Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast - Dr. Christopher Browning- "Ordinary Men" of the Holocaust

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

In this interview with historian Dr. Christopher Browning, we discuss his book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. An internationally renowned author and researcher, Dr. Browning is also a professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). He is an internationally recognized expert on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany and has authored over 75 publications.   His focus on Battalion 101 emerged during his research of the Holocaust, when he discovered that this battalion was unlike any other in the German army or police force—it was comprised of ordinary, middle-aged men, not trained soldiers. Despite this fact, they assimilated into the Nazi practices of mass murder with disturbing ease. Dr. Browning examines the psychological and cultural influences that impacted this seeming phenomenon and offers poignant insights from existing historical documents. We want to thank Jeremiah Stokes, Ed.D., LMHC for being part of this episode and helping with write up available on psychiatrypodcast.com  By listening to this episode, you can earn 2 Psychiatry CME Credits. Link to blog. Link to YouTube video.

Welcome to the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Podcast. We are a podcast that seeks to train mental health professionals to do good psychotherapy, to do good psychiatry. And this episode is a unique episode. It is a timely episode. It is an episode that dives into one of the most horrific stories I've ever heard. This is the story of the ordinary men of Reserve Police Battalion 101. It is an interview with Dr. Christopher Browning, who is a lifetime Holocaust researcher. He's spent 50 years diving into the Holocaust. During the interview, he himself breaks down at one point with emotion, talking about some of the documents that he found unearthing the voluntary nature of this police battalion's murders. he is someone who has looked at this with a lens to try to understand how and why it happened we look at conformity in this episode we look at studies of conformity psychological group dynamics

we look at the dehumanization of a people group and how that was just in the water we unfortunately did not have a lot of resistors in Germany who are resisting the murder of Jews. And that is something that deeply disturbs me. And it's like in my mind, as a psychiatrist and as a therapist, I think to myself, how can we teach people to not conform to groups and to be able to notice cognitive dissonance and look at their values and say, this does not align with my values. How do we create values that humanize every people group,

every religion, every, you know, that we humanize and don't dehumanize. How do we, in the face of the current events, be very careful to not go all bad? You know, there seems to be an increase in disgust, towards certain people groups that happens throughout history. And with that and people who are following orders,

following authority structures, conforming to a group, you can have atrocities on the scale like we're going to talk about today. Also joined with me is Dr. Jeremiah Stokes. He is a excellent, truly excellent therapist in town. He has become a friend. We've been discussing this book on walks. We've been talking about this idea of how do we teach people to not just conform to groups.

We wrote an article together. Psychiatrypodcast.com has that. And we're going to be talking about more details on how to create a safe space in therapy where patients can disagree with us. And maybe that's the first place they can disagree and not conform. And maybe that creates, along with looking at, values and, you know, the values that they have, maybe that creates a place where they can resist conformity. It seems that just talking about our propensity to conform to groups allows us a little

bit of room to question if we want to conform to groups, right? So I am excited and I'm also horrified to put this out there. It is something you definitely do not want to listen to to with your children. You don't want to listen to this when you're driving, when you're distracted, when you potentially could get distracted. You don't want to listen to this when you're super tired. Don't listen to this in the middle of the night. It's going to have a lot of details which are very raw and very, I mean, this is like one of the most vile things that's happened in the history of mankind. And so expect it to elicit some emotion in yourself. and I think it's a warning from history to be careful to not just conform and to be ready to not go along when people are dehumanizing groups of people.

And we have to look at the groups that we ourselves are a part of and how those could dehumanize other groups. So it's not just good to point the finger at other groups. Oh, the other side is doing this. No, it's like both sides have the propensity to dehumanize. How do we value people? And so this is kind of like going around in my head, and I just wanted to put that out there as a longer introduction today to prepare you for what you're going to hear,

and I will leave it there. I am joined today with Dr. Christopher Browning. He is a historian, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Professor Browning is an internationally recognized expert on the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. He has authored over 75 publications. His most notable work is a book entitled Ordinary Men, Reserve Police Battalion 101. and the final solution in Poland. This seminal text is a remarkable work

that meticulously and very detailedly chronicles the extraordinary experiences of ordinary men shooting 38,000 Jews, often point blank, including women and children, and deporting another 45,000. This book illuminates the full spectrum of the capacity of human behavior as it relates to areas such as obedience, authority, group, think, collective influence, and aggression.

And so, Dr. Browning, before we jump into some of the psychological causes for these murders, can you outline what you found from reading roughly 30 volumes of court transcripts on Police Battalion 101? Yes. In the late 80s, I was looking through a collection of German court records writing to trial. about atrocities in Poland and came across the indictment of Reserve Police Battalion 101, which was this rather obscure unit I had never heard of. Upon reading the indictment, it was clear that several things were very unusual. One, the testimony detailed how on the opening day of the massacre, the first massacre, the commanding officer, Major Wilhelm Tropp, gave the men the option of not taking the

part if they, quote, did not feel up to it, so that no one was coerced that day to shoot, and indeed that remained, in effect, the standing order of the battalion throughout its stay in Poland that officers could not force men to shoot against their will, so that people could opt out at any time in the years that this battalion was killing people in Poland. The second was I was reading graphic descriptions of massacres in detail that I had not seen in court records before. Other trials of killing units had basically been trials of the officers because they didn't have the rosters. They didn't know the rank and file. And the officers lied for one another, whitewashed what had happened.

Here were rank and file men describing the absolute horrors of the massacres in a detail of just simply never seen in any jurisdiction. German court testimony before. So I went to work on the court for the full court records in Hamburg, of which there were 30 volumes of testimony taken from 210 men. Most of them rank and file. And it was out of that that I could reconstruct the path of the battalion, the chronology of its massacres, and of course, ultimately to try to hazard some explanation of why this unit became such a prolific kiddling unit, particularly because the composition of the battalion was made up of middle-aged random conscripts. This was not an SS unit. This was not an elite unit. This was in a unit that was slapped together in the winter of 1941-42 from the dregs of the manpower pool,

middle-aged men average age 39 and a half years old, and sent to do far behind the line's occupation duty in Poland with no idea and no preparation, it would basically be a killing unit in the Nazi final solution. So if one was, in effect, looking at what a regime can do to harness, mobilize, and organized people to be killing on their behalf that are not part of the ideological elite, not part of the early members of the movement committed to it, but rather the average person pulled off the street. I mean, literally, this is a random selection.

then Reserve Police Pretend 101 would be that test case for historians made even more important because the major gave them the option not to take part when they did not want to. So we had the test of what the average person would do and do under the circumstances of not having to but having a voluntary outlet. So that was why when I read this, I knew that I had a very special sort of historians' eureka moment. I have found a case study that would be illuminating much wider movements. And the issue of trying to explain then why people did as they did, I made the step basically that I wasn't going to work through individual psychology. These were not individual psychopaths.

I would have to use the tools of social psychology looking at interaction of men in groups, that these men did what they did because they were part of a group. They never would have done this on their own. as individuals, but as part of a group, they became prolific killers. So it was through the social psychological concepts that various people had developed in the post-World War II period, particularly a series of social psychologists in the late 50s and 60s, that became, in a sense, my interpretational entree to explain what I, the actions that I'd empirically recreated from the historical record based on the interrogations of these 200,

men. Okay. So they were given the option to kill, so they weren't forced. They were not incredibly brainwashed. They weren't SS men. And what kind of work did they do before? And were they chosen due to their psychological makeup or not? No, I mean, basically, at this point in the war, Germany raised the age level of people who would have to do compulsory wartime service, but who were still too old. for the army to want to use them. So men from basically in their late 30s and up to their mid-40s could now be drafted. But the organization that drafted them was the reserve police, not the army.

And so they're drafted. They have little training, little ideological indoctrination, and are sent, as I say, to what was considered occupation duty far behind the lines. So no, these men are not the percentage of Nazi party members. is not remarkably different than the population. Some of the men join the SS subsequently. They tried to use this as a stepping zone to a Nazi career, but there are very few, virtually none in the SS to begin with,

except for some of the officers. Okay, and so now they weren't ideologically like brainwashed or heavily educated, but how much of that was in the culture, in the media, like how, and how much was it just there, this sort of anti-Jew sentiment? Yeah. Most of these men, I should start with, is, were people who were non-skilled manual labors in the economy, so they had no economic deferment.

