The banal business of killing

Editions Gallimard have undertaken to publish all the works of Harald Welzer, director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Memory at the University of Essen, who defines himself as a psychosociologist. Harald Welzer reconsiders theoretical approaches to explanations of mass violence that take the behavior of killers as their object. It is true that this research, originally driven by questions about the Shoah, but which goes far beyond this field today, included a limited number of studies, and particularly Stanley Milgram’s famous Yale experiment on the degree of obedience of an individual convinced by an institution to inflict torture leading to death. The work of Harald Welzer The Executors. From ordinary men to mass murderers, was translated into French in 2007.

Wiretapped prisoners

The book Soldiers, written in collaboration with the historian Sönke Neitzel, offers an explanation of the ease a priori disconcerting with which men – and in this volume, only men – lend themselves to the most extensive massacres, including, and without distinction, against civilians. The two authors once again raise the question of the ordinary character of executioners, a question posed in a classic book by Christopher Browning.

Underneathly, there is also the “ German question “. Were the Germans, through their culture and education, prepared to become assassins? ? Or, placed in similar conditions, would any man have acted in this way, massacring thousands of people without any remorse? ? The authors define a “ frame of reference » in which German soldiers evolve and, in this work, only German soldiers.

For this original research, they are using material which is just as original and which was recently declassified: the minutes of the wiretapping carried out by the British and American forces on captured German soldiers.

As early as March 1939, the British War Office decided to set up a listening center. The Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Center (CSDIC) was installed in Trent Park, north London, then in Latimer. A second center was created to listen to Italian prisoners. The Americans created their own centers, one at Fort Hunt in Virginia and the other at Fort Tracy, California. Prisoners were selected (without being informed) and sent to these camps whose walls were peppered with microphones. There were also snitches, who encouraged the soldiers to speak out. The listenings were transcribed, sometimes analyzed. In all, 10,191 prisoners passed through these centers, and the British alone wrote 16,960 wiretapping reports.

Wetzel and Sönke first define, in a long introduction, this frame of reference in which men act, and this much more, they specify, than in an ideological framework. However, if this frame of reference is described at length, it is not the same for what the authors mean by “ ideology “. Using the classics of social psychology – Erwin Goffman is highlighted – they explain that “ routine cultural connections and cultural obligations that seem self-evident constitute a considerable part of the frames of reference: this explains why they demonstrate such effectiveness and why they are often a quasi-constraint: they are far from wait for the level of reflection » (p. 32).

This framework – the construction of which the authors do not explain and which appears as an intangible fact – becomes military for the German soldiers: “ The internal norms of the group constitute the standard framework of behavior ; the standard framework of the extra-military universe becomes subordinate and unimportant » (p. 52). THE III^e Reich provided a particular frame of reference, with the exaltation produced by the regime’s march forward, but also the new laws, particularly the anti-Jewish laws. There was conformity of attitudes to this new framework, which was also changing, much more than an intellectual acceptance of the regime’s ideology. Added to this is the particular frame of reference of war.

Violence and gossip

After a hundred clear and readable pages, even for the layman in social psychology, Neitzel and Welzer use the listening reports thematically: 46 themes are defined in short paragraphs, describing violence defined as autotelic (p. 102- 109), a definition given by politician Jan Philip Reemtsma. This is violence which is not due to a “ wildness “, nor to a “ brutalization » — notion defined by Georges L. Mosse as a lowering of the threshold of violence tolerated by continuous exposure to crime —, but, again, to what is normal in the frame of reference of the III^e Reich and the World War.

The recorded discussions of German soldiers very rarely relate to the extermination of the Jews (in only 0.2% of cases), but, the authors explain, this was not for lack of information — the prisoners seemed quite aware of the systematic nature of the massacres. It is quite simply that the process was seen as a normal part of the “ frame of reference “. Extermination had become so commonplace that it no longer constituted an interesting topic of conversation.

But some soldiers still testify to the awareness they had of the exceptional nature of the murders of Jews, and there is a contradiction there that the two authors do not manage to resolve in their demonstration. A few, rare, even mention the difficulties they had in accepting the scale of the crimes, often by denouncing the poor organization of them, their visibility and their consequence: a bad reputation for Germany. Even rarer were those who expressed, during conversations that were a bit of a cock-and-donkey, done in idleness and always in a group, a moral condemnation – almost always the work of high-ranking officers.

The imprisoned German soldiers were not only gossiping about the murderous actions of the Wehrmacht and the SS. In their male conversations around the war which had become their professional activity, they also spoke at length about their weapons and the technical aspects of them. They also talked about sex, uprooted young men, freed from the social control of their community of origin, but also predators in occupied countries. Conversations about sex quickly joined those about violence, with the assumed description of gang rapes and murders of women. They also discussed the course of the war and showed surprising optimism, at least until August 1944 and the breakthrough of the Western Front by the Allied armies.

How to explain these illusions ?

“ Like most other people in most other situations, the soldiers here are strictly attached to the necessities for action induced by their social environment: as long as they are not plunged directly into the “major events”, their own perceptions, interpretations and decisions are in no way affected. People do not think abstractly, but concretely » (p. 318).

German prisoners speak at such length – how can we be surprised? ? — of the Führer and, here again, it is striking to note their adherence to the myth of Hitler, their belief in his qualities as savior of Germany.

A neo-Arendtian analysis

The main development of the authors to explain tolerance to mass violence, despite sometimes dissonant opinions on the justice of extermination, shows the gap between the strength of the frame of reference and the weakness of the ideology. The soldiers were waging neither a war of extermination nor a racial war: “ They fought a war within the framework of their society, National Socialist society, which encouraged them to also commit acts radically contrary to humanity when they found themselves in a position to do so. To commit them — and this is what is strictly speaking worrying — it was not necessary to be racist or anti-Semitic » (p. 356). It is in fact the normality of the soldiers’ behavior that the authors underline, reinventing the Arendtian concept: they were carrying out their job as killers in a banal way.

The conclusion of the work is largely unexpected (but the reader was warned of this from the introduction). The violence displayed by German soldiers cannot be defined as different from the violence shown by other soldiers — and comparison is made with American soldiers in the Vietnam War and Iraq.

Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer therefore conclude that there was a difference in degree in the violence of the soldiers of the Wehrmacht and the SSand not of nature, even if they write cautiously, aware that their totalizing explanation is not devoid of contractions: violence “ only becomes specifically “national socialist” at the moment when it moves towards the intentional destruction of people whom it is impossible, even with the most ill will, to define as a threat – this concerns the assassination of prisoners of Soviet war and, above all, the extermination of the Jews “.

They provide a disappointing conclusion, given the richness of their analyses. A worrying conclusion too, by dint of generalization, perhaps at the risk of relativizing Nazi violence.