Stephen Spielberg’s powerful movie “Schindler’s List” about a group of Polish Jews and their German protector in WW II covers much of the enormity of the Holocaust, but it is a highly detailed film that demands close attention from viewers. Some minor scenes, often just in passing, can communicate as much about the human condition as any of the major ones.
One tiny vignette concerns the time in 1944 when the Nazis sent squads of slave laborers to dig up many of the mass graves of their victims in a bid to hide the evidence of their atrocities. In the camera’s eye of the film, this phase is presented all too briefly, with a great heap of unearthed cadavers that have been stacked up like logs and set aflame. Then, for just a second or two, a wild-eyed SS officer lurches across the screen, takes a swig from a mostly drained bottle of vodka, and fires his pistol into the corpses in a deranged drunken fury. Here is a brief but masterly portrait of a man who has gone insane from mass killing; no longer human, he has become a beast beyond all chance of recovery.
Considering all the episodes of mass killing of the helpless in the 20th Century, we should wonder what happens to the men who do the actual killing. For if such killing is so easy, then we are all condemned by it. But, if performing such murder is too much for many to bear, then – however perversely – there is hope for us all.
When Cain murdered Abel, he was driven into the wilderness and lost to us all, a fate that – if at least in a metaphorical sense – attends most murderers in any sort of civil society.
The mark of Cain can be difficult to bear. We can tolerate those who commit homicide under some circumstances: Killing in self-defence or to protect the innocent is often forgiven, both in our hearts and often even in law. Most of us excuse the homicide committed by soldiers, usually because it is seldom to their personal benefit (but may be undertaken for ours), but also because the soldier assumes a strong degree of mutual personal risk in that there is a good chance he will be killed too. The societal tolerance for a soldier who kills armed opponents in battle fades rapidly if he deliberately slays unarmed and undefended civilians or murders his prisoners.
Other killers are much less welcome among us. Howard Engel’s Lord High Executioner suggests that executioners and hangmen led lonely lives. One Elizabethan hangman successfully petitioned for the right to commit necrophilia, as his pariah status largely prevented his chances for finding a willing bed-partner. In Royal France (and early Quebec), an executioner could choose a bride among the condemned, provided that she consented to marriage to the hangman rather than being executed by him. Frequently there were no takers. Also, when no executioner was available, volunteers for the position would be sought among the backlogged condemned; most of whom again usually preferred death to amnesty paired with a new career and the social isolation that went with it.
Engel also recounts the tale of one Canadian hangman, John Radclive, in the late 19th Century. His remuneration was an inadequate regular salary; but he was allowed to also bill for his services (and the costs of a new rope and restraints) every time he was called upon. This was not a profitable way to make a living; and he moonlighted as a waiter at a Toronto boat club. One day a visiting Mountie noticed that Canada’s executioner was serving his drinks and raised a fuss – as he felt that gentlemen should not be served by a common hangman. Radclive was fired. It also says much about the job, that both Radclive and Arthur Ellis (his successor) ended their days as alcoholics; a career hazard for all of their international colleagues.
Gilbert and Sullivan aside, Japan never had a “Lord High Executioner”. In the days of Shoguns and Samurai, the task of execution of criminals was left to the Eta, the lowest class in society.
Traditionally, in a firing squad, the rifles are loaded separately – and one man has a blank cartridge. This is not so that every member of the squad can believe that he is innocent in performing the execution (any trained soldier knows that the recoil for a blank is much less than it is for a ball cartridge); but so that each member of the firing squad has “plausible deniability” afterwards. It is also noteworthy that execution duty is normally regarded as a punishment detail.
Few soldiers who volunteer for execution details are likely to be trusted by their comrades and officers afterwards. This trait even continued among the Wehrmacht in WW II, where Army officers often sought to rid their units of men who had volunteered to help out at mass executions of Jews and others. It should be noted that German troops were presented with far more opportunities to become involved in firing squads than most troops in WW II, and many considered it their National Socialist duty to participate in them.