They weren't skilled workers making submarines in Hamburg. they were waiters and truck drivers and warehouse workers and clerks. Most of them had left school at 14. So we have people who were not highly educated. And, of course, being average age 38, 39 and a half, they had gone to school in Weimar, Germany, in the 20s. Their schooling was under a democracy. They were not part of the Hitler youth, not part of the Hitler curricula that were imposed upon schools. They didn't have a cadre of Nazi teachers.

which would explain the kind of bubble that younger Germans lived in from 1933 on because of all of these socialization mechanisms, they were born and raised in their formative period, came in an age when they had non-Nazi standards by which to measure the world. They had some other reality against which they could measure what was happening. On the other hand, of course, they are also subject to the saturation of the media and social media. so forth with Nazi propaganda about Jews. As one of the men said, anti-Semitism was in the air we breathe. That is, the regimes making anti-Semitism public policy created, in a sense, an atmosphere in which even non-Nazis, in which ordinary people who had been educated and grown up in the 20s, are not going to be unaffected. You can't listen to the news or read the papers every day for 10 years before they

go to Poland that is consistently pursuing a whole series of anti-Jewish stereotypes, repeating and inventing new accusations against Jews without that filtering in. I mean, this is kind of osmosis or saturation, I'm sure that takes place. But again, to repeat, that's different than being ideologically committed hardcore Nazis. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And Professor Browning, you know, when I hear you give your introduction regarding these men, and you mentioned, you know, the social psychological context that I think needs

to be conceptualized when we think about these men. I think that this book teaches us this painful lesson about things like power, influence, group think, and the susceptibility for evil. I think there's so many vital pieces of information in this text that inform our human psychology. And I think it's really vital that we grasp the significance of this book. So I'm curious, from your perspectives, tell us about the importance of this book, why you wrote it, and the message that you want it to send the world today. Yeah, certainly the, in a sense, the originality of the book when it came out first in 1992

was we didn't have a case study of a killing unit. German documents we had from the bureaucracy were, you know, the bureaucrats kept wonderful documentation. They couldn't destroy all of it. At Nuremberg, we saw just the tip of the iceberg. There were hundreds of thousands of these pages that the government and the middle echelon bureaucrats and officers commanding units produced. But these were not the records of the grassroots face-to-face killers. Those people don't leave written records.

And insofar as they wrote letters, families, of course, either burned them or hid them. They didn't read diaries and there were almost none. So they were the key participants in the Holocaust, apart from the policymakers at the top, the middle echelon problem solvers. These are the people who did the actual killing, but in contrast to the others, didn't leave the written records behind. So it's the oral history of the interrogations

that allowed us to get into them, have access to them. And as I say, this was a unit unlike other trials where we had found the roster of the battalion and we could interrogate the rank and file, which gave a whole new perspective in contrast to liars, officers' lines, to cover other lying officers, the mutual alibis that they would provide, the most preposterous kinds of stories they would make up for the court that had no contradictory witnesses to,

you know, to, to, to, to, uh, thwart them. Uh, so this is what was original about it. Then the question is how to use that material. And as I say, for me, then, uh, particularly three, uh, people stood out. Milgram's work on what he called obedience to authority, but I thought more properly should be called deference to authority. Because these people in sense are given choice. The major says the unit has this terrible task to do. The unit is going to have to commit these killings. But the individuals can still opt out. So it is people in the unit choosing to defer to the authority of the major, choosing to recognize the authority of the regime and the policies carrying out, that turned them into killers. Second was role adaptation by Zimbardo experiments,

the prison, Stanford, famous Stanford prison experiment, the capacity of people to be changed by the role they take on, to be changed by what they are doing and seeing. And how quickly these men, when they put on a uniform, they then become part of a unit. this unit is in Poland as an occupation unit, their only social family is these 500 men. Ostracism being turned into a pariah in that unit has a huge social cost that one would not bear as a dissident in Hamburg where you have your family, you have friends, the isolation that results from being an outsider in an occupation unit in which the surrounding population, of course, are the enemy, and your only support network is this group.

So that when you put that uniform on and become part of that unit, the pressure to adapt to the expectations of what a policeman should do and how to be a policeman that fits in with the other policeman becomes, I think, much more intensified than role adaptation if you join a corporation as an office worker or something like that. And the third was the power of conformity, and these were the Solomon Ash experiments, that people, when they're surrounded by everybody else who seems to be going along, will go along too, even if they know themselves that what they're doing is not right or what's being said is not true. But they will opt for conformity and not challenging those around them rather than to take on pariah status and be considered the, the weird one who doesn't see things and doesn't act the way everybody else around them is acting. So conformity, role adaptation, deference to authority, seemed to me to be concepts or patterns

of behavior within groups that we already seen in psychological experience had powerful ability to shape behavior of people in groups. And as I read through, when I went back to look at the empirical account of this battalion and describing what they did, these seem to me the most pertinent. These seem to me the most illuminating, helping me to understand why they did what I had managed to describe them doing.

Yeah, I want to, you know, this is probably one of the most difficult books I've read. I remember a couple pages, and I would get like a stomachache almost needing to stop it. But I think it's worth talking about the first day because it seems like that was a very seminal event in these men's sort of group evil dynamic. Yeah, so do you want to tell us about that first day specifically? Yeah, these men are sent to Poland in late June of 1942,

and three weeks later, they are sent off to basically carry out their first massacre. They don't know what they're going to do until early in the morning. they arrive at the village of Josefuf in southern Poland in the Lublin district. And as they get out of their trucks, the major basically assembles them in a kind of semicircle around him, addresses the men, and tells them what's going to happen. This is when he gives his speech. The men describe him as his voice choking, tears streaming down his cheeks. He's physically struggling to control himself.

This was a tremendously emotional, conflicting motion. moment for him, as he tells the men we have a task to do, a terrible task, I would never ask you to do on my own, but this is the policy of the regime that is telling us to do this. He goes on to then help try to find sort of psychological rationales for the men. And Hamburg, of course, had been bombed by the Allies. had the great firestorm of Hamburg, didn't have it for another year, but cities around there had been bombed. And he knows, you know, in Germany,

the bombs are falling on women and children, which in a sense is saying, they're killing our women and children, we can kill their women and children. That the non-combatten rule has been erased by the allies, so you shouldn't feel guilty if we now transgress there as well. Knowing in a sense of that was a kind of common,

notion that most people, particularly of a middle age like that, would bring to the battlefield. He then went on to say the Jews are helping the partisans. They are part of the enemy. This is part of the combat, part of the war. They are the enemy in this war, which endorsed, in a sense, the Nazi view that World War II is a war against the Jews. So they would see this in combat terms, not as the killing of non-combatants, but of an enemy. And then he ends up the speech with his offer for those of you who don't feel up to it, you can step out. And a small number of men about it. But first of all, first of all, nobody did initially.

And then one man did step out. And his SS captain, one of the few SS men in the unit, began to berate him. But the major took the man under his protection, made clear that he met it and he would protect them against their officers. And then about a dozen men stepped out and they could not take part in what would follow. They then organized the men into three groups. One company would form a cordon around the village. A second company would go into the ghettoized section of the village where all the Jews were concentrated, round them up and bring them to the marketplace. And a third company was sent to the

woods where they would form the firing squad. The men had no training or experience for this. So the company doctor draws a figure of a human being on the ground and then demonstrate shows to the man that if they put the banette on their rifle and place the banette at the top of the spinal column at the neck, you can shoot and give a so-called neck shot that will kill instantly. And this is as much training in a sense as he's been had on how to carry out a massacre. The officers have never done this before, and they organized it in what we, in retrospect, the Nazis would discover was the least efficient, psychologically most taxing way to carry out a massacre. As the trucks carried the men out to the forest when they disembarked from the trucks, the Jews,

they would pair off face-to-face one to one with the man who was going to shoot them, march into the forest, be made to lie on the ground, and then the German policeman would place the gun at their head and fire. many of them either didn't hear or hadn't paid attention to the instruction, and they had these old World War I large bore rifles. They would put the point of the gun at the back of the skull, not the neck, and of course the head would explode, and they would be covered in the brain matter and the blood of their victims. This is their descriptions of what happened when you shot somebody in the head at point blank range were graphic and horrifying, just almost beyond belief. after the people had been concentrated in the town square, the cord company is brought in and sent to the forest as well. So you have two companies shooting, one company loading the trucks.

And this goes on basically from mid-morning until it's dark, until this is summer, of course, until late in the evening. There was no preparation to, there's no pits being dug here. There's no preparation to bury the bodies. nobody's collected valuables. There's just a forest filled with dead corpses lying there. And when it's done, the major puts them back in the trucks and tells the Polish mayor to go bury the corpses. And they drive back to the schoolhouse in another town where they were barrack.

He offers food. Almost no one eats. He opens the liquor cabinet and people drink like crazy. And the descriptions of the men, I mean, I'm not as. psychiatrist, I'll use this term in a layman's way, not at a professional way, but they were traumatized. The way in which they speak about this, that they were distraught, they were upset, was incomprehensible to them. This is something they had not been prepared for, warned about, and they could make no sense about it. And one of the men told his non-commissioned officers, if I had to do that again, I would go crazy.

What is one of the most, to me, shocking observations of what takes place in the weeks and months after is how quickly what had been an utterly traumatic and upsetting event in the first day becomes utter routine to which they habituate and normalize. And the horror of it quickly recedes. They get used to killing people. The massacre was described an incredible detail on the first day. subsequently becomes, their descriptions become more and more blurred. They can't keep one massacre apart from another.

