Nick, I’m a little late into this debate.
My comments on the Second World War will follow but first as to Jordan Peterson
He is neither god nor demon.
Peterson is someone who is trying, perhaps at times ineffectively or ineptly as you point out, to counter a movement which is at its core not just divisive in terms of its need to label, and therefore easily reject empirical data or contrary opinions, but a movement which elevates ‘feelings’ over rational debate.
It silences people and tries to banish them if they dare to question their authority, often with no chance for redemption.
Lastly, it is also a movement which is infantilizing.
It purports to want to protect me, and I suppose those incapable of fighting for their own rights, from having to read anything which might contradict their movement’s ever-expanding orthodoxy or, heavens forbid, offend me.
That’s my job to decide and not theirs: anything else and its censorship.
In short, while I do not agree with everything Peterson says, he is important. Pity he’s not a woman…more people might listen.
I read “Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ by Daniel Goldhagen, who is a former associate professor of government and social studies at Harvard University: he’s got the creds but man does he over-generalize.
Nonetheless, some of his primary sources are chilling.
A letter from a young SS officer to his mother, and forgive the paraphrase, describes his disgust at the performance of the local men rounded up to act as executioners. They were drunk, and getting drunker, and thus were often missing their targets, some of whom were flopping around in the water and blood like fish.
The officer goes on to boast that with good German efficiency, he came up with a solution, and the executions proceeded in an orderly fashion: all in a letter to his mother!
However, missing from your synopsis is the number of suicides in the German Army and especially among the SS death squads during and I suppose after the war.
Having a hard time locating the source again, but the idea of using foreign executioners was not just a manpower issue but one of keeping German troops who engaged in wholesale slaughter — and not while in combat — from killing themselves when on leave.
Not every German was a willing executioner.
As well, from NORMAN G. FINKELSTEIN and RUTH BETTINA BIRN, which I think tackles the issue that all Germans were easily transformed into ruthless killers:
“Goldhagen depicts anti-Semitism as the manifestation of a deranged state. The Germans were “pathologically ill … struck with the illness of sadism … diseased … tyrannical, sadistic,” “psychopathic” (HWE: 397, 450, quoting a “keen diarist of the Warsaw Ghetto”), in thrall to “absolutely fantastical … beliefs that ordinarily only madmen have of others … [prone] to wild, `magical thinking’” (HWE: 412), and so on. Goldhagen never explains, however, why the Germans succumbed and why the Jews fell victim to this derangement.”
In other words, anti-semitism aside, some human beings cannot take slaughtering people, some are even haunted by their deeds and so kill themselves.
Others of course are not easily bothered…Abu Ghraib anybody?
(As an aside, an often forgotten stat is the number of foreign troops fighting for the Nazis in Russia: some historians put them at close to 1 million, others separate the data to mean that between 600,000 to 1,400,000 Russians became Hilfswilliger or willing helpers.)
Interesting topic, thanks for writing it.