Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Goldhagen: A Narrative of Guilt and Redemption

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Goldhagen: A Narrative of Guilt and Redemption Robert R Newman Reserve Police Battalion 101 (RPB 101) with a complement of some 500 men, originating in Hamburg, was sent by Nazi Germany on its third tour of duty to occupied Poland in June 1942. From then until November 1943, its primary activity was to maintain order among the unruly Poles, but a major additional task was ridding the Lublin District of Jews. During these sixteen months, RPB 101 executed some 38,000 Jews by shooting, and packed 45,000 Jews in boxcars to go to the Treblinka extermination camp, for a total body count of 83,00U.1 RPB 101 was typical of the hundred-plus police battalions SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler had ready for duty in occupied lands by mid-1940. These battalions were dispatched throughout territory conquered by the Germans, including Norway and the Netherlands. Some of them were elite units, composed of physically fit young men of military caliber; but reserve units such as RPB 101 were older, ordinary Germans, many belonging to Hamburg's municipal police. Many others came from various trades and unskilled occupations. Some were drawn to police battalions to escape army service; few were active Nazis, and very few were members of the SS. These order police are not to be confused with the SS Einsatzgruppen (special forces) about whom much has been written, and whose fanatical Nazism is well documented. Einsatzgruppen were the cutting edge of Hitler's executions in the conquered territories; order police such as RPB 101, because of their low status and the mundane tasks that were their primary assignment, did not attract much attention at Nuremberg or after. When the Eastern Front began collapsing in 1944, most RPB 101 policemen made it back to their homes with little attention from the Allies. The West German government, however, in its fitful and long-drawn-out prosecutions of war criminals, eventually heard testimony about RPB 101's activities, and began an investigation of the battalion in 1962. Over the next five years, the Robert P. Newman is Adjunct Professor of Communication Studies at The University of Iowa, in Iowa City, Iowa. He wishes to acknowledge the helpful critiques of Samuel Becker, V.R. Berghahn, Barbara Biesecker, Kathleen Farrell, and Charles Willard, and the facilities and resources of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, University of Iowa. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 1, No. 3,1998, pp. 407-424 ISSN 1094-8392 408 Rhetoric & Public Affairs Hamburg office of the State Prosecutor located and interrogated 210 former members of tiie battalion. It was clear to the prosecutor that these men had committed war crimes; fourteen of them were indicted in 1967, and put on trial in October of that year. In April 1968, five of these were found guilty and sentenced: three of them to eight years in prison, one to six years, and one to five. There was a long appeals process, ending in 1972, when the sentences were reduced. The records of interrogation , investigation, and the trial are still held by the Hamburg State Prosecutor. This macronarrative of the creation, activities, and demise of RPB 101 is not controversial. What is today the center of acrimonious dispute in the community of German historians and Holocaust scholars is the conflicting micronarratives constructed out of the court records, dealing with the attitudes and motives of the policemen as they shot Jewish men, women, and children at pointblank range. One prominent narrative warrants moral judgment against the majority of the German people; a competing narrative restricts judgment to fanatical Nazis, or even to Hitler. At stake is nothing less than the soul of a nation, and by extension the integrity of philosophical humanism. Browning's Unwilling Policemen Christopher Browning was a graduate student in history at the University of Wisconsin when American campuses exploded in the late sixties. Like thousands of other academics, he was appalled at the atrocities committed by U.S. troops in Vietnam.2 Browning told interviewer Adam Shatz that in search of an answer as to how "ordinary people could get involved in terrible policies" he turned to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann...