a particularly ruthless Communist-baiter. In 1933 Himmler and Heydrich recruited Müller for their newly established Bayerische Politische Polizei (the precursor of the Gestapo), in spite of the fact that Müller was no Nazi Party member. Indeed, he would – without much enthusiasm – only become one as late as 1939, when he became head of the Gestapo. A political evaluation report of two years earlier praised him for his draconic measures against the Communists during the Weimar era, but tellingly added:
It is no less clear, however, that had it been his task, Müller would have proceeded just the same against the Right. With his vast ambition and relentless drive, he would have done anything to win the appreciation of whoever might be boss in a given system.
For this reason, the Ortsgruppenleiter of Munich-Pasing had observed about Müller, somewhat earlier: ‘We cannot very well imagine him as a ←24 | 25→party comrade.’ And yet, only a few years later this unwelcome party comrade belonged to the elite circle of Hitler’s extermination experts.
Another example is Müller’s colleague, Franz Josef Huber. If Müller’s ruthless opportunism was frowned upon in party circles, Huber was originally considered an outright enemy of the Nazi movement. As Müller, he had been employed at the political department of the Munich CID before 1933. But whereas Müller had persecuted the left, Huber’s ‘victims’ were on the right side of the political spectrum. In a fiercely critical party evaluation report of 1937, Huber is said to have been an informer on Nazi colleagues during the Weimar years and even to have referred to Hitler as a ‘runaway, unemployed house-painter’ and an ‘Austrian deserter’. Hardly surprising then, Huber was scheduled to be executed after the Nazi’s came to power. Heydrich saved him by offering him a post in his police force. Huber finally wound up as Gestapo chief of Vienna.19
For the moment these two examples may suffice to underline the caution required when identifying the motives of the perpetrators. For it is by no means self-evident to assume ‘idealist’ intentions with Hitler’s genocidal collaborators solely on the basis of their involvement in the crime. Without doubt, Huber and particularly Müller belonged to the leading men of this group. But their motives appear to have remained at a fair distance from the paranoid ones discussed earlier. Apparently, others could be at least as inspiring.
But the most important objection against the patho-ideological perspective remains its paradoxical exoneration of the perpetrators. Inspired by their revolting crimes, the advocates of the Laoconian point of view underscore their profound evil by picturing them as the blinded and obsessively fanaticized disciples of Hitler’s satanic Weltanschauung. Inevitably however, the result of such a picture is the opposite of the painter’s intention. For with his violent brush strokes, the criminals he seeks to expose transform into the psychopathic crusaders of their Führer’s gospel. In this way, the Nazi criminal acquires the amalgamated characteristics of the bogeyman, the demon and the lunatic. But with the appearance of this pitch-black diabolical culprit, the possibility of identification, and thus worldly judgment, evaporates into thin air. For how, after all, should we be able to judge those who considered themselves as ‘latter-day Laocoöns in the grip of a death struggle’, or who genuinely felt that the indiscriminate ←25 | 26→mass killing of men, women and children equaled the rescue of the world or the extermination of vermin on the field? One can hardly reproach the agonized Laocoön for defending himself, or the family man for protecting his loved ones and the farmer for assuring the survival of his crops. The problem here is, of course, that all three lack any sense of wrong-doing. And because of this, the attribution of subjective guilt becomes impossible. For guilt presupposes blame, which in turn requires the ability to distinguish between right and wrong. With the absence of the latter, the first two become meaningless.
Whoever takes the patho-ideological interpretation seriously is therefore confronted by the uneasy outcome that the only remaining yardstick left for passing judgment on the Nazi killers is the one we normally reserve for the mentally ill and insane. If the criminal acts of such unfortunates result from their mental deficiency we do not consider them subjectively guilty and therefore do not punish them, but instead refer them to an asylum for appropriate care and treatment. Paradoxically then, the application of the patho-ideological perspective to the collaborators of Hitler’s genocide inevitably results in the excuse of their conduct, as one simply cannot diagnose the patient as mentally deficient and then call him to account for the actions caused by his handicap. In such a scenario individual guilt and criminal responsibility disappear behind the horizon of mental derangement and the Nazi genocide itself is reduced to an error of judgment with the gas chambers as the absolute low point of its catastrophic consequences. According to this kind of logic, the mass murders are indeed turned into a self-defense strategy of the Third Reich, which may not have had any basis in reality, but which, in the final analysis, becomes understandable – and even excusable – because of the failing mental capabilities of those who carried them out.
Such considerations may well have played a part in Von dem Bach’s statement before the IMT, and, as we shall see, they initially determined the defense of some of his former SS colleagues.20 But there can be no doubt that they are not the intention of the advocates of the patho-ideological interpretation of the perpetrators’ conduct. And yet, they form its logical outcome. Thus we arrive at the bizarre situation in which the very same arguments applied by the Nuremberg defense counsel to exonerate their clients were subsequently adopted by their ‘historical prosecutors’ to emphasize the exact opposite.
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The idea that the behavior of the Nazi killers could somehow be explained by a perverted form of ‘subjective self-defense’, based on erroneous ideological assumptions – the very heart of the patho-ideological interpretation –, was already thoroughly dealt and dispensed with shortly after the war. The clearest demonstration of its inadequacy took place in the Nuremberg court room during one of the so-called follow-up trials by the Americans. It concerned the Einsatzgruppen-trial in 1947/48, in which this particular scenario of self-defense played a significant role.21 On trial were a number of commanding officers of the mobile annihilation units of the SS – the Einsatzgruppen –, who had carried out mass killing operations in Eastern Europe and the Soviet territories. Because of the overwhelming evidence none of the defendants seriously denied his objective participation in these killings. Disagreement, however, arose over their subjective involvement. Thus, their defense counsel sought to convince the judges that their clients had actually committed their crimes in good faith. While recognizing that in reality their victims had constituted no threat at all to either themselves or the German Reich, they maintained that the defendants had nevertheless genuinely believed in the existence of such a threat at the time and had acted accordingly. Clearly, in hindsight, they were proved wrong, but considering the circumstances they could hardly be blamed for this ‘judgmental error’. In the words of the prominent legal expert, Professor Reinhart Maurach, this defense reads as follows:
The defendants, according to the National Socialist theory as well as due to their own conception and experience, were obsessed with a psychological delusion based on a fallacious idea concerning the identity of the aims of Bolshevism and the political role of Jewry in Eastern Europe. This conception was apt not only to exclude the possibility of a discussion regarding the moral defensibility of the liquidation order but to bring the defendants to the conviction that the attack against the future existence of the German Reich and people was to be expected mainly from the Jewish population in the occupied Russian territories.
Based on these arguments, leading defense counsel Dr. Rudolf Aschenauer insisted that the defendants had committed their criminal acts ‘in presumed self-defense on behalf of a third party’, and ‘under conditions of presumed necessity to act for the rescue of a third party from immediate, otherwise unavoidable danger.’ The ‘third party’ here was, of course, made up of the ←27 | 28→German Reich and its people, whose very existence was supposedly endangered by