I could recreate the dating of the massacres and the itinerary of the battalion only from survivor testimonies. People who managed to hide knew the day that their village was liquided when their families were killed. These men in this battalion had no idea where they were and what day it was, just that they went from one village to another and either rounded people up, put them on the death trains to Treblinka, which was just about 60 miles to the north where they were gassed immediately or shot them on the spot if they were too far from a rail station to march the victims to the

train. And this was their life from the summer to the fall of 1942. And as I say, it became a blur. It became a routine. One doesn't get a sense that for most of them, most of this became increasingly less troubling. Some people did become increasingly troubled. The number of people who took up the major's option increased. That is the pool of people who evaded direct shooting group. They still participated in the roundups. They still guarded the shooting pits, but they didn't pull the trigger themselves. They would excuse themselves from the firing squads because the major had allow them to opt out. So I dubbed this group the evaders. And then there was a middle group which didn't seek opportunities to kill, but would never refuse when asked. That is,

they simply followed whatever the directions were. And scariest of all was a group that turned into eager killers. People that learned to enjoy killing other human beings, sought the opportunity to maximize their number of victims, would come back from the killing, sit down to a hearty meal and joke and laugh about what they had did had done. So people responded to this along a whole spectrum from evaders at one end to eager killers at the other and probably the largest group in the middle of being what I call the compliers who simply went along, did not want to challenge what was happening, but didn't seek to maximize what was happening either.

You know, you mentioned the traumatization of these men, which I think is undoubtedly evident, particularly for any mental health professional who would read this book. I think that they would be able to spot that instantaneously. I realized in reading this book, there's a few different lenses by which you can read this book. You know, I think you can lens it, you could read it through the lens of the killers or you could read it through the lens of victims. And I'm curious, Have you heard any sort of critique that writing about the men's struggles of killing is giving them some sort of empathy or some sort of emotional response? Have you heard any criticisms such as that? Yes.

I mean, of course, the book has encountered a number of critiques, some with more merit than others. And this, in a sense, this historian's ethical question of what is the line between recreating the world of the perpetrators, with sufficient empathy that you can explain why they did what they did without tipping into sympathy for seeing them as in a sense victims of a system. And I've always insisted, and the book insists this as well, is that these men had human agency. One of the reasons I went into this or detail in this case study, because from the beginning, the major gives them the option. This was the, for me, at the crux of the book is the issue of choice. This was the case study where choice was explicit. In other killing units, men who dared to say no got away with it. But here was a case

where the major doesn't put them to a test of courage or experimentation. He makes it clear from the beginning they have this option. So everything that I described in that book has to be seen through the lens of human choice. And that's why I found this particular case study so key in comparing to study other perpetrators that I did is everything takes place after the major says, if you don't feel up to it, you can step out and that no one was coerced, threatened to take part in the killing. So for those who say that I am in a sense excusing the perpetrators, that I'm making them the victims of these anonymous social psychological forces, I just simply reject that. The experiments themselves reject that.

In each of these experiments I talked about, a significant minority does not go along. There's about one-third of the people in the Milking experiments won't do it. They don't go up to the top end of the torture scale while two-thirds do. It's frightening that two-thirds do, but we do have to remember the one-third who say no. And we know in the Zimbardo experiment that are the 12 guards. Two were the, quote, good guards who when they didn't think anyone was watching, did help mitigate the prisoner's misery. They didn't know they were being captured on camera. They thought they were doing this in secret without any of their fellow guards knowing.

But even in that experiment, there were two people who, in a sense, didn't give way to the system. So the experiments themselves say people have choice. Some people make the right decision. all too many people make the wrong decision, but we won't understand why they make the wrong decision if we don't study them. And to say, I won't study them because this requires an amount of empathy

is, I think, to abdicate our responsibility as scholars to do the best we can to know what happened and why it happened in the aftermath. Yeah. I think knowing about the Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram study, other conformity studies can potentially equip someone to not just go along. And I think that your book has that role and that's my heart in having you on and to bring you before a bunch of mental health professionals. It's like thinking about how can we equip people to not just succumb to the movements of people.

and like ideologues. But I imagine this was incredibly taxing for you psychologically to do this. And I'm curious if you would speak to what it was like studying the Holocaust most of your adult life and specifically this book. Yes, I mean, I spent my whole career over 50 years researching in these kinds of documents. I in a sense try to look at it in the way a physician who operates in the search. room operates. Basically, in regular life, I would never cut somebody open. But as a professional equipped to do this under certain circumstances, I better do it and I better do it quite dispassionately and not be overcome by emotion. You don't want a weeping surgeon who's operating on you in the

operating room. So I do compartmentalize. I think professionally I have to. I don't want to lose and I don't think I have lost my sense of moral engagement with the topic I'm studying. But when I am researching and writing, I try to do it as dispassionately and professionally as I can. I think Holocaust history has to be written by the same rules of historical research and analysis and writing as any other part of my history, and that I have tried to bring to it. Having said, that despite all the kinds of documents that I've read there are moments when I was in the archive and I would come across a document that was simply something I never encountered before that just kind of took my breath away and at those moments I would just sort of have to take a pause

leave the archive and then come back the next day I can hear it in your voice I can I can literally hear it in your voice as you as you talk about that Yeah, it's awful. One of those days was when I read in the indictment, Major Trops offer. This, the point of choice, knowing that everything else that happened, people didn't have to do it. And, as you can see how you get, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So deeply connected to that, deeply connected to that piece. I think it's nice, or it would be nicer to imagine that they were forced to do this, you know? And it's like knowing that they were given the choice and that they chose to do it, most of them, the majority of them. I'm sure that just messed with your brain, you know? Yeah, it's like you didn't expect that. You didn't go into this thinking an ordinary person would be able to do this. Yeah, I mean, that's certainly from then on I knew I had a project I had to do.

And as you say, I mean, writing the book, I could write each chapter of sort of day by day. But then when I sat down to read the whole manuscript for the first time, cover to cover without stopping, and at the end I said, you know, why have I done this? This is too horrible for anybody to read. And that I didn't know what the fate of the book would be. Would it be so ghastly that simply no one could get through it? Or would it in fact managed to do what I'd hoped it would do, which would raise this whole issue and open a new avenue of Holocaust research, which we had not had yet. Yeah, I think on my podcast, I like to do some episodes on psychopathy. I like to do some episodes

on, you know, forensic stuff because I think a lot of therapists are wired to be highly agreeable. A lot of therapists are wired to be highly empathic. We don't want to imagine that people are capable of doing awful awful awful things and so we may miss some of the the signs that a culture a society how groups of people are talking about each other are driving the same historical archetypal evil and so i think it is very valuable to talk about it it's incredibly valuable the fact I asked you we did a pre-interview

which wasn't recorded I wish we would have recorded it but in the pre-interview I asked you where were the heroes like how many what percentage of the population of Germany

were actively resisting and you said well basically very few I mean you can get people who will be like the evaders that avoid doing the worst of the regime's dirty work but still, in the sense, enable it because even the men who wouldn't shoot in the battalion,

were still engaged in the roundups, still engaged in the ghetto clearings, and guarding accordion duty and so forth. So in Germany, you have a whole spectrum of behavior, and you have, of course, the enthusiastic Nazi go-getters, and you have those who are the profiteers on the regime trying to exploit what openings and benefits it offers to not to collaborate people who are the bandwagon Nazis or find ways to kind of use the system themselves. You have those who just keep their head down and waiting for better times.

But the number of people who take the risk to engage in active resistance, that is, not just not participating in the regime's rituals and whatever, but trying to, trying to in fact block them, to obstruct them, is one very dangerous. This is a regime that did not tolerate any kind of significant opposition or dissent, and very lonely. There were very few people whom shared your view in Germany, and that therefore you're in a sense going very much against the grain of the society around you in a very lonely quest try to save Germany from Hitler and the Nazis. So resistance where it occurred is really

quite extraordinary, but it is also extremely difficult, extremely dangerous and unfortunately, therefore, relatively rare. Now, in terms of, say, people in the killing units, as I say, the men who wouldn't take part basically are left alone. And in units, even without a major Trump making an offer. We know that individuals said, I won't do that. And no officer wanted a court marshal in which somebody is up there saying, you know, I told the major I wouldn't shoot unarmed women and children, and you're trying to try them for disobedience to orders. They didn't want that in the military justice system. The line that was drawn was not between saying no, that you could get away with. The line that you couldn't cross was trying to persuade

others in the unit to do likewise. Individual abstention a regime can easily tolerate, concerted, organized opposition. It cannot. So the people who would try to recruit others to not shoot, they would get immediately arrested and tried, but not for disobeying an order, not for refusing to shoot, but for trying to subvert morale, for trying to demoralize the unit by organizing, you know, federal soldiers or policemen against their officers, basically a mutiny. So there was a space in which individuals could with relatively little danger evade. But if you cross that line into doing anything that was concerted, anything that was organized with someone else, then the regime came down on you very, very harshly.

