The Social Dynamics of Genocide: Social Psychology and Compliance in Himmler’s Murder Squads

Abstract

The Einsatzgruppen were four special paramilitary units that followed regular army troops into the Soviet territories after Nazi Germany’s invasion in 1941. There they enforced Nazi population reorganization and extermination policies in the occupied territories.¹  Einsatzgruppen members operated in both urban and rural spaces, incited pogroms, and erected and later liquidated ghettos. They are best known, however, for leading, coordinating, and perpetrating the mass murder of one to two million victims, including whole Jewish communities, Sinti and Roma, local communists and nationalists, and people the Hitler regime considered physically and mentally disabled.²

Scholarly and popular depictions of the Holocaust often present Nazi perpetrators as constituting an effective, cohesive, and well-organized “murder enterprise”;³ however, the Einsatzgruppen were comprised of men from Nazi Germany’s various party and state security institutions, who did not always work harmoniously.⁴ For example, in a 1961 trial in West Germany, Kurt Kühl, who had been a member of the Order Police (Orpo), testified that he and six of his comrades from Reserve Police Battalion 9 were assigned to Einsatzkommando 12, a subunit of Einsatzgruppe D. Between July and September 1941, the unit, which included members of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, Security Service, an internal arm in the SS that acted as the organization’s intelligence agency), the Secret Police (Gestapo), and the Criminal Police (Kripo), mass executed Jewish and communist men across present-day Romania and Ukraine. Kühl reported that a strict hierarchy existed between these professional groups, which included a clear-cut division of labor and a lack of intergroup communication. He remembered that at the end of each day, after the executions, the SD, Gestapo, Kripo, and Orpo men drove back in their respective groups to their separate quarters.⁵

How could this unit, so diverse in terms of its members’ professions, far from unified, and challenged by miscommunication, murder so many victims? The existing scholarship reviews the Einsatzgruppen’s history and the chronology of their crimes.⁶ While some assess the units’ missions as part of the Nazi occupation and extermination policies in specific regions,⁷ others record the operations of one Einsatzgruppe or a specific subunit.⁸ Much scholarship exists on the psychology and social relations of Holocaust perpetrators,⁹ and the growing scholarly interest in comparative genocide studies offers new, innovative ways to explain perpetrators’ mobilization and motivations.¹⁰ Further queries discuss how the SS (Schutzstaffel, Protection Squadron) and various Third Reich institutions shaped peer relations to radicalize policies and missions,¹¹ while others reconstruct the social profiles of Einsatzgruppen officers, as well as rank-and-file members, or look at aspects of leadership and peer-group relations in specific Einsatzgruppen teams.¹² A thorough investigation, however, of how social relations in the Einsatzgruppen units enhanced members’ compliance has yet to be undertaken.

This article combines historical research with findings from social psychology and sociology to examine the possible effects of social relations on the Einsatzgruppen’s genocidal “effectivity.” By investigating the Einsatzgruppen’s professional compositions and operational structures, this article links cohesion and compliance to intra- or intergroup relations and escalating aggression to explain unit members’ willingness to participate in mass murder. A thorough understanding of peer group relations in the Einsatzgruppen also reveals how Nazi organizational culture and ideology blended to radicalize members. My study thus illuminates how social settings, locations, and the chronology of the war enhanced various Nazi institutions’ participation in mass atrocities.

This article follows Einsatzkommando 12, whose members murdered tens of thousands of Jews and communists across the southern frontiers of the Soviet Union.¹³ Since ego documents of former unit members are unavailable, this study analyzes members’ statements collected during postwar interrogations at Nuremberg and in West German legal proceedings from the 1950s through the 1970s. The affidavits provide information on members’ socioeconomic and education levels and career patterns before and after their wartime assignments. They also reveal the unit’s work allocations and operational structures and include statements related to peer and personal relationships.

The time and place in which interrogators collected the statements limit the accuracy of these accounts and the perpetrators’ willingness to elaborate on atrocities, as former unit members were aware that the German law distinguished between willful perpetrators of murder (Täter) and accomplices (Beihilfe).¹⁴ My analysis, therefore, takes into account the fact that members tried to exonerate themselves by claiming that they only followed orders, by aligning their answers with their fellow perpetrators before their interrogations, by speaking apologetically, or simply by lying about their role in the executions. Nevertheless, these statements’ voluntary nature regarding social relations speaks to their authenticity and consistency across different ranks and roles.

Focusing on one unit throughout the occupation allows me to sketch its members’ Alltagsgeschichte (everyday experiences) at different times and different locations. From this analysis, I draw conclusions on how professional compositions and operational structures shaped patterns of cohesion and comradeship in the Einsatzgruppen and enhanced members’ compliance.

The article first discusses existing studies on motivations and social relations among Holocaust perpetrators and reviews the links between team cohesion and compliance in various settings. It then describes Einsatzgruppen’s organizational culture, hierarchy, and operational structures and follows the particular settings and crimes of Einsatzkommando 12. Next, the study applies relevant social, psychological, and historical studies to analyze how social relations enhanced compliance in Einsatzkommando 12.

Holocaust perpetrators’ motivations

Efforts to explain the crimes committed by the Einsatzgruppen began in the immediate postwar era. In Nuremberg, defendants argued that there was a preliminary directive from Hitler to murder all Soviet Jews (Tötungs- or Führerbefehl).¹⁵ Historians have largely dismissed the idea of a single Führerbefehl, concluding instead that the escalation of the Einsatzgruppen’s operations to genocide was the result of a chain of complex and not always consistent initiatives taken by field units, which the SS leadership welcomed and reinforced.¹⁶ Multidisciplinary inquiries into Holocaust perpetrators’ motivations have helped to illuminate this process. Earlier debates were divided between seeing the Holocaust as a premeditated plan guided by antisemitism and Nazi ideology and viewing it as part of the development and progression of Nazi aggression and war.¹⁷

