This somewhat premature shutdown, however, left a few tasks remaining. How, for example, was Himmler to erase the last offcial trace of Jews in the General Government, who, due to their better physical condition, had been selected to work in various commercial and military enterprises (the majority of whom were at the Majdanek, Poniatowa, and Trawniki labor camps)? Himmler moved quickly and with stealth because if these surviving Jews caught wind of the successful revolt at Sobibor, it was feared they might be inspired to act similarly.233 Without industrial-sized gas chambers to do his dirty work, the safest option was to have these workers shot. With the help of SS and Police Leader Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, Himmler hatched Operation Harvest Festival (or Erntefest). The frst stage of this operation involved instructing management at all three labor camps to have their prisoners dig zigzag trenches in felds close to the camp boundaries (ostensibly for defensive military purposes). Then, on 3 November 1943, several thousand police and SS men simultaneously surrounded the camps. Using Jeckeln's Babi Yar model, over the next two days the Jews were stripped of their clothes and forced toward the trenches through heavily armed cordons of police and SS men. Then, they were systematically shot in the trenches. The victims who followed were to stack themselves like sardines on top of those shot before them. By the end of the second day, 43,000 Jews had been shot in the largest mass shooting of civilians undertaken by Germans during World War Two.234 Arad explains what happened next at Trawniki.

A group of 100-120 Jews from the Milejow camp (east of Lublin) were brought to cremate the corpses of the murdered. After two or three weeks, when they fnished the cremating work, they were also shot. They were shot in small groups, and each group had to cremate the corpses of the previous group. The last group was cremated by the Ukrainian guards.235

The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 participated in Operation Harvest Festival. However, these "ordinary" Germans only performed cordon and transport duties.236 For a big job like "Majdanek and Poniatowa during Erntefest, the Security Police of Lublin furnished the shooters." These ordinary yet no doubt capable Germans, having risen to the top of Himmler's attrition process, were, according to Browning, killing "specialists."237

# Conclusion

This chapter traces a "rational" journey in mass murder that started out as pilot studies and rapidly expanded into a carefully calculated, continuously improving, and ultimately successful attempt to murder all the "useless mouths" in the General Government. Between late 1941 and mid-1942, a journey of discovery took place among a competitive group of specialists that generated rapid advances across all four components of a rationalized system: increased control, calculability, predictability, and effciency (along with a movement from human to more non-human technology). That is, after gradually developing a standardized set of mostly non-human cordon/security measures—sealed, electrifed, and barb-wired perimeters, minefeld buffer zones, 24 hour armed security towers, regular Jewish worker rotations—and relying on a variety of equally controlling techniques of deception, eventually one innovator—Christian Wirth—managed to invent a virtually inescapable and highly effcient assembly-line process of mass murder. The key to the success of Wirth's veritable factory of death was the uncanny ability of his system to effciently convert a constant, calculable, and therefore predictable fow of docile victims into dead bodies.

Wirth's journey of discovery shares much in common with Jeckeln's. Much like the shooting campaign, the "twisted road" from Lange's gas vans through to the construction of the Treblinka extermination camp exhibited initially low rates of killing, top-down pressure to increase those rates, the application of formal rationality from the bottom-up (increased experimentation, bureaucratization, and the honing of a less stressful industrialized killing process), resulting in increased kill rates that only served to stimulate new top-down pressures to kill more Jews thus occasioning an ever-expanding cycle of destruction. A key commonality between both murder campaigns was an interactive relationship between top-down and bottom-up forces whereby, as Matthäus observes, "[n]ot only did those committing mass murder learn by doing, but their top commanders and those in planning positions learned as well."238

The key distinguishing feature separating the murder campaigns was that Wirth's "one best way" of killing civilians was more successful than Jeckeln's largely because Wirth developed a more impersonal, less public, less labor intensive, and more industrial and organized means of mass extermination.  When Wirth scaled all the weighty psychological obstacles associated with killing civilians and refned his frightfully effcient killing process, he toppled Jeckeln from his star innovator role in Nazi Jewish policy. Wirth became *the* solution to the Nazi regime's seemingly unresolvable and expanding "Jewish problem."

But in the Nazis' competitive bureaucracy where entrepreneurial functionaries constantly tried to outdo one another, Wirth's elevated status did not last long. Operation Reinhard gassing factories were only designed to exterminate people unable to work. Few of these victims were lined up as working fodder for the German war effort or broader economy. However, as discussed at the Wannsee Conference, for all the other Jews in Western and Central Europe who had not experienced the starvation conditions endured by those entrapped in the Polish ghettos, the Nazis' fagging military fortunes meant that a camp of dual purpose—elimination through work and, for non-workers, immediate extermination—was now needed. This more productive, yet still highly destructive work and death camp would become the new most "perfect" solution. It was called Auschwitz-Birkenau. Destruction with far greater effciency was about to be perfected.

# Notes

smaller villages and towns, where he undertook selections of workers and non-workers. The former were transported to factories in the Łódź ghetto and the latter were sent off to be exterminated (Montague 2012, p. 72).

Padfeld (1990) also concludes, "it is diffcult to understand why Lange was there or why the conference had to be postponed for him unless he was to explain the practicalities of liquidation" (p. 357).

off fngers, pulled out gold teeth. They even looked in the anuses and, with the women, genitalia" (quoted in Cesarani 2016, p. 462).

extermination camps in the General Government was likely to be a highly lethal "success." Consequently, it was also around this point in time that Globocnik was given the green light to try and exterminate all the Jews in the General Government (Kershaw 2000, p. 129). But why would the green light for Operation Reinhard come a month or two after construction at Sobibor had started? The go-ahead for the wider project by higher-ups surely came before late April.

depended on deceiving these 'half-starved, yammering fgures' and preventing panic from ensuing" (p. 142).

# References

#### 218 N. RUSSELL

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# The Solution to the Jewish Question—Auschwitz-Birkenau

At face value, Operation Reinhard and the Auschwitz concentration camp system appear somewhat similar, the main common denominator being the goal of killing massive numbers of human beings. Having said that, a closer look reveals each was governed by different, discrete policy objectives: Operation Reinhard's policy was to kill all the "useless mouths" in the Polish ghettos while Auschwitz focused on extermination through work. Even so, as this chapter will show, Auschwitz moved toward its objective using the same mechanism as Operation Reinhard and, later, Milgram did—the application of intuition, past experience, and close observation of the pilot-testing process (all of which advanced effciency, predictability, calculability, and control, along with a greater dependence on non-human technologies). With a more pronounced emphasis on industrialization, Auschwitz achieved its most signifcant "advancement"—the one that distinguished it most from other solutions to the "Jewish problem"—in the matter of the most powerful strain resolving mechanism of all—the means of inficting harm.

Killing on an industrial scale distinguished Auschwitz in three main ways: effciency, proftability, and (from the Nazi perspective) "humaneness." The Nazis, it seems, regarded the Auschwitz process as the most humane solution to the "Jewish problem" in two main ways. First, for the most directly involved perpetrators, Auschwitz was a relatively stressfree, and with the camp's high standard of living, pleasant place to work. Second, Auschwitz developed a standard operating procedure that the Nazis in and beyond the camp—including the German public cognizant of the extermination campaign1—perceived as a gentle, even kind, way of killing other human beings on an unprecedented scale. Although it was neither of these, the process's designation as "most humane" seems to have eased many of the reservations that Nazi functionaries might have otherwise felt.

As this chapter will show, the general perception that Auschwitz offered the most humane solution to the Jewish problem was particularly dangerous, because in all likelihood it extended the life cycle of the effcient and proftable policy of extermination by work. That is, the mutually inclusive combination of advanced formal rationality and what, for the most directly involved perpetrators, was a less stressful killing process translated into an effcient body-consuming machine that, if not for the Soviets, would have probably known no end. The easier and less the stressful killing became, the more victims the leadership in Berlin found in need of extermination. What follows explains how the most effcient and proftable killing process developed during the Holocaust, and why many Nazis perceived it as humane.

# Humble Beginnings

As Soviet military strength grew after the winter of 1941, Himmler's plans to fll Auschwitz with Russian POWs naturally faltered.2 Thus, he turned to a less desirable source of slave labor—Jews. But the frst group to arrive at Auschwitz I around this time was incapable of productive labor: 400 mainly elderly people sent from an Upper Silesian labor camp to be killed.3 In mid-February 1942, these Jews were gassed in Crematorium I.4 Their death screams could be heard throughout the main camp, and German staff raised concerns that—despite a few attempts to dampen these noises5—gassing victims here probably lacked necessary "privacy…"6 Therefore, as more Jews incapable of work arrived at Auschwitz I, more were transferred to the nearby Birkenau satellite camp. On 27 February 1942, Hans Kammler, the head of the construction division of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Department, decided that it made more sense for the industrial-style crematorium—Crematorium II—which, Bischoff and Prüfer originally planned for Auschwitz I, instead be built at the more secluded Birkenau site.7 Soon after this decision, on 20 March 1942 (just as Operation Reinhard started), a stone cottage on the new satellite camp was hastily converted into a gas chamber to deal with the ongoing infux of non-workers to Birkenau.8 The 60–80 square meter cottage called Bunker I proved capable of killing about 500 victims per gassing.9 As in the early stages of Operation Reinhard, Jewish work commandos dumped the victims' bodies into large nearby pits. According to Camp Commandant Höss, "Whereas in the spring of 1942 only small operations were involved, the number of convoys increased during the summer…"10 To keep up with the bureaucratic momentum that supplied increasing numbers of victims and to avoid bottlenecks, Höss felt, "we *had* to create new extermination facilities" [italics added].11 Of course, he did not *have* to do this; as a problem-solving bureaucratic functionary, he chose to do it. In June 1942, Birkenau's gassing capacity increased when Bunker II, another stone cottage, was converted into a gas chamber. Measuring about 105 square meters, Bunker II was larger than Bunker I and capable of killing about 800 people per gassing.12 The victims' bodies were also dumped in nearby pits.

On 17 and 18 July 1942, Himmler visited Auschwitz for the second time. During this visit, he personally observed Bunker II in action.13 The gassing operation he saw included mostly young and old Jews. According to Höss, Himmler "made no remark regarding the process of extermination, but remained quite silent."14 Himmler's reaction in this case stands in stark contrast to his earlier response to the mass shooting of mostly men in Minsk, which had caused his face to turn "white as cheese…" With the removal of the distasteful visual spectacle, Himmler was no longer disturbed by the massacre of civilians.15

During this visit, Himmler informed Höss, who after the war acquired a reputation for being unusually frank,16 "Eichmann's [train transport] program will continue…and will be accelerated every month from now on."17 Himmler then instructed Höss to increase Birkenau's population capacity from 100,000 to 200,000.18 Himmler's intention was to bolster the Nazi war machine by building a regional armaments industry that would draw upon Birkenau's slave labor force.19 But, because many of those bound for Auschwitz were incapable of productive labor, Himmler also apparently instructed Höss to exterminate those Jews incapable of work.20 Because Himmler had just seen Bunker II in action, he knew that killing large numbers of non-workers as they arrived in Auschwitz would pose no problem for Höss, who had, as Lasik put it, the requisite "organizational talents."21 But the SS-Reichsführer did raise concerns about the adjacent pits full of rotting bodies. Again, just in case Germany lost the war, Himmler deemed it wise to eliminate any evidence of Nazi war crimes. Doing so would also address the local authority's concerns that the 107,000 bodies buried in the pits were polluting the groundwater.22

Himmler's solution to the body disposal problem was two-fold. First, as a shorter-term measure, in September 1942 Paul Blobel's Kommando 1005 was sent to Auschwitz to apply the best outdoor body-burning techniques they had discovered that summer.23 Second, and as a longerterm solution, Höss would expedite Topf & Sons' construction of Birkenau's industrial crematorium (Crematorium II). Himmler's concern re-emphasized the central problem also encountered in the Operation Reinhard camps: Killing was generally easier than body disposal.24 But he clearly sensed that Birkenau held the potential to overcome such problems, which perhaps explains why during his visit he requested that Birkenau be doubled in size and Höss promoted to Lieutenant Colonel.25

The SS-Reichsführer's demand to expand Birkenau's capacity to 200,000 must have sent camp offcial Karl Bischoff into a spin. The increased death rate that would come with doubling the camp's size would mean even more bodies in need of cremation. To eliminate any risk of bottlenecks, on 19 August Bischoff ordered another Topf & Sons' industrial crematorium.26 This crematorium—Crematorium III—located opposite Crematorium II was to be a mirror image of its predecessor. See, for example, the following Allied forces aerial photograph taken in 1944 of both crematoria: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/ en/photo/aerial-photograph-showing-gas-chambers-and-crematoria-atthe-auschwitz-birkenau.

