Langerbein, Helmut. Hitler's Death Squads: the Logic of Mass Murder

International Social Science Review, Fall-Winter, 2004 by William S. Brockington, Jr

Langerbein, Helmut. Hitler's Death Squads: The Logic of Mass Murder. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2003. xi 232 pp. Cloth, $27.00.

Helmut Langerbein is the most recent (and most assuredly not the last) to investigate causality and culpability in the murder of six million Jews, as well as millions of other Untermenschen (inferior beings) selected by the Nazi hierarchy, during the years of the Third Reich. The issue of responsibility for criminal acts is almost as old as civilization itself, with one of the earliest ethical questions--that of group accountability vis-a-vis individual fault. Is an entire tribe responsible for the behavior of an individual, or is justice satisfied when the individual who commits a crime is suitably punished? A parallel question regarding guilt concerns that of motive: Is the offense the result of an individual decision or is the person acting on behalf of the corporate unit? The act of killing another human is expressly forbidden by most civil and religious law; yet there are occasions, such as war, when such behavior is not only permissible but is also requisite. The slaughter of combatants is normally accepted by the rules of war, but the killing of non-combatants in wartime has never been simple to proscribe or to legitimize.

Although civilians, as producers of war materiel, came to be viewed as justifiable military targets in the twentieth century, determining whether a specific military act constituted a legitimate military action or an atrocity against non-combatants was often problematic. When ordinary individuals are placed in extraordinary situations, and when legal orders are issued, upon whom does responsibility rest if societal norms are exceeded? Further, who determines societal norms and whether those norms are transferable to other societies? Finally, if there is consensus that societal norms have been exceeded, even after consideration for situational abnormality, who decides not only the individual punishment but also corporate responsibility and retribution? At the end of World War II, when the magnitude of Nazi "crimes against humanity" was unveiled, these questions were immediately addressed. Since then, however, causality and culpability regarding die Endlosung der Judenfrage (Final Solution of the Jewish Question) has become one of the most analyzed and debated events of history.

With virtually the entire Nazi archives to study, historians and social scientists have investigated--and debated--the twin issues of guilt and of responsibility since the collapse of Hitler's Germany. Initially, at the War Crimes Trials at Nuremberg (1946-47) and at numerous trials held throughout Europe, guilt was ascribed to Nazi fanatics who carried out the orders of a madman. Macro interpretations of the Holocaust by scholars such as Raul Hilberg (extensively cited by Langerbein), Elie Wiesel, and Lucy Dawidowicz provided a framework for the microanalysis of the components of genocide. Since the 1960s, German and non-German scholars have focused less upon the mechanisms of the killing machine and more upon the most incendiary question of all: Who was to blame? Langerbein addresses the dichotomy that has emerged by placing Christopher Browning (Ordinary Men, 1992) and Daniel Goldhagen (Hitler's Willing Executioners, 1996) at the two ends of the interpretive spectrum. As the title of his book suggests, Browning concludes that the motivation for brutal acts was singular; hence, voluntary participation meant individual guilt. Goldhagen, just as obviously from his book's title, asserts collective guilt.

To reach his own conclusions, Langerbein's research focuses upon a microcosm of the death machine, the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads which murdered approximately 1.5 million people (Jews, communists, and other Untermenschen) from the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 until their replacement by extermination camps in 1943. A historical background chapter provides a general history of the killer groups (wherein Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm's 1981 seminal work on the Einsatzgruppen is cited thirteen times). Motivation is deduced from Langerbein's analysis of court records pertaining to Einsatzgruppen officers and men tried in German courts between 1950 and 1991. From this primary data, Langerbein discerns a set of background common denominators (such as education and pre-war employment) as well as similarities in the motivations of those men. Goldhagen is repudiated throughout (pp. 70, 102, 127, 182, et passim), while Browning is credited with leading the way for the study of motivation of lesser men. Langerbein's own conclusion is that his subjects were atypical men who functioned in extraordinary situations.

In general, Hitler's Death Squads is a solid study of the character and background of the specific officers and unteroffiziere (lower-ranking military officers) serving in the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union--for whom Langerbein has information. With this narrow focus, the secondary bibliography is relatively limited (seventy-four books/articles and two websites), although pertinent works are listed. While trial data provided much information on a select group of individuals, it is difficult to know how (a)typical these individuals were. The four Einsatzgruppen contained nineteen subgroups, each of 600-1,000 men; of these, 1,770 were investigated by postwar German authorities, 136 were indicted, and 53 judgments were rendered. In Langerbein's chapter on commanding officers, about eight (it was difficult to ascertain an exact number from his prose) individuals were extensively examined. As there were at least sixty commanders at that level, Langerbein's sample is perhaps not large enough. In a later chapter, approximately fifteen specialists are analyzed, but there is no indication of the total number of specialists. Without knowing the specifics of the fractional size of the samples or the nature of those omitted, his extrapolations may be as (in)valid as the conclusions by Browning or Goldhagen. Assessing Nazi policy regarding genocide requires more information than was provided: Earlier Einsatzgruppen (e.g., Poland, 1939) are mentioned, but the Wannsee Conference is not nor is there much analysis of German anti-Semitism, although this is probably presumed. Langerbein concludes that anti-Semitism was a significant factor for the commanding officers but much less so for the unteroffiziere.