Robert J. Lifton suggests, for example, that the psychological mechanism of “doubling”—the development of an alternate identity he called the “Auschwitz-Self”—allowed concentration camp doctors to see mass killing as somehow “healing” humanity, and to break their Hippocratic oath and murder victims.¹⁸ Christopher Browning’s celebrated study on Reserve Police Battalion 101, Ordinary Men, examines middle- to lower-ranked perpetrators. It illuminates the situational, social, and psychological factors that motivated these policemen to participate in mass shootings or prevented them from stepping back, finding such explanations as peer pressure, obedience and deference to authority, careerism, desensitization, and sadism as potential factors.¹⁹ Daniel Goldhagen, however, criticizes Browning’s study for failing to grasp the significance of antisemitism, ideology, or the fact that policemen operated under an authoritarian organization in a dictatorial regime. A debate between these two scholarly interpretations occurred shortly after their publication in the 1990s.²⁰

Subsequent psychological and sociological studies were divided between those that focused on situational factors and social environment, those that emphasized personality predispositions and susceptibility to authoritarianism, and those arguing that both ideology and situational factors contributed to the escalation in atrocities by perpetrators during the Holocaust.²¹ Recent studies tend to fall into this third category. In Becoming Evil, psychologist James Waller suggests that universal psychological constructs alongside societal dispositions, social settings, and perpetrators’ perceptions of their victims motivated Holocaust perpetrators.²² Social psychologist Leonard S. Newman cites the social psychological theories of cognitive dissonance, pluralistic ignorance, and attributional errors to explain why any situation may produce varying attitudes and behavioral outcomes.²³ Harald Welzer, also a social psychologist, explores how habituation, conformity, and obedience are factors that increase the likelihood that an individual will commit murder, specifically by routinizing and presenting executions as “work.”²⁴

My current study draws on Browning’s findings and adopts this third approach, integrating dispositions and situations to explain Holocaust perpetration. Taking ideology and antisemitism into account, it looks at how professional hierarchies and operational structures shaped social relations in the Einsatzgruppen and explains how cohesion and comradeship enhanced perpetration in mass shooting perpetrator units.

Cohesion and the psychology of social relations

Previous psychology research has found that cohesive teams perform better when coping with various quickly evolving situations in war-related and civilian settings.²⁵ Military unit cohesion, which consists of group pride, task commitment, and emotional intimacy, alleviates combat stress by creating strong peer bonds and by motivating soldiers to work for their comrades and protect one another.²⁶ Scholars distinguish between primary (or social) cohesion, which describes relations between peers of the same group, and secondary (or task) cohesion, which measures members’ identification with their immediate leaders and organizations (brigade, division, army corps), and entire institutions (nation, or regime). While primary cohesion sets behavioral standards, secondary cohesion aligns members with symbols and ideas that provide meaning and purpose to their missions. The relationship between these two forms of cohesion determines group performance.²⁷

Social psychology adds to our understanding of how group cohesion and intergroup dynamics enhance aggression. Classic experiments by psychologists Solomon Asch and Philip Zimbardo reveal how quickly people conform to group norms and even adapt their behaviors to the point of tolerating or inflicting violence.²⁸ Later studies proposed that “Social Identity” is a psychological construct that derives from the emotional weight individuals ascribe to the groups with which they affiliate, thus underpinning the groups’ cohesion and conformity.²⁹ Group affiliations divide humans’ social worlds into “in-groups” (social circles that include those who are similar to the individual based on social status, nationality, ethnicity, and so forth) and “out-groups” (those who do not fit these criteria, and are thus considered “other”).³⁰ This division ascribes lower levels of emotional and cognitive complexity to out-group members, lower levels of empathy toward the “other,” and could thus lead individuals to degrade, dehumanize, and even physically harm members of opposing groups.³¹ As armed conflicts involve existential threats and uncertainty, “Social Identity” and group affiliation radicalize the attitudes and behaviors of combatants and paramilitaries and, under some circumstances, might escalate their operations into mass violence.³²

Cohesion and comradeship in Third Reich institutions

Historians of the Nazi era have examined the links between cohesion and compliance in various organizations and institutions during the Holocaust. Studies on the Wehrmacht suggest that soldiers’ compliance was the result of a strong attachment to their primary units, but also a product of aggressive ideology and indoctrination, which aligned them with the regime’s symbols and goals.³³ Among the Order Police, Browning finds that one of the strongest motivations for the policemen to murder was their desire to “conform to the behavior of comrades,”³⁴ and later studies conclude that Nazi indoctrination also contributed to the police’s cohesive militarized organizational culture and provided the context and standards for police battalions to perpetrate mass crimes.³⁵

Similarly, the SS purposefully shaped its ideology and strict organizational culture to enhance cohesion and compliance within the party and state security organizations under its control.³⁶ The SS radicalized its members by dividing them into small dynamic groups whose members were each assigned specific roles. Alongside military-like schedules and sports drills, this operational structure inspired members to “work for their comrades” and to perpetrate crimes against various victim groups.³⁷ In the concentration and extermination camps, the staff were all members of professional networks. They worked in closed circles, which advanced solidarity and mutual care on the one hand and murderous “effectiveness” on the other.³⁸

A special feature of the Nazis’ indoctrination was that it used the preexisting myth of trench comradeship during World War I—an alleged harmony between German soldiers of all ranks and classes. The Nazis capitalized on this myth and modeled peer relations in civilian, military, and paramilitary organizations accordingly. This comradeship ideal became fundamental to building solidarity, emotional intimacy, and care between all legitimate members of the German “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft), but also fed on the othering of Jews, Bolsheviks, and further “undesirable social elements.” To prove themselves worthy members of the “people’s community,” Germans needed to act against designated “others.”³⁹

The current study tests the comradeship hypothesis by looking at the patterns and effects of primary and secondary cohesion in one unit where murder was perpetrated through face-to-face mass shootings. My research thus examines the relationship between cohesion and the genocidal “effectivity” of Holocaust perpetrators and adds to our understanding of the social psychology that underlies genocide preparation.

