Ian Rich’s “Holocaust Perpetrators of the German Police Battalions” is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the subject. By focusing on Police Battalions 304 and 314, he adds to the number of battalions that have now been studied in depth: Reserve-Polizei-Bataillon (RPB) 101 by myself and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, RPB 45 by Harold Welzer, RPB 105 and PB 303 by Karl Schneider, and RPB 61 by Stefan Klemp. There are also shorter but nonetheless important studies of PB 307 (Klaus-Michael Mallmann), PB 310 (Edward Westermann), PB 322 (Andrej Angrick et al., Konrad Kweit, Leonid Rein), and RPB 9 and 69 (Klemp) among many others. With a “body-count” of 44,300, PB 314 ranks among the top dozen most lethal battalions, while PB 304 claimed some 18,000 victims. What are the significant contributions that Rich’s study of these two units makes to the growing historical literature on police battalions and Holocaust perpetrators?
First, Rich reconstructs the itineraries and killing actions of the two battalions, based primarily upon the Soviet and East German trial records of PB 314 and the West German trial records of PB 304. This is important, because they were involved in the two initial stages of the “Holocaust by bullets” on occupied Soviet territory in the summer and fall of 1941. In July and August sub-units of PB 314 were dispersed and stationed in small towns in the Kovel region of Volhynia. Beginning on July 22, 1st and 2nd companies in particular carried out small-scale massacres of adult male Jews in various locations, with the number of victims usually ranging from 200 to 300 on each occasion. Beginning in late August, a second flurry of killings—often in the same towns—targeted Jewish women, with the fate of Jewish children unclear. Once the battalion moved further east, 3rd company carried out a small scale massacre in Vinnitsa on September 12. The killing actions were conducted in different ways (victims shot lying down in the pit or standing on the edge of the pit, either back or face to the shooters), indicating that the junior officers in charge had autonomy to organize the executions as they saw fit and no standardized procedure had yet emerged. Several of the junior officers proved unenthusiastic, experienced illness, and obtained transfers with no detriment to their careers. Others “led from the front” as role models for the murderous activities they were organizing. It was only much later, in mid-October 1941, that PB 314 conducted its first large-scale massacre of 15,000 Jews in Dnepropetrovsk. Its campaign of mass murder was then completed while in winter quarters in Kharkov, claiming 12,000 Jewish victims in December and January.
PB 304 did not arrive on occupied Soviet territory until late August and then proceeded to participate in a series of large-scale massacres whose goal was clearly the annihilation of entire Jewish communities with the exception of temporarily exempted skilled workers. In a brief 43 day-span from September 2 through October 14, the unit killed at least 15,658 people, including mass shootings at Starokonstantinov, Ladyzhin, Gaisin, Kirovohrad, Oleksandria, Uman, and Zanamianka. The pattern of operation was uniform: an organizational meeting the day before to assign tasks, roundup of Jews from houses marked by Ukrainian auxiliaries, march or transport to the killing site, collection of clothing and valuables, and shooting of victims forced to lie down in mass graves. The various tasks were rotated between different companies and platoons for each massacre. Shooting was done by volunteers, of whom there were “always enough”.
Rich’s second contribution is a generational analysis that emphasizes the heterogeneous composition of each battalion. The older senior officers came from the “front generation” and the younger senior officers from “the war youth generation.” They both followed a post-war trajectory of either the Freikorps and SA membership or police career, and each then led into the SS. In contrast to the reserve police battalions, whose rank and file came from the 1900–9 cohort and whose party membership was 20–25 percent, the rank and file of these two 300-level battalions were selected from a large pool of volunteers, mostly of the 1909–12 cohort, with an average age of 31 or 32 in 1941. They were mostly of working class background. Around 40% were party members, and all had been vetted for political reliability. The non-commissioned officers (NCOs) were career police in their mid-30s (i.e. war youth generation) with a high percentage of party/SS affiliation. Most interesting for Rich were the younger junior officers of the “first Hitler Youth generation”, who did not join the battalions until the summer of 1941 and at that time were between 19 and 21 years old. As middle-class Abiturienten, they had been “fast-tracked” through the elite officer training program at the Berlin-Köpernick police academy. Having grown up within a closed world of successive Nazi organizations, they had nonetheless been given an additional heavy dose of ideological indoctrination.
Third, Rich argues that ideology needs greater emphasis vis-à-vis the predominantly situational explanations that he thinks are now prevalent in Holocaust perpetrator studies. He does not think that the example of RPB 101 is particularly useful, both because it was not representative of most battalions and because it did not become involved in mass killing until long after the killing precedents had been set. I agree that RPB 101 was atypical in terms of its older age cohort, the lack of selectivity and nazification of its rank and file, as well as the much briefer period of training and indoctrination and lack of prior experience in policing racial imperialism that distinguished it in particular from the 300-level battalions. However, the fact that RPB 101’s “body count” exceeded that of any 300-level battalion, even though it did not begin mass killing until July 1942, poses in my opinion a strong argument for a predominately though not exclusively situational explanation. Rich does approvingly cite the closing paragraph of my “Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers” (2000) in which I conceded that, RBP 101 aside, in many killing units a “crucial nucleus” of ideologically-motivated “eager killers” exercised a fateful influence vastly disproportionate to their numbers. For Rich, the junior officers of PB 304 and 314 were just such a “crucial nucleus” with just such an impact. They led from the front as “role models” at the killings sites, but also contributed vitally in two other ways. First, knowing their men they made the appropriate assignments to assure the smooth flow of the killing operation. Second, as teachers and mentors of their men, they sustained the morale and discipline of their units through ideological lessons, cultivation, and social events. They “choreographed” and “interpreted” their units’ actions to provide a “definition of reality” and “meaning” that justified and legitimized the mass killing.
Rich’s argument is persuasive but incomplete. Missing from his analysis is the role of the NCOs. He is aware that the trial records provide “more evidence” on the junior officers than other members of the battalion and that “care needs to be taken in order not to overemphasize their influence on the actions of the other perpetrators.” Yet the reader learns virtually nothing about the NCOs, who would have been far more numerous and closer to their men than the handful of junior officers to whom Rich attributes such powerful influence. Here again the counter example of RPB 101, in my opinion, is quite instructive. While the lieutenants were older reserve officers quite the opposite of Rich’s junior officers in PB 304 and 314, the NCOs were the younger career policeman who modeled and transmitted the norms of the organizational culture of Himmler’s nazified Ordnungspolizei to conscripted, middle-aged reservists. I suspect the NCOs had a far more important role in PB 304 and 314 than can be found in Rich’s otherwise very instructive book. In short, Rich has given disproportionate weight to the disproportionate influence of the ideologically-driven junior officers.