Browning, Gross, and the Challenges of Holocaust Research Vis-à-vis Collaboration Between the Germans and Poles

World War II in Poland involves an intertwining of many relationships between the conquering German SS and Polish partisans. Although the Germans considered the Poles to be untermenschen to be fought and eradicated, there were many moments during the German occupation of Poland where the SS and the Hiwis (partisan Poles) shared a common enemy in the Jews and collaborated actively together to destroy the Jews of Poland. Two historians active in the Holocaust field, Jan T. Gross and Christopher R. Browning, examined German-Polish collaboration from different angles.

In Neighbors, Gross covers the Polish involvement in the massacre of Jews in the little hamlet of Jedwabne during the summer of 1941. The entire argument is intended to conceptualize the Poles as active participants of the Holocaust, a reality which is far less researched than the obvious German contribution. During Gross' research, the author notes that he tried to "seek German documentation of the destruction of the Jews in this territory (Gross 2001, 8) and that he could not find any such paper trail. Gross summarizes the small number of resources available to him and transcribes testimony from Jewish witnesses of the massacre verbatim. Although the author knows that these victims are technically not required to tell the truth, he finds no reason to "have falsified their accounts out of ill will vis-à-vis their Polish neighbors" (ibid 10).

The atmosphere in Jedwabne after the Soviet occupation was one where Polish partisans suffered. Gross describes Polish sentiment towards the Soviet occupiers as extremely negative all around, especially in Jedwabne. The Polish locals for the most part felt that their Jewish neighbors were in approval of the Soviet occupation and thus placed themselves at odds with the Jews. Bronislaw Sleszynski, one of the main partisan perpetrators in the Jedwabne massacre, testified that the Jews placed up a banner which said "We welcome you" (ibid 24). According to Agnieszka Arnold, another Gross witness, the Polish opinions on Soviet-Jewish relations were "a stereotype, a cliché, which could be confirmed by anything" (ibid 25). However, Gross considers the Polish witness testimony to be less than completely truthful in these cases, as he discovers that there were more Polish collaborators with the Soviets than Jewish collaborators.

Peering more at the German side of the atrocities, Browning attempts to answer the question of how ordinary people-businessmen, dockworkers, carpenters, etc. could commit the most horrendous crimes. To Browning both the soldiers in Reserve Police Battalion 101 and their collaborators, the Hiwis, were not exactly the richest men in society and indeed had similar origins. Peering more at the German side of the atrocities, Browning attempts to answer the question of how ordinary people-businessmen, dockworkers, carpenters, etc. could commit the most horrendous crimes. The challenge posed to Browning that was not nearly as imposing to Gross was the credibility of the witnesses who served in Reserve Battalion 101. Unable to accept all of the German testimony as truth, Browning could not approach the testimony he researched in the same method. To Browning it was far too difficult to construct an accurate picture of his research subject by analyzing the testimony of 125 different individuals. Thus Browning's Ordinary Men takes far less into account the personal opinions and testimony of the perpetrators or victims and relies more on psychological studies to validate his argument.

Browning discovers in studies by prominent psychologists of the time that there is a common authoritarian instinct that exists in all human beings to varying degrees. Those who were more enthusiastic about killing were generally higher up the pecking order when it came to social status in the unit; those who were unable or unwilling to participate in mass murder were considered cowardly by SS standards (Browning 1998 164-6). To Browning, the perpetrators viewed themselves as a case of individuals being placed in an almost impossible situation with "no choice" (ibid 170). Browning argues that at Jozefow, the battalion's first mass murder action, the soldiers were shocked into action and experienced trauma which they instinctively blocked out (sometimes with alcohol) for their subsequent mass murder campaigns. At Jozefow, the German authorities realized that there was a substantial minority in their ranks who could not go ahead with the murders and thus enlisted the Hiwis (Lithuanian collaborators) to aid them. For future massacres, the Hiwis were involved, but there was a greater German involvement. For many German soldiers, they needed to know that they were not alone in their hatred of the Jews and needed to see the Poles take their murdering role enthusiastically to spur themselves on when future killings were ordered.

The primary psychological argument Browning favors in the evolution of "ordinary men" to genocidal killers is Stanley Milgram's obedience to authority. Milgram's study concludes that there is a "deeply ingrained behavioral tendency to comply with the directives of those positioned hierarchically above, even to the point of performing repugnant actions in violation of universally accepted moral norms" (ibid 171). A majority of Milgram's subjects became at least mildly sadistic even without external coercion. The same can be said for the members of Reserve Battalion 101; after Jozefow, a higher percentage of the unit was able and willing to participate in the ghetto-clearings and Judenjagd ("Jew hunt"). Despite the complexities in the massacres, Browning agrees that there was a level of similarity between the Milgram lab experiment and the actions of Battalion 101. By late 1942, the German soldiers were far more comfortable for the most part in murdering the Jews; in Milgram's experiment, there was a similar desensitization of the subjects towards inflicting pain on others.