For the people who evaded, moreover, they had strategies to minimize their estrangement from their fellow policeman. Almost everyone who said, I won't shoot, then said, I can't do that because I am too weak. They didn't say, I can't do that because shooting unarmed civilians is immoral. I can't do that because we have a criminal regime. They could evade personally and not take part as long as they didn't challenge their comrades and challenge the regime. And they did that by simply saying, I am too weak to do it. That, of course, had the insidious effect of affirming and legitimizing the killers as the right model, which they could not live up to. And it was rhetorically successful in a sense keeping them from being estranged from their colleagues.

they were considered the weaklings, but not people who were reproaching their colleagues. And so that was the avenue that the vast majority of evaders followed to exempt themselves from the single worst thing, which was pulling the trigger and killing somebody at point-blank range. That created space to avoid that, but the price of doing that was supporting the other activities of the battalion and basically validating what your comrades were doing who did the killing. Yeah, so you talk about three groups and what you exactly just said jumped out to me as well was that the group that I would consider more heroic, the ones that were like, we don't want to pull the trigger, were considered weak. And that was kind of like how they were able to maintain, maybe be a part of the group, but not be ostracized by. the group too much, right? It would be too much if they were to say, I don't want to do this because I feel morally this is reprehensible. But to say I'm too weak, it's kind of like, okay, we're going to

give you a pass. And it seemed to me, even on that first day, the people that decided to shoot after they, if they had killed a couple people and they were like, I can't do this anymore, it seemed like there wasn't hazing of that person for not being able to continue. But there was almost like a good. Yeah, I mean, basically, the more I get into studying the world of national socialism, it is a truly inverted world that the people who had the courage and to have moral autonomy to not want to kill are weaklings. The people that go along have no control over their own destiny, simply take orders and

follow whatever they're doing, are considered the tough ones. And of course, they're the cowards and the ones who preserve their more. moral autonomy are the ones with incredible courage. So courage and cowardice, toughness and weakness are turned on their head. And in terms of how the morality of what they were doing was done, morality is turned on his head too. One of my colleagues, Thomas Kuna, an historian at Clark University, used the phrase, the morality of immorality. And let me explain, in a sense, with an example of that. In Serbia, where the Germans invaded Yugoslavia, carved the country up into its constituent

parts, and took Serbia as their own occupation zone under a military administration. There was an uprising headed mainly by Tito and the communists, which became very effective, and so their German response was sort of massive retaliation. and so a unit is brought in from the outside to conduct what was going to be called a punitive expedition. And the commander gives the order that this unit was to sweep through this area in the Sava Bend, the area in central Yugoslavia, where they were to hit the boat hit the entire population most hard. That they were not to, you know, men, women, children, everybody was,

in the enemy, they had to punish the entire population for this uprising that had taken place. So erasing again this distinction between non-combatants and combatants, which is at the core of most atrocities in mass murder. He then wanted to say, as difficult as this may seem, basically those who succumb to their humanitarian impulse, must keep in mind that they are sinning against the lives of their comrades. So you had a world in which to not shoot women and children was a sin, and to kill women and children was to uphold the morality of protecting the lives of your comrades. To kill was moral, to not kill was a sin. And it just absolutely turned on his head the whole notion of my own.

morality, and thou shall not kill. And the moral obligation then is, in fact, to kill women and children as long as they're on the other side. You know, when I hear that, I think it's easy for us to only see this happening in Nazi Germany, but this has happened in other cultures, societies, times. you know and to i i see it as well in like how often militaries will will emphasize dehumanizing stories about the enemies stories like you know pedophilia story you know stories like that which would stir up disgust in the average soldier towards the enemy any comment on that yes i mean this is in war all too common

One event will either be invented or it will be magnified into being the archetype of the entire other people so that they are, as you say, be dehumanized. One of the most gratifying things about the book is that it's been used at the military academies because it does force people to come to grips with this issue of how you, train troops or make them conscious of how easy it is to slip into, to demonizing the enemy, dehumanizing the enemy, and that being able to kill people that you shouldn't be killing. Just recently in the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic, did an article on General Mark Millie. And in there, Millie is talking about his encounter with President Trump trying to explain why Iraqi American soldiers who have been tried for war crimes

should not be pardoned and honored. And of course, it was a conversation in which there was no meeting of minds. But then Millie went on to say that he had been given a book by his friend, the former Israeli chief of staff. And it was Chris Browning's ordinary men. And he says it's an important book, and it's a text book about, it's a tale of moral degeneration. So Millie really got it.

I mean, he understood that this is a threat that faces every army. How do you train your men, discipline your men, so that you don't have the moral degeneration that so easily can take place once the mechanisms of dehumanization are in place? Yeah. I've worked at the VA, you know, as a resident, and I'd get to spend a lot of time with patients on the psychiatric unit. And often what surprised me the most was they had a rehearsed narrative

they would tell of battles of things, flat affect, would just tell it as if they were telling it a thousand times. But often they had a story of some demoralizing event which they shot a child. And it was that demoralizing event that

they didn't want to talk about and that continued to harass them in their sleep every night of their life unless they were drunk and so a lot of the guys would just drink every night and then when they would stop drinking

it would come back so it was like the trauma, the demoralization was there um so yeah I don't know I'm just resonating with what you're saying yeah well certainly in terms of battalion alcohol was

usually brought to the killing site. That is, the anesthetist of alcohol was part of the organizing a massacre and the people in the firing squaders get to have a couple of drinks before they started shooting and more after so that alcohol was understood to be an important part of the anesthetizing process, the desensitizing process. I've often been asked, you know, after the war, did these men have post-stratic stress syndrome? Did they carry this home? And how did they cope with what they had done after the war? And as far as I could tell in the period between the end of the war,

when, of course, Germany was in ruins and the last year of the war, the huge casualties Germany suffered both on the war fronts and at home, was equal to sort of more than all the other casualties and the other five years of the war. This was the real bloodbath for Germans themselves when the cost of the war came home to them that they had inflicted and exported elsewhere up until that point.

So they come home, and everybody else, of course, had had a hard time with the bombs and the Soviet occupation and whatever. And everybody wanted to forget together. So there is no, you know, what did you do in the war daddy kinds of questions? Everybody didn't want to raise any kind of questions

because they all have this issue of complicity with the Nazi regime. And there is a kind of universal amnesia. But then, strangely, what occurred to some of the men when they're brought in to be interrogated in the early 60s would make remarks such as, well, I hadn't thought about this for years, but now that I'm being forced to talk about it, I'm having nightmares. All of us came back. It was deep, within the deep freeze, and now it was thawing. and one man committed suicide. Only one of them committed suicide between his first, after his first interview and before his second interview, he jumped out of the second story of his house and killed himself. But others did admit to that this would be becoming quite disturbing. But in general, I would say the overall tenor of the interrogations was not remorse. It was not guilt. It was self-pity. basically how they framed their own lives, how they understood their own lives, was a colossal bad luck story.

In 1942, they had the bad luck to be drafted into a unit that was sent to Poland to do terrible dirty work on behalf of the regime. And they did it. And they came home and they got no medals. They got no rewards. What they got was a terrible defeat. And then 20 years later, somebody changed the rules of the game. And having been obedient, reserve policeman in 1940s doing terrible things on behalf of the regime, the new regime was now appalling them into court and trying to find out if there were criminals who should be tried and sent to jail. That was their second huge piece of bad luck. So they have a life of two pieces of colossal bad luck, poor them. Almost nothing about the victims, no consciousness of the horrible suffering they had inflicted

on others, but a great deal of concern for what they themselves, has suffered, which they framed as a double bad luck story. Yeah, I think it would take me probably less than an hour to get them into the deep shame that they're hiding. Of course, the, you know, self-pity as a defense, avoiding responsibility, trying to solicit support, creating a narrative to make sense of the horrible things. things they did. But I don't know. I just imagine there was physical ailments from the chronic stress and from the, you know, of what they had done. I just imagine, like, because I know Vietnam vets, and, I mean, not that they, like, not that we can draw a comparison between these two groups at all,

but higher rates of diabetes, higher rates of heart disease, higher rates of a lot of physical things just from being in a war, right? I mean, it's not unusual in taking care of a patient at the VA. They have 15 to 20 things on their problem list. So I'm just curious, like, did any of that come through as you sort of looked at it? And then, like, any physical stuff that maybe it was the manifestation of the stress. Yeah, I did. If it's there, I didn't know enough to pick it up. It may be their hints, but I don't remember people referring to problems of physical health. And, of course, even if they had, that may not be in the interrogation record. That is the man who's taking the notes of the conversations is putting down the information

that he thinks will be useful for the prosecutors. And for a historian, fortunately, lots of stuff gets put into that may be extraneous to the prosecutor, but terribly important to the historian. But what got left out, I don't know. And that may be well, it may well be one of the kinds of things that, one, the person who's taking the notes of the interrogation simply doesn't pick up either,

which you would pick up as a trained psychiatrist. I just can't say. It's a case where historians don't have the evidence. There's many questions we have that we would love to have more evidence. for and I would say this is one where I didn't I didn't find the evidence. If it's there, I wasn't good enough to pick it up. You know, it's interesting because I think when we go through a psychological trauma, the more severe the trauma, the deeper the repression.

And, you know, I think about when you, you know, when you read the reports on the defense, you know, at that point, these men had 20 plus years removed from the traumatic incidents, right? But I do wonder, you had a chapter on an individual named Captain Wolfgang Hoffman. And to me, this kind of does illuminate some of the traumatic symptoms that came up while in duty. It was almost as if he didn't have enough time to repress, so he was sort of in it. But I was curious, can you talk a little bit about what he experienced, his symptomology, how that sort of guided his leadership? Yeah, I mean, I think you're certainly right about the power of repression in these men. But Hoffman is one where it was quite overt, not later, but on the field.