The Einsatzgruppen’s history and hierarchy

The origins of the Einsatzgruppen reveal how ideology and organizational culture shaped these groups’ professional composition, operational structure, peer relation, and member compliance. With the outbreak of the Second World War, the leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler and his deputy Reinhard Heydrich founded the Reich’s Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA), an administrative umbrella that subjugated all of Germany’s party and state security organizations to the SS.⁴⁰ A clear hierarchy governed these organizations: At the top of the RSHA stood the SD whose activist intellectuals gathered information on the Nazi party and German public’s opinions.⁴¹ Second were the Gestapo and Kripo (referred to as Security Police, Sicherheitspolizei, Sipo), who terrorized, persecuted, and tortured victims.⁴² The SD’s supremacy and arrogance, and a clash between the SS’s unorthodoxy and Sipo’s traditional career patterns prevented true unification between the SD and Sipo.⁴³ The RSHA also perpetuated and exacerbated differences between Gestapo and Kripo men by promulgating group stereotypes and entrenching the different functions of each group.⁴⁴

The RSHA consisted of separate offices comprising complex hierarchies with segregated functions and responsibilities. Political and personal agendas guided the organization’s authoritarian and militarized yet flexible culture (free of the chains of traditional, bourgeois bureaucracy or regulations).⁴⁵ Promotions in the RSHA were granted based on competence and personal loyalties, which drove members to compete to propose and implement ever radicalizing plans. ⁴⁶

When Germany expanded its borders in 1938, Himmler deployed “special task forces” (Einsatzgruppen), which embodied the RSHA’s professional composition and hierarchies, operational structures, and organizational culture.⁴⁷ Earlier teams registered, policed, and terrorized locals in Austria, Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland, and Poland.⁴⁸ The manning of four Einsatzgruppen designated for the Soviet Union began in April 1941. Himmler handpicked outstanding SD and Sipo officers to lead the units, and junior officers were cadets of the RSHA leadership training program (Der Leitende Dienst).⁴⁹ The Einsatzgruppen’s rank-and-file members came from the SD and Sipo branches from across the Reich,⁵⁰ but its numbers were further augmented by members of the Order Police and the Waffen-SS (armed SS troops), which stood under Himmler’s direct control outside of the RSHA.⁵¹ These professional organizations varied in terms of members’ age, education, and socioeconomic level. Waffen-SS and SD men tended to be younger, and the latter more educated, while Gestapo, Kripo, and Orpo members were older and typically only had professional training. All these institutions exposed their men to heavy indoctrination, yet in none of these institutions do members significantly stand out as being more fanatic by having attended the Hitler Youth or by joining the SA or the party earlier than the other groups.⁵²

With the launch of Operation Barbarossa, each of the four Einsatzgruppen followed an army group into the Soviet territories, divided into battalion-sized units called Sonder- or Einsatzkommandos (special or operation units). After reaching their designated areas of influence, each unit broke into smaller subunits called Vor-, Roll-, or Teilkommandos (advance-, raiding-, or subdetachments).⁵³ While some of these forces soon became stationary, others remained mobile throughout the war and traveled across vast geographic regions to massacre local Jewish communities.⁵⁴

Studies that discuss the Einsatzgruppen’s personnel and their motives tend to focus on their leaders and analyze the social, political, and personal motivations that lead to their specific career paths⁵⁵ or discuss specific officers and their contributions to the extermination process.⁵⁶ Historian Andrej Angrick’s research of Einsatzgruppen D includes an analysis of its social fabric and peer relations,⁵⁷ and the study by Alexander Neumann, Petra Peckl, and Kim Priemel dissects the relationships between one unit leader and his team of junior officers. The following analysis zeroes in on the social relations between the rank-and-file members of Einsatzkommando 12 and utilizes social psychology to explain how cohesion and comradeship encouraged the men to participate in mass executions.

Einsatzkommando 12

A central objective of the Barbarossa campaign was to seize Ukraine and the Black Sea basin, whose abundance of natural resources was essential for Nazi Germany’s plans to win the war.⁵⁸ The initial eighty to one hundred members of Einsatzkommando 12 were a mix of SD, Gestapo, and Kripo men,⁵⁹ joined by the second platoon of Reserve Police Battalion 9’s fourth company, and an unknown number of Waffen-SS soldiers.⁶⁰ The unit’s leader was the former head of the Gestapo branch in Aachen, SS-Stürmbannführer (Major) Gustav Adolf Nosske, who commanded a team of five junior officers.⁶¹

Einsatzkommando 12 followed the Wehrmacht’s Eleventh Army into Romania, Ukraine, southern Russia, and eventually the Caucasus.⁶² The vast geographical regions the unit covered were characterized by sparse, scattered populations and challenged coordination. Nevertheless, the members of Einsatzkommando 12 murdered thousands of civilians, contributing to the total estimated ninety thousand victims murdered by the collective five units under Einsatzgruppe D.⁶³

Einsatzkommando 12’s professional composition and operational structure shaped peer relations and encouraged members to perpetrate mass executions. According to members’ testimonies, clear distance and hierarchy between its various professional groups was already visible when the unit traveled east in June 1941. A former SD officer named Walter Hering testified that while SD men drove their private cars, the policemen rode in a truck in the rear.⁶⁴ One former Orpo man, Walter Pritzkow, testified that although they were dispatched to the Soviet Union together, there was hardly any interaction between members of the Order Police and SD or SS men.⁶⁵ The same was true for the Waffen-SS men and those of the SD and Sipo, as the former called one another “SS comrades” but referred to the others as “clerks” (Beamte), an inferior status by the standards of the militarized Waffen-SS.⁶⁶ A clear hierarchy also existed between the SD and Sipo. For example, the former Kripo officer Guido Magwitz testified that despite wearing the same uniform, Sipo men “were not taken seriously” (nicht für voll genommen wurden) by the SD.⁶⁷

