“Ordinary Men, not killer machines”— Through the Eyes of the Nazi Perpetrators

Written by: Hannalyn Jayne Ng Ying Ying (23-E3)

Designed by: Tan Kai Rui (24-I1), Danker Chloe Genevieve (24-A6)

In 2023, Netflix released an hour-long documentary titled “Ordinary Men: the ‘Forgotten Holocaust’ and the main issue the show explored was how the mass killings and genocide of the Jews were viewed and carried out, all through the eyes of the Nazi perpetrators, the German soldiers themselves. The Holocaust has always been regarded as one of the darkest times in human history, a stain on our pages that can never be removed. It displayed  the atrocities of  war crimes against our very own kind that can never be pardoned. Mass exterminations, torture, mistreatment. The mass murder on an unprecedented scale resulted in the deaths of more than six million Jewish people, and millions more non-Jews, including those with disabilities, Soviet Prisoners of War (POWs), and ethnic Poles, all stemming from the hatred that one man, Adolf Hitler, carried towards these “inferior races”. He believed that Germans were the “master race, where the Aryans were deemed the pinnacle of human racial hierarchy - the "Herrenmenschen" ("master humans"), and the rest, a “danger that needed to be exterminated”. 

Adolf Hitler spread his Nazi ideologies throughout Germany, and a dark era fell upon not just Germany, but all these other nations that the Nazi forces stormed through and occupied, under the belief that they were doing their part for the regime. The Holocaust however, would never have achieved the level of destruction it did, without the German soldiers themselves, the little cogs making up the powerful machine that was the German Empire, tirelessly carrying out the orders they were given, be it the fighting of the war on several fronts, the management of the dreadful concentration camps, or the innumerous counts of violence that would never be considered humane or ethical, both then and now. 

Yet, as Netflix presents in this documentary, the most significant revelation was this — “Not a single case has been found where a subordinate’s life was in danger if he refused to shoot unarmed civilians. If any of the rank and file don’t feel up to it, you can step out and you don’t have to take part. One man does step out . . . and then about a dozen people follow his example.” Thus, only about 13 out of a 400 to 500 men battalion refused the order to kill unarmed individuals whose only offence was that they were Jewish. Subsequently, those thirteen members were not given the harshest punishments. Rather, they were simply assigned other jobs, like cleaning latrines and were subjected to name-calling by other soldiers, like being called bastards, dirty rats, and sissies. Befehlsnotstand - the necessity to obey orders because disobedience would lead to drastic consequences, especially for the person refusing to carry out the order - therefore, did not actually exist. 

If the German soldiers had a choice not to commit those war crimes, then why did they do it, knowing they were killing innocent humans just like themselves? 

It has long been argued numerous times in the past that some German soldiers, under extensive indoctrination by Nazi ideologies, did, in fact, take pleasure in killing the unarmed Jews - all the men, women, children, and even the weaker disabled ones, who could not fend for themselves - and arguably, may have felt pretty much no guilt doing so, as they saw it as an act of honour and service to the Fatherland. Otto Ohlendorf, the former head of Einsatzgruppe D, was one of those who took this  purpose upon himself, believing that “in the spirit of Nazi propaganda, the Jews are responsible for communism in the Soviet Union, and therefore enemies of the German Reich”. He gave orders to 600 men, who murdered 90,000 people in one year. Yet, he is one of those who goes against Hollywood’s image of a Nazi perpetrator, being the complete opposite of the idea of a henchman who is not particularly intelligent and who only cares about killing as many people as possible, like a mindless killing machine, as Harald Welzer, the documentary’s German social psychologist says. Leaders like Ohlendorf were well educated, mostly middle-class, sophisticated, accomplished, and charismatic even, with a sureness to their beliefs and the way they led. They believed that the Nazi propaganda was the truth, having been fed the notions over and over again, so much that it became their reality. 

From a different perspective, especially for the soldiers who did not naturally have this sense of duty they had to fulfil to their country, the documentary posits that while the consequences for the few who refused to kill the Jews were not dire, especially because they did not get heavily punished by superiors as a result, the social ostracism that those men faced, would have been devastating enough for a soldier to choose to follow the crowd rather than being singled out as one of the few that “did not have the guts or courage” to kill. While ego or self-perception may seem a smaller and more ethical price in exchange for not being responsible for taking the life of another, suffering at the hands of degrading insults from other soldiers and being purposely excluded from the very men they had to spend the most time with was bound to have taken a toll on the mental and emotional health of those soldiers who opted out. This made that option naturally undesirable. 

The documentary also indicated that many of the battalion’s men had become desensitised to the killing - after the first incident of 13 July 1942, it became easier. Subterfuge - the use of deception through prompting victims, who did not know they were being led to their graves, to sing, dance and applaud on the way there - also helped to ease the guilty consciences of the perpetrators. The more shocking thing is that these men, who led so many to their graves, who shot thousands of Jews, and sent an even greater number to extermination camps were just “ordinary” Germans, mostly from Hamburg. Many were not even initially Nazi sympathisers nor especially hostile toward Jews, at least before Nazi propaganda began influencing them. They had ordinary jobs as bakers, carpenters, office workers, and some were just older family men. 

Can anyone become a killer, when placed under certain circumstances?

Welzer concludes that wherever people can say to themselves, “I am only a cog in the wheel, I am not responsible,” then “almost anything is possible”, and “All sorts of people can become killers under certain circumstances.” 

Should ordinary people, like you and me, be fed with the same ideas, be put under the same tense and war-torn environment, and have peers who believe that the killing is justified or a duty that one simply has to do without thinking much about it, then maybe we, could very well become murderers ourselves. 

References

Moss, W. (2023, September 23). “Ordinary Men: The Forgotten Holocaust ” and Lessons for Today. Hollywood Progressive. Retrieved March 26, 2024, from https://hollywoodprogressive.com/television/forgotten-holocaust

Russell, N. (2018). The Nazi’s Pursuit for a “Humane” Method of Killing. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-97999-1_8