Langerbein, Helmut. Hitler's Death Squads: the Logic of Mass Murder.

• Author: Brockington, Jr, William S.
• Position: Book Review

Langerbein, Helmut. Hitler's Death Squads: The Logic of Mass Murder. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2003. xi + 232 pp. Cloth, $27.00.

Helmut Langerbein is the most recent (and most assuredly not the last) to investigate causality and culpability in the murder of six million Jews, as well as millions of other Untermenschen (inferior beings) selected by the Nazi hierarchy, during the years of the Third Reich. The issue of responsibility for criminal acts is almost as old as civilization itself, with one of the earliest ethical questions--that of group accountability vis-a-vis individual fault. Is an entire tribe responsible for the behavior of an individual, or is justice satisfied when the individual who commits a crime is suitably punished? A parallel question regarding guilt concerns that of motive: Is the offense the result of an individual decision or is the person acting on behalf of the corporate unit? The act of killing another human is expressly forbidden by most civil and religious law; yet there are occasions, such as war, when such behavior is not only permissible but is also requisite. The slaughter of combatants is normally accepted by the rules of war, but the killing of non-combatants in wartime has never been simple to proscribe or to legitimize.

Although civilians, as producers of war materiel, came to be viewed as justifiable military targets in the twentieth century, determining whether a specific military act constituted a legitimate military action or an atrocity against non-combatants was often problematic. When ordinary individuals are placed in extraordinary situations, and when legal orders are issued, upon whom does responsibility rest if societal norms are exceeded? Further, who determines societal norms and whether those norms are transferable to other societies? Finally, if there is consensus that societal norms have been exceeded, even after consideration for situational abnormality, who decides not only the individual punishment but also corporate responsibility and retribution? At the end of World War II, when the magnitude of Nazi "crimes against humanity" was unveiled, these questions were immediately addressed. Since then, however, causality and culpability regarding die Endlosung der Judenfrage (Final Solution of the Jewish Question) has become one of the most analyzed and debated events of history.

With virtually the entire Nazi archives to study, historians and social scientists have...