Out of a fear that these new facilities might still fail to handle the anticipated number of bodies, plans were made to build several other smaller facilities: Crematoriums IV, V, and VI (never built). Although the plans for Crematoriums IV and V included their own gas chambers, they were to be constructed next to Bunkers II and I (respectively) so that, if needed, the newer facilities could be co-opted to cremate the victims from these older gassing facilities.27

With all this construction likely to take some time, the bodies of victims gassed in the meantime were burned using Blobel's open-fre techniques in massive pits adjacent to Bunkers I and II. This short-term solution, however, generated a problem of its own, exposing the camp and local community to the pungent smell of burning fesh.28 The elevated smokestacks of the industrial crematoria would somewhat eliminate this problem, which provided another incentive to expedite their construction.

A few months later, in September 1942, Himmler's order to double the capacity of Birkenau to 200,000 prisoners was scaled back to 140,000 when Armaments Minister Albert Speer convinced Hitler of Himmler's probable incompetence in the area of arms production.29 Despite this setback to Himmler's ambitions, the construction plans for Crematoria II to V remained unchanged and preceded with haste.

With the onset of the 1942–1943 winter, the operators of Bunkers I and II encountered an unanticipated problem. The cold weather made it diffcult to raise the room temperature in the gas chambers above the requisite 25.7 degrees Celsius that enabled the vaporization of Zyklon-B pellets. To avoid this problem in the future, the plans for Crematorium II were changed: Its more insulated basement-level morgues were converted into massive underground gas chambers. Doing so simply required replacing the morgues' body chutes with a staircase, which victims would descend. The fnal plan had the larger of Crematorium II's two morgues serving as an undressing room and the smaller as a massive, partially underground gas chamber.30 This decision was made easier by the fact that the morgue (now gas chamber) already came with a powerful odor-expelling ventilation system. It will be recalled that the earlier conversion of Crematorium I's morgue into a gas chamber (around late 1941) had highlighted this technology's usefulness for expelling poisonous gas.31 A minor setback of the new plan was that architect Walter Dejaco's blueprints, produced on 19 December, arrived too late and the concrete for the chutes had already been laid and therefore required demolition.32 By 29 January, Bischoff and his team stopped referring to the smaller of Crematorium II33 and started terming it a "gassing cellar [Vergaungskeller]."34 Because the gas chamber was so big and any gas within it could be extracted so quickly (and replaced with fresh air), the application of this ad hoc decision to both Crematoriums II and III increased Auschwitz-Birkenau's killing/ body disposal capacity enormously.

In early March of 1943, Crematorium II was ready to undergo a series of tests, the biggest of which occurred around the middle of the month when 1492 women, children, and elderly Jews were gassed and then cremated. Incineration of these bodies took more than a day, thus highlighting the inaccuracy of Prüfer's initial calculation: It had failed to incinerate 1440 bodies in 24 hours. After some minor adjustments, the facility's maximum incineration capacity reached 750 bodies in 24 hours, and on 31 March, Crematorium II was ready for use. Death and incineration in Crematorium II basically involved a six-step process. Step One: Victims lined up outside the extermination center then descended the stairs into the morgue converted into an undressing chamber. Step Two: victims undressed. Step Three: The naked victims entered another slightly smaller chamber—the second partially underground morgue recently converted into a gas chamber—termed the "showers." Step Four: German "disinfectors" would climb on top of the gas chamber and pour Zyklon-B crystals through sealable ceiling vents35 with the victims then dying below. Step Five: When the victims had died, the gas fumes would be extracted and the Jewish work commando, on entering the chamber, would strip the bodies of all valuables. Step Six: the Jewish work commando would transfer the bodies to the adjacent crematoria (one level above) to be incinerated. The following video clip provides a basic overview of this process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q75pOXBr4e0. For a virtual reality walk-through of Crematorium II, see https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=x3EeTFtYr5E.

A week before Crematorium II's test-run, on 22 March 1943, Crematorium IV was completed. However, by May this facility had been permanently decommissioned because of a major structural defect that only worsened with time.36 The completion of Crematorium II was followed by Crematorium V and then III on 4 April and 24 June 1943, respectively.37 Thus, as Operation Reinhard wound down, Auschwitz-Birkenau's role in the Final Solution ramped up.

By the frst half of 1943, however, as all this construction came to an end, the tide of the war turned rather decisively in the Soviet's favor. In February 1943, the Wehrmacht was defeated in the Battle of Stalingrad. Then in August, it was defeated again in the Battle of Kursk, its fnal offensive attack on Soviet territory. The Nazi war machine never recovered from these blows, and thereafter, all Germans knew that the Russians were coming. However, earlier, during the "euphoria of victory," Germany had been persuaded into willingly or indifferently supporting their government's pursuit of a variety of horrifc war crimes. And many of these crimes involved Soviet victims, a nation that in light of its enormous loses could in victory hardly be expected to act with benevolence. Having allowed the undertaking of such dark deeds, Germany probably wouldn't be able to act with impunity after all. Suddenly, the folly, selfshness, and greed of it all became apparent. Germany collectively started to contemplate its fate. Many Germans no doubt considered assassinating Hitler and then blaming it all on the machinations of a hypnotic madman. Indeed, during 1943, there was a rapid increase in assassination attempts on Hitler. In desperation, perhaps Germany could negotiate a permanent truce. But it was too late for all that. As Hitler reminded his inner circle: "Gentlemen, the bridges behind us are broken."38 Germany as a nation had arguably long passed the Obedience study's persuasion phase (the frst part of the experiment where participants were convinced into inficting the intensifying shocks) and, having supported wrongdoing, by 1943 was deep inside the experiment's after-capitulation phase (the point after participants commit themselves to completing).39 "[T]hat is good", Goebbels noted in his diary on March of the same year, because "a *Volk* that have burned their bridges fght much more unconditionally than those who still have the chance of retreat."40 All that Germany could do was fght on to the bitter end, thereby delaying the inevitable.

But fght is not all that they did. A document from the German Postal Censor's Offce in Ukraine, which surveilled all private correspondence, warned that the Nazi perk for Germans stationed in the east to purchase then post-cheap local goods back home had spiraled out of control. This undated report, probably written soon after the defeat at Stalingrad, elaborates on "the only thing about Ukraine that interests the majority of the authors"—black marketeering41:

The illegal trade is not just aimed at acquiring personal family necessities. It is becoming a "*business*," carried out on a commercial basis. People are investing and earning money. The letters promise that money grows on trees in Ukraine and that people can get rich there quickly. "Here, you can become a rich woman overnight." Ordinary people are in a position to write home that they have already "earned" thousands. Others want to convert profts made in Ukraine into cars and property in the Reich. In nouveau rich fashion, jewels and expensive furs are purchased for housewives. […] All of this supports the harsh conclusion that is often drawn in the letters: Ukraine is a black market paradise.

The report ends in a statement that supports Heinrich Böll's earlier observation that Germans' stockpiling of goods in the occupied territories reminded him of robbing a corpse: "People often refer to Germans working in business and civilian administration in Ukraine as 'East hyenas.'"42 Instead of black market trading, other Germans preferred the more direct "shopping with a pistol…"43 For example, in Lithuania, the company commander of Police Battalion 105 spent "a day and night" packing "crates of loot" to send back home to Bremen.44 Many saw stealing as a well-deserved perk in exchange for having undertaking their emotionally taxing genocidal tasks.45 And anyway, so these men no doubt told themselves, if they didn't keep the stolen goods, someone probably "less deserving" than themselves would. Such rampant corruption was common in the East because the risk of the Nazi authorities prosecuting them was slim—an inherently criminal regime was not in the strongest position to accuse others of criminality. Consequently, many ordinary Germans sensed they could engage in such personally benefcial acts with total impunity.46

This kind of corruption spread to much of the civilian population back home in Germany. As Jews from all over Western and Central Europe were increasingly rounded up and sent to places like Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazis confscated millions of cubic meters of their household effects and then redistributed them to German bombing raid victims, young newlyweds, large families, and war widows. Occasionally, the recipients were distinguished members of the SS and military.47 In the heavily bombed working-class districts of Hamburg, for example, librarian Gertrud Seydelmann recollected:

Ordinary housewives suddenly wore fur coats, traded coffee, and jewelry, and had imported antique furniture and rugs from Holland and France. … Some of our regular readers were always telling me to go down to the harbor if I wanted to get hold of rugs, carpets, furniture, jewelry, and furs. It was property stolen from Dutch Jews who, as I learned after the war, had been taken away to the death camps. I wanted nothing to do with this. But in refusing, I had to be careful around those greedy people, especially the women, who were busily enriching themselves. I couldn't let my true feelings show.48

These housewives never killed any Jews, and as aerial bombardment of German housing increased in the last few years of the war, their emotional universes were all consumed by *their* victimization. And anyway, so these housewives likely told themselves, if they refused to capitalize on this infux of property, (again) some other less deserving German than themselves no doubt would. After such rationalizations suffciently disarmed their guilty conscience, a competition of who among them could successfully acquire the most prized possessions of a murdered people ensued.

Back at Auschwitz-Birkenau, from mid-1943, the camp's multiple gas chambers and crematoria facilities, managed by the organizational talents of Eichmann and Höss, were capable of effciently killing and hygienically disposing of more human beings than any of the Operation Reinhard camps. All that was needed was an opportunity to prove it. That opportunity came on 19 March 1944 when the German armed forces invaded Hungary, which the Nazis (correctly) suspected was about to desert the Axis alliance in favor of the allies.49 Germany's successful invasion of Hungary occurred as elsewhere the Nazis were losing enormous tracts of land. Germany might lose the war, but there was still an opportunity for Hitler to win his personal battle with the European Jews.50 With hegemony over Hungary and the loaded gun of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi leadership decided to exterminate the Hungarian Jews.

Although several months before the Hungarian invasion Höss had left Auschwitz for a higher administrative position in Berlin,51 he returned to his old job to do what he did best. As Hilberg puts it, "Hungary was going to lift Auschwitz to the top."52 To have any chance of achieving "Aktion Höss,"53 the energetic commandant needed to act with celerity and unprecedented levels of effciency. He had a three-track railway siding laid inside the Birkenau complex—an innovation that enabled three trains to enter the camp perimeter at any one time.54 From mid-May 1944, Höss expected from Eichmann an average delivery of about 12–14,000 Hungarian Jews a day.55 Because most of the arrivals were young and old, only about 10–30% were selected as workers.56 The rest were sent on-foot to Crematoria II, III, and V, while smaller groups were gassed in Bunker II, which had been re-commissioned for the special action.57

However, it soon became apparent that Auschwitz-Birkenau's maximum incineration capacity could not keep up with such a massive and continuous infux of victims. The inventive Höss therefore devised a combination of old and new techniques. These included the construction of several massive outdoor incineration pits, the biggest of which measured around 45 m long by 8 m wide and 2 m deep.58 There about 5000 bodies a day could be incinerated.59 Another technique Höss deployed included over-flling the industrial crematoria and then having a Jewish work detail use hammers to crush the partially incinerated bodies into ash. This solution came with the attendant risk of damaging the crematoria. Nonetheless, both strategies greatly increased Birkenau's maximum incineration capacity to around 800060 or even 10,000 bodies per day.61 Therefore, after the selections of workers from non-workers, Auschwitz-Birkenau could keep up with the daily infux of around 12–14,000 Jews.

