Hitler's Police Battalions: Enforcing Racial War in the East (review)

Westermann's subject is the transformation of the traditional German police force (the Order or Uniformed Police) from protectors of domestic law and order to "political soldiers" dedicated to combating and killing perceived enemies in German-occupied regions. He carefully traces the persistence of right-wing feeling among police formations during the ill-fated Weimar Republic, and then their increasing militarization, along with the Nazification of their officer corps and mounting amalgamation with the SS in the early years of the Third Reich. These trends fostered a highly ideological organizational culture that demonized Bolsheviks and Jews and institutional norms that glorified hardness, obedience, and service to the "higher purpose" of defending national purity. By 1939, when the Nazi regime began deploying regular and reserve police units for "pacification" and population transfers in occupied Poland, the men enrolled had become, with few exceptions, effective, unquestioning, and brutal executioners. After the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, they meted out death to 1 million people, primarily Jews and other supposed "partisans," but including prisoners of war as well.

The interpretive thrust of Westermann's well-substantiated account is twofold. First, he seeks to debunk postwar legends about the role of German police units on the eastern front by showing that they took part in both massacres and military operations on a massive scale; they did not return home in 1945 with clean hands. Second, he offers a subtly stated dissent from the reasons that Browning and Goldhagen each have advanced for the willingness of "ordinary" Germans to kill on such a scale day in and day out.¹ Unlike Browning, Westermann does not think that peer pressure and group loyalty primarily explain what occurred. Even if these were the prevailing motives among the men of Police Battalion 101 who composed Browning's Research sample, that unit's reserve status and relatively high average age made it unusual among the murderous police formations on the eastern front. The great majority of these units comprised full-time career officers and volunteers drawn, according to the expressed wishes of the SS, from the most fervently Nazi age cohort—Germans born between the years 1900 and 1912—who were steadily inculcated during the 1930s with the doctrines and reflexes that the Nazi state's "racial war" required. Yet, unlike Goldhagen, who also sees the policemen as driven by ruthless hatreds, Westermann defines these attitudes more broadly and depicts them as imparted by the Nazi regime—deliberately and gradually, through training and indoctrination—not embedded in German culture and merely expressed once Adolf Hitler ruled.

Although Westermann brings to bear insights derived from his own military experience and makes a brief foray into social psychology, via discussion of the pertinence of the famous Milgram experiment to understanding the behavior of German police units, this book is not really interdisciplinary in its methodology. Rather, the author blends the results of painstaking reading in vast archival and secondary sources into an analytical narrative to demonstrate anew the illuminating power of historical empiricism. But the central subject of the work—the mechanisms by which genocide operates—is currently a matter of intense interdisciplinary interest. Westermann's fine book is of wide relevance.