The chief perpetrators of the Holocaust were Adolph Hitler, his top Nazi henchmen and a bureaucracy charged with deporting and exterminating Jews during the Second World War. But they could not have murdered millions without assistance. When it came to the act of killing on the Eastern Front, the new Netflix documentary “Ordinary Men” introduces us to the foot soldiers of the Nazi genocide.
Many were neither Nazi party members nor committed fascist ideologues. The ordinary men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 held jobs like baker, craftsman or plumber back home in Hamburg before being sent to the front in 1942. Nothing in their backgrounds would have indicated a willingness, once in uniform and given their orders, to mass shoot defenseless Jews hundreds of miles from their homes in the “Holocaust by bullets.” But shoot Jews they did, with a few exceptions. No more than 20% of battalion refused the assignment, according to historian Christopher Browning.
At a time when the term “genocide” is being used in acrimonious debates about the Israel-Hamas war — as politicians, activists and even serious scholars debate the propriety of invoking the Holocaust to defend or attack either side in the conflict — the Netflix documentary confronts us with difficult questions. What explains humans’ capacity to inflict harm on “the other?” What are the consequences of dehumanizing and violent rhetoric?
In this episode of History As It Happens, Holocaust scholar Thomas Kuehne discusses the psychology of mass murder while drawing distinctions between the uniqueness of the Nazis’ crimes and today’s events.
“On an individual level, you will certainly find perpetrators of the Holocaust and Hamas fighters you seem to be similar, but we should be aware that the settings are very different. Hamas are religiously motivated fanatics and are comparable only remotely to the Nazi fanatics of their time,” said Mr. Kuehne, the author of “Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918-1945.”
SEE ALSO: History As It Happens: The question of genocide
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