The distance between men of these various institutions persisted throughout the unit’s operation. Orpo man Walter Baudich remembered that while traveling through present-day Ukraine, his Orpo comrades were told they had to obey any order given to them by SD and Sipo men, and added that the Orpo stayed in separate accommodations from the SD and Sipo, and that the relations between the groups were so tense that they barely had any contact.⁶⁸ The junior officer Karl Fischer and the Orpo man Heinz Hoffman both reported that a similar separation still existed a year and a half after the launch of Barbarossa, when Einsatzkommando 12 operated in the Caucasian city of Pyatigorsk.⁶⁹

These statements reflect that members of Einsatzkommando 12 did not operate as one faction and fraternized only with other individuals within their specific professional subgroup while keeping a physical and mental distance from men of opposing groups. In his study of Einsatzgruppe D, Angrick concludes that members did not develop a unified “corporate identity” but formed professional cliques within the smaller operative units. He adds that Order Policemen adjunct to the Einsatzgruppe felt degraded by Gestapo and Kripo men and even developed a grudge against them.⁷⁰ The case of Einsatzkommnado 12 proves this point. Unit members were organized by professional affiliation, and the physical and emotional distance between the groups suggests they lacked a unified identity. Also, the statements by Orpo men within Einsatzkommando 12 indicate they were indeed segregated and felt degraded by SD and Sipo men.

The higher status of SD and Sipo Einsatzgruppen members compared to those of the Orpo seems peculiar because, from an organizational viewpoint, the RSHA and the Orpo were both main offices (Hauptämter) with equal status in the SS. Furthermore, the head of the Orpo, Kurt Daluege, answered only to Himmler and certainly was not subordinate to Heydrich, head of the RSHA, but rather was his equal.⁷¹ Yet in the Einsatzgruppen, matters were different. Early versions of these special units that worked in Central and Eastern Europe included mostly if not only, RSHA men.⁷² Similarly, the “core” personnel of the Barbarossa Einsatzgruppen consisted of SD and Sipo men. In contrast, Orpo and Waffen-SS men, whose organizations were not part of the RSHA, were considered augmenting forces (even though parallel Order Police battalions and Waffen-SS brigades perpetrated horrible massacres independent of the Einsatzgruppen).⁷³ Therefore, the Orpo men’s testimonies about non- and miscommunication with SD and Sipo members and their lack of a sense of belonging to the units suggest that in the Einsatzgruppen’s social pyramid, Order policemen stood “below” RSHA men. This hierarchy and the physical distance between the SD, Sipo, Waffen-SS, and Orpo suggest that all of these groups, and not just the Orpo, failed to develop an attachment to Einsatzkommando 12. They referred to their original institutions as their point of social affiliation and developed or maintained close social bonds only with other members who shared their institutional background.

How could this fractured social pattern encourage members to participate in executions resulting in the murder of tens of thousands? Undoubtably, evidence suggests that members of all professional groups shot victims,⁷⁴ and the professional composition of the shooting squads varied and depended on the situation. Yet testimonies also reveal that Einsatzkommando 12 sustained traditional job allocations unrelated to the mass killings, which reinforced the hierarchy and distance between the groups. For example, while SD men gathered information on locals, drafted reports to Berlin, and defined the unit’s objectives, Gestapo and Kripo men conducted administrative work and interrogated suspects and Orpo or Waffen-SS men did “dirty jobs” like securing routes and executions.⁷⁵

In his study of the Einsatzgruppen, historian Peter Klein asserts that these divisions made the units effective because members were allocated roles that matched their professional training. This division of labor thus provided clear guidance about each group’s duties and responsibilities. Klein concludes that this policy helped members quickly adapt, assume their positions, and function effectively in their new environments.⁷⁶ The same is true for the members of Einsatzkommando 12, whose designated roles made it clear and easy for them to perform their assignments while operating in the Soviet Union.

In addition, the unit’s fragmented composition enhanced compliance, as each professional group performed only part of the larger killing operation. In his pathbreaking work, historian Hans Mommsen contended that this division of responsibilities, which originated in the party’s initial structure back in the 1920s, was typical of the Nazi modus operandi. It characterized the Third Reich’s institutions throughout their existence, when Hitler allocated each of his senior functionaries limited authority. This policy legitimized withholding information from different operators, confined political coordination and communication to those directly involved in each specific task, and enhanced compliance by keeping Hitler’s loyalists in a state of constant ambiguity and competition.⁷⁷ Later studies on face-to-face Holocaust perpetrators discuss a division of labor while massacring and deporting Jewish populations. Executing only part of the crime (either taking people out of their homes, loading them on trucks, walking them to the execution site, or shooting them) reduced the perpetrators’ sense of responsibility, guilt, shame, and overall qualms.⁷⁸ The same applied to members of Einsatzkommando 12. The unit’s professional groups followed a functional differentiation whereby each group perpetrated, and was thus exposed to, only certain aspects of the crimes. As in other groups of Holocaust perpetrators, the division of labor in Einsatzkommando 12 lowered members’ sense of responsibility and guilt, lessening their desire to challenge or disobey orders and thus enhancing their compliance.

Affiliation, cohesion, and compliance

Although decisive, job allocations and the diffusion of responsibilities could only explain so much of Einsatzkommando 12 members’ readiness to perpetrate mass murder, particularly given the evidence indicating that members of all professional groups shot victims.⁷⁹ Testimonies also reveal that while the distance between the professional groups pushed members of different organizations apart, men of similar backgrounds bonded so that cohesion and comradeship in Einsatzkommando 12 existed among members of the same institutions. For example, the Orpo man Heinz Hoffmann, who testified to the physical distance between the Orpo and the rest of the unit’s professional groups, added that “we members of the police (wir Polizeiangehörigen) always kept to ourselves.”⁸⁰

Also, many members developed their careers together in specific Sipo stations before arriving in the Einsatzgruppen and were later assigned to the units together. Because their members knew each other before they came to the Eastern Front, these groups maintained their cohesion and bonded primarily with one another while working in the Einsatzgruppen. For example, when the Kripo official Herbert Buck testified about his experiences in Einsatzkommando 12, he referred only to the group of Kripo men from Hamburg, with whom he came to the unit straight out of the Kripo school (Kriminalpolizeischule) in Berlin. When confronted with the crimes committed by Einsatzkommando 12, Buck did not express his own opinion but spoke for the entire Kripo group, to which he referred as “we Hamburg comrades (Wir hamburgischen Kameraden).”⁸¹