He is one of the two SS captains in the unit. So he's aspiring to an SS career. He's the commander of second company. But in the areas where he's sending his men out to kill, on the days in which he should be leading them out to the massacres, he gets absolutely debilitating stomach cramps. And he's bedridden. He can't move. And he's in some bearing situation where he's ordering others to kill while physically he's

incapable of leading them on the field. And of course, for the men, this becomes immediately evident that he's making them do things that he cannot physically do himself. And certainly those the, what the men described is the absolute regularity of this pattern that he had, he suffered his terrible stomach cramps only when it came time for killing. It wasn't some of the kind of disease that would, you know, be there all the time. It wasn't ulcers. But so I ran this past, you know, several other medical people and they said, yeah, this is a clear evidence of psychosomatic illness. that this is a physical illness being triggered by psychological trauma,

and that he simply couldn't will his body to do what he wanted it to do. He wanted to kill, but his body, in a sense, quote, betrayed him. So he has a falling out, one with his men, and secondly, with the major, who has a captain on his hands who can't function. So he eventually is sent away. He goes off to the eastern front, has made the head of, of a unit of native auxiliaries that he organizes. And in real combat, he becomes a quite effective officer.

This man was not a coward in the military sense that he's afraid to risk his life or fight, but he apparently had some psychological limit where he could not simply shoot innocent people at point-blank range, even though he desperately wanted to and was terribly embarrassed that his body betrayed him. Yeah, and I think it's interesting because in real, reading about Hoffman prior to the killings. He had this like this really proud, rigid character. And he had this, it seemed that he had this temperament that was like almost unapproachable and strict. And so then for him to have this complete turnaround in his disposition and demeanor,

I think really illuminated the severity of the trauma. And then there were implications to that as well. Because after, you know, after that happened, his men had a completely different perception of him and he was considered, you know, no longer this strong, uh, military, formidable character. And now he's this sort of weakling. Um, so I found that to be just really powerful. It's like his body betrayed him. Yeah. I love, I love that line. His body betrayed him. It's like he wanted to be strong. He wanted to, but then somewhere deep inside of his soul, right? He just he couldn't stomach it, literally. Yeah.

Yeah, any, let's see. Any of the thoughts on that? I think for me it was moral injury was one of my thoughts. There's this idea, moral injury, slightly different than PTSD. Moral injury comes up when someone violates their own values or religious experiences. moral injury can overlap with PTSD, but it's not exactly the same. It doesn't have the same starter response to association, re-experiencing it.

It manifests more in avoidance, which we've talked about, self-loathing, depression, anhadonia, lack of pleasure, isolation, guilt, and shame. And so I'm curious, if you saw more of like a moral injury component, maybe if you think back to the things that you read. Well, certainly I didn't. have the concept when I was writing the book in the early 90s, but subsequently the whole notion of what we call cognitive dissonance came more into the literature. And that seemed to me very appropriate.

I wish I had known that term when I was writing, because I would have added that to my list of social psychological tools in a sense, because these men initially are engaged in a conduct that causes the trauma because they know what they're doing is breaking every norm and rule that they've been raised with. But they're part of a unit that's doing it. So they have these dual claims on them. Their own background and normal upbringing has rules about killing and the unit has its rules about killing and the two are in conflict. And many of the men cope with that. If you can't change, If one of them has to change, if you have to bring what you're doing in sync with what you are willing to accept and you can't get out of the unit, then you change your initial beliefs and begin to numb yourself to being sensitive about killing. And you create a consistent world in which, as I say, the Nazis invert sin and not killing is sinful.

Killing is coming to the aid of your comrades. Well, no, I'm curious. It's like, you know, I think about the dissonance. I think about the cognitive dissonance, not only with this particular military personnel, but I think about the idea that all of Nazi Germany from a very early start had this dissonance that they had to deal with, and particularly this group, you know, with this group not being indoctrinated by the Nazi ideology. So they had sort of their own mindset and their own perception. And I just, I wonder, you know, is that something that you feel that all of these men really struggled with significantly?

I'm not sure if we want to use the word struggle, because it seems as if they almost glide into this without much of a struggle. I mean, I'm sure there was for some, but the ease with which they make this transformation. One of the very rare documents we have written by one of these men is not from Police Battalion 101, but Police Battalion, Reserve Police Battalion 105, from the neighboring city, a North German origin, that went into Lithuania.

And the photographer of Company 3 and Reserve Police Battalion 105 wrote letters every week to his wife, and she kept them, preserved them, and we have them. So we can trace right through his own letters week by week the process of degeneration. He starts out with the invasion in early July. First of all, even as they first come in, he had been in Norway, which was very cushy, you know, stationing. And now they're sent to take part in Operation Barbarossa and the invasion of the Soviet Union. And on the eve of the invasion, the officers of all the units were orally, were instructed to orally give their troops the so-called secret orders, which nobody wanted to have in writing because if somebody was killed and captured, it would provide information to the enemy.

But these were the orders about collective retaliation and about mass reprisals if people were shot on and things about the German conduct of the occupation that were totally in violation of all international laws that existed up to that point. And the guy writes, you know, that when his officer gives his speech, he sort of thinks he's just posing and sort of playing tough guy. And he, that the officers, you know, think they're such grand people, you know, such big, big shots. And he obviously doesn't understand that this is quite literal. Then they go into Lithuania and he basically says, oh, yeah, this is nothing like Oslo. And here he says, the Jews are fair game.

They can't buy anything in the stores. They have no future. And he goes on to say, anybody could impress them as kind of servants. So my bunkmaid and I have two Jewish servants, 13 and 15 years old. Nowhere can the Jews buy anything, any food to eat. I cannot be so tough, we give them our bread. I cannot be so tough, we give them our bread. That's early July.

early August he's writing and describing to his wife was happening. This is when they make this transition now to systematic mass killing. He says, here all the Jews are being shot men, women, and children. And then he goes on to say, don't talk about this, don't show this part of the letter to our daughter. And so two things here. One, he's obviously feeling a sense of shame that you don't want, this is something. the kids should not hear. And secondly, it's in what I call the anonymous passive. Here, all the Jews are being shot. It's not my unit is killing them. It's not I am killing them, but the Jews are being

shot. Now, that formulation appears in all sorts of post-war testimony, the passive voice. The Jews were killed. The Jews were put into the trains. But in fact, as a defense mechanism, I realize now, that the passive voice was being used even by the people in the field as the killing was taking place. He writes to his wife and the passive voice about what his unit and the Germans around them are actively doing. And then he goes on after the Jews, this area have been killed, they're still facing partisans. And he talks about how angry the men are when, you know, here they're in deep, you know, they're deep in Lithuanian territory. And the notion that Lithuanians have a right to resist is just unheard of.

When they're shot at by the partisans, the men become so angry, they want to kill all Russians. It's genocidal language. When we're ambushed like this, we want to kill all Russians. He goes on, as a photographer, there's a massacre, a execution of captured Protestants that took,

that took place. And he tells his wife, This is now getting into early fall. I missed the execution. It was said to have been fun. And then finally, later he gets to the point where he says, oh, there was another execution. I got it on my camera.

I have it on film. And then he goes on to say, it will be a great souvenir for our children. This is the guy who in July says, don't tell our daughter now is collecting souvenirs for her kids, of photographs of massacres. And this is the most astonishing line of downward moral degeneration. Desensitation.

It's just, I mean, you'd hardly believe it if you didn't see the letters and actually see that progression of dehumanization, of desensitization that takes place. Sometimes with clients all ask them, if you had a kid, would you allow this to happen? to them or if you had a daughter, if you had a son, it almost like takes it out of the sort of the slow acclimatization because I'm seeing the cognitive dissonance, you know, but they can't see it anymore. And what you're saying is that that person would say,

oh, absolutely. I would absolutely want my son or daughter to do it. you know and that's just like a complete like the you know it's it's almost like once they started doing it their defenses came on more and more to like protect themselves from realizing how evil it truly was yeah but also shows the power how people can be changed by what they do and see that the participation in this really changes who they are i mean the guy who says in early july i give them my bread I can't be so tough is now within four months collecting massacre photographs for his kids so that there is a you know it's as a it is a transformation that that that these men

undergo is I would argue caused by what they are doing and what they are seeing yeah no it's well it's like yeah what you do okay so And this is another question of mine. It's like we're talking about cognitive dissonance. Was there a cognitive dissonance because they believe so much propaganda regarding the Jews? And they were kind of saturated in that propaganda. So was there really that cognitive dissonance? Because I think about cognitive dissonance is like you have a biblical belief.