Refecting on Höss' "assembly-line operation,"62 camp worker SS-Unterscharführer Pery Broad recalled, "There was never a break. Hardly had the last corpse been dragged out of the chamber to the cremation ditch in the corpse-covered yard behind the crematorium, than the next batch was already undressing."63 This blitzkrieg against the Hungarian Jews—which took place across a seven-week period between 15 May and 9 July 1944—ended in the deportation of nearly 440,000 people to Auschwitz-Birkenau, most of whom were gassed on arrival.64 According to van Pelt and Dwork, "At no other time was Auschwitz more effcient as a killing center."65 Indeed, Höss, with the constant fow of Eichmann's trains, had taken Auschwitz-Birkenau to the top. But because the camp reached its full body-consuming stride so late into the war, it ended up killing "only" between 1,100,000 and 1,500,000 civilians.66 Although Auschwitz never got to demonstrate its long-term destructive potential, it still became what Hilberg termed "the largest death center the world had ever seen."67 In light of the rapid decimation of the Hungarian Jews, one can only imagine the number of people the Nazi regime would have killed had Auschwitz-Birkenau remained open for just a few more years. Hayes actually estimates that had the war continued and the Nazis were able to round up and transport the remaining European Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau, all could have been killed and their bodies cremated by the end of 1946.68

# Auschwitz-Birkenau: Formal Rationality and the Most Efficient Means to the End

In terms of the four main components of formal rationality—effciency, predictability, control, and calculability—Auschwitz-Birkenau took resolving the Jewish question to a new and even higher level. Trains from all over Europe packed with several thousand Jews each entered a heavily guarded, electrifed, and basically inescapable camp perimeter. With the selection of non-workers from workers complete, effciency required the key ingredient of victim docility, as had been the case during Operation Reinhard. Once again, the T4's usual tricks appeared. "Very politely, very amiably, a little speech was made to [those selected for immediate death]," noted French physician André Lettich. A German would tell them, "You've arrived after a trip; you're dirty; you're going to have a bath. Undress quickly!" To further bolster the pretext, on some occasions Lettich claims, "towels and soap were distributed."69 If the process moved too slowly, German camp workers might capitalize on the fact that the victims were likely thirsty after having endured a threeto four-day train journey. They might promise a drink of water or coffee, but only after the new arrivals had taken a delousing shower. This offer, which the Jews frequently applauded, helped ensure a calm, smooth, and continuous fow of bodies through the system.70

By offering the strongest prisoners a chance for survival in exchange for their labor, the camp guards also managed to diffuse the most threatening source of Jewish resistance. Those selected as workers had an identifcation number tattooed on the inside of their wrist to track their movements within and beyond the camp, and their gradual demise from living to dead. The promise of false hope helped to motivate the slowly starving Jews to work hard: Auschwitz I's camp gate (mis)informed all that "Arbeit Macht Frei"—"Work will set you free." Prisoners not only worked hard for free but also did so in return for barely any food. When their productivity dropped below a certain level or they were deemed surplus to requirements, like their unproductive relatives before them, they too were sent to the gas chambers. Even if these workers eventually realized their fate, there was no time left to organize a revolt and they were often too weak to resist anyway. After these workers had been killed, they were replaced by healthier new arrivals. Trapped within the highly secure and largely inescapable enclosure, these new slaves typically shared the same fate as those before them.71

Alice Lok Cahana's account of the gassing process at Auschwitz-Birkenau (which was essentially the same for both non-workers and worn-out workers) illustrates more of the Nazis' tricks of deception. On 7 October 1944, Cahana and her sister were selected to go to a new barrack but on the way they were instructed to frst take a shower for hygiene purposes. They were sent to "a nice building with fowers at the windows."

I see fowers in a window—reminding you of home. Reminding you that mother went out when the Germans came into Hungary, and instead of being scared or crying or hysterical she went to the market and bought violets. And it made me so calm. If Mother buys fowers it can't be so bad. They will not hurt us.72

With the fowers having set Cahana's worst fears at ease, she willingly entered the changing room where "an SS woman said, 'Everyone put their shoes nicely together, your clothes on the foor.'"73 But were they really about to take a shower? More props suggested so. "The 'changing rooms', the anterooms to the gas chambers [were]…overt stage sets, with their numbered pegs for clothing ('Remember your number!') and the signs in various languages advertising the benefts of hygiene."74 Next, Cahana notes, "we were taken into a room—naked."75 After entering, a solid door quickly closed behind them. Before they could establish what was happening, the door suddenly swung open and they were quickly ushered out of the so-called showers. Cahana and those with her had, by the narrowest of margins, avoided certain death because the Jewish work detail had staged a revolt.

Had there not been a revolt, a van with the markings of the Red Cross would have pulled up outside. The van's markings were, according to Auschwitz bookkeeper Oskar Gröning, designed to "create the impression" to all those who could see from near and far that, in line with the pretense, this facility was indeed a delousing station—"people had nothing to fear."76 A couple of Germans would exit the van and, donning gas masks, climb on top of the semi-underground gas chamber. The two "disinfecting operators," as they were euphemistically termed, would then await a signal from a higher authority fgure (sometimes a medical doctor) to pour carefully measured quantities of Zyklon-B crystals into the roof vents.77 Then, the two operators would close and seal the lids behind them,78 return to their van, and drive off. And because they drove off, they remained perceptually oblivious to the pandemonium and terror left in their wake.79 It took about 10–12 minutes to kill all the victims,80 upon which the industrial-strength air vents would expediently remove the gas from the chamber. Next, the Jewish Sonderkommando entered the chamber and stripped the two, perhaps two and a half, thousand or so, victims81 of anything valuable—hair, hidden items, gold teeth. The stripping process took about four hours.82 The bodies were then dragged into the adjacent lift and transferred to one of the crematoria where they were incinerated. The German overseers or even their Eastern European collaborators need not engage in any of this horrifc labor. In an action, reminiscent of Milgram's processing blocks (one hour per participant), Clendinnen notes about Auschwitz-Birkenau's highly rationalized system, "When the episode was over and the rooms emptied, there would be a frantic rush to remove all traces of the last audience and to reset the scene for the next intake and the next performance."83 A single performance at Auschwitz—the start-to-fnish conversion of a single convoy into ash—took on average 72 hours.84

Because many workers required close supervision over fairly long periods of time, Auschwitz's system of "extermination through work" was dependent on far more (relatively expensive) German guards than the Operation Reinhard camps—2500 on average.85 Having said this, like Operation Reinhard but so different from the mass shootings, few Germans were required to run Auschwitz's extermination facilities. With a large Jewish slave labor workforce and Jewish kapo enforcers, as Rees says of Auschwitz's Crematoria II and III,

The whole horrifc operation was often supervised by as few as two SS men. Even when the killing process was stretched to the limit there were only ever a handful of SS members around. This, of course, limited to a minimum the number of Germans who might be subjected to the kind of psychological damage that members of the killing squads in the East had suffered.86

Auschwitz-Birkenau, like Operation Reinhard, could kill a set maximum number of victims per day, thus enabling the calculation of monthly or even yearly genocidal mortality rates. As a result, predicting how long it would take to "disappear" Europe's entire population of Jews became technically possible. Indeed, in terms of calculability and predictability, Auschwitz exceeded Operation Reinhard for two main reasons. First, Auschwitz's indoor crematoria ensured that unpredictable rainy weather did not reduce the camp's normal body-burning capacity. Second, the diesel motors used in Operation Reinhard frequently broke down,87 regularly causing major bottlenecks in the system. At Auschwitz, Zyklon-B posed no such risk because packing humans into a hermetically sealed and insulated chamber reliably and predictably saw the room temperature rise over the requisite 25.7 degrees Celsius.

Auschwitz had another advantage. Although all prisoners who entered were, as in Operation Reinhard and the mass shootings, robbed of all their valuables, over the long term the system of "extermination through work" was a potentially more proftable form of extortion. To feed, clothe, and lodge a worker in Auschwitz cost 1.34 Reichsmarks per day, but to hire the least skilled laborers, the Nazis charged employers 3–4 Reichsmarks.88 Between 1940 and 1945, the Nazi state earned 60 million Reichsmarks from Auschwitz's slave labor system.89 The longer the Auschwitz stayed open, the more proft the Nazis could accrue. Operation Reinhard and the mass shootings, however, could—for obvious reasons—only generate high profts over the short term. Quite simply the system at Auschwitz became the Nazi regime's model solution to its European-wide Jewish question because of its effciency and longerterm proftability.

In 2001, I visited Auschwitz during a backpacking tour across Eastern Europe. Afterward, I, like most visitors, was left wondering what kind of cold, calculated, and cunning person could envisage, design, and then build such a monstrous factory of death. But the answer that has emerged from my subsequent research sees this singular monstrous person disappear into the collective mass. Instead, I found numerous perpetrators who independently and together suggested and tested a wide variety of potential "improvements." The ideas that proved most effective—for example, to utilize Eastern European collaborators and Jewish labor for the most diffcult positions, to install air ventilation systems in a morgue, to use faster-acting Zyklon-B gas, to construct a contiguous gas chamber and crematorium, to convert Crematorium II's basement-level morgues into an undressing room and gas chamber, and fnally to increase the scale of everything—were retained. And all the ideas that, with time, proved ineffective were dropped. Eventually, the most effective means accumulated until an ugly beast emerged—one increasingly capable of converting the preconceived goal discussed at Wannsee into a reality.

Auschwitz-Birkenau stood at the end of a long journey of ad hoc experimentation that chipped away at the numerous and varied problems associated with exterminating millions of unwanted civilians. The invention of Auschwitz cannot be attributed to any one person. The resulting responsibility ambiguity at every link in the organizational chain only made it psychologically easier for all involved to play a part in the perpetrator collective that, "only in small ways," contributed to the camp's invention. And it was Auschwitz's disjointed invention that probably explains why, after the war, perpetrators could not pinpoint who exactly invented the ghoulish yet undeniably clever process of extermination. For the perpetrators—but also for victims, survivors, and postwar observers—the end result that was Auschwitz-Birkenau became an incomprehensible enigma beyond rational explanation.

But, it is here that a centrally important Milgram-Holocaust linkage is found. Consider, for example, Milgram's discovery that substituting a translucent screen separating the participant from learner with a solid partition could greatly increase the completion rate—an idea actually stimulated from the bottom-up by his participants' avoidance behavior. Milgram did not know why exactly this small innovation increased the completion rate, he just knew it did. And when discoveries like this moved him closer to his preconceived goal, he retained them. Over time, these kinds of innovations accumulated until a "devilishly ingenious"90 procedure emerged and he achieved his goal—maximization of the baseline completion rate. And afterward, Milgram, the main but not only inventive force behind the Obedience experiments, could not explain the disturbing results he had obtained.

# Conclusion

Auschwitz was the terminus of the "twisted road" to the Holocaust. It represents the Nazis' most preferred solution to their self-defned "Jewish problem." As in Operation Reinhard, staff at Auschwitz collectively found ways to extend a little more all four components of a formally rational organizational system—greater effciency, predictability, calculability, and control. Just some of the key ideas that advanced formal rationality included the use of tracking tattoos, industrial-sized, weatherproof, indoor crematoria, a gas dependent on body heat, new tricks of deception, and railway tracks of suffcient capacity. Auschwitz's innovations saw the killing and cremation of humans on a greater scale and in a shorter amount of time than any earlier system they had developed. On top of all this, the program of extermination through work was less wasteful (of slave labor), and therefore, the system overall was far more proftable than Operation Reinhard. As Bauman argues:

Considered as a complex purposeful operation, the Holocaust may serve as a paradigm of modern bureaucratic rationality. Almost everything was done to achieve maximum results with minimum costs and efforts. Almost everything (within the realm of the possible) was done to deploy the skills and resources of everybody involved, including those who were to become the victims of the successful operation. Almost all pressures irrelevant or adversary to the purpose of the operation were neutralized or put out of action altogether. Indeed, the story of the organization of the Holocaust could be made into a textbook of scientifc management.91

Without a doubt, there were many examples of great ineffciency during the Holocaust—for one, the Nazi management system with its overlapping jurisdictions stimulated the duplication of tasks as different factions independently vied to resolve whatever it was they thought the Führer wished. Having said this, it was still a management system that went on to produce more effcient winners and less effcient losers. Once the process took its course, the leadership was able to pick and choose from a range of options the best available solution to any one problem. And from this perspective, Höss' Auschwitz was *the* winner among a wide range of competitors. In terms of developing the most rational solution to a seemingly intractable problem—in conjunction with business acumen and entrepreneurial capitalism where the pursuit of proft was taken to its unregulated natural extreme—nothing competes with Auschwitz.