In these examples, members of Einsatzkommando 12 used the pronoun “we” (wir) or “us” (uns) to describe those men who shared their institutional background rather than the entire unit, which confirms that members maintained their identification with their original professional and social division institutions. It also indicates that primary cohesion existed between men of similar backgrounds rather than between members of the larger Einsatzkommando 12. Testimony by the Orpo man Willi Jentzsch proves this point. After admitting he performed executions as a member of Einsatzkommando 12, Jentzsch reported that little to no contact existed between Orpo men, and SS or SD members.⁸² In a telling quote, Jentzsch also testified that whenever “a single person” (eine einzelne Person) shot victims, it provided a reason for the men to talk about their experiences within their “comrades circles” (Kameradenkreise).⁸³ Although this statement reveals that emotional intimacy and care did exist between the members of Einsatzkommando 12, it also reveals a physical and mental distance between Orpo men and the rest of the unit members. It is thus likely that the “comrades circles” Jentzsch referred to were comprised only of Orpo men rather than various men from different professions and backgrounds. Thus, primary cohesion in Einsatzkommando 12, which included emotional intimacy and support, existed only between members from similar institutional backgrounds.

Jentzsch’s testimony also hints at members’ social relations before and after they participated in executions and during leisure time. In his study of alcohol (ab)use among Holocaust perpetrators, historian Edward Westermann mentions a few cases in which Einsatzgruppen units engaged in “drink and song” before and after they mass murdered victims. These social evenings (Kameradschaftabends), which included heavy drinking rituals and the perpetrators’ loud boasting of their crimes, not only helped unit members rid themselves of the horrors of the day, but also strengthened their social bonds.⁸⁴ Jentzsch’s mentioning of “discussions in comrades circles” indicates that the division and distance between Einsatzkommando 12’s professional groups existed not only while members committed murder, but also in their after-hours. Further testimonies reveal that, at least in some cases, Einsatzgruppen members even spent their social evenings divided among their separate professional groups. For example, in a 1962 interrogation, a Waffen-SS man and member of Sonderkommando 7a, a subunit of Einsatzgruppe B, stated that in the evenings that followed executions, men of the Sipo and Waffen-SS drank in two separate groups that did not fraternize.⁸⁵ Also, in two postwar testimonies, a Kripo man named Alois Wehner, a member of Einsatzkommando 3, a subunit of Einsatzgruppe A, reported that the unit’s “entire Gestapo department was a clique whose members kept to themselves” and “did not let anyone look inside [their group].”⁸⁶ He also described how a band of Gestapo men who commanded executions outside of Kaunas used to return to the city from their killing sprees drunk and spent their evenings separate from the rest, boasting about the Jews they had murdered.⁸⁷ These testimonies suggest that across locations and times, during work or after-hours, the subset of professional groups within Einsatzkommando 12 (whether SD, Gestapo, Kripo, Orpo, or Waffen-SS) comprised members’ immediate social networks and provided them with the emotional togetherness and security they needed.

Historians have established similar links between primary cohesion—measured by team members’ trust and care for one another—and operational “success” among various units and subunits of Holocaust perpetrators. For example, Studying the wartime police station in Nowy Sącz, Poland, historian Thomas Kühne shows that cohesion between the policemen and the myth of comradeship, which demanded excluding and harming Jews, heightened their brutality toward victims, and helped them cope with the psychological toll their crimes entailed.⁸⁸ Statements by members of Einsatzkommando 12 reflect a similar pattern of team cohesion and performance within each of the unit’s professional groups. Yet these findings complicate the comradeship thesis. Like the policemen in Nowy Sącz, Einsatzgruppen members classified Jews and communists as “the other” and harmed them. At the same time, the hierarchy between the Reich’s security organizations caused individuals within that system to also view members of parallel organizations as “the other.” An inherent tension arose between the idea of a supreme ethnic or racial hegemony and a hierarchy between the different groups that belonged to and maintained that hegemony. Individuals and groups of different professions thus stood on different levels of that hierarchical pyramid. Therefore, to understand how the Volksgemeinschaft ideology enhanced comradeship and compliance with mass murder, one should investigate the smaller perpetrating units. In both hegemonic units, as in Kühne’s observation, and mixed-backgrounds units, such as the Einsatzgruppen, one must analyze with whom individual members identified. Some identified with the entire Volksgemeinschaft, others with the organization in which they developed their careers, and others with the unit they belonged to while perpetrating specific crimes.

The question of identity and its effect on the perpetrators puts Lifton’s thesis of the “Auschwitz self” in a new light. Unlike Nazi doctors, Einsatzgruppen members did not sign a Hippocratic oath. It is easy to assume they did not have to develop alternate identities to justify and ease their engagement in mass murder.⁸⁹ Rather, their organizational or professional identities (as SD, Gestapo, Kripo men, etc.) forged under heavy Nazi and SS indoctrination demanded that they harm “enemies” to protect the Volksgemeinschaft. Therefore, rather than the tension between members’ “biographical- and “Auschwitz-Self,” when analyzing the Einsatzgruppen, one should focus on the tension between members’ identification with their specific organization and their identity as members of the Volk. Additionally, although Lifton argues that members’ overlapping identities inhibited one another, current findings suggest that in the Einsatzgruppen, the tension between members’ organizational identity and national identity increased their willingness to perpetrate crimes.