And then you have like this belief that, you know, I should shoot and kill innocent people. And it's like there's the cognitive dissonance. But do you think that they have this cognitive dissonance, because their ideology was so dehumanizing of the Jews. Well, certainly, given the immediate persecution of Jews when they enter this area, and then he says, I cannot be so tough, I give them my bread. Obviously, his own ability to identify these people as human beings,

and human beings need to have food, with what is the reality happening to most of the Jews, whom they are living, yes, that's cognitive. dissonance. And the degree then to which he resolves that by basically dispensing with the sensitivity about Jews being human beings and the occupation. I mean, the people are killing after August are mostly Russians and Lithuanians now. So it's not just Jews, but anybody in the occupied area that are, quote, the enemy, any sympathy with them, any recognition of their humanity is basically what disappears so that he doesn't have to say, I can't be so tough.

He can be quite tough enough to take pictures at executions and save them for his kids. Okay. What about the idea, though, that there was so much propaganda and ideological influence around Jews being less than humans. They were obviously even portrayed as animals. I know that a lot of propaganda had done that. looking at how that's combined with the capacity for human aggression

is this what led them to be such vicious predators that combination of this I guess looking at the capacity of human aggression is what I'm asking you know as when I was reading this text it got me thinking you know what is all of our capacities for aggression and if we have the right influences can it tap into any of us

and can that level of aggression be externalized Does that make sense? Yes, but I think you also have to be, that has to be set in the context in which these people are operating. And, you know, for me, one of the sort of things I was trying to explain, not just in this book, but more overall, is that in 1938 with the Kristallnacht riots and the burning of synagogues, the Nazis own reports and collecting information about, public mood. That was not popular. Legal, clean, unemotional persecution of Jews was one thing. Violent pogroms, mobs, beatings, physical attacks in the streets violated all sorts of German notions about law and order, and burning synagogues violated notions about sanctity of houses of worship. And the regime realized that this had not been popular. And this had put the

regime and the population in a sense in a position of cognitive dissonance where they would like to support the regime and were willing to accept the regime's claim that Jewish policy was legitimate. There was a Jewish problem and it had to be solved. And what they were witnessing with their own eyes, which was quite shocking. The people who were shocked in 1938 are killing Jews en masse in the Soviet Union in 1941. And what I argue is in part is because you've totally researched. shape the environment they are in. In 1938, they're at peace, in 1941, they're at war. In 1938,

they're at home in Germany. In 1941, they're a deep in occupied territory. In 1938, they're facing German Jews who dressed like them, speak their own language, or highly cultured as Germans. In 1941, they are facing Osteuden, these very strange dressed people, long, curly, you know, curls and wearing strange clothes and speaking Yiddish or Slavic languages. So that the context in which you can now, it's so much easier to dehumanize the Jew, one, in wartime when it's the enemy, two, when the Jews look and speak differently than you do, they're not German neighbors, they're not the people who have been customers in your stores and classmates of your kids, but they're these very strange people in the East,

which is already an alien territory. They're aliens within an alien territory. They're doubly alien. And in the wartime where they can be seen as enemy, everything you do can be the Nazi propaganda head was very clear. The Jews support the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks are

behind the Soviet regime or the Soviet regime and Red Army. So the connection from the Red Army to the Bolsheviks to the Jew is a straight line. And that is at the core of much of the propaganda that the men are being fed.

So the barbarosa opens up the possibility of a, not only of a general war of destruction, but a war of destruction that is including a racial war against the Jews. And as part of the package. So when you can package killing Jews as part of war and part of what distantly happens in these alien, unbarized, uncivilized areas to the east, where the enemy doesn't value human life, so how can you value human life? so how can you value human life and so on, that you can package this whole thing

in a conumbra that just makes killing people and killing Jews normal. You can normalize it. I know in Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, there were severe restrictions on freedom of speech. And I'm curious if you see that as like a progression of like restricting freedom of speech, instituting more and more propaganda, dehumanizing a group of people as kind of like a pathway? Oh, certainly. I mean, when Hitler comes to power, the very first thing he does, when he's appointed Chancellor on January 30th, the very first thing he does within a week is go to Hindenburg and ask Hindenberg to use his emergency powers in the Constitution to suspend the rights of free speech, free press, and freedom of assembly.

Then we will have an election. And of course, the Nazis running an election in which your opposition has no free speech, press, or assembly, it means that it isn't a free election. Even in that election, the Nazis only got 44% of the vote. Even in an election without free expression, they could not get to 50%. But, of course, over time, most historians think that by 36, 37, with the recovery, of the economy, the rejection of airside treaty, the national economic successes, Hitler would have won overwhelmingly in the election if it had been held. He didn't need to rig elections by then, but he didn't need to have elections, much less rig them. But in 33, he is still, the Nazis are

not at the beginning of their rule, are not capable of even in a coerced election getting 50% of the vote. But as you say, over time, when you can saturate, virtually every media from the schoolroom to the newspapers to the radio to the movie screen, and there's only one message allowed, is pretty hard to keep a different frame of reference, to transcend the frame of reference that the regime is providing as to what's going on. And so I call that, you know, living inside the Nazi bubble. How do you get outside that? And for the men of 101, they were old enough to have a different reference.

They could remember in their own experience back to the 20s. Younger Germans raised in the Hitler youth and Hitler school curricula with Nazi teachers, what other reference points do they have? How do you sort out a system of values and whatever against which you measure the Nazi regime and find it wanting? The Nazis create the reference points by which they're measured, and these people have no other, if they're truly raised in the Nazi bubble, they have basically no other reference points beyond that.

Yeah, I was also thinking, the mind-blowing aspect to this to me was you have basically 200 men that kill 80,000 people. And I was thinking, like, why didn't masses of Jewish people rebel? But then I was thinking, well, the Germans took away their guns.

And so do you think, that was also a part of it is like, you know, making owning guns illegal, it just made it easier for the Jewish, for this atrocity to happen. I'm very reluctant to reference this, because this is one of the right-wing phony claims, no guns, no Holocaust. And so let me frame it this way. First of all, gun control in Germany, became stronger in the early 20s when the right wing carried out over 350 political assassinations in the four years after World War I. I mean, Americans, we have some violence, but Germany in the early 20s was saturated with gun violence.

And so, yes, there were gun laws in attempting to do this. Nonetheless, guns were not remotely as widely accessible as they are in the United States now. But I'll put as bluntly as I can. 1939, the Germans defeated Poland, which had one of the largest armies in Europe in a month. In June of 1940, they overran and defeated France, which had the largest land army in Europe, and defeated them in five weeks. The notion that Grandma Rumenstein in her old people's home if she had only had a derringer in her purse, or if Moshe, the Taylor, had only had his hunting rifle, that they would have stopped the Nazi. regime in its tracks. And the Holocaust would have happened strikes me as one of the most absurd political fantasies that one, the historical fantasies that one could possibly imagine.

That the Nazis overran all of Europe, every army there, and that the notion that a few citizens, if only they had a gun in their closet, this wouldn't have taken place, is just ridiculous. I just cannot emphasize that enough. That's just so absurd. It really is just not on the table for rational discussion. Now, how, of course, in Poland, they did this in part was, of course, they occupied the country, they had monopoly of force, and that they took things village by village, ghetto by ghetto, and that they always would bring superior force to the point at which they were going to get the operation, and that the main alternative for Jews was certainly not to try to get a pistol on the black market or something like that, but to either hide or run. And if you didn't,

then you were caught and either killed or sent off on a train to the gas chamber. But the point at which, you know, attempts were then made to collect guns in the Warsaw Ghetto becomes the main clear one. Once the vast bulk of the population had already been deported in the summer fall of The resistance takes over the ghetto inside. There is a sense of revolution inside the ghetto that overthrows the Jewish Council and the Jewish police, takes control of the ghetto, and they desperately try to get guns. And, of course, it's very difficult because no country in Europe had guns floating around in the hundreds of millions like we do in the United States. and that basically they could arm themselves with a few guns, but very few. And still then, needless to say, the Nazis that invaded the ghetto were fully armed,

equipped with modern firearms, and the ghetto fighters had a few pistols and a couple of machine guns. It was not at all going to ever be an equal contest of civilians against a military force. whatever the collection of private weapons, the civilian force had tried to gather. But it really is the ability of the Nazis to take each place one by one, bringing the day of the day, they're the ones to schedule the day of the ghetto clearing. They're the day that scheduled the massacre, and they know when they have to bring superior forces to bear at that point. And the Jews, of course, are left in the dark. They aren't informed when these day is coming.

And the rational response is to dig hiding places in bunkers and try to time your escape to the forest, right? But even in the forest, you have partisans and others that don't want Jews there, attracting the Germans. They don't want to share the forest and limited resources with Jewish refugees that have fled there. So the forest is not safe either. And it's a situation of such asymmetrical power that Jews. had nothing but bad options to choose from. There is no good option that any of them could have chosen because they are the powerless group in an environment where there's both no support from spounding population and overwhelming power in the hands of the Germans. Yeah, I think there's a couple

things that come to my mind. One is the organized taking over of power, taking over of multiple lanes of power, grouping people together. You know, and, you know, what would it be today? It would be like drones, right? So we'd be fighting with guns versus drones probably or something. So it'd be like, you know, maybe an even more unequal battle. But yeah, I'm just curious because I feel like, yeah, you have been co-opted. I've seen several, like when you search your name, the more right-handed people have quoted your book quite a bit, but I think it seems like you are not deferential to that. You know, I welcome everybody to read my book. I only hope that those who have cited it actually read it, because too often it's cited by people who haven't actually read the book

and haven't really come to grips with the arguments that it's making. But I welcome everyone to buy it and to read it. Okay, so here's the question. What is the most, what are some mischaracterizations of the book? Yeah, I think there are two. One is the, if only they had guns, this wouldn't have happened. If, you know, no gun control, no Holocaust, which, as I've said, I think, is so a historical and out of touch with reality.

