Masters of Death by Richard Rhodes Read Free Book Online Page A

stigmatizing and shunning can have lethal consequences under combat conditions and are therefore powerful social controls when directed against soldiers who use violence malefically. Distancing — mechanically (killing at a distance with artillery or bombs) or organizationally (multiple executioners shooting at the same time)— also effectively limits socialization beyond defensive violence.
    Constraining soldiers to defensive violence is important to militaries for reasons more immediately practical than simply conforming to treaty obligations limiting military violence: soldiers whose experiences and choices have carried them through virulency to criminal maleficence are subversive of military discipline and dangerous not only to the enemy but also to their own ranks, particularly to the superiors who order them into harm’s way. Bartov describes the development of just such complications in the Wehrmacht after Barbarossa:
    Within the ranks of the army, breaches of combat discipline were punished with unprecedented harshness and contempt for life; conversely, soldiers were ordered to commit “official” and “organized” acts of murder and destruction against enemy civilians, POWs and property; and, as a consequence of the legalization of criminality, the troops soon resorted to “wild” requisitions and indiscriminate shootings explicitly forbidden by their commanders. In stark contradiction to the harsh combat discipline, however, the troops were rarely punished for unauthorized crimes against the enemy, both because of their commanders’ underlying sympathy with such actions, and because they constituted a convenient safety valve for venting the men’s anger and frustration caused by the rigid discipline demanded from the men and by the increasingly heavy cost and hopelessness of the war. Thus a vicious circle was created whereby the perversion of discipline bred increasing barbarism, which in turn further brutalized discipline.
    Athens’s violent-socialization model supplies an evidence-based instrument through which to view the Third Reich, and specifically the Einsatzgruppen, that may help to illuminate their history and thus the history of the Holocaust.
    When Field Marshal and Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, a giant with a basso profundo voice, invited Adolf Hitler to assume the chancellorship of Germany on 30 January 1933, the new Führer installed a government of criminals and radicalized former soldiers, including convicted assassins such as Nazi Party official Martin Bormann and future Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. Nearly thirty percent of Nazi Party members had a strong militaristic background, many of them as irregulars fighting in the streets as members of the Freikorps, which were responsible for nearly four hundred political assassinations in the postwar years of turmoil.
    Hitler himself had been imprisoned at Landsberg in 1924 for high treason for his part in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, which included firing into the air to take command of a crowd and holding hostages at gunpoint. Before that, in 1921, he and two other party leaders had rushed a speaking platform and assaulted a Bavarian monarchist speaker with clubs and chairs. Since the three men’s bodyguards had joined in the assault—a total of six men surrounding the victim, Otto Ballerstedt— the extent of Hitler’s personal participation is unclear. Neither incident can be characterized as a successful violent performance, and there is no other evidence that Hitler was personally violent, however many millions he would later order killed. He served for four years as a courier in the German army in the First World War, but “despite his habits of exaggeration and self-inflation,” writes biographer George Victor, “despite being in fifty battles, he took no personal credit for any killing.” Hitler apparently never moved past the violent performances stage of violent socialization, and continued to exhibit features of