The story of Einsatzkommando 12 thus provides an example of how Nazi Germany and its murderous policies capitalized on tensions related to identities and group affiliations. Despite the divides between the SD, Sipo, Orpo, and Waffen-SS, the groups all worked to advance the operations of the larger Einsatzkommando 12. This cooperation was possible thanks to the members’ strong secondary cohesion, meaning their conviction in Nazi ideology and alignment with SS symbols and messages. Combined with strong primary cohesion and identification with their professional groups, the men’s secondary cohesion had them all work for the same murderous missions and increase the unit’s overall performance.⁹⁰ Therefore, despite a hierarchy between different groups and organizations, the case of Einsatzkommando 12 shows how ideology, indoctrination, and shared secondary symbols aligned all members of the Volksgemeinschaft with the regime’s goals and ensured they all worked to advance its missions in the field.

In her study of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, sociologist Sara Berger finds that camp personnel comprised men of various institutional backgrounds whose duties also corresponded with their training. Despite their different professions, the “Aktion Reinhardt” staff worked together, as ideology and career ambitions encouraged them to improve the camps’ killing facilities and methods, just like members of Einsatzkommando 12.⁹¹ Historian Karin Orth draws similar conclusions about the managerial staff (Führungspersonal) of the concentration camps. As with the Einsatzgruppen and the Reinhard camps, these teams included members of different professional or administrative backgrounds, who, once assigned to a specific camp, worked together to advance its operations. Yet, unlike the members of Einsatzkommando 12, who sustained their social divides throughout their operations, the concentration camps’ staff developed close social circles with their own customs and slang, even though they came from mixed backgrounds.⁹²

A possible explanation for the social cohesion in the camps and lack thereof in Einsatzkommando12 are the different physical settings. The concentration and extermination camps were well-defined places with designated fixed spaces for after-hours interactions (such as casinos, pubs, canteens, and even movie houses),⁹³ all of which were critical to forming unit socialization over time. Although the Einsatzgruppen units kept the tradition of social evenings and drinking, some were mobile and traveled across different spaces. Even units that set their stationary headquarters in local former police stations and drank in local pubs lacked the space and time necessary for social consolidation, which takes longer to emerge. These differences in settings thus help explain the growth of social integration among camp staff members and the continuous fragmentation in the Einsatzgruppen units.

Despite the different social and physical settings, different groups within the camps and in Einsatzkommando 12 learned to cooperate when committing radical and escalating acts of violence against Jews during the Holocaust. Members of these two institutions developed their careers under long and heavy indoctrination.⁹⁴ Nazi ideology, racial theory, antisemitism, and anti-Bolshevism thus aligned these men (and women) with the Nazi regime’s objectives. Despite the professional divides and hierarchies in Einsatzkommando 12, the deadly consequences for its victims confirm that primary cohesion within the professional groups, combined with shared secondary messages and symbols, drove its members to cooperate in fulfilling their genocidal missions.

Teilkommandos

Alongside professional composition and hierarchies, operational structures considerably impacted Einsatzgruppen members’ cohesion, comradeship, and performance. Einsatzkommando 12 was divided into four to five separate and, at times, ad hoc squads called Teilkommandos. Each Teilkommando was headed by a junior officer and consisted of ten to twenty-five men, who, like the larger unit, were a mix of SD, Sipo, Orpo, and Waffen-SS.⁹⁵ Due to the vast geographical distances that Einsatzkommando 12 covered, the mobile, isolated Teilkommandos were its main form of organization, which persisted throughout its mission in the Soviet Union. The split into Teilkommandos first happened shortly after the men reached Romania⁹⁶ and continued after the entire Einsatzkommando 12 crossed the Dniester River and perpetrated the mass execution of Jews and communists in Transnistria.⁹⁷ When the unit arrived in Mykolaiv in October 1941, Teilkommandos were sent to the cities of Kherson and Odessa, while the rest of its mobile squads perpetrated executions in Mikhaylovka and Rostov.⁹⁸ The division into Teilkommandos continued when the men marched southeast into Russia in spring and summer 1942, and when they reached and perpetrated massacres in the Caucasus.⁹⁹

This operational structure enhanced Einsatzkommando 12’s genocidal “success” because it allowed members to branch out into isolated squads that covered more ground, allowing them to claim more victims. The Teilkommandos also maintained the unit’s differential job allocations and sustained the distance and hierarchy between men of different institutions. According to perpetrator testimonies, these operative platoons contributed to the larger unit’s patterns of cohesion and comradeship by bringing members of similar backgrounds closer together, while also broadening gaps between members of different institutions.¹⁰⁰

For example, two Orpo men testified that they were members of a Teilkommando that traveled through Transnistria. When the platoon reached an ethnic German town, its officer ordered that the Orpo men shoot Russian political activists, and that the SD personnel divide the policemen into shooting squads and give orders to fire. After the executions ended, the few SD men present at the execution drove back to their lodging separately from the policemen. The two testimonies argued that the physical distance between the groups attested to a social divide because the Orpo men always kept together and had no contact with the SD or SS men.¹⁰¹

These statements might sound like the thinly veiled efforts of former Orpo men to exonerate themselves by stating that they only followed SD orders; however, other members also testified that strict divisions of labor and social distance existed between the different professional groups. Regardless, men from each group shot victims, even when they faced varying situations, locations, and times. For example, Karl Fischer, a junior officer who headed a Teilkommando, testified that his men were allocated assignments that matched their professional backgrounds and explained that the Gestapo men in his platoon were those responsible for “political assignments.”¹⁰² A Gestapo official named Rudolf Bolder admitted that his peers interrogated locals but stressed that SD men, not the Gestapo, determined the victims’ fate. Bolder also argued that a group of Orpo and Waffen-SS men perpetrated shootings by the Teilkommando.¹⁰³ Another statement revealed that in Mykolaiv, Gestapo and Kripo men were the ones who shot victims. In contrast, Orpo men secured routes and execution sites, and SD men commanded the shootings and gave mercy shots to victims.¹⁰⁴

Since all professional groups shot victims, the testimonies do not indicate whether any of the groups felt comfortable or bitter for having to shoot, while the other groups performed “office work.” When former members discuss the relations between the groups, they point to the preexisting hierarchy between the organizations, cross-institution stereotypes, and the allocation of jobs they had to perform other than shooting. Therefore, it seems like the unit’s social pattern and members’ compliance were not shaped by having to perform executions, but rather by the unit’s professional hierarchy and operational structures.