However, as the next chapter will show, the clear presence in Auschwitz of an ever-advancing form of Weberian formal rationality provides an incomplete picture. The extermination machine had to be as effcient and proftable as possible, but it also had to ensure that those Germans most directly involved could avoid experiencing any "burdening of the soul"—any feelings of shame, guilt, or (most commonly) repugnance that killing civilians could stimulate. The Germans most directly involved had to be able to avoid the conclusion that they had become mass executioners of defenseless men, women, children, and babies. The killing process at Auschwitz extended previous boundaries of formal rationality and did so in a way that German perpetrators in and beyond the camps were able to call "humane."

# Notes

vestibule. Moreover, it proved necessary to improve the ventilation of Leichenkeller 2 (which was only deaerated) by adding an aeration system to bring air into the room. After the furnaces had been tested and their output better estimated, it became clear that they could not handle the "yield" of two gas chambers. Consequently, Leichenkeller 2 became an undressing room" (Pressac and van Pelt 1998, p. 224).

# References

Longerich, P. (2012). *Heinrich Himmler*. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Marcus, S. (1974). Book review of 'obedience to authority' by Stanley Milgram. *The New York Times Book Review, 79*(2), 1–3.

#### 240 N. RUSSELL

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# The Nazi's Pursuit for a "Humane" Method of Killing

When Nazis from a wide variety of ranks, whether lowly Rolf-Heinz Höppner in Lódź or Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss, Wilhelm Kube, Karl Brandt, or even those of the heights of Heinrich Himmler spoke of a "humane" method of killing other human beings, what exactly did they mean? One outcome of this book is a tentative outline of the key characteristics—a Weberian Ideal-Type—of what the Nazis regarded as the most humane method of killing. As this chapter will argue, when these and other Nazis spoke of such matters, what they seemed to desire was a method of killing that rated highly on four main conditions. First, victims should remain totally unaware that they are about to die. Second, perpetrators need not touch, see, or hear their victims as they die. Third, the death blow should avoid leaving any visual indications of harm on the victims' bodies.  At the start of the Holocaust, the Nazis did not have a cheap and effcient method of killing civilians that came remotely close to meeting all four of these conditions. Over time, however, and with much competitive trial-and-error experimentation, certain innovators in places like Auschwitz inched their way ever closer to this ideal.

# No Anticipation of Death

Most Nazis strongly preferred that their many civilian victims not experience the stress of knowing they were about to die. To secure such a condition, the Nazis relied most often on elaborate props of deception.

© The Author(s) 2019 N. Russell, *Understanding Willing Participants, Volume 2*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97999-1\_8

These included, for example, promises of water, food, and work after taking a quick shower, fake railway stations, pleasantly painted gas chambers with fowers and a carefully placed Star of David—all to trick victims into thinking they had not arrived at a place of death. So why was it so important to the perpetrators that the victims not anticipate their own deaths? One explanation is that such props encouraged victim docility, which helped to secure a smooth and effcient fow of victims through the killing process. There is certainly much truth to this explanation; however, a closer look reveals other, more subtle but equally important motives.

A strong indicator that the "overt stage sets" were not only about securing an effcient killing process comes from an example near the end of the war. At the Stutthof camp between August and November 1944, camp commandant Paul Werner Hoppe instructed his subordinates to kill all Jews who were old, sick, and unable to work.1 To deal with similar requests in the past, a railway car was converted into a hermetically sealed Zyklon-B gas chamber. In this case, a group of Jewish women were told they were to go to a stocking and darning shop—easy indoor work—and had to be transported there by train:

One of the SS men put on a railroad employee's uniform and whistled, as is usually done in marshaling yards. To make the subterfuge complete, an ordinary car was placed next to the gassing car […] The SS staff of the camp urged the twenty or thirty victims to hurry: it was time to leave; they had to go clear to Danzig. As soon as everybody was in the car, the doors were closed. Then the gas was thrown through the opening in the roof.2

Why did this SS man go to such ineffcient lengths—putting on a special uniform, blowing a whistle, arranging another carriage, and putting on such a big show? Did he simply wish to avoid the display of force and physical intimidation that would have more effciently resulted in the women doing as they were told? In fact, he seems to have tried to tempt the women into willingly, perhaps even cheerfully, entering the gas chamber of their own accord. It seems that such elaborate and ineffcient deception likely grew out of a concern for the reaction victims might have had to knowledge of their impending deaths. If they were oblivious to their fate, then the victims could be expected to avoid the reactions of terror likely to accompany such knowledge. Thus, for the victims, the elaborate deception would make for a less stressful and therefore more "humane" dying experience. This is no doubt part of the explanation, as the following admission by SS-Mann Heinrich Hesse makes clear:

One of the Jewish people killed by me was a Jewish woman aged between twenty and thirty, I cannot remember exactly. She was a beautiful woman. I was glad to be able to shoot her so that she did not fall into the hands of the Untersturmführer. But please don't take that to mean that I enjoyed it. I said to the Jewess when I brought her from the cellar that the Untersturmführer wanted to speak to her, or something to that effect. My only thought was that if I had to do something I should cause the person as little pain as possible. I did not want the Jewess to suffer fear of death. I then made her come out of the cellar. She went in front of me. On the way to the grave or graves, which had already been dug, I suddenly shot her from behind.3

Here, again the perpetrator's sole concern seems to have been the stress generated by the victim's "fear of death." The same concern led to a refnement to the Zyklon-B killing method. The SS preferred using Zyklon-B that had its distinctive nutty smell removed, which the manufacturers added to provide humans with an early warning of the gas's lethal presence.4 Even after deceiving their victims into entering the "shower," the SS preferred they remain incapable of identifying the mysterious "delousing" gas. This deception, however, fooled nobody—the victims could immediately feel that the gas was nocuous. Therefore, it appears that the purpose behind removing the smell was a Milgram-like "balm to the…conscience"5 whereby although the victims still ended up dying, the perpetrators could tell themselves that they never saw death coming. That is, the removal of the nutty smell was a strain resolving technique of self-deception where the perpetrators made a slight change to the killing method that really did little more than making them feel a lot better about their extermination of other human beings.

Another closely related explanation for the preference to deceive victims is that perpetrators hoped to avoid having to deal with their victims' guilt-inducing reactions to suddenly realizing they were about to die. Having to encounter potentially emotional victims just before killing them—the begging, sobbing, crying, screaming, and expressions of absolute horror—would have probably made the perpetrators feel like the ruthless executioners they had become. Keeping victims oblivious to their fate arguably resulted in much less stress for the perpetrators. When, as survivor Ada Lichtman noted, the props of deception encouraged victims to dance, sing, and applauded on their way to the grave, perpetrators would have found the psychological stress associated with being an executioner much easier to bear. Certainly, these acts of deception made for a relatively less stressful and more tolerable work environment.

The importance of subterfuge for easing perpetrators' guilty consciences is perhaps best illustrated in the powerful emotional sting killers often experienced when their victims saw through the techniques of deception. With just a few words, powerless people were capable of inficting deep wounds on the guilty consciences of the most effcient Nazi killers. Consider, for example, the recollections of Rudolf Höss, in regards to a "shattering" event that he believed he would "never forget:"

One woman approached me as she walked past and, pointing to her four children who were manfully helping the smallest ones over the rough ground, whispered: 'How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful, darling children? Have you no heart at all?' […] I remember, too, a woman who tried to throw her children out of the gas-chamber, just as the door was closing. Weeping she called out: 'At least let my precious children live.' There were many such shattering scenes, which affected all who witnessed them.6

For Höss, there were other events:

On one occasion two small children were so absorbed in some game that they quite refused to let their mother tear them away from it. Even the Jews of the Special Detachment were reluctant to pick the children up. The imploring look in the eyes of the mother, who certainly knew what was happening, is something I shall never forget. The people were already in the gas-chamber and becoming restive, and I had to act. Everyone was looking at me. I nodded to the junior non-commissioned offcer on duty and he picked up the screaming, struggling children in his arms and carried them into the gas-chamber, accompanied by their mother who was weeping in the most heart-rending fashion. My pity was so great that I longed to vanish from the scene: yet I might not show the slightest trace of emotion.7

In the most sophisticated of killing centers like Auschwitz, elaborate acts of deception could secure victim docility and greatly aided in maintaining killing effciency. But it was equally important that such techniques *also* enabled perpetrators to generally avoid the great psychological stress that they were killers of defenseless civilians. For the most directly involved Germans, techniques of victim deception also served as tools of self-deception so that the killing of other human beings felt to them like a humane and gentle experience.

# Touching, Seeing, or Hearing

The Nazi regime's pursuit of a method of killing capable of destroying large numbers of civilians gradually moved in a direction that allowed German perpetrators to emotionally distance themselves from their victims. By the time Crematorium II was completed at Auschwitz, the Germans most directly involved in the killing process need not touch, see, or hear their victims die. According to German political prisoner Karl Lil, once victims of Auschwitz were trapped in the hermetically sealed gas chambers, little of their fate could be detected by those outside. "A few seconds later a cry, muffed, stifed by the concrete walls. And then, a few minutes afterward, a brownish-yellow vapor poured out of the chimney."8 Because the most directly involved Germans could be, if they so chose, physically and emotionally distant from the act of killing, they tended to perceive this method as a more humane and gentle experience (again, for them).

How could the Germans regard a method of killing that barely stimulated their sensory systems as humane? The more perceptually benign the method of killing, the greater the disconnect between cause and effect. And the greater the disconnect between cause and effect, the greater the responsibility ambiguity. And it was this responsibility ambiguity that helped those Germans working in the camps to perceive themselves only indirectly involved. This distinction made no difference to the lethal outcome, but it did wonders for German perpetrators' self-perceptions. When Germans in Auschwitz killed, the separation of cause from effect inherent in the process ensured that the end result did not *feel* gruesome or beastly, like say, killing with their bare hands. For Höss, the Zyklon-B method was, as he put it himself, more "humane."9 Much like the desk murderers in Berlin, or those that rounded up victims, or drove the trains, partaking in the killing process for Höss and his men was not gruesome because none of them were "directly" involved. The indirectness of the entire operation seductively ensured that their essential contributions to the wider organizational process resembled the structurally disconnected and perceptually benign contributions of all the other specialist functionary links further up the organizational chain.

As the perceptual distance between cause and effect increased, Germans in the camps became more and more able to avoid encountering the consequences of their lethal contributions. Avoidance was an option for the German camp staff because, much like Milgram's participants, they were in a position of power to control what they were willing to know (or not know). It had become possible for all Germans involved to engage in "intentional ignorance"10—all could look away and then continue to contribute and beneft from that contribution. This is why Stangl was able to say, "unless one was actually working in the forest, one could live without actually seeing; most of us [Germans] never saw anybody dying or dead."11 As Hayes notes, this occurred in the ghettos as well: "the Germans were adept at insulating themselves from the worst aspects of the killing processes […] they often made the Jewish police forces do their dirty work of rounding up people who did not appear for deportation when scheduled to do so."12 If Germans never saw anything, how could they be directly responsible? Stangl, for one, went to great lengths to make sure he was unlikely to experience anything that might upset him. For example, when asked after the war where the worst place in the extermination camps was for him, his response suggests he put great effort into shielding himself from the realities surrounding him. "'The undressing barracks,' he said at once. 'I avoided it from my innermost being; I couldn't confront them; I couldn't lie to them; I avoided at any price talking to those who were about to die: *I couldn't stand it*'" [italics added].13 Stangl's self-centered viewpoint which skirted over his victims' actually horrifc experiences was not only very common among the German perpetrators,14 it shares some similarity to Mrs. Rosenblum's sole concern with *her* terrible experience during the Obedience studies. What Stangl failed to consider was that it was his selective avoidance of personal encounters with his approximately one million victims that ensured that he was indeed able to "stand it." Höss conceded, "My inner scruples about remaining in the concentration camp, despite my unsuitability for such work, receded into the background now that I no longer came into such direct contact with the prisoners as I had done in Dachau." As Wistrich said of both Höss and Stangl, "Their sleep was never disturbed since they rarely saw any suffering faces, concentrating as they did solely on the organizational task at hand."15 As Primo Levi perceptively put it:

The best way to defend oneself against the invasion of burdensome memories is to impede their entry, to extend a *cordon sanitaire*. It is easier to deny entry to a memory than to free oneself from it after it has been recorded. This, in substance, was the purpose of many of the artifces thought up by the Nazi commanders in order to protect the consciences of those assigned to do the dirty work and to ensure their services, disagreeable even for the most hardened cutthroats.16

