Into the Grey Zone, Wehrmacht Bystanders, German Labor Market Policy and the Holocaust

Journal of Genocide Research (2008), 10(3), September, 389 –411

Into the grey zone: Wehrmacht bystanders, German labor market policy and the Holocaust KIM C. PRIEMEL

In 1941, German troops occupied the city of Vilnius. Mass killings started immediately, reducing the Jewish population by 70% by the end of the year. In the following two years, genocidal action ceased nearly altogether due to the effects of increasing labor shortages. Since neither Soviet POWs nor Lithuanian gentiles were available in sufficient numbers, German offices had to resort to the remaining Jewish workforce. This article explores the cases of three German officers who used economic rationale extensively in order to save their workers from mass murder. Their efforts testify to the scope of action that was open to minor Wehrmacht officers in the occupied territories. By highlighting the institutional background against which these men were able to provide help to Jews some tentative conclusions about how passive bystanders turned into active rescuers shall be drawn. Since the historian’s insight into individual motivations is often frustrated by the limited availability and reliability of sources, this article stresses the impact of situational factors. By drawing on sociopsychological research the essay argues that the risks the Wehrmacht rescuers had to take not only remained fairly limited but were also marked by ambiguity. Rather than opting for outright resistance, at least two of the three men remained within a “grey zone” of moral compromise which, however, was vital to the success of their rescue efforts.

I. Introduction At the end of the denazification trial in the Hessian town of Darmstadt in 1948, the jury classified Karl Plagge as a “fellow traveler.”1 As an “old fighter,” i.e. a former party member of many years’ standing, who had joined the NSDAP as early as 1931, Plagge might well have been placed under the much more severe category of “activist.” Therefore, the verdict appeared to be a highly convenient outcome for Plagge. In fact, this was the charge to which he himself had pleaded. However, the jury’s logic was somewhat peculiar. The mild choice of “fellow traveler” was by and large the result of affidavits of former subordinates of Plagge, as well as that of an unexpected witness who had been asked to testify by Jewish inmates of the Ludwigsburg DP camp. All confirmed that Plagge had gone to great lengths to save Jews from death during his time as a Wehrmacht officer in Vilnius. The jury accepted these testimonies as exonerating evidence but, in a ISSN 1462-3528 print; ISSN 1469-9494 online/08/030389-23 # 2008 Research Network in Genocide Studies DOI: 10.1080/14623520802305743

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remarkable volte d’argumentation, made a slight but significant differentiation. Although Plagge’s rescue efforts had shown his humanity, so the verdict reads, this did not necessarily mean that his actions had resulted from any anti-National Socialist intentions. A complete acquittal was therefore denied.2 The reasoning of the Hessian jury was less surprising than it may at first sight seem,3 but it is certainly astonishing how comparably little attention the jury paid to the extraordinary story of Plagge’s actions. The fact that a German Wehrmacht officer had opposed National Socialist extermination policy and had, indeed, succeeded in saving a large number of lives does not seem to have impressed the court back then in the same way that it does today.4 The present article will deal with the unlikely case of Plagge as well as with those of two other Wehrmacht members, Oskar Scho¨nbrunner and, more prominently, Anton Schmid. They did not only belong to that tiny group of courageous Germans who helped Jews during the reign of Nazism but also to the even smaller band of Wehrmacht soldiers who engaged in rescue actions.5 However, this is neither a story of heroes nor one of pure philanthropy, but rather a tale of chance occasions and ambiguity. In the first part the essay will outline the rescue efforts undertaken by the three men, all of them in Vilnius. In a second step these actions are placed in the wider context of the German war economy. The focus will be particularly on the links between occupation policy and labor market problems in order to depict the specific scope of action available to minor Wehrmacht officers in the occupied territories behind the front. In a final step the question of the individual motivations of these officers who turned from bystanders6 to rescuers will be raised by drawing on results of sociopsychological research.7 Thus, taking the example of three rescuer case studies and considering them from a “rearview mirror” perspective, this essay intends to give more nuance to research on bystander behavior during the Holocaust.8 II.