It is also interesting that despite discussing and, at times, admitting that they participated in mass shootings, very few members claimed that they had asked to be dismissed from the shootings. As we recall, Ordinary Men includes a passage that describes how policemen were granted the opportunity to not participate in the shootings. Twelve men accepted this offer and did not take part. Testimonies by members of Einsatzkommando 12 lack a similar story, save one unit member who mentioned that he and his peer asked not to participate in executions and deliberately “missed” their shots; others testified that the head of Einsatzkommandp 12, Nosske, avoided commanding or participating in massacres.¹⁰⁵ These choices were not linked to members’ institutional backgrounds or ranks, and hierarchy or relations between the professional groups did not affect them. Avoidance or refusal to shoot in Einsatzkommando 12 emanated from reasons other than social relations or cohesion.

Although assignment or refusal to shoot in the Teilkommandos did not depend on a member’s profession, the allocation of duties other than shooting did, and men of different backgrounds often worked separately. As in the larger unit, the professional groups in the Teilkommandos constituted members’ immediate social frameworks and provided them with the emotional support and mutual trust that contributed to their “effectivity.” Evidence also suggests that the Teilkommandos staff changed often since the teams were dissolved and regrouped whenever the unit arrived in a new place and since its men rotated frequently.¹⁰⁶ The Teilkommandos were thus dynamic and merely temporary social frameworks, rendering the men’s institutional backgrounds the only stable object of identification in that ever-changing environment. The Teilkommandos thus reinforced subgroup cohesion, and it is likely that primary comradeship in these groups existed between men who shared professional backgrounds rather than among all members of a specific Teilkommando.

Also, the Teilkommandos contributed to the unit’s overall “effectivity” by following the SS operational structure. As in Claudia Koonz’s observation of the SS, the Einsatzgruppen radicalized members by dividing them into smaller dynamic units that assigned members specific roles, making each member indispensable to the rest of the group.¹⁰⁷ While SS teams trained and worked together, the Teilkommandos included men of various backgrounds, but still worked swiftly and efficiently. The Teilkommandos were thus effective in enhancing members’ compliance by designating specific roles and making it more difficult for members to “disappoint” their comrades in the smaller groups.

Psychological and sociological research further explains how the Teilkommandos enhanced compliance. One well-known study by social psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrates that small teams that dictate norms tend to enhance individual conformity even when those norms negate members’ personal behavioral standards.¹⁰⁸ The Teilkommandos fit this description; as small groups that dictated specific behavioral standards, these squads enhanced conformity and a willingness to perpetrate mass murder even though members were not pathological sadists and did not murder before or after their deployment to the Eastern Front. Sociologist Stefan Kühl explains that newcomers in any group, especially in dictatorial organizations, experience an initial period, which he calls a “gray zone,” that intensifies members’ desire to prove their loyalty and right to belong. It pushes them to adopt new behaviors and forsake previous moral standards.¹⁰⁹ The Teilkommandos, whose work strength and missions changed often, constituted new and changing environments and thus created perpetuated “gray zones” that encouraged members to prove themselves worthy and competent by conforming to and exceeding the groups’ violent norms.

Psychological studies also find that in novel groups, which have only recently formed, it takes time to develop moral and behavioral standards. To avoid uncertainty, members tend to sample norms and behaviors they adopted in previous social groups and apply them when encountering similar situations in their new groups.¹¹⁰ Further findings suggest that uncertainty and stress enhance people’s conformity to group norms, especially in groups characterized by clear hierarchies and structures, closed boundaries, collective thinking, ethnocentrism, and orthodox and conservative belief systems. These groups mitigate members’ anxieties by removing ambiguities and providing clear guidelines on how to act. Also, individuals whose group is under either a real or imagined threat show elevated tendencies to endorse and enforce group norms, and their behaviors tend to radicalize.¹¹¹

When the members of Einsatzkommando 12 were divided into the small, mixed-background Teilkommandos, they found themselves in newly formed groups. Their previous careers in the Third Reich’s political organizations dictated strict hierarchies between members of the SD, Gestapo, Kripo, Orpo, or Waffen-SS. These hierarchies provided clear structure and boundaries between members and between them and their victims. Nazi indoctrination added clear conservative, authoritarian, antisemitic, and racial values. The SS control and ethos ensured that all the political security organizations in the Third Reich functioned as entitative environments, which reduced members’ uncertainties or doubts, demanded that they conform and comply, encouraged initiative and action, and provided moral and behavioral guidelines on how to treat victims. While in the Soviet Union, each of the Teilkommandos sustained the same hierarchy and structure, maintained the existing racial doctrines of Nazi Germany, and followed Nazi racial and antisemitic ideologies. Although smaller, the Teilkommandos members continued to organize themselves by institutional background, bringing men from similar professions closer together.

The nature of the Teilkommandos thus enhanced primary and secondary cohesion, which increased performance. Also, their dynamic nature and constantly changing work strength, locations, and assignments prevented members from developing the trust necessary to unite against their leaders or orders. It is also important to note that the Einsatzgruppen and their Teilkommandos traveled through unfamiliar territories and amid populations foreign and strange to the men. These settings elevated members’ uncertainty and stress, as Nazi indoctrination and racial thought presented “inferior locals,” and especially Jews and Bolsheviks, as posing real, imminent threats to the men’s lives, their assignments, and the nation. Since the Teilkommandos often worked close to advancing or retreating troops, the physical threat of the front added to their anxieties. I argue that the myriad characteristics related to the squads’ structure, organizational culture, and varied and ever-changing environments triggered psychological mechanisms that encouraged members’ compliance and increased their willingness to perpetrate violence against perceived enemies.