It transpires that the Führer often informed those like Himmler tasked with implementing the Holocaust that extermination should be implemented as "humanely" as possible.17 And what it seems he meant by this was that killing should be "done impersonally." For Hitler, killing "impersonally" was, according to John Toland, synonymous with doing so "without cruelty."18 This is why during Himmler's second visit to Sobibor in 1943, the camp guards were instructed not to wear their whips and truncheons19—the leadership desperately needed to hold on to the belief that (where possible) their goal was a generally cruelty-free and humane enterprise. Cruelty was, however, as Goldhagen so convincing shows, endemic.20 But this tactile "hands on"-type cruelty—often physical beatings—was, as Levi implied at the end of Volume 1, usually not lethal (and often—although certainly not always—it had a "rational" organizational purpose).21 Violence during the roundups and in the concentration camps was, generally speaking, only lethal when Germans had ready access to means of killing that enabled them to (at least) avoid having to touch their victims.22 And when Germans were more intimately connected to the deaths of their victims, they often—although again certainly not always23—had quite different experiences to the more indirect perpetrators like Stangl and Höss. Consider, for example, the postwar admission by one elderly German to his son:

the brown eyes of a six-year-old girl had never let him rest. He was a Wehrmacht soldier in Warsaw during the ghetto uprising. They were clearing the bunkers, and one morning a six-year-old girl came out of one of these bunkers and ran over to hug him. He could still remember the look in her eyes, both fearful and trusting. Then his commander ordered him to stab her with his bayonet—which he did. He killed her.  […] He had never told it to anyone before.24

Of course, technocrats concentrating on step-by-step organizational tasks—timetables, transports, supplies, disposal—while others suffer, shares much in common with the Obedience Studies. As one participant in the Remote condition stated, "It's funny how you really begin to forget that there's a guy out there, even though you can hear him. For a long time I just concentrated on pressing the switches and reading the words."25 Unlike the above Wehrmacht soldier, technocrats were, with varying degrees of success, able to "forget," because the technology is structurally divorced from the moral.

As long as Höss, Stangl, and most other Germans in the more advanced gassing camps received no (or only a few) perceptual cues, it seems they could avoid thinking about the implications of their contributions. For the vast majority of Germans working within Auschwitz, the camp's structural compartmentalization—its many different sectors greatly aided in separating cause from effect. Auschwitz bookkeeper Oskar Gröning, for example, took great comfort in the fact that he worked in the much larger "living" section of the camp; he could claim to have nothing to do with the remotely located, compartmentalized, and relatively tiny gas chamber sector. As Gröning said himself:

Part of living in Auschwitz was perfectly normal. […] It was like a small city. I had my unit, and gas chambers were irrelevant in that unit. There was one side of life in Auschwitz, and there was another, and the two were more or less separate.26

For the vast majority of German perpetrators who worked within the camp, it was almost as if the mass killing of human beings was not even happening. Such mind games were easier to maintain in Auschwitz than in the Operation Reinhard camps because the former, unlike the latter, was frst and foremost a *work* (not extermination) camp.27 Unlike at Auschwitz, in the Operation Reinhard camps every worker, strategy, objective, and building was much more closely connected to the sole task of extermination. Thus, the Germans based in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka had to be more profcient than those at Auschwitz in the art of self-deception and delusional thinking.

Even at Auschwitz, however, there were occasions when, even for the most determined of offcers, confronting death was unavoidable. Höss, for example, saw things he wished he had not. But he relied on certain strategies to deal with such encounters. When upset, he "found it impossible to go back to my home and my family." Instead, "I would mount my horse and ride, until I had chased the terrible picture away."28 Germans at Auschwitz able to control how much perceptual information they were exposed to lived, as Willem A. Visser't Hooft put it, "in a twilight between knowing and not knowing."29

The power to know what was happening in concept but not in perceptual reality was even greater for the leadership comfortably based in Berlin. Walther Funk, the Nazi Minister of Economic Affairs, said of the atrocities after the war: "That was just the trouble; we were all blinded."30 Funk is largely right, except that during the war (even after it; see below footnote) he actively chose not to look in fear of what he might see. After the war and at the Nuremberg trials, the Allied forces used their greater power to reverse the Nazi leadership's earlier option to engage in avoidance by forcing them to view the chilling liberation flm footage of the insides of Nazi concentration camps. Suddenly unable to so easily avoid the perceptually intense reality, some of these leading Nazis reacted by trying to look away from the footage playing before them, many looked stunned, shocked, and, for the most part, shameful. One of them—again the "blinded" Funk—could not help sobbing and crying.31

If, as Stangl said, the Germans in the camps rarely ever saw any death, such purposeful avoidance powerfully aided in reducing their feelings of responsibility for the end result. Much like those in the Peer Administers Shock condition, all those indirectly involved could argue that they were not responsible because they never directly hurt anybody. Stangl was keen to point out, "Of course, I wasn't 'involved' in that sense… Not in the operational sense."32 This seemingly trivial difference was of great importance to Stangl—as perhaps best illustrated by how upset he became when accused of being more directly involved:

Stangl, insisting that he had never shot into a crowd of people, appeared to be more indignant about this accusation than about anything else, and to fnd irrelevant the fact that, whether he shot into the group or not, these very same people died anyway, less than two hours later, through actions ultimately under his control.33

After the war, Eichmann became equally indignant when he was accused of beating a boy to death.34 A similar reaction might have been expected had participants who completed Milgram's Peer Administers Shock condition been accused of directly inficting shocks on the learner. Actually, every German perpetrator right up to Hitler not involved in the "operational sense" could rely on Stangl's strain resolving logic. Eichmann, for one, repeatedly argued, "I never killed a single one. […] I never killed anyone and I never gave the order to kill anyone."35 Eichmann said that after the Wannsee Conference he:

felt something of the satisfaction of Pilate, because I felt entirely innocent of any guilt. The leading fgures of the Reich at the time had spoken at the Wannsee Conference, the "Popes" had given their orders; it was up to me to obey, and that is what I bore in mind over the future years.36

The problem for Eichmann was that he was willing to admit (or could not deny) that he was, in his own words, guilty of "aiding and abetting…"37 Although he was purposefully (and, in terms of his career, opportunistically) lost in the fog of responsibility ambiguity, this admission directly connected him to the Holocaust. So, in the sense that he knew without knowing, Eichmann, irrespective of all his strain resolving coping mechanisms, was guilty. No matter how he spun the mind games in his head, he (like Milgram) *was* responsible for his harmful contributions, and he knew it. "I created a situation for myself in which I could fnd a spark of inner calm. The main medicament was: I have nothing to do with it all personally. They are not my people. […] But my nervousness got worse. I had no rest at night."38

The reason Eichmann never personally killed anyone was that, in all likelihood, he was no killer. To be clear, *from his desk* Eichmann proved more than capable of sending millions of people to their deaths. But, remove the distancing factors offered by bureaucracy and technology, Eichmann—intense anti-semite or not, evil monster or not—was impotent, squeamish, and likely harmless.39 Consider, for example, his timid reaction to someone describing the gassing procedure: "I was horrifed. My nerves aren't strong enough…I can't listen to such things…without their affecting me. Even today, if I see someone with a deep cut, I have to look away."40 As mentioned, during the winter of 1941–1942, the meek Eichmann was sent to Chełmno to gather a detailed account of the camp's extermination process. The experience left him so shaken that he both forgot to time the operation with his stopwatch and politely declined an offer to observe, through a peephole, the victims in their death throes.41 For Eichmann, worse was to come. Asked to record the Chełmno process, he felt obliged to observe the visually intense end result.  The gassing van drove up to a somewhat long pit, the doors were opened, and the corpses were tossed out. It was as if they were still alive, their limbs were so supple. […] and I can still picture the way a civilian pulled teeth out with a pair of pliers. Then I cleared out.42

Even the Germans most directly involved in operations at Auschwitz-Birkenau could hold on to the strain resolving logic that, like Höss, Stangl, and even the more distant Eichmann, they too were *only* indirectly involved. They *merely* dropped Zyklon-B crystals or switched on a diesel motor—they were *just* technicians. They never killed anybody, not personally anyway. If such coping mechanisms failed to salve their consciences, they, much like Milgram's "obedient" participants, could tell themselves or others that they would never have done such things of their own accord. They were just following orders. As said, the German gas chamber supervisor Werner Karl Dubois, who participated in both the T4 program and Operation Reinhard:

What should be taken into account is that we did not act on our own initiative, but in the context of the Reich's Final Solution to the Jewish problem.43

Similarly, Höss was keen to point out, "I must obey, since I was a soldier."44 But, again, like many of Milgram's participants, he also continued under the sneaking suspicion that he could probably act with impunity. "You see, in Germany it was understood that if something went wrong, then the man who gave the orders was responsible."45 Eichmann was no different. Despite the occasional nervous feelings of responsibility, he suspected that because he did not *appear* responsible for directly killing anyone, he too (opportunistically) believed himself "covered…"46 Hidden within the fog of responsibility ambiguity, Eichmann knew that he could (and did) blame the Nazi Popes. Höss's men no doubt blamed him, he blamed Himmler, and Himmler blamed Hitler. But, again, Hitler never killed any Jews, not *directly* anyway. Perhaps Milgram was right when he argued that the same psychological process inherent within modern bureaucratic organizations infuenced both his "obedient" participants and the Nazi perpetrators.47 That is, when goal achievement is, as it was in both these cases, divided between groups of specialists, fragmentation of the overall process enables the displacement of personal responsibility. Under such a system, the person ultimately responsible for the evil act seems to disappear.

If displacing responsibility for one's actions did not ease the "burdening of the soul," another technique capable of subduing such feelings was to concede that all involved were a little bit responsible. As the bookkeeper Oskar Gröning, for example, claimed, he was only a "small cog in the gears."  This kind of thinking can reduce personal feelings of responsibility because everyone is just a little bit guilty of what Eichmann earlier called "aiding and abetting…"—a relatively minor infraction during the Holocaust (so they liked to tell themselves). Most certainly, at no other point or place during the entire Holocaust did responsibility ambiguity at every link in the organizational chain reach the heights it did at Auschwitz.

Because Germans working in the most advanced gassing camps could all argue that they had neither heard, seen, nor touched the end result of the extermination process, all could claim that they were not personally responsible. And if, to some extent, they could convince themselves they were not personally responsible, then the vast majority felt little or no "burdening of the soul," and thus they were at a much lower risk than members of the shooting squads of becoming "neurotics" or "savages." Because the camp workers had the option of perceptually circumventing the frightful consequences of their contributions, they were comparatively more capable of carrying on, of contributing to the apparently "necessary" yet "humane" murder of other human beings on an unimaginable scale.

# A Peaceful and Gentle Death

Another factor of the "humane death" that many Nazi perpetrators valued highly was that the method of killing civilians should leave no postmortem indications of pain or violence.  Also, no signs of defecation, vomiting, or frothing at the mouth or nose. Finally, a victim's postmortem countenance should appear calm and neutral as if to suggest they were peacefully sleeping. It was the T4 chemist August Becker who perhaps best captured all this when, as mentioned, he complained to his superiors about certain gas van operators: "In order to get the Aktion fnished as quickly as possible the driver presses down on the accelerator as far as it will go. As a result the persons to be executed die of suffocation and do not doze off as was planned." He then added, "It has proved that if my instructions are followed and the levers are properly adjusted death comes faster and the prisoners fall asleep peacefully. Distorted faces and excretions, such as were observed before, no longer occur."48 On the measure of eliminating postmortem indicators of a violent death, gassing was clearly preferable to using frearms because it did not leave the horrifc wounds produced by the early mass shootings. But different types of gas produced different results. Kurt Gerstein (the Chief Disinfection Offcer) argued that carbon monoxide gassing left a greater mess than Zyklon-B. When the doors of the carbon monoxide chamber opened, "the bodies were thrown out blue, wet with sweat and urine, the legs covered with excrement and menstrual blood."49 For this reason, Höss preferred Zyklon-B:

There was no noticeable change in the bodies and no sign of convulsions or discolorations. Only after the bodies had been left lying for some time, that is to say after several hours, did the usual death stains appear in the places where they had lain. Soiling through opening of the bowels was also rare. There were no signs of wounding of any kind. The faces showed no distortion.50

Even if Höss's impression was an exaggeration (and it probably was),51 because Germans at Auschwitz were able to purposefully avoid encountering what actually took place in the gas chamber, the untested belief that Zyklon-B left no signs of a painful death fulflled the strain resolving role of another Milgram-like "balm to the…conscience."

