Inferno - Max Hastings [330]
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 Browning shows that during the weeks and months that followed, most of Reserve Police Battalion 101’s members overcame initial revulsion and became hardened killers. To be sure, they resorted to alcohol to render their duties tolerable, but they performed them with a growing accession of brutality. Lt. Hartwig Gnade, for instance, degenerated from a mere murderer into a sadist: at a mass killing at Łomazy on 16 August, while he waited for 1,700 Jews to finish digging their own mass grave, he selected twenty elderly, heavily bearded Jews and made them crawl naked before him. As they did so, he screamed at his squad, “ ‘Where are my non-commissioned officers? Don’t you have any clubs yet?’ The NCOs went to the edge of the forest, fetched themselves clubs, and vigorously beat the Jews with them.” By the time Battalion 101 completed its contribution to the Holocaust in November 1943, its 500 men had shot at least 38,000 Jews, and herded a further 45,000 aboard trains for Treblinka. Browning found no evidence that any sanction was imposed upon those who refused to kill; in one of the most highly educated societies in Europe, it was easy to find men willing to murder those whom their rulers defined as state enemies, without employing duress.
Many Jews in their last moments invoked the Almighty as their refuge and sought His help as killers descended upon their communities. Nineteen-year-old Ephrahim Bleichman’s uncle Moshe was shot by Polish gendarmes after fresh meat was found in his house, and his cousin Brucha was killed by scavengers who wanted her fresh bread. Young Bleichman thought: “If this tragedy was God’s will, nothing could be done. Yet my family … depended on God, not man to rectify the situation. I could neither abide by their philosophy, nor dispute it. The propaganda machine combined with systematic harassment cowed many of us into apathy. [They] felt powerless.” Ephrahim took to the forest when he heard that a German deportation was imminent, and survived in hiding for many months. “We shared the forest with owls, snakes, wild hogs and deer. On windy nights, the tree branches made strange noises. The shadows of bushes resembled intruders ready to pounce on us. The natural movements of animals made us always worry that enemies were afoot. It took us a long time to accustom ourselves to the nights.” By the summer of 1942, all Soviet Jews in areas under Nazi control had been killed. Thereafter, even as Germany’s military predicament worsened, the pace of slaughter quickened. There were wholesale deportations from