The second is, in a sense, to look at the book and see it as the model of what a government, a deep state, if we can use that term, wants to mobilize ordinary people to eliminate their targeted group. This is how easy it is to do. This is the danger they imminently face. And of course, it's basically the Nazis are transferred to being, in a sense, the deep state of the United States, and the Jews are now those who are opposed to it. we're going to be the victims if they don't bring about an end to the current evil regime. Yeah, and one of my thoughts is that I think there's throughout the world different people groups dehumanize other people groups, which I think we can across the board say we should be very

careful to use dehumanizing language, whether you know, you're on the right or the left. When we see it happen, we should identify in our minds, oh, this is dehumanizing language. I don't care if I agree with this group that they're dehumanizing or not. Do we really want to dehumanize them? Would you agree with that sentiment? Well, certainly that's been a political tool for ages. Nazis did not invent dehumanizing your opposition, denigrating them, delegitimizing them. this has been part of political discourse, I've been afraid, for centuries.

It becomes express really dangerous. It's always potentially dangerous. It becomes really dangerous when you have a regime that is not just doing it for rhetoric, but in fact is taking it literally as well and intends to act upon it. I also think about when reading this book, I think it's important for us to do an analysis in modern day society where we might see the potential for something like this to come up again, right? Like I think that's a lesson of this book.

And so I'm curious, groups or maybe subgroups or situations in current day society where you see maybe the potential for the propensity of something like this to unfold again and maybe not at the same magnitude of Nazi Germany, but like as the author of this book and you look around, are there situations in current-day society where you say to yourself, oh, okay, we better be ready for this or prepared, or this creates a sense of anxiety or concern. Does that ever come up for you right now? Oh, well, certainly when one looks at the rhetoric of Russia versus the Ukraine in which the Ukrainians are characterized as Nazis. And of course, in Soviet memory, the World War II is the great patriotic war. The Nazis are the

arch symbol of all evil. which is not hard to say because in many ways they were, but to take the fact that in the 1940s, when the Nazis came to the Ukraine, given how many Ukrainians had perished in the 30s under Stalinist policies of mass starvation, needs to say there were Ukrainians who welcomed the Nazis as liberators, not realizing

they didn't come to liberate, but they came to take the black soil for themselves. And so the Nazis had no trouble creating auxiliary militias of Ukrainians who became the trigger-pollers of the Holocaust. Many of the Jews in the Ukraine were shot by Ukrainians under German command. And so for Putin to invoke Ukrainians as Nazis harkens back to World War II. what it admits, of course, is that since then, the Ukraine has democratized and Russia has not, that the real reason Putin is invading the Ukraine is that after 214 throughout the Putin psychopaths and run on a pass with democratization with threatens to create an example that Putin can't

stand as a neighbor because it would expose the dictatorship and the hollowness of his own regime. But the way to dehumanize Ukrainian Democrats is to label all Ukrainians as Nazis, invoking the fact that some Ukrainians, indeed, were Nazi collaborators 80 years ago. So we see that process of dehumanization and labeling in the Russian invasion of the Ukraine quite clearly. I'm going to jump back to kind of like what your psychological... sort of what you came to as like, this is something that we should look at. Specifically, you looked at the prison, the Stanford Prison Experiment, and your understanding of Police Battalion 101. How are they similar and how are they different in your mind?

Well, similarity in the sense, what Zimbardo was testing, that if you randomly selected people and you put one group in prison guard, you need. uniforms and empowered them and charged them with controlling their prisoner population. That, in effect, they broke into three groups. There was one group that were the inventive cruelty, the ones who used this chance to exercise power to invent and think of all sorts of ways to torment and make the lives of their prisoners miserable because this made them more docile and more controllable. There was a middle group that simply looked at the rulebook and went by the rules.

This is what prison guards were supposed to do. This is what we were assigned to do. We'll follow the book. And then there were the two, quote, good guards who, when they didn't think anybody else was looking and were picked up on hidden camera, did small favor, small acts of mitigation to make the prisoners lot somewhat less miserable. So it's certainly, to me, both one confirmed that spectrum that I had come up with 101 that this collection of role-playing prison guards fell into as well. So that certainly was a similarity.

And I think we can see in terms of what I've, if I call some of the men in Battalion 101 eager killers, there were several of the men. who became eager prison guards. The guy, you know, with the glasses and the, you know, feeling, he obviously got high on what he was doing. He obviously got a sense of exhilaration in fulfilling this role. Jeremiah, what's that quote you had from that guy? Yeah, so one of the sadistically oriented guards, this was his quote,

he said, I ran my own little experiment to see how far I could go, to see how degrading I could be before people objective. And so he really, I mean, and that got me thinking about some of the eager killers, too. And I think these are obviously the folks that do have, you know, the psychopathological traits. And I think if with any subgroup of the population, they're going to be there. And I think that this gentleman represented that. He was almost this, he was really getting joy and pleasure out of being sadistic. The crazy thing about this is they did psychological testing before.

and they tried to exclude people like this. And the other crazy thing is we're not talking about 2% of the police battalion. Like psychopathy runs about 2% for men in the population, 1 to 2%. And so I don't think it's pure psychopathy. It's almost like, I don't know, it's it's far, the percentage far exceeds what we would expect for just psychopaths in the population. I usually don't use the word sadist for the eager killers because I think, in fact, the eager killers were far more than the number of people we would clinically define as sadists. That, as you say, in the barter experiment, they were tried to screen these people out.

They were given various psychological tests to not include predictable sadists, and nonetheless, the situation produced people who became eager guards, just as the situation produced people who became eager killers, that afterwards returned to quite normal lives. The people who were eager killers did not, you know, were not as far as we know, particularly cruel people in Germany before, 1942, or particularly cruel after. And it's that almost Jekyllyn Hyde quality, where in the same. situation they found themselves in, they've become this very different set of behaviors that are clearly in a significant part produced by situation and not by, I think, particular or abnormal

psychological traits. Yeah. Sorting out, you know, the individual psychology and the susceptibility of situation and the degree to which you will go to the extreme in that situation is, you know, that's more in your camp than mine. I don't have the training to quite sort that out, nor do I think we probably have the evidence from these interrogations to sort that out either. Well, I think his quote of, I ran my own little experiment, there was something about that that struck me as like psychopathic, right? And often, you know, if you're a psychopathic, you're taking a personality

test, you're not going to often give the truth, right? You're going to try to act normal. Okay, but there's one other thing I was thinking about, and this is the commonality that I saw between Police Battalion 101 and both Milgram's experiment, which I want to get to a little bit more, and the Stanford person experiment is that there's, in these experiments, the people that they're drawing into the experiment have been enculturated in our society to science. trust the researcher, trust this high institution where this research is taking place. This research has value. It's very important.

And so there's this kind of enculturation, right? Especially if you've gone through college, and most of these are college students, Stanford students. Whereas in the police battalion, there's this inculturation to go with what the authority says, go with what the government says. Like, these are your people. This is your tribe. This is your, I don't know. Is that a commonality that you thought was important? Oh, yes. I mean, certainly the fact that this is situated as a unit in occupied territory in wartime.

Go with your tribe is a very strong kind of pressure on these men. And the major himself says, you know, I would never ask you to do this. This is not personal. But this is, the regime has assigned us this task. So the task comes from above. what you're doing is not out of your own personal volition. It doesn't say something about you as a person, but this is government policy so that you can unload the responsibility in effect. Trump is, you know, Major Trump, sorry, Major Trump is in effect unloading his own responsibility on the regime and allowing the men to do so likewise, that you remain yourself,

this is somebody else's moral decision and if you do it, you're not doing it because you're a bad person. I think that was a Freudian slip. Okay, to Milgram's experiment, how was Milgram's experiment adding to your understanding of the police battalion? Yeah, there are, in a sense, it's... And maybe we should, like, just remind our audience, this was the experiment where, you know, you have,

a researcher who's telling someone, hey, we're going to shock this person in the other room. It's going to be escalating. We're going to start low. And then the experimenter listens to an actor. They don't know they're an actor who's being shocked. Progressively, their yells get louder until they go silent. And only 30% stopped and didn't want to do it, right?

