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By Root 1324 0

amid further mass deportations from the districts of Lublin and Galicia, the SS extended the policy of dispatching victims immediately on their arrival in camp reception areas. The concept of resettling Jews in the east had been abandoned, although a figleaf of pretence was sustained. Germany’s leaders now anticipated that their summer offensive in Russia would end the war, and the usefulness of Jewish slave labour. The Slovakian government allowed the shipment of 50,000 of its citizens to Auschwitz. A programme of deportations of western European Jews was introduced, conducted in collaboration with national security forces – the Nazi empire lacked resources to cleanse the occupied territories without the assistance of indigenous bureaucracies and law-enforcement agencies. Among the explicit purposes of the German government was to ensure that as many foreign regimes as possible were complicit in the massacre of Jews. In this, it achieved considerable success.

Posterity is fascinated by the ease with which the Nazis found so many ordinary men – to borrow the title of Christopher Browning’s classic study – willing to murder in cold blood vast numbers of innocents, of all ages and both sexes. Yet there is ample evidence in modern experience that many people are ready to kill others to order, once satisfied that this fulfils the wishes of those whose authority they accept. Hundreds of thousands of Russians were complicit in the deaths of millions of their fellow countrymen at the behest of Stalin and Beria, before the Holocaust was thought of. Germany’s generals may not themselves have killed civilians, but they were happy to acquiesce in, and even enthuse about, others doing so.

Post-war testimony shows that implementation of the Final Solution required only a modicum of patience and practice to overcome the scruples of some novice mass-murderers. On 13 July 1942, Reserve Police Battalion 101 arrived in a convoy of trucks at the Polish village of Josefów, whose inhabitants included 1,800 Jews. Mostly middle-aged reservists from Hamburg, on their arrival they were ordered to gather around their commander, fifty-three-year-old Major Wilhelm Trapp, a career policeman affectionately known to the unit as ‘Papa Trapp’. In a choking voice and with tears in his eyes, he told them they had a most unwelcome assignment, ordered at the highest level: to arrest all Jews in the village, remove to a work camp men of working age, and kill the remainder. He said this was justified by Jewish involvement with partisans, and the Jews’ instigation of the American boycott that had injured Germany. He then invited any man who felt unable to perform this unpleasant duty to step aside. Several policemen indeed declined to participate, and after the killings began their number increased. At least twenty were permitted to return to barracks.

Yet a sufficiency of others stayed to do the business: one man later recalled that his first victim vainly begged for mercy, on the grounds that he was a decorated World War I veteran. Georg Kageler, a thirty-seven-year-old tailor, killed his initial batch easily enough, but then fell into conversation with a mother and daughter from Kassel, who were destined to die next. He appealed to his platoon leader to be excused, and was sent to guard the marketplace while others did his share of shooting. Another man who quit during the slaughter explained that he became distressed by the poor marksmanship of a comrade: ‘He always aimed his gun too high, producing terrible wounds in his victims. In many cases the entire backs of victims’ heads were torn off, so that the brains sprayed all over. I simply couldn’t watch it any longer.’ One member of the battalion, Walter Zimmerman, later gave evidence: ‘In no case can I remember that anyone was forced to continue participating in the executions when he declared that he was no longer able to … There were always some comrades who found it easier to shoot Jews than did others, so that the respective commando leaders never had difficulty finding suitable shooters.’

Christopher