# Instantaneous Death

The fnal characteristic the Nazi's most "humane" means of killing was that it killed instantaneously. The victim should be dead before he or she could register any pain. As Browning, clearly astounded, notes, "a quick death without agony of anticipation was considered an example of human compassion!"52 On this measure, no method could compete with a bullet in the back of the neck (but, of course, killing with guns failed in other ways, most notably, the anticipation of death and the infiction of visually disturbing wounds).

Although Zyklon-B performed well on most of the four conditions, when compared with a bullet in the back of the neck, it still killed slowly. It could be argued that the introduction of the numerous techniques of deception (one of which applied after the docile victims were locked inside the chamber) was, at least in part, introduced with the purpose of addressing this weakness. Again, it was preferable that the victims never saw death coming. But clearly such measures were not enough because the Nazi planners attempted to directly increase the speed with which Zyklon-B killed. For example, on one rare occasion when Höss chose to observe the gassings through a peephole in the gas chamber door, he noticed:

those who were standing nearest to the induction vents were killed at once. It can be said that about one-third died straightaway. The remainder staggered about and began to scream and struggle for air. The screaming, however, soon changed to the death rattle and in a few minutes all lay still.53

Just as Milgram would later tweak his procedure, Höss's observation appears to have stimulated a subtle change to the design of the gas chamber. While Crematoria II and III were, as mentioned, designed as mirror images of one another, the link to the Allied aerial photo presented in the previous chapter revealed one slight difference:

gas introduction columns of crematorium II were arrayed in a straight line, roughly along the longitudinal axis of the gas chamber, whereas in crematorium III they were spaced in pairs on both sides of the axis. This placement was meant to ensure rapid and uniform spread of the poison inside the chamber.54

This innovation ensured that more victims died, as Höss put it, "straightaway." Although Zyklon-B still killed slower than a shot to the neck, it did its work faster than any other type of gas available to the Nazis. Höss elaborated:

The doctors explained to me that the prussic acid had a paralysing effect on the lungs, but its action was so quick and strong that death came before the convulsions could set in, and in this its effects differed from those produced by carbon monoxide or by a general oxygen defciency.55

As we have seen, Wirth had tried to remedy the relative sluggishness of carbon monoxide by lowering the height of the ceiling in Treblinka's second set of gas chambers. But even with this innovation, his method could not compete with Zyklon-B. As Wellers notes:

Gerhard Peters, the general manager of Degesch, the frm that developed Zyclon B and delivered it to Auschwitz, was able to establish scientifcally that hydrocyanic acid is six times more toxic than chlorine, thirty-four times more than carbon monoxide, and 750 times more than chloroform.56

Without a doubt, the carbon monoxide exhaust fumes used during Operation Reinhard could be an effcient means of killing large numbers of humans (as was leaving freight cars full of Jews outside Treblinka for too long in the intense summer heat, as Eberl did), but concerns lingered about celerity. These concerns explain why Pfannenstiel went to Belzec armed with a stopwatch. It is interesting to note in this context that a month after Himmler's July 1942 visit to Auschwitz where he observed Bunker II in action, Kurt Gerstein and Rolf Günther were instructed (probably by the SS-Reichsführer himself) to pay Wirth a visit at Belzec. As Hilberg points out:

They had about 200 pounds of Zyklon with them and were about to convert the carbon monoxide chambers to the hydrogen cyanide method. The unwelcome guests stayed to watch a gassing which took an especially long time (over three hours) because the diesel engine had failed. To Wirth's great embarrassment and mortifcation, Gerstein timed the operation with a stopwatch. Facing the greatest crisis of his career, Wirth dropped his pride and asked Gerstein "not to propose any other type of gas chamber in Berlin." Gerstein obliged, ordering the Zyklon to be buried on the pretext that it had spoiled. Höss and Wirth were henceforth enemies.57

The two men were enemies because the delivery of Zyklon-B clearly signaled to Wirth that he had lost to Höss in the ferce competition to discover a more perfect solution to the seemingly unresolvable "Jewish problem": the most "humane" means of converting the Führer's wish into reality. According to Konrad Morgen, after the regime dumped him, all that was left to Wirth before he was killed in an ambush in Italy near the war's end was invidious bragging rights: Höss (who had no T4 Euthanasia experience) was his "untalented pupil."58

An interesting question remains. If only work Jews had to face the horrifc realities of the insides of the gas chambers, why were Germans who could, and typically did, avoid such spectacles, so concerned about fnding a method of extermination that killed quickly, cleanly, imperceptibly, and covertly? Put simply, many Nazis believed extermination to be necessary, and for the German camp staff Zyklon-B helped deactivate the censuring gaze of their guilty conscience.59 If they were somewhat involved in the killing process, at least they could tell themselves it was humane.60 As Hans Mommsen notes: "Inhumanity had frst to be declared as 'humanity' before it could be put into technocratic practice, with moral inhibitions thereafter reduced to a minimum."61

After the war, Höss tried to explain all this to the Allied forces when he "spoke proudly of his 'improvements.'"62 But his indignant audience could not comprehend his logic—his words were surely the ramblings of a madman. Höss then tried to bridge their understanding by adding that if not for him, many of the victims would have died more horrifcally. But a frightful faw remained in Höss's logic. If he and the other Nazi innovators had never introduced their "humane improvements," killing by other, more gruesome, methods likely would have stimulated defance among the ranks (much as it did when the SS Cavalry Brigade refused to implement Himmler's direct orders in 1941 to shoot women and children in the Pripet marshes using a more traditional military-style execution technique). Thus, without the "humane" enhancements, the number of victims would have been much lower (and Himmler and Heydrich's little experiment would probably have been abandoned in favor of other more "realistic" solutions).63 But instead, innovators and problem-solvers like Höss provided the remote and blinkered Nazi leadership with ever-greater capacity to eliminate an ever-expanding array of so-called inferiors.

Some of the above quotations capture why, for the Nazi leadership, Höss was more than just the most effcient of Nazi mass murderers. He was really the epitome of the perfect Nazi in the (killing) feld—the kind of executioner genocidal managers like Himmler and Heydrich greatly desired and heavily relied upon. In terms of effciency, Höss was creative, determined, and ambitious. But he was also controlled, outwardly unemotional, and thus suffciently "hard," as they termed it.64 Despite his masked performance of "hardness," during the implementation of his diffcult duties, Höss also managed to remain what Himmler termed "decent…" As the SS-Reichsführer said himself on 4 October 1943 during a speech where, to an audience of high ranking SS offcers, he touched on the Holocaust:

Most of you must know what it means to see a hundred corpses lie side by side, or fve hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck this out and—excepting cases of human weakness—to have kept our integrity, that is what has made us hard. In our history, this is an unwritten and never-to-be-written page of glory…65

During the Holocaust some Germans had, as Himmler notes, fallen prey to human weakness: They were too "soft" and could not do what (apparently) needed to be done. Or worse, they abused their positions of power by opportunistically gratifying their pathological proclivity for sadism or penchant—perhaps stimulated by feelings of boredom—for unnecessary cruelty.66 Decent Germans, according to Himmler, were never unnecessarily cruel. As he said in the same speech: "We shall never be rough and heartless when it is not necessary, that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude towards animals, will also assume a decent attitude towards these human animals."67 What could Himmler possibly have meant by such words?  In 1944, as Clemens Giese and Waldemar Kahler (both involved in the introduction of the November 1933 Nazi animal protection laws) noted:

The animals protection movement, strongly promoted by the National Socialist government, has long demanded that animals be given anesthesia before being killed. The overwhelming majority of the German people have long condemned killing without anesthesia, a practice universal among Jews though not confned to them, …as against the cultivated sensitivities of our society.68

When the sensitive Himmler instructed that "human animals" be killed—much like with other animals—it was preferable these acts be undertaken without cruelty—all were gently to go to sleep. Unlike the "weak" Germans who inficted extraneous cruelties on their human victims, Höss had no interest in or time for such base pursuits. Thus, always with his eye fxed frmly on achieving the bureaucratic goal at hand, Höss proved to be a far deadlier executioner than the pathological and tyrannical killers.

Therefore, what Himmler—and clearly Hitler—liked about executioners like Höss was that he was the kind of person who would "carry out mass murder with self-control and 'decency' rather than with sadism" (the last of which the Nazis deemed a crime for which some Germans faced prosecution).69 Höss, the consummate professional, was what the Nazi leadership believed to be an effcient yet, were possible, *civilized* killer. This is why, as mentioned, Höss could say with a straight face:

I fnd it incredible that human beings could ever turn into such beasts. The way the 'greens' [conventional criminals] knocked the French Jewesses about, tearing them to pieces, killing them with axes, and throttling them—it was simply gruesome.70

Such interpersonal violence was barbaric, cruel, and unbecoming of a professional, rational, sensitive, humane, and thus civilized Nazi executioner.71 To use these adjectives in the same sentence as the noun Nazi may cause an incredulous snicker among many readers. But to do so perhaps risks missing something which, in my view, is crucial yet so frequently misunderstood when it comes to the Holocaust: For the most expert of Nazi genocidaires like Höss, the distasteful duty of killing was a higher calling because, as Hayes observes, the Nazis genuinely believed "that the Reich's expansion to the east was part of a civilizing process that expanded European culture at the expense of supposedly barbaric Asia."72 Of course, for many years now undefeated Europeans (and their descendants) of all stripes have relied on this "Nazi"-like logic to justify the expansion of their settler colonies. And with reference to the word "humane," as Neitzel and Welzer incisively observe:

Ideologists of annihilation like Himmler or practitioners like Rudolf Höss continually stressed that destroying human lives was an unpleasant task that ran contrary to their "humane" instincts. But the ability to overcome such scruples was seen as a measure of one's character. It was the coupling of murder and morality – the realization that unpleasant acts were necessary and the will to carry out those acts *in defance of* feelings of human sympathy – that allowed the perpetrators of genocide to see themselves as "respectable" people, as people whose hearts, in Höss' words, "were not bad."73

Perhaps there is a little more to the sociology of Norbert Elias than previously imagined.

As Bauman notes, extermination through work, the Zyklon-B stationary gas chamber, and the industrialized cremation process fnished the war as "the most perfect" solution to the Jewish problem that "the Nazis had time to invent…"74 It was cheap, proftable, highly effcient, *and* the most "humane" method they could fnd (thus suggesting there might exist a dialectical link between the apparently incompatible Bauman on rationalization and Elias on civility).75 In the end, Höss beat out people like Jeckeln, Lange, and Wirth to win the competition to fulfll Hitler's wish mainly because his method of killing rated highest on the most important of the four characteristics discussed above: Zyklon-B did not require Germans to touch, see, or (barely) hear the killing of their victims. And as a result, these Germans could convincingly engage in strain resolving acts of self-deception, telling themselves that the gassings "probably" killed without any anticipation of death, killed without leaving any marks indicative of a painful death, and killed quickly, even if, in reality, this was not true.

But despite Höss's success in this competition, the leading Nazis never found his methods completely satisfactory. As Bauman implies in the above quotation, the method of killing at Auschwitz was not perfect per se: In reality, it did not eliminate the anticipation of death, it did not kill instantaneously, and it did leave marks indicative of a painful death. What the Nazis ultimately desired was a method of eliminating unwanted civilians that did not necessitate killing. Even before the start of the Soviet invasion, Nazi realists had pursued and almost discovered what the Chief Doctor of the SS, Ernst-Robert von Grawitz, termed the "perfect solution to the problem"76—sterilization.

