Book Review: Thomas Kühne. Belonging and Genocide: Hitler's Community, 1918-1945
Thomas Kühne: Belonging and Genocide: Hitler's Community, 1918-1945
Reviewed by Jochen Böhler
This is an interesting essay on a difficult question: What were the bonds between the German society and the Nazi mass crimes? The question has rarely been dealt with so radically: According to Kühne, the entire German “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) was not only aware of, but – both directly and indirectly – involved in these crimes (p. 3-4).
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Reviewed by Jochen Böhler
This is an interesting essay on a difficult question: What were the bonds between the German society and the Nazi mass crimes? The question has rarely been dealt with so radically: According to Kühne, the entire German “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) was not only aware of, but – both directly and indirectly – involved in these crimes (p. 3-4).
The first chapter
(Craving Community – World War I and the Myth of Comradeship) demonstrates how
the loss of orientation in the wake of industrialization at the end of the 19th
century resulted in stratification and social tensions within the German
society (for example Protestants against Catholics, socialists and workers
against ruling classes). Neither the so called “Spirit of 1914” nor the party
truce (Burgfrieden) were able to bridge these gaps. Other countries such as
England and France were not free of such antagonisms, but in 1918, they found
themselves amongst the victors and still possessed colonies. Thus, they built
up less inner tensions and had more space to discharge them. In contrast, in
Germany the perception to be surrounded by enemies prevailed even in peace
times. The counter-concept was the widespread myth of comradeship, born in the
trenches of the First World War and shared by the political right and left. But
only nationalist and rightwing organizations used this myth to create the ideal
of the Volksgemeinschaft, which should include all “real” Germans and exclude
their “internal enemies” (like for example the German Jews or Communists).
From 1933 onwards, the
Nazis forged the myth of comradeship into the envisaged people’s community by
creating a welfare state for “Aryan” Germans only, whilst simultaneously
training them in militarized mass organizations (Chapter Two: Fabricating the
Male Bond – The Racial Nation as a Training Camp). Here, the Volksgemeinschaft
materialized in an undiffused way, customizing its members to systematic
breaches of norms and laws and ostracizing nonconformists that could not or did
not want to “belong”.
Creating community
through participation in common rituals and crimes and through exclusion of
“non-Aryans” is the common thread of the book. The methods applied became much
more radical with the Second World War, when new spaces and opportunities
opened to the uniformed members of the German Volksgemeinschaft in the occupied
East. In chapter three (Performing Genocidal Ethics – Togetherness in Himmler’s
Elite) and four (Spreading Complicity – Pleasure and Qualms in the Cynical
Army) we see that brutalization, excesses, and crimes were no obstacles to the
program of persecution and elimination of Jews and other locals, but – by
welding the brothers in crime even more together – formed one of its most
important bonding elements. The German Army’s notorious “criminal orders”
provided a seemingly legalistic framework for atrocities against enemy soldiers
and civilians in a world where “condemning compassion for the enemy as a sin
against one’s own comrades was the essence of Nazi genocidal ethics” (p. 109).
But, according to Kühne, one did not necessarily have to be a fanatic Nazi to
share such implementations of the war of extermination. Most German policemen
and soldiers, longing for the secure haven of comradeship, gave up the
individual “I” and merged into the “We” of their groups regardless to their
convictions and beliefs. At the Eastern Front, where military comradeship and
the feeling of belonging to the German master race became inseparably entangled
and the Wehrmacht became “the spearhead of the Volksgemeinschaft” (p. 126),
witnessing and committing mass crimes became a daily routine. It was the
awareness of this compliancy and the anticipation of its dreadful consequences
for the German nation once if the war would be lost that kept up the fighting
spirit amongst German soldiers until the bitter end.
After having
scrutinized the milieus of former and current warriors as male members of the
Volksgemeinschaft, the book extends the model of affiliation by complicity on
women in the “Community of Crime” (chapter five). Women were members of Nazi
women organizations, SS-auxiliaries in concentration camps or in services in
the occupied East (Osteinsatz), worked with the Wehrmacht or police units or
lived as a family side by side with their husbands in their violent
environments.
Kühne’s knowledgeable
study provides us with valuable insights into the wheelwork of the Nazi
genocide and the entanglement of large parts of the German society. Ingenious
and with admirable ease, he weaves the relevant findings in anthropological,
sociological, psychological and perpetrator research from authors such as himself,
Karin Orth, Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Christopher Browning, Jürgen Matthäus,
Harald Welzer, Omer Bartov, Martin Dean, Elizabeth Harvey, Peter Longerich and
Dieter Pohl Kühne cites the respective titles, with the exception of the
equally important and influential study of Götz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat. Raub,
Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus, Frankfurt am Main 2005. into his
fabric, combining them with descriptive examples and citations from first hand
evidence such as perpetrators diaries, letters, and postwar testimonies. His
great achievement is to sway the spot from crimes of heinous hatred to the
reverse of the medal that enabled the perpetrators to commit them: the love of
comradeship and the feeling of belonging to the German Volksgemeinschaft.
Kühne’s overall
approach though – linking his findings to the Volksgemeinschaft as a whole –
might be challenged. As he admits himself, the women milieus he uses as
examples were not small in numbers, but did not represent a majority within the
female part of the German society either (pp. 143, 148, 151). And, one might
ask, what about the millions of German boys, men and pensioners who were not
members of veteran organizations, police or army units, or did not pass Nazi
training camps? Kühne’s assumption that the widespread knowledge within the
German society of the mass crimes sufficed for those who had never witnessed
them to feel in one boat with those who had committed them (pp. 159-161) could
use some further examination for sure.
On the other hand, Kühne’s
elaborate interplay of belonging and exclusion in its extreme form allows him
to explain convincingly large scale participation in or acceptance of war
crimes – most and foremost within the German Army – as well as other forms of
mass violence – like for example the participation of non-German perpetrators
in the Holocaust (p. 80-81). Without a doubt he has provided us with a valuable
tool to examine other cases of political mass murder. Consequently and not
surprisingly, he positions himself clearly within the trend of Anglo-Saxon
research to see the Holocaust as “a genocide” amongst others during 20th
Century (p. 3). For example Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution. A Genocide,
Oxford 2009.
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