ingredient of most criminal trials and the German ones against the collaborators of the Nazi state were no exception. The defendants in these trials were no mythical characters, but specimens of the kind, persons of flesh and blood, who were called to account for their involvement in concrete criminal acts. That their prosaic courtroom appearances differed considerably from the more flamboyant presentations of historical imagination is therefore hardly surprising. For anyone who seriously wants to find out why these men (and women) had once ‘followed Hitler on his murderous path’, however, it is imperative to study their ‘courtroom profiles’. For they document a significantly more mundane – even though by no means more reassuring – story than the Laoconian-style historiography. Thus, to get to know these criminals and their backgrounds one has to turn to those who brought them to justice during the past decades. They consisted of the criminal investigators, state prosecutors and especially also the judges, who got to know them far more intimately than any historian ever would. For a variety of reasons, the efforts and achievements of these prosecution officials have met with considerable ←31 | 32→criticism, which can easily be summed up by the simple threefold formula of ‘too little, too late and too lenient’. Such reproaches were targeted particularly at the track record of the West German justice system, and for each of them serious arguments can be found.28 Paradoxically however, it is precisely this much criticized West German justice system which has taught us by far the most about the backgrounds, the psychology and modus operandi of these criminals. And there are three main reasons for this.
The first consists of the relatively demanding legal obligation for West German courts to motivate extensively and explicitly the considerations and decisions on which their judgments and verdicts are based. For this reason, these judgments are far more informative to the investigator than those by, say, Dutch, East German or Anglo-American courts. The second reason relates to the fact that of all criminal justice systems which dealt with Nazi criminals, the West German one took by far the greatest interest in the (subjective) background of their conduct. And this too resulted in observations and insights of considerable value to historical and criminological research into the question of their motivation. The third reason why, in particular, the West German documentation on the post-war prosecution and trials of Nazi crimes is so informative to us is probably the most surprising one. For as far as the gravest Nazi crimes were concerned, it lasted some fifteen years before any systematic prosecution policy was set up in West-Germany, with the establishment of the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg. As a result of this ‘delayed’ judicial reaction, the perpetrators of these crimes were given every opportunity to re-integrate into post-war German society without much difficulty. And the smooth nature of their ‘return to normalcy’ underscores one of the most crucial insights into the criminological profile of Hitler’s genocide collaborators: its inconspicuous middle-class character.
Before 1933 none of them had even the faintest idea of the criminal career he (or she) would make in the service of their Führer. And the very thought that in ten years’ time they would consist of routine participants in mass murder was as unimaginable to them as to any of their fellow countrymen. Under normal circumstances then, hardly any of them would have turned criminal and in their biographies one looks in vain for characteristics which somehow seem to have preordained them for their role as Hitler’s mass executioners. With rare exceptions, none had criminal antecedents or ←32 | 33→suffered from any certifiable personality disorder which could offer even the beginning of an explanation for their criminal conduct. At the time of this conduct, most were married, headed a family and belonged to either the Catholic or Protestant church communities of which more than 90 % of the German population were members. And despite the fiercely anti-clerical stance of the Nazi movement and the regime, we know that a substantial number of them stuck to their religious convictions and church membership. No different from the average German citizen then, they had been brought up with the elementary notions of right and wrong, on the basis of which they had developed a moral awareness which determined their regular day-to-day behavior within society. What set them apart from their fellow citizens, however, and what finally landed them in court, was that, at some point in their lives, they had chosen to abandon this awareness of right and wrong as a guide-line for their conduct, and to offer their services to a government with a distinctly criminal agenda. It is this choice which brought them on the murderous path of Hitler’s Unrechtsstaat and which calls for further investigation if one seeks a serious answer to Marrus’ puzzling question.
Whoever undertakes such an investigation on the basis of the prosecution records referred to earlier, will discover that the answer to the puzzle lies above all in the absence of distinctive features of those who fill its pages. For they were indeed distinctive because of the crimes of which they stood accused, but hardly because of their unusual personalities or background characteristics. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that most would never have exceeded their inconspicuousness if historical coincidence had not ‘tapped them on the shoulder’, so to speak. And we can get a pretty good idea what this ‘shoulder tap’ looked like when focusing on the recruits for Hitler’s earliest mass murderous enterprise: the so-called Euthanasie-Aktion.
This wholesale medical killing program targeted Germany’s physically and mentally handicapped and was set up by Hitler’s personal Chancellery at the start of the war. It lasted until its very end and cost a total of some 200.000 lives. The patients included in this secret program – men, women and children – were murdered either through carbon-monoxide gassing in one of the six extermination centers spread across Germany, or poisoned by means of lethal injections or overdosed medication in ‘regular’ nursing homes.29 The first – gassing – phase of this ‘mercy killing’ project provided ←33 | 34→considerable expertise for Hitler’s subsequent genocidal operations in Poland and the Soviet Union and part of its staff was later transferred to the so-called Aktion Reinhard camps, Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor, where about one-third of all Jewish victims of the Holocaust perished under its hands.
One of the obvious questions in any attempt to make sense out of this group of annihilation experts concerns the way in which they became involved in Hitler’s killing apparatus. Dietrich Allers, one of the leading managers of this so-called T4 organization (named after its Berlin address, Tiergartenstrasse 4), pictured his introduction as follows:
I was scheduled to go to officer’s training school, but then, in November 1940, my mother met Werner Blankenburg in the street in Berlin. When she told him what I was doing he said, “That’s ridiculous. There is an opening in my department for a lawyer. I’ll fix it.” And that’s how I got into T4.30
Such a dreary prologue to a profession as prominent administrator of mass killing may well appear too ridiculous to be taken seriously, but there is actually no reason to doubt Allers’ version in this respect. Just as with many of his generation, the start of the war meant the unwelcome end of a promising civil career. In Allers’ case it was that of a young lawyer in Prussian public service. Instead, he was now drafted and stationed in Poland as a non-commissioned officer with the task of training recruits. Unsurprisingly, he felt little enthusiasm about his new duties and his mother’s coincidental meeting with his old SA-comrade – Allers had joined both the NSDAP and the SA as a law student in 1932 – offered him an excellent opportunity to escape from his dreaded military existence. Werner Blankenburg had worked himself up to the position of deputy to the operational chief of the ‘euthanasia’ organization, Viktor Brack. And it was indeed a fact that, at the time, the bureau was in desperate need of an experienced legal professional, as the first one had resigned after a fierce dispute.31 Allers, therefore, did not need to think twice before deciding to accept Blankenburg’s offer. The opportunity to leave the military behind, return home and pick up his profession in the service of such a prestigious institute as the Führer Chancellery, was certainly more than he could have dreamed of. And so, as of January 1941, Dietrich Allers started to devote his talents to the administrative aspects of the annihilation program.
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Allers’ unspectacular and coincidental introduction to T4 was hardly exceptional. As he himself told