# The Search for the Most Efficient, Profitable, and Humane Method of Killing (Without Killing)

As Höss and others competed to kill more effciently, a group of Nazi scientists undertook a variety of experiments to invent a cheap, rapid, and surreptitious technique of mass sterilization. It was believed that by sterilizing those deemed inferior, large categories of people like Jews, Gypsies, and other groups could be eliminated through natural death. Moreover, by eliminating the ability of these "inferiors" to procreate, all could safely be retained as a long-term source of slave labor, thereby providing the opportunity for all Germans "to pursue higher pleasures."77

The search for a solution started in March 1941 as the Soviet invasion was being planned. After corresponding with the T4's Victor Brack, Himmler became interested in mass sterilization as it might be applied to the expanding Jewish problem. Hilberg outlines the general contents of Brack's correspondence with Himmler:

It started as a sober account of the possibilities of X-rays in the feld of sterilization and castration. Preliminary investigations by medical experts of the chancellery, wrote Brack, had indicated that small doses of X-rays achieved only temporary sterilization; large doses caused burns. Having come to this conclusion, Brack ignored it completely and continued with the following fantastic scheme: The persons to be "processed"…would step up to a counter to be asked some questions or to fll out forms. Thus occupied, the unsuspecting candidate for sterilization would face the window for two or three minutes while the offcial sitting behind the counter would throw a switch which would release X-rays through two tubes pointing at the victim. With twenty such counters (cost: 20,000-30,000 marks apiece) 3000-4000 persons could be sterilized daily.78

Also in March 1941, Himmler expressed interest in Professor Carl Clauberg's nonsurgical attempts at female sterilization. The technique called for circumventing conception by injecting an irritant into the uterus. Himmler requested Clauberg's transfer to the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück where he could perfect his method. At the time, however, Clauberg held no interest in relocating and negotiations between the two ceased. Perhaps because Hitler initially disapproved of this potential solution, Himmler's interest in sterilization waned.79

In October 1941, however, Adolf Pokorny, a retired army medial practitioner, contacted Himmler in regards to another possible mass sterilization technique. Pokorny informed Himmler about a Dr. Madaus at Radebeul-Dresden who had apparently sterilized mice and rats with a serum extracted from a South American plant called Caladium seguinum.80 In reference to Himmler's preferred source of slave labor, Pokorny pointed out:

If, on the basis of this research, it were possible to produce a drug which, after a relatively short time, effects an imperceptible sterilization on human beings, then we would have a powerful new weapon at our disposal. The thought alone that the three million Bolsheviks, who are at present German prisoners, could be sterilized so that they could be used as laborers but be prevented from reproduction, opens the most far-reaching perspectives.81

Despite the Führer's disapproval of this strategy, on 10 March 1942 Himmler ordered Pohl to offer Madaus a research contract to undertake experiments on concentration camp prisoners, and within six months Madaus had agreed to the transfer.82

A few months later, in June of 1942, Brack felt it important to remind Himmler of the potential advantages of sterilization over killing. "Castration by X-rays…is not only relatively cheap but can also be performed on many thousands in the shortest time."83 He also pointed out that Chief Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler had been able to set up an experimental research program. Soon after, ex-T4 employee and medical doctor Horst Schumann began experiments on men and women at Auschwitz.84 Around the same time, on 7 July 1942, Clauberg fnally accepted Himmler's offer to move to Auschwitz to start an experimental program on who Clauberg termed "unworthy women…"85

All of these programs ended in failure, the only outcome being the misery and misfortune of all those unfortunately selected as research subjects. Had just one of these programs succeeded in producing a perfect method of killing without killing, Hilberg is convinced the net of potential human targets would have widened:

In the very conception of these explorations, the destruction process threatened to escape from its narrowly defned channel and to engulf everyone within reach who might be branded as "inferior." Already, the fate of *Mischlinge* of the frst degree hung in the balance while the Interior Ministry waited for the perfection of mass sterilization techniques. In consequence of the failure of these experiments a development was arrested which had spelled in its dim outlines the doom of large sections of the population of Europe.86

As Ernst Kaltenbrunner (Heydrich's replacement) said in 1944, "Germany must see to it…that the populations of eastern Europe and most of the Balkan and Danubian countries are forced to die out as a result of sterilization and the destruction of the ruling class in these countries."87

By the end of the same year, even those Himmler believed to be ugly were being lined up for extermination.88 Clearly, the less the method psychologically burdened the most direct perpetrators' conscience, the easier it would be for them to perform their tasks. And the easier the task, the wider the potential pool of targets. Interestingly (or disturbingly):

When Clauberg returned from Russia to Germany in October, 1951, he had the frst opportunity in ten years to tell interviewing reporters that just prior to his capture he had perfected his sterilization method after all. The new method consisted of a simple injection, and he was now looking forward to its application, albeit only in "special cases."89

If Clauberg had perfected his method of sterilization before the end of the war and then used it on "inferior" populations, it is likely that he would have surpassed Höss in the rationionally driven competition to discover the most "humane" method of converting the Führer's wish into reality. But, of course, these Nazi scientists failed, leaving the regime with the next best option: the most advanced gassing systems at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and fnally Auschwitz-Birkenau.90

# Conclusion

Although implementing an effcient (formally rational) system of mass murder was of great importance to the Nazi regime, it was equally important for the perpetrators across the division of labor to fnd a method of killing perceived to be "humane." Four main factors were involved: Optimally victims had (1) no anticipation of death; (2) need not be touched, seen, or heard when being killed; (3) died gently; and (4) instantaneously. As the victims' horrifc experiences clearly illustrate, in reality the most popular methods of killing in places like Auschwitz were not "humane" experiences at all. "Humane killing," as the perpetrators saw it, was probably a contradiction.  That is, much like the all-important responsibility ambiguity, these kinds of perpetrator beliefs played a crucial role in reducing the so-called burdening of the soul. And the less the soul was burdened, the easier it became for the leadership to persuade, tempt, or coerce the most directly involved ordinary Germans into inficting harm on others.

Perpetrator perceptions over "humane" methods of killing might help increase our understanding of what it was that was so *moderate* about German anti-semitism. That is, unlike the Eastern Europeans and their barbaric pogroms where Jews were clubbed to death by the "Deathdealer of Kovno," most "moderately antisemitic" Germans would only kill Jews with more "humane"—clean, emotionally distant, and civilized—methods. Although many ordinary Germans had come to agree that *something* needed to be done about the "Jewish problem"—thus indisputably rendering them anti-semitic—their more sensitive constitutions rendered the Eastern European pogrom an offensive fnal solution. The Wehrmacht colonel who observed the death-dealer in action believed it "probably the most frightful event that I had seen during the course of two world wars," and aroused in him and other Germans present a similar feeling of "horror and outrage." And when offended like this, Germans were commonly observed to behave in ways that sharply conficted with the popular perception of the cruel and sadistic Nazi killer. As Arendt observed:

in Rumania even the S.S. were taken aback, and occasionally frightened, by the horrors of old-fashioned, spontaneous pogroms on a gigantic scale; they often intervened to save Jews from sheer butchery, so that the killing could be done in what, according to them, was a civilized way.91

Thus, from this perspective, the anti-semitism common among Germans was, relatively speaking, much more moderate compared to that found in some Eastern European countries. The problem, however, with this moderate anti-semitism was that it stimulated a demand for a more "humane" and "civilized" method of killing that happened also to advance killing effciency enormously.

Thus, in places like Auschwitz, it became possible for only moderately anti-semitic or even indifferent Germans to easily and repeatedly participate in a killing process capable of exterminating Jews on an unprecedented scale. And because the most advanced killing methods hardly "burdened the soul" (unlike the less organized and more repulsive pogroms where intense feelings of hatred quickly fzzled out), the German's seemingly banal machinery of destruction could continue consuming the lives of victims with no end in sight. It would seem to me that this is how and why moderate anti-semitism so common among Hitler's willing executioners ended up being so much more deadly and destructive. It is here that I believe we fnd an answer to Bauer's "real question" of how during the Holocaust so many moderately anti-semitic Germans were so quickly converted into willing executioners.

After the war when Germans were bombarded with the horrifying evidence of the Holocaust, many Nazi sympathizers rejected the Final Solution's methods, but in many cases the moderate anti-semitism remained. Consider, for example, one German architect's rather defensive, candid, and no doubt common postwar reaction to the Holocaust:

[T]he Jews … were a problem. They came from the east. You should see them in Poland; the lowest class of people, full of lice, dirty and poor, running about in their Ghettos in flthy caftans. They came here, and got rich by unbelievable methods after the frst war. They occupied all the good places … in medicine and law and government posts! … [What the Nazis did] of course … was no way to settle the Jewish problem. But there was a problem and it had to be settled some way.92

As Koonz points out, after the war the conscience of many respectable yet clearly Nazifed Germans (like that above) remained untroubled, "because they could forget their passivity in the face of white-collar persecution and simultaneously express moral outrage about the violent attacks and coarse language common in the hardcore Nazi subculture."93 Somewhat like the architect, one German POW said to another during a bugged conversation: "I quite agree that the Jews had to be turned out, that was obvious, but the manner in which it was done was absolutely wrong, and the present hatred [directed at post-war Germany] is the result."94 From such evidence, Felix Römer concludes (much like during the Obedience studies where Milgram's application of greater power typically trumped the participants' more benign individual preferences) that even when Germans in the armed forces professed their belief that "extreme violence against defenseless civilians…cross[ed] a line, they were" still, far more often than not, "capable of such violence, the minute group pressure of the circumstances demanded it."95 All this aside, perhaps these moderately anti-semitic Germans would have been more amenable to the Nazi's preferred but unperfected fnal solution of mass sterilization: the most "humane" method of killing (without killing). Maybe Norbert Elias was right after all, "if humanity can survive the violence of our age, [our descendants] might consider us as late barbarians."96

# Notes

can become a repetitive and routinized task, acts of cruelty can also aid in relieving perpetrators' feelings of boredom (e.g., see Goldhagen 1996, p. 259 and Schelvis 2007, p. 113). This arguably occurred during the Obedience studies when, as mentioned, the experimenter occasionally broke out of his usual robotic delivery and would—seemingly playing a game of cat and mouse—invent his own rhetorical prod-like devices in an attempt to entrap participants into inficting further shocks.

Keitel wipes brow, takes off headphones […] Hess glares at screen looking like a ghoul with sunken eyes over the footlamp […] Keitel puts on headphone, glares at screen out of the corner of his eye […] von Neurath has head bowed, doesn't look […] Funk covers his eyes, looks away […] Sauckel mops brow […] Frank swallows hard, blinks eyes, trying to stife tears […] Fritzsche watches intensely with knitted brow, cramped at the end of his seat, evidently in agony […] Goering keeps leaning on balustrade, not watching most of the time, looking droopy […] Funk mumbles something under his breath […] Streicher keeps watching, immobile except for an occasional squint […] Funk now in tears, blows nose, wipes eyes, looks down […] Frick shakes head at illustration of "violent death."—Frank mutters "Horrible!" […] Rosenberg fdgets, peeks at screen, bows head, looks to see how others are reacting […] Seyss-Inquart stoic throughout […] Speer looks very sad, swallows hard […] Defense attorneys are now muttering, "for God's sake—terrible." Raeder watches without budging […] von Papen sits with hand over brow, looking down, has not looked at screen yet […] Hess keeps looking bewildered…piles of dead are shown in a slave labor camp […] von Schirach watching intently, gasps, whispers to Sauckel […] Funk crying now […] Goering looks sad, leaning on elbow […] Doenitz has head bowed, no longer watching […] Sauckel shudders at picture of Buchenwald crematorium oven…as human skin lampshade is shown, Streicher says, "I don't believe that" […] Goering coughing […] Attorneys gasping […] Now Dachau […] Schacht still not looking […] Frank nods his head bitterly and says, "Horrible!" […] Rosenberg still fdgeting, leans forward, looks around, leans back, hangs head […] Fritzsche, pale biting lips, really seems in agony […] Doenitz has head buried in his hands […] Keitel now bowing head […] Ribbentrop looks up at screen as British offcer starts to speak, saying he has already buried 17,000 corpses […] Frank biting his nails […] Frick shakes his head incredulously at speech of female doctor describing treatment and experiments on female prisoners at Belsen […] As Kramer is shown, Funk says with a choking voice, "The dirty swine!" […] Ribbentrop sitting with pursed lips and blinking eyes, not looking at screen […]  Keitel and Ribbentrop look up at mention of tractor clearing corpses, see it, then hang their heads […] Streicher shows signs of disturbance for the frst time […] Film ends. After the showing of the flm, Hess remarks, "I don't believe it." Goering whispers to him to keep quiet, his own cockiness quite gone. Streicher says something about "perhaps in the last days." Fritzsche retorts mournfully, "Million? In the last days—No." Otherwise there is gloomy silence as the prisoners fle out of the courtroom."