Which is like a small percentage. Yeah. And so you have, again, the bulk of the piece. deferring to the authority of the scientist in his white lab coat and his clipboard and symbolizing, as you put it, the legitimacy, the authority of science. And so again, the responsibility for what's happening is on that distant authority. You're just the cog and the machine. So the attempt to sense transfer responsibility. And Milgram did try to emphasize that, that these people in the experiment were basically not acting with their own moral authority, but transferring it to,

displacing it onto the outside, to the scientist with the clipboard. And Tromp and his speech was trying to create, I think, that same mechanism. Now, when Milgram did the, when we talked about the experiment afterwards, he thought the deference to authority was, was very key. But he also noted that men would cite conformity in their post-experiment interviews. And he thought citing conformity was a kind of way of, again, of copying out, placing responsibility elsewhere. But he thought men cited that conformity was.

was a part, but I'm, as long as I don't remember the quite formulation, but basically he thought that conformity was, you know, was probably a bigger part than the men admitted to. They preferred the shift of responsibility in their explanation than they simply went along with the group. In a sense that conformity was a bigger factor than the men themselves would admit to, because it wasn't as exonerating. Well, in my interviews that I looked at, the interrogations, conformity is cited much more than any other factor. So if conformity is the hidden iceberg, and I have that much citation of the power of conformity, desire not to be the outsider in the unit, to be part of the unit, then by Milgram's arguments, it was even bigger than what the men

confessed to. And it was already, in their case, the major factor that they cite. So in terms of the balance, in Milgram's experiments, post-experiment, most of the men tried to cite authority for what they did in the battalion, insofar as they commented, the majority cited conformity as the most powerful group pressure that they faced. Okay, so yeah, I mean, it's so stark to see that conformity is so powerful, right? It's just, it's eye-opening. And I'm curious, do you think someone listening to this learning about the power of conformity? Like, is that enough to make them conform less when going against moral principles or going against their conscience or

going against the laws of human nature, their conception of morality? The real answer is I don't know. I hope. This is the scientist in you. Okay, but you hope. I like that. My aspiration is that the book will help change consciousness

that people will be more aware of, and certainly if it influences people who will be in command situations and people who are training people in military, and police units that this will have an effect. The book was used by people who were involved in police reform and police training in New Orleans. So it's been used in police training, has been used in military training. And so I'm hoping there is at least some ripple effect there. The person who did this in New Orleans told me, you know, she gave the book to this group that she was working with.

And when they came back, she asked somebody, what they think of the book. He says, well, it's a very good book, but what does Poland have to do with us? He couldn't make the connection. So he didn't quite understand why the book had been assigned. Hopefully the discussion that followed would change that. But his immediate reaction was, well, this was a good book, but what does Poland have to do with us? And didn't somehow see this as immediately relevant to his position as a policeman. Jeremiah, maybe I'll ask you a question now. Okay, imagine you're with a patient.

How might you use this information to help a patient where maybe you see them conforming in a way that's against their own internal state morality, so to speak? Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think if I had a patient who was struggling with this, I would have a couple different models. You know, just learning about this work reminds me of the work of Victor Frankel. Logo Therapy, you know, Victor Frankel was a Holocaust survivor turned psychiatrist. And, you know, one of Frankl's findings while he was in a concentration camp, you know, his whole family being killed, was that we are meaning-making entities.

We make meaning out of all of our experiences. So the first thing that I think I would do with the patient is I would have them construct their own sense of meaning of what was happening externally. after that, I would then encourage them to potentially determine if there's some cognitive dissonance going on. So let's say that there's some sort of ideological, political, cultural beliefs that are happening systematically on a macro level. I would encourage them to find some sort of individualistic view that they have that may differ from that collective power. And I would really encourage them to wrestle with that, right? So let's say that like 80% of them agrees with the social forces around them, but maybe they have that like 20% that says something otherwise.

I would encourage them to lean into that 20% because I think that 20% is that autonomy, right? And that reminds me of the evading killers. Like there was something very special about these guys who refused to do the killing. And I think they did some deep introspective work. I mean, they had to wrestle with this. And so that's what I would have my patient do. I would have them wrestle with it, and I would have them acquire data. And I would say, hey, look, what's the best thing to do here?

What's the most appropriate thing to do here based on the meaning that you've constructed, based on your deliberation between the dissonance and your mind, and what's most effective for the world around you? Dr. Browning, how is it listening to a therapist pontificate on what they would do? Oh, very interesting. Let me go back to this sort of tripartite division and this issue of the, of the, of the, the so-called good people or the ones who managed to not take part. I had based that, of course, upon reading the interrogations of the men. And some of the criticism was, well, how could the battalion have continued to function

if you had that many evaders? Was this possible? And I've certainly found other cases where we can do a headcount, and it is possible that a significant portion of the men cannot participate. and the efficiency of the killing unit is not impaired. But the other one is that I did a, in a sense, a bookend study. This, the Morton of Mnumina, of course, is based on the post-war interrogations of the perpetrators. And I did a kind of bookend study of the survivor test, based on survivor testimonies,

of a collection of slave labor camps in central Poland and a small industrial town of Straakovica. And there I had 292 different people who gave one or more testimonies. And since one of the criticisms of ordinary men was, well, it's all based on the Germans, the German testimonies are mendacious, how can I make real conclusions based on corrupted evidence and that I'm being suckered by the corrupted evidence. But when one looks at a different set of evidence of people who were in constant contact with German perpetrators, which are prisoners in a labor camp, where they and the people who are running it are face-to-face in contact for close to two years, what do they say about German perpetrators? What was their take on this? And remember, survival depends upon them reading Germans well.

If you're in a camp run by Germans, if you don't know the difference between one German and another, if you don't know how to negotiate between the different German groups and you treat them as a monolith, you're not going to survive. And what emerges from studying the language of the testimonies, the way they referred to different Germans, was they broke down to three groups. One group were the, quote, dangerous Germans. When they came into the camp, dead Jews was the result, they killed people. And when they came, you fled, you hid, you got out of their way, you avoided the dangerous Germans because the dangerous Germans were gratuitous killers.

A second group were the corrupt Germans. These are people you could negotiate with. These are people you could bribe. These are people that, in a sense, even with the weapons of the weak, you could have some kind of negotiate. arrangement in terms of making the Germans have a self-interest in the survival of the Jewish workers to produce better and so forth, if they would improve the rations of the workers, if they improve the medicine of the workers, if they would keep the dangerous Germans sort of out of the way, or give warning when the SS was coming to inspect. because it was in their interest, they would profit from keep preserving their Jewish workers.

And then there was a small group they referred to as the, quote, decent Germans. And this was a very small number of people who, if you were really in trouble, you could go to, and they would treat you as a human being. They would shelter. If you were too sick to work the shift, you didn't leave you in the camp because if people came through, they'd shoot the sick Jews who were too sick to work. They would hide a sick Jew or give them some kind of task that they could do that wasn't taxing. They would allow their prisoners to do things that other, you know, foreman and so forth wouldn't, but a small number of decent Germans with whom you could find some kind of refuge when things were really dangerous. So this is the testimony of the survivors.

This is not corrupted self-interested German testimonies. came up with, in effect, the same kind of tripart division, or not the same division, but a tripart division of how Germans broke down in the eyes of the prisoners in terms of how they had to approach each of these groups, of course, very differently, because survival depended upon knowing which Germans were the decent Germans, which Germans were the dangerous Germans, and which Germans were the corrupt Germans, because you had to approach each of those in a very different way. Yeah. I think we all want to imagine we're going to be part of the decent Germans or even better, like that rare Schindler from Schindler's list or, you know,

like kind of the exception, right, like the one in a million type of thing. And I think my hope from you guys listening to this is that you take away that there is a strong drive for conformity we can abdicate our responsibility by, you know, thinking of the person that is in charge as holding the responsibility rather than considering our own moral ground, our own moral footing. Yeah, are there any other big takeaways, Jeremiah, you're taking away? And then Christopher, I'll give you the last sort of reflections as we wrap this thing up. Yeah, I just think, you know, as mental health professionals, I think we're living in a world where we're seeing elements of this. And I think that it's vital as therapists that we're mindful of this with our patients when they come into the office and that this is just a reality in our world. And obviously, we're not at the point where these men more in ordinary men. But I think we just need to be really mindful that there's a lot of group think. There's a lot of bias. There's a lot of polarization. And I think, people get sucked into that. And I just really want to encourage critical thinking for ourselves

as therapist, mental health professionals, and for patients. Any final thoughts, Dr. Browning? Yes. I mean, I think one of the lessons of the book is, of course, that a regime that wants to commit mass murder does not fail to do so for a lack of executions. Whatever problems they face, the bottleneck is not being unable to find people to pull the trigger or to conduct face-to-face killing with their victims, that this is a potential that modern states have. So the best line of defense is to make sure we don't have regimes that want to commit mass murder. And therefore, it's utterly essential to promote democratic regimes that are committed

to human rights, dedicated to the principles of value of human life. and that if you have a president that is, or not a president, if you have someone who is promising retribution, that that should be taken seriously. That when you have someone running for power who is promising retribution, that is a sign that ought to be a red flag to any person who cherishes democracy.

That's good, yeah. Well, I appreciate you coming on. This has been an epic. I feel like this was a piece of history recording this with you, having you long form talk about this monumental, historical, you know, brutally, brutally honest and very brutal, but hopefully we can take away some things that change the course of history. So thank you for coming on. And yeah, we'll leave it there for today. Thank you. Thank you.