The SS Einsatzgruppen and the Morality of Mass Murder

The SS Einsatzgruppen were a select task force formed from lower to mid-raking members of the Nazi Party’s Schutzstaffel, or SS, and educated leadership from the SS school. This special force had a single, grim duty: to locate and execute hundreds of thousands of indicated people, mainly Eastern European Jews, whom the Nazi Party had identified as subversive or politically dangerous. This group’s duty was to follow on the tails of the moving army, roaming through war torn, German-occupied areas of Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in 1938-1939, performing their grim tasks. One of the first groups eliminated by the SS Einsatzgruppen were Boy Scouts between 12 and 16 years of age. Within this horrible context, where is the morality and blame for such acts? Does it lie with the officers who ordered their subordinates to kill, or with the subordinates themselves? What about the nature of the mass killings and Hitler’s Final Solution? This essay argues that despite members of the Nazi Party depicted as sadistic and cruel, officers performing mass killings were often depressed, drunk, and unable to cope with their orders. Additionally, the later introduction of centralized death camps was practical in relieving these stresses while also fulfilling anti-Sematic ideology.

During the German expansion into Eastern Europe in 1938-1939, Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, were determined to resettle the area with Germans in something of a delusional version of the British colonization of India. Himmler, who had been given authority over the eastern occupation, was determined to practically apply Hitler’s tirades of anti-Semitism. During this time, the SS Einsatzgruppen was systematically murdering thousands of people, but by 1941 it became clear that without a territory in which to evacuate and isolate the Jews, another “solution” was needed. During this change from SS Einsatzgruppen murders by machine gun to large scale killings in death camps such as Auschwitz, Rhodes reports that Himmler suffered a great deal from “stomach convulsions” which emerged from “…this psychic division which extended over his whole life”. Rhodes continues the firsthand account, “The basic cause of these convulsions was not removed, was indeed constantly being aggravated”. This indicates that Himmler was not at ease with his work in literally creating the Holocaust, but was wracked with a division between his nature and his behavior.

Further evidence of the unrest, heavy drinking, and constant nightmares of German officers tasked with murder demonstrates that Himmler was not alone in his personal agonies. Baumeister details incidents where SS soldiers were simply unable to perform their duties, especially under certain intimate circumstances. These SS members were instructed to choose their victim, lay them on their face, and shoot them point blank in the back of the head. The incidents were so plagued with avoidance and revulsion that many officers often missed their point blank shot, even to the point of inventing a term for it: “shooting past”. While these SS Einsatzgruppen officers later described not the moral disgust for these acts during the Nuremburg trial, but the physical disgust, it is clear that the men had the same division of mind and body as Himmler. They were not at ease with what they were doing, although ideologically they may have agreed with Hitler’s intense racism and view on ethnic cleansing.

The change from employing the SS Einsatzgruppen to mass killings by machine gun to gassings in death camps was the answer to a two-fold problem for the Nazi Party. First, they needed a way to destroy massive amounts of Jews and other non-Germans which was impractical for the SS Einsatzgruppen to continue doing to solve the “Jewish question”, and the psychological and physical issues of exposure to the mainstream murder itself. Langerbein quoted an SS officer regarding the change to stationary death camps as more “humane”, while it also helped to compartmentalize individual officer’s tasks associated with the death camp mass murders. Through the change to death camps, the SS could fulfill their duty to Hitler and Himmler to eradicate all non-Germans and especially Jews, while retaining their personal sanity.

A moral conundrum occurs when considering which members of the Nazi Party to blame for the nearly indescribable acts of terror and death against humanity - stripping them of all human dignity. It is important to note the heavy socialization into Nazi ideology that fostered intense racism and German-centric patriotism. Koonz describes the interwoven nature of all subjects in Nazi schools with the “Jewish question” and deep, philosophical issues of in versus out groups. While it is likely that some SS officers were simply psychotic and/or sadistic, most officers were wracked and sickened by their daily chores of murder and death, even if it made perfect sense with Nazi socialization. In the end, the blame rests on the one who fostered the Nazi ideology in the hearts and minds of the German people: Adolf Hitler. While it is just to have condemned those who participated in the Holocaust from a global perspective, the blame does not feasibly exist in one person or task force.

The incredible, horrific sum of the Holocaust, the answer to the Nazi “Jewish question”, resulted in the necessitation of large scale, less intimate ways of murder via death camps. This allowed not only for the fulfillment of Nazi beliefs of racial purity and expansionism, but also for the soldiers themselves to be physically and mentally able to perform their grisly work. As demonstrated by Himmler and members of his SS Einsatzgruppen, the mental and physical difficulty of the mass killings was often debilitating and led to serious physiological issues. This indicates that despite the intense socialization into the hate-based Nazi belief system, something about the murders was still loathsome, even to the upper echelons of the Nazi ranks. Ultimately, the blame rests on the orchestrator of the Nazi Party, but is also intrinsic to all who took part. This suggests an interesting concept about humanity: that someone can be socialized and menaced into murder even to epic proportions, but you cannot remove the sheer, physical horror of it.

Bibliography

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Downing, David. The Nazi death camps. Milwaukee, WI: World Almanac Library, 2006.

Evans, Richard J.. The Third Reich at war. New York: Penguin Press, 2009.

Koonz, Claudia. The Nazi conscious. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Langerbein, Helmut . Hitler's Death Squads: The Logic of Mass Murder. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004.

Rhodes, Richard. Masters of death: the SS-Einsatzgruppen and the invention of the Holocaust. New York: A.A. Knopf, 2003.