Contemporary and postwar evidence confirm that the Teilkommandos supported the overall deadlines of the unit’s operations. Wherever Einsatzkommando 12 arrived, its squads spread out, reaching the most remote locations, with lethal consequences to local Jewish populations and communist pockets.¹¹² After reaching the Caucasus in August 1942, one of the Teilkommandos continued traveling as far east as the present-day Russian city of Budyonnovsk, located only two hundred kilometers from the Caspian Sea, where its members massacred Jews and political dissidents.¹¹³

Further evidence reveals that the structural division into Teilkommandos was similar across all mobile, operative Einsatzgruppen units.¹¹⁴ Therefore, it is likely that the Teilkommandos were mostly a means for the Einsatzgruppen leadership to increase the units’ “productivity” by allowing members to cover more ground. Yet I argue that psychological mechanisms also contributed to the Teilkommandos’ scope and barbarity. Combined with Nazi ideology, the platoons’ mixed-background compositions, constantly changing work strength, and in-person nature reinforced group affiliation, conformity, cohesion, and intergroup relations, which intensified animosity toward victims and encouraged members to comply with, adopt, and exercise ever-brutalizing standards of behavior.

Conclusion

The Wehrmacht’s defeat at Stalingrad forced Einsatzkommando 12 to retreat westward.¹¹⁵ After murdering the Jewish populations of southern Ukraine, the Crimea, and the Caucasus, in March 1943, the men were split into several subunits, which continued to murder Jewish and non-Jewish locals via executions and gas vans while moving west until the end of the war.¹¹⁶

This article examines social relations in one of the deadliest killing units during the Holocaust. Einsatzkommando 12 lumped together men of all of Nazi Germany’s party and state paramilitary organizations yet maintained a strict hierarchy and segregation. This operation created specific patterns of cohesion by which men from different organizations did not mix, but worked and fraternized mainly, if not only, with peers of similar backgrounds. The study also finds that Einsatzkommando 12 was divided into smaller Teilkommandos. Each Teilkommando had similar work divisions between members of different professions. The squads enhanced the unit’s efficiency by covering more ground quickly and efficiently and confronting new, unstable social environments, which enhanced members’ willingness to conform and belong, while denying them the ability to unite against leaders and assignments.

Primary cohesion, solidarity, mutual care, and emotional intimacy existed in Einsatzkommando 12. Yet these factors did not occur across the entire group, or the smaller Teilkommandos, but rather among members of similar professional backgrounds. Men of the SD, Gestapo, Kripo, Waffen-SS, or Orpo each bonded only with their peers, developed their own social circles, and “worked for their comrades” to prove themselves worthy and to belong. The groups were also all heavily indoctrinated in Nazi ideology, SS ethics, racial theory, antisemitism, and anti-Bolshevism,¹¹⁷ which aligned members with the regime’s murderous goals and inspired secondary cohesion. Combined primary and secondary cohesion thus prompted unit members’ compliance and enhanced their operations.

These conclusions add to the existing scholarship on Holocaust and genocide perpetrators by illuminating how social dynamics enhanced compliance. Professional hierarchies and operational structures in Einsatzkommando 12 encouraged primary group bonds, while sustaining a preexisting hierarchy between the groups. Drawing on the pathbreaking work of Christopher Browning, these findings add to the psychological and sociological queries that consider both dispositions and situations to explain perpetrators’ behavior. Utilizing the social psychological theories of group affiliations and intergroup relations helps to broaden our understanding of why perpetrators committed mass murder during the Holocaust and could potentially explain other instances of conformity and compliance in other genocides and examples of mass violence.

Also, this study further complicates existing findings on how the ideology of the “People’s Community” (Volksgemeinschaft) and trench comradeship influenced Holocaust perpetrators. The men of Einastzkommando 12 were simultaneously members of their specific security organizations and members of the Volk. Since the security organizations adopted a hierarchy among the various groups that comprised the Einsatzgruppen, exclusion and “othering” were aimed not only at the Volk’s “enemies” but also at members of parallel institutions. Mechanisms of group affiliation and intergroup relations explain how this tension between primary and secondary cohesion helped to facilitate acts of mass murder. Therefore, to understand how comradeship and exclusion propelled perpetration during the Holocaust, one must investigate the smaller perpetrating units and consider the tensions between the Nazi idea of a racial hegemony and the hierarchy between the different organizations and groups that belonged to it.

The focus on everyday life in Einsatzkommando 12 adds to the research and historiography on the Einsatzgruppen, as it expands our knowledge of the units routes, crimes, modus operandi, and members’ social profiles and career patterns. A closer look into Einsatzkommando 12 also adds to what is known of how security organizations in the Third Reich used Nazi ideology, bureaucracy, and SS ethics to organize peer relations and prompt compliance, and how organizational hierarchies and professional compartmentalization in Nazi institutions encouraged primary group performance while maintaining cross-section cooperation. Following Einsatzkommando 12 closely reveals how these structures cascaded from headquarters to the smallest field units to enhance action, initiative, and radicalization.

To explain how so few were able to motivate so many to participate in the Holocaust, we can look at operational structures, professional hierarchies, and peer group relations, which reveal more of how and why “face-to-face” perpetrators contributed to the Holocaust. Dictatorships thrive thanks to loyal military and paramilitary forces that enforce the leader or the party’s policies by terrorizing, reorganizing, mobilizing, and, in some cases, mass murdering civilians.¹¹⁸ Studying groups of perpetrators, like the Einsatzgruppen, which were the executive arms of genocidal regimes and non-state entities that conducted mass shooting operations, is crucial to understanding how international or interethnic conflicts escalate into mass murder. Alongside historical, political, and social circumstances, social relations help clarify why individuals were willing to murder victims at close range and how the violence of the Holocaust progressed. By studying these trends, we can try to draw the necessary conclusions to prevent current and future instances of mass violence and genocide.

Maayan Armelin holds a PhD from the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, and an MA in Social Psychology from the University of Haifa. She was a recipient of fellowships from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for the study of violence, the Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies in Vienna, and the Claims Conference. Her research integrates historical, sociological, and psychological perspectives in studying peer relations and leadership styles in the SS-Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads which operated in the Soviet Union from 1941 to1944.

Footnotes