"were meant to bring order into what had become a chaotic situation and to mark the end of the persecution of the Jews" (Lösener 1961, pp. 262– 313, as cited in Koonz 2003, p. 190). Although these laws likely reduced violent attacks on German Jews and *seemed* to usher in a new period of civility, they also made possible this enemy's disenfranchisement, impoverishment, and eventual extermination. As Koonz (2003, p. 224) argued with respect to all Germans: they "found it hard to grasp the reality that lawful, orderly persecution would turn out to be more deadly than random cruelty."

The summary of that conference states: "During various visits to the penitentiaries, prisoners have always been observed who – because of their bodily characteristics – hardly deserve the designation human [*Mensch*]; they look like miscarriages of hell [*Missgeburten der Hölle*]. Such prisoners should be photographed. It is planned that they too shall be eliminated [*auszuschalten*]. Crime and sentence are irrelevant. Only such photographs should be submitted which clearly show the deformity" (pp. 642–643). Alluding to the potential danger of such policies for the Nazis themselves, the Gauleiter of Danzig-West Prussia Albert Forster once said of Himmler: "If I looked like Himmler, I would not talk about race!" (Levine 1969, p. 350, as cited in Rutherford 2007, p. 67).

They should have thought of a different solution" (quoted in Schelvis 2007, p. 254). Many Germans, even decades after the war, continued to long for the Nazis because as one woman pointed out: "During the war we didn't go hungry. Back then everything worked. It was only after the war that things turned bad" (quoted in Aly 2006, p. 179).

# References

Headland, R. (1992). *Messages of murder: A study of the reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the security police and the security service, 1941–1943*. London: Associated University Press.

*persecution: Bureaucracy, business, and the organization of the Holocaust* (pp. 340–360). New York: Berghahn Books.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Conclusion—The Milgram-Holocaust Linkage and Beyond

This book set out by asking a question that has perplexed Holocaust historians for many years: How did an only moderately antisemitic society in Germany end up killing millions of European Jews? I suggested one way to shed new light on this question might be to explore Stanley Milgram's Obedience studies, concentrating particularly on their invention. I reasoned that Milgram's invention of his experiments and the Nazis' invention of the Holocaust share a key similarity: Both successfully transformed large numbers of "ordinary" and arguably indifferent people into willing infictors of harm. Therefore, if it were possible to delineate Milgram's start-to-fnish journey in transforming most of his participants into infictors of harm *on a likeable person*, perhaps my fndings might offer some insight into how *only moderately antisemitic* Germans so quickly became willing executioners. Volume 1 revealed that when inventing and then collecting his data, Milgram relied heavily on formally rational techniques of discovery and organization.

In terms of the invention of the Obedience experiments, after hearing many Nazi war criminals plead that during the Holocaust they only followed higher orders, Milgram wondered if ordinary people in a social psychology experiment would also follow orders to infict harm on an innocent person. He set out with a preconceived goal: run a harm-inficting experiment that would "maximize obedience…" Because Milgram did not have a procedure capable of generating such a result, he had to invent one. Then, relying on forces he suspected caused the Holocaust—Nazi-like pledges of loyalty, strict obedience to harmful orders, and little steps toward a radical outcome—he envisioned a rather rudimentary basic experimental procedure where participants accepted a pledge to obey orders to engage in an escalating physical assault. Soon realizing this idea would unlikely achieve his goal to maximize obedience, Milgram started applying his intuitive feel and drew on his previous experiences as a social psychologist to envision what he thought might better move him toward preconceived goal achievement. Two key innovations emerged: Instead of a physical assault, Milgram sensed participants might more likely infict "harm" if they were instructed to deploy fake shocks from an emotionally and physically distancing electrical device (effectively substituting human labor with a more predictable, controllable, calculable, and effcient source of non-human technology). Also, he envisioned a more effcacious institutional justifcation for inficting the shocks: By hurting the learner, the participant would help establish whether or not punishment improved learning. Rather powerfully, this procedural change morally inverted the infiction of harm on an innocent person into a commendable social good.

Although this emerging procedure started to appear a little less like the Holocaust captured in the laboratory setting, to test its potential to achieve his desired end result, Milgram had his students run a series of pilot studies. Not only did the frst pilots demonstrate the basic research idea held enormous potential—about 60% of participants inficted every shock—Milgram also observed them engage in unanticipated behaviors that inspired new procedural innovations that he thought might move him even closer to converting his preconceived goal into a reality. Importantly, these improvements were beyond his intuitive feel and past experiences of what he imagined might generate a high completion rate. For example, in the frst pilot series participants could see an outline of the learner through a translucent screen. For many participants, the image of a pained learner clearly caused discomfort—seeing a connection between cause and effect likely made them feel too personally responsible for their actions. To Milgram's surprise, however, some of the distressed participants resolved the weighty dilemma before them by turning away from the pained learner and then continued to infict further shocks. Thus, instead of Milgram from the *top*-*down* adding his own manipulative innovations to the basic procedure, these participants from the *bottom*-*up* invented their own such techniques. Inadvertently, these self-initiated actions helped move Milgram toward preconceived goal achievement. They did so because when some participants turned away from the pained learner, Milgram's observation of this behavior caused him to wonder if introducing a solid wall to subsequent pilots might cause the completion rate to increase beyond 60%. If Milgram was right, then introducing a wall into the standard procedure would bring him even closer to goal achievement. Milgram's suspicions proved correct: During the next pilots, a wall was introduced and in the fnal trial run termed the Truly Remote Pilot, "virtually all" participants inficted every shock asked of them. This trial saw Milgram achieve his preconceived goal and signaled that he was fnally ready to run his frst offcial baseline—an experiment he was confdent would obtain a surprisingly high completion rate.

Thus, with time the "rules and regulations" surrounding Milgram's gradually improving procedure became the most effcient and predictable "one best way" for the experimenter (an actor) to control participants into doing what he (Milgram) wanted: to (ostensibly) infict harm on an innocent person. And it was *past history*—Milgram's intuitive feel, past experiences, and close observations of the pilot studies—that had, through a process of trial-and-error discovery, gradually led him to a procedure that could push and pull nearly all into doing what he wanted. If he wanted to achieve his preconceived goal during the frst offcial baseline condition, all Milgram's helpers—research assistants, actors, *and* participants—just needed to follow his latest and most effective "rules and regulations."1 This, I would argue, was the rationally driven and somewhat circuitous learning process that guided Milgram toward the invention of his "one best way" to preconceived goal achievement.

The key to the success of the Obedience research was that, as best illustrated by the Truly Remote Pilot, every specialist task across the study's organizational chain—from the National Science Foundation funders, the participant "processing" team, to the shock-inficting participants—felt or appeared suffciently banal and thus adequately devoid of personal responsibility for any harm inficted. It was critical that every functionary involved came to suspect that, because of the division of labor inherent within any bureaucratic process, all could blame someone else for their morally dubious yet personally (fnancially, materially, and/ or socially) benefcial contributions to a harmful process. All needed to suspect that they could contribute to the infiction of intense stress or, in the case of the participants, physical harm with probable impunity. None could feel and appear to be most responsible. Such conditions made it much easier for Milgram (and the experimenter) to persuade, tempt, and (if needed) coerce all helpers into fulflling their specialist role.

In summary, Milgram's biggest leaps toward goal achievement came after he substituted a Nazi-like pledge to obey with the socially more acceptable pursuit of "scientifc" discovery and a direct physical assault with the non-human technology of the "shock" machine, introduced the non-human technology of a wall, and (inadvertently) constructed the non-human participant-processing technology of bureaucracy. These innovations, in particular, ensured that by the time Milgram ran his frst offcial baseline condition, most ordinary people at the end of his participantprocessing assembly line willingly inficted "harm" on an innocent person. During the invention of the baseline experiment, it is therefore fair to conclude, frstly, that Milgram behaved less like a social scientist and more like a goal-orientated project manager trying to socially engineer a preconceived result. Secondly, Weberian formally rational techniques of discovery, organization, and non-human technologies played a central role in the invention and production of the Obedience study's surprising results.

In Volume 2 of this book, I illustrated how certain innovators within the Nazi regime relied on the same Milgram-like formally rational techniques of discovery and non-human organizational technologies to achieve their preconceived goals. This shared reliance on Weberian formal rationality, I argue, forms the most important Milgram-Holocaust linkage—it played *the* key role in transforming so many ordinary and only moderately antisemitic Germans into willing infictors of harm.

Inspired by the extermination of Indigenous North Americans and Armenians, Hitler rationally drew on past experience and an intuitive feel to envision initially rudimentary strategies of eliminating German and later European Jews—a group whom he despised. Throughout the 1930s, however, there was neither a strategy, nor the organizational infrastructure or technology—*no procedure*—to render the German state capable of exterminating such massive numbers of mostly women and children. Despite the Nazis' unrelenting and intensifying propaganda campaign, which morally inverted the removal of all Jews from the Reich into a social good, Hitler's personal preference remained unachievable. As a result, the Führer moved on to other apparently more realistic solutions to his most urgent problem—the Jews were to be shipped to Madagascar.

It could be argued that Hitler's desire, in conjunction with ordinary Germans' increasing capability to kill fairly large numbers of civilians after September 1939, stimulated a rational search for a technically feasible method of extermination. And, as apparently more realistic solutions like deportation were rendered unrealistic, powerful, and ambitious, project managers like Himmler and Heydrich started to sense merit in the once unrealistic solution of extermination—particularly mass shooting. The invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 offered a unique opportunity to pilot test various shooting techniques that at least aimed to work toward the so-called Führer's wish. Despite some "promising" discoveries and "auspicious" results by innovators like Jäger and especially Jeckeln that interactively (from both top-down and bottom-up forces within the execution hierarchy) emerged with increasing time and observational experience, major limitations remained with frearms as a means of mass extermination. Not least of which was that ordinary German executioners were forced to witness an undeniable connection between their causal contributions and the lethal effects. That is, guns made those most directly involved feel and appear too responsible for their actions. Little or no responsibility ambiguity remained at the last link in the organizational chain (just as Milgram would later discover). The resulting responsibility clarity often stimulated intense feelings of guilt and, most commonly, repugnance. Thus, Himmler (like Milgram) concluded that another way had to be found.

As this realization settled in, innovators across the organizational machinery of destruction independently pursued other exploratory pilot studies, trialing the viability of potentially more compartmentalized yet effcient killing techniques that could be attached to the last link in Eichmann's people-moving organizational process. The most "successful" of these killing experiments involved different logistical and technical means of gassing civilians. Over time, and building on previous experience (particularly the T4 Euthanasia project), certain front line innovators made increasingly destructive discoveries—Lange's gas vans at Chełmno, Wirth during Operation Reinhard, and fnally Höss and his men at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Indeed, when Höss's advanced, highly effcient, relatively impersonal and apparently more "humane," gassing and body-incineration technique was attached as the last link in Eichmann's people-moving chain, ambiguity over responsibility for the end result increased, rendering frontline German perpetrators largely unaffected by their contributions (especially considering Jewish prisoners disposed of the victims' bodies). Consequently, the violent capabilities of German executioners in places like Auschwitz increased enormously.

Throughout, this journey of discovery achieved sustained increases across all four of Ritzer's components of a formally rational system. This pattern was particularly evident as less predictable human labor was substituted for more controlling, predictable, calculable, and effcient non-human technologies. I therefore argue that the Nazi regime gradually evolved an ever-improving formally rational genocidal infrastructure, which, lying behind the executioners' individual actions, greatly contributed to the destructive end result. With time, the Nazis discovered that (much like with the Truly Remote Pilot) the less the touching, seeing, and hearing associated with harm infiction, the greater the "banality of evil" at the last, *and thus every*, point along the genocidal chain. And the more "banal" the process felt and appeared to all those involved, the more ambiguous the issue of responsibility and, as a result, the easier it became for authority fgures (even peers) to persuade, tempt, and coerce ordinary and *only* moderately antisemitic Germans into killing. At each link across the organizational chain, every functionary helper had to be able to blame someone or something else as more responsible for their harmful contributions to the process—thus, the theory of responsibility ambiguity.2 It is here that I believe we fnd the answer to Bauer's "real question" of how so many only moderately antisemitic Germans were quickly converted into willing executioners. Moreover, it is here that we come to recognize what Milgram actually uncovered in his laboratory not people "just following orders" but the deployment of an inherently problem-solving, malevolent organizational process that—from the topdown *and* bottom-up—socially engineered the leadership's preferred preconceived goal into a terrifying reality.