The deepest question Browning is attempting to answer in Ordinary Men is the dilemma of whether the brand of behavior exhibited by the men of Battalion 101 is inborn or acquired through "brainwashing". Browning tilts towards the idea that most of the soldiers "were immersed in a deluge of racist and anti-Semitic propaganda (Browning 1998, 184) and thus did not necessarily carry these traits prominently before Hitler came to power. However he does agree that the authoritarian instinct exists in all human beings, and that the incessant indoctrination of Nazi propaganda brought this characteristic out naturally. Some soldiers in Battalion 101, like Lieutenant Gnade, were naturally authoritarian and absorbed the Nazi "brainwashing" tactics with glee; others, such as Captain Hoffmann and Lieutenant Buchmann, were averse to Nazi propaganda in varying degrees. Hoffmann developed colitis due to the stress of being ordered and forced to kill unarmed civilians; Buchmann vehemently objected to the battalion commander, Wilhelm Trapp, and barely avoided a court-martial for his personal actions.

Gross' main challenge in completing his study of the Jedwabne massacre was the reluctance of the Poles to discuss the true specter of Polish-Jewish relations during the war. He mentions that the Holocaust and the Polish struggles of World War II were always studied as if they occurred in completely different worlds and could not be placed in the same vein. Gross states that "it was standard practice in European historiographies of the period" (Gross 2001, 118) to separate the Polish struggle from the Holocaust. Gross was forced to deal with personal attacks and the inability of the Polish people to quickly accept that they were also complicit in the murder of Jews. The author states that after lengthy debate, "28 percent of the respondents (Polish population) believed the sole and only perpetrators of the Jedwabne killings were the Germans" (ibid 120).

The other serious challenge to Gross was the reluctance of the current residents of Jedwabne to even mention the massacre and the lack of a paper trail of evidence available to him. For this reason he was forced to rely on the testimony of the victims and survivors for a bulk of his study. There was indeed a psychological block that the residents of Jedwabne were reticent to even admit, let alone overcome. Gross was required to discover the aged perpetrators of the crime and correlate them with the only real solid evidence of the crime on paper, the Lomza trial in 1949. Gross was required to go to the extent of reviewing the testimonies of the wives of the perpetrators who witnessed, but did not actively partake in the massacre. It was eventually discovered that the Germans had a role in the slaughter at Jedwabne, but that they did not partake in the killings. The German role was that of tacit approval given to the Polish mayor to allow the town to run riot.

In both studies, apparent collaboration existed between the conquering Germans and the Polish natives, even while the Germans were attempting to crush Polish resistance. Many Poles viewed the Germans more much more palatably than the Soviets and feared Stalinist rule far more than Hitler's racially based hierarchy. Gross states that "twenty months of Soviet occupation of this area (Jedwabne) took a heavy toll on the local people" (Gross 2001, 30) and the German army was "welcomed by the local population of the area" (ibid 31). Due to the tactical situation during the summer of 1941, the Germans were less able to actively kill the Jews themselves (as they were moving forward into Russia) and gave tacit approval to the Poles to do so under unusually loose supervision.

The actions of Battalion 101 took place a year after the Jedwabne massacre and the Germans took a far more active role in slaughtering the Jews in their conquered territories. The Hiwis were required more because the German unit was initially reluctant to partake in the mass murders, and needed to see the more enthusiastic Hiwis, who had already taken part in mass murder, finish the job. In this case there was far more active collaboration between the Germans and the Poles, who possessed similar mindsets concerning the Jews. As 1942 wore on, the Germans required fewer Polish collaborators due to their increased willingness to partake in the murders themselves. Through 1943, the Germans required the Poles to aid them again in greater numbers in mass murder because they were losing the war on the Eastern Front and required the vast majority of their troops on the front lines to attempt to repel the Red Army.

Both authors overcame challenges to present groundbreaking views regarding their topics of research. Jan T. Gross and Christopher Browning succeeded in profiling how ordinary Germans and Poles became mass murderers and in some cases combined their efforts to achieve the goal of a Europe without Jews. Both scholars provided the background that gave the murderers incentive to commit genocide and outlined the cooperation between the two disparate groups that eventually became a toxic combination for the vast majority of Jews in Poland.

Works Cited

Browning, Christopher R., Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 1998), 164-6, 170-1, 184.

Gross, Jan T., Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (New York, Penguin Books, 2001), 8, 10, 24-5, 30-1, 118, 120.