Yet even the executors of the Nazi’s cruelest policies had problems with risk-free killing. Himmler, the leader of the SS, had to constantly reassure his men who ran the concentration camps that they were doing a “heroic” duty which was even more difficult than front-line fighting. Indeed, one of the reasons for the creation of the Waffen SS combat units (which did have a formidable battlefield reputation) was to let SS men rotate out of camp duty. As the Waffen SS grew in size, Himmler once reminded its officers that “In many cases it is much easier to go into battle with a company of infantry, than it is to suppress an obstructive population of low cultural level…” One might note the several euphemisms employed here.
To run their camps and execution units, the SS also increasingly turned to recruiting criminals and thugs from throughout Eastern Europe – coarse men for whom the systemic murder of hundreds of thousands of people presented fewer emotional troubles. Martin Gilbert’s stunning history The Holocaust contains a photograph of members of one Einsatzgruppe murder squad posing for the camera – all men who had shot thousands of people, and a close study of their faces suggests they were merciless men whose humanity was fast fading. Einsatzgruppen members (who shot around half a million people in 1941 alone) were a combination of Himmler’s police — who had been cultivated for ruthlessness — and disciplinary cases from elsewhere in the SS network, who were carefully psychologically conditioned by weeks of intensive training for their murderous work.
Once the extermination camps opened up in 1942, the SS took pains to automate the process at a safe psychological distance from many of its men. Reading historical accounts about the almost dispassionate nature of the killing machinery can be too numbing to translate to the imagery of the mind’s eye. But some attempts to portray this policy have succeeded. The 2002 film “The Grey Zone” about the October 1944 Sonderkommando revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau illustrates many of the details of how the camp was actually run, and the effect that working there had on some SS men. The Sonderkommandos were inmates who were given a few more weeks of life in return for “processing” incoming “shipments” before being executed themselves.
Despite the documentation of the Nazi’s crimes, those done by the Soviets were much more massive. Their Gulag camp system and massacres by their security forces experienced many of the same problems that the Nazis ran into. As Anne Applebaum’s new book Gulag: A History shows, there was a growing reliance on criminals and goons to handle the rough stuff, and camp administrators usually were not selected from the ranks of educated men. Prisoners, particularly criminals, were often pressed into service to help run the Soviet camps.
Like the Nazis, the Soviet security organs were certainly capable of handling mass executions. The excavation of burial sites from mass executions in the Soviet Union show that the Soviet NKVD and other security organs faced stress when shooting large numbers of people. Empty bottles of vodka are found throughout the layers of bodies. However, perhaps this picture is not quite complete as at some sites the top layer of bodies largely consists of the skeletons of unclothed young women.
Eventually, even the Soviet NKVD found it was helpful to split the functions of its jailors and executioners from its intelligence apparatus – splitting into the MVD (the Internal Security Ministry) and the MGB, later known as the KGB, in 1946. The MGB/KGB was more than happy to segregate itself from the brutality associated with running camps and handling prisoners.
Mass murder has certainly continued since the days of the great totalitarian movements of the 1930s and ‘40s. Within the last decade, we have seen the use of criminals, the inadequate and disturbed elements handling the dirty work of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. However, the mass murders in Rwanda and Burundi, and some of the excesses of the Taliban and Islamic insurgents in Afghanistan and Algeria seem to have been done by highly conditioned people – many of whom were initially coerced into participation. Once one becomes a murderer under these circumstances, it does become easier to continue – for a while.
Perhaps the easiest way to manufacture mass killers is to use children. While almost every totalitarian movement in history has sought to condition children to its purposes, the abduction of children in contemporary conflicts (particularly in Africa) has resulted in the creation of totally dispassionate killers. And these children will probably bear the mark of Cain for life.
The history of executioners and agents of massacre needs more exploration for a number of reasons, and the most important questions are a long way from being answered – we still really need to understand how we can allow ourselves to behave this way, and to fully understand the price it exacts.
