argued that the inefficient and overburdened Nazi regime depended on the support, indeed the active collaboration, of the citizenry for its survival -- that it was more bottom-up than top-down. This third phase culminated in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 1996 book, ''Hitler's Willing Executioners,'' a best seller in both the United States and Germany, which contended that Germans as a whole brought on the Holocaust because they were possessed of a particularly virulent strain of Jew-hatred, what Goldhagen termed ''eliminationist anti-Semitism.''
Johnson does not entirely disagree with the most recent interpretations. He repeatedly points to Hitler's widespread popularity and to the depressingly few instances of overt resistance. But he emphasizes the need for distinctions. To identify ordinary Germans too closely with the Holocaust is, in a sense, to excuse or diminish the culpability of those most directly involved. ''It needs to be remembered,'' he writes, ''that some Germans were far more guilty than others,'' and that ''if they are not to be held accountable in historical memory, then almost nobody can be.'' By closely examining the lives and activities of the Gestapo in the three Rhineland communities of Cologne, Krefeld and Bergheim, Johnson concludes that the officers of Hitler's secret police were anything but ordinary men.
Members of the Gestapo, he says, were chosen for their reliability. They were zealous Nazis, fanatical anti-Semites, violence-prone true believers; they had volunteered for the Gestapo and enjoyed wielding power over others. Most of the older officers had been policemen in the Weimar period, and because of their longstanding (and often illegal) Nazi credentials had survived a purge after Hitler took power in which two-thirds of their colleagues were removed. These were men who did not simply follow orders. They had the responsibility for determining who would live and who would die. They tortured and murdered. The go-getters among them, and there were many, eagerly took time out from their regular duties to participate in mass exterminations in the east.
And after the war they tended to be unrepentant. Karl Löffler had been the head of the Jewish desk for the Cologne Gestapo in the early 1940's; Richard Schulenburg held the same job for Krefeld. Both had been directly involved in the deportations, and both knew exactly what they were doing. Johnson calls them ''local Eichmanns.'' At their denazification proceedings they were classified as ''minor offenders'' and deprived of their pensions. Both men appealed and won compensation for their years as police officers, as well as lighter classifications: Schulenburg was listed as a ''fellow traveler,'' and Löffler received a full exoneration. Not yet satisfied, both applied to have their years with the Gestapo included in their pensions. In the mid-50's they won this point -- and then they appealed again, this time to have their pensions reflect the promotions they had received when they were deporting Jews to the death camps. Once again they were successful. There is no satisfactory ending to this story. ''Fully rehabilitated and fully compensated,'' Johnson tells us, ''each man lived for several more years to a ripe old age.''
"The cases against former Gestapo
and SS men and Nazi Party officials would, with few exceptions, be confined
to handing out mild sentences in individual cases of wrongdoing in relatively
minor but highly specific matters, as opposed to heavy sentences for the many
people involved in more momentous, though less well defined, acts of
inhumanity. The verdict in this Cologne case and those that followed it
elsewhere may have helped the new German nation get on with the pressing
business of its present and future by covering over some gaping sores from its
past. But such verdicts did not resolve many important questions about the
nature of the Nazi terror and the murder of the Jews of Cologne and the rest
of Germany. Many of these questions continue to burn painfully today."
-- from the first chapter of
Much of Johnson's evidence about the Gestapo is statistical in nature -- he looked at around 1,100 cases from court and police files, following up with opinion surveys and personal interviews -- and more often than one would wish, his book reads like an academic monograph: ''Based on a random sample of one-eighth of all Krefeld Gestapo case files, table 4.3 charts the yearly percentage of Jewish cases from the beginning of the Third Reich in 1933 to its end in 1945.'' Fortunately, the dry numbers are leavened with individual portraits, like those of the local Eichmanns, that keep the narrative moving. Sometimes Johnson gives us just a glimpse of a person -- as with Josef Gimnicher, the 94-year-old who left for the death camps on crutches, proudly wearing his war decorations beside his Jewish star; and the Nazi Party functionary named Kreyer, who took pleasure in denouncing Jews for minor infractions, hoping they'd end up in the morgue of the Krefeld Jewish cemetery, which he called the ''festival hall.'' (There is no shortage of eliminationist anti-Semitism in these pages.)
Johnson's longer descriptions often memorialize unsung heroes he feels should not be forgotten. There is the Rev. Josef Spieker of Cologne, the first Roman Catholic priest to be sent to a concentration camp. Spieker had been an early opponent of the Nazis, and after he delivered a sermon in October 1934 declaring, ''Germany has only one Führer. That is Christ,'' the authorities decided they had had enough. Spieker was arrested, jailed, acquitted at a trial for insufficient evidence, immediately rearrested and placed in solitary confinement, then sent to a concentration camp. Retried in 1936 for abusing his religious office, he was found guilty and sentenced to 15 months in prison. Upon his release in 1937, he was forced to leave Germany. He fled to Chile, feeling all the while that he had been abandoned not just by his country but by his church as well.
Another of Johnson's unsung heroes is Josef Mahler, a Jewish Communist who endured three years of beatings and interrogations. The Gestapo was hoping to wring a confession out of him for a show trial, but they couldn't break him. Finally they just gave up. Mahler's death certificate said he died of a heart attack.
Yet even if we accept that the murderers of the Gestapo deserve to be judged more harshly than ordinary Germans, what can we say about the responsibility of those ''normal citizens'' of the Third Reich? That is the question that haunts ''Nazi Terror,'' much as it has energized scholarship over the last decade. Johnson sounds a Goldhagian note when he writes, ''It took nearly the entire German population to carry out the Holocaust.'' Yet he also observes that ''most Germans did not want the Jews to be killed. Many ordinary Germans even provided Jews with understanding and support.'' The apparent contradiction of these two statements lies at the heart of Johnson's argument.
Johnson explains that the Gestapo performed its duties not through indiscriminate terror but by methodically singling out particular groups of victims and going after them with every pretense of legality. The Jews weren't even the first targets. They were not as dangerous to the state as the Communists, the Social Democrats and other organized political enemies, who were crushed with speed and ruthlessness after the Nazis took power. Next came the religious opponents, including the Jehovah's Witnesses. Jews didn't become a priority of the Gestapo until 1939 and the war, even though the Nuremberg Laws and a host of other restrictions had already reduced them to the direst circumstances.
The other side of the Gestapo's policy was that nontargeted Germans were left pretty much alone. Johnson's statistics show that very few of these Germans -- in Krefeld the figure was about 1 percent -- were ever bothered by the Gestapo. Most of them didn't fear the Gestapo, or even know anybody who had had a run-in with the secret police -- and not because laws weren't being broken. Low-level defiance, Johnson shows, was extremely common: people told Hitler jokes, they listened to BBC broadcasts, they went to swing clubs and danced to decadent American music. But the Gestapo had more important things to worry about.
In what may be his most provocative statement, Johnson says that ''most Germans may not even have realized until very late in the war, if ever, that they were living in a vile dictatorship.'' This is not to say that they were unaware of the Holocaust; Johnson demonstrates that millions of Germans must have known at least some of the truth. But, he concludes, ''a tacit Faustian bargain was struck between the regime and the citizenry.'' The government looked the other way when petty crimes were being committed. Ordinary Germans looked the other way when Jews were being rounded up and murdered; they abetted one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century not through active collaboration but through passivity, denial and indifference.
To many readers this conclusion will seem frustratingly inadequate. With images of piles of skeletal corpses before their eyes, they will want to judge more severely, to say that people should have spoken out, that it was their duty as human beings. (One of the reasons for the enduring fascination of the Holocaust is that it provides a window on the soul: tell me your thoughts about it and I will tell you who you are.) Even Johnson, at the end, draws back from the thrust of his own arguments when he writes, ''One wonders how so many people could find the courage to dance to forbidden swing music . . . and communicate their discontent with their government and society in myriad ways, but could not summon the courage and compassion to register abhorrence and thereby break the silence about the systematic murder of millions of defenseless and innocent men, women and children.''
Still, it seems to me, something about compassion and indifference can be learned by looking closer to home. We know that almost no one in the United States protested when Japanese-Americans were rounded up during World War II. And while it is important to stress that the treatment of the Japanese-Americans was in no way comparable to the treatment of the German Jews, a small thought experiment does not seem out of order here. What if word had begun seeping back that Japanese-American children were being murdered in the internment camps? How many of the good people of California would have taken time out from their busy and war-burdened lives to register a protest, or even to learn the facts of the matter? Some, to be sure, and undoubtedly a great many more than the number of Germans who worried about the fate of the Jews. A democratic ethos does make a difference. But can anyone say with confidence that a significant portion of the public would have behaved compassionately? I for one would not bet the ranch on the kindness of strangers.
Barry Gewen is an editor at the Book Review.
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