Actions

In the first days of the onslaught against the Soviet Union, the German army advanced rapidly, sweeping away what resistance the Red Army was able or willing to organize and achieving control over Lithuania within days.9 On June 24 both Kaunas and Vilnius surrendered and military interim commandants took over executive and legislative powers. With the stabilization of the rear areas in early July they were replaced by the arrival of those units that were to remain permanently behind the lines. It was left to them to establish an organizational and administrative infrastructure for the exploitation of militarily useful resources and the raising and transfer of supplies to the fighting troops, but also to take action against possible partisan warfare. Among those Wehrmacht units was Feldkommandantur 814 under Lieutenant Colonel Max Zehnpfenning,10 which replaced a unit that had initially been assigned to the area, but whose commanding officer had subsequently been judged too soft for the difficult situation in the ethnically divided city with its largely Polish and Jewish population. In practice, however, the course of racial discrimination immediately pursued by 390

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Zehnpfenning could build on his predecessors’ policies. His Feldkommandantur assumed responsibility for anti-Semitic action, both administrative and military. Several announcements obliged the Jewish population to wear yellow badges on their clothing and curtailed Jewish civilian rights, while soldiers directly participated in killing operations such as the execution of allegedly Bolshevist officials.11 Zehnpfenning’s staff included first paymaster Oskar Scho¨nbrunner who arrived in Vilnius in early July 1941. So did the Heereskraftfahrpark 562 (HKP 562), a vehicle repair unit commanded by Captain Karl Plagge. At the end of August, Landesschu¨tzenbataillon 898 arrived in Vilnius, and one of its non-commissioned officers, Sergeant Anton Schmid, took over the local Versprengtensammelstelle whose task was to collect, coordinate, and reassign scattered soldiers.12 These men had little in common. Scho¨nbrunner, born in 1908, was the only regular officer. He had grown up in a bourgeois Bavarian household and had completed training as a professional clerk before joining the Wehrmacht in 1926. At the beginning of the 1941 campaign he had been transferred from France to Lithuania.13 Plagge, who was then 44 years old and thus considerably older than Scho¨nbrunner, was a veteran of World War I. Coming from a family of army physicians, Plagge had studied chemistry and mechanical engineering in his hometown of Darmstadt after the war. He subsequently established a private laboratory and had also joined a major local company in the 1930s. Due to his engineering qualifications he was first assigned to a local vehicle repair unit in 1940 and then placed in charge of HKP 562 the following year.14 Schmid, born in 1900 and like Plagge a veteran of the Great War, had been raised in the lower-class, petty-bourgeois milieu of fin-de-sie`cle Vienna. In the 1920s, he had completed an apprenticeship in electrical engineering and finally set up a small shop of his own. In 1939, he was conscripted into a Landesschu¨tzen unit, usually reserved for older or ailing men unfit for front service. Via Poland and Byelorussia Schmid arrived in Vilnius.15 In addition to their official functions, various Wehrmacht units in Vilnius soon engaged in other manifold activities according to the pre-devised scheme of economic exploitation in the east that was meant to ensure supplies and provisions “from the country.”16 This scheme, according to a conference of high-ranking government officials held in May 1941, also involved the “establishment of repair workshops for army purposes [. . .] to a high degree [Aufmachung von Reparaturwerksta¨tten fu¨r die Truppe [. . .] in erho¨htem Maße].”17 As a result, not only construction and repair units but also other Wehrmacht sections started to recruit staff, in most cases artisans and technical experts. Thus, a carpenter’s and upholsterer’s workshop was added to the Versprengtensammelstelle, and the workers were put in Schmid’s charge, while the Feldkommandantur established its own tailor’s workshop on Scho¨nbrunner’s initiative. In the case of HKP 562 there was no doubt about its dependence on skilled labor for the performance of various jobs in the garages. Since these could not be carried out by the German members of the Kraftfahrpark alone, large numbers of mechanics, glaziers, and panel beaters had to be employed. Due to the scarcity of skilled 391

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workers and the dominance of Jews among the local artisans, all three sections relied heavily on Jewish labor.18 From the perspective of the German employers this was an economic necessity since the tasks assigned to the units could not have been executed without sufficiently qualified workers—many of whom were Jews. Moreover, these had to accept minimum wages, making their labor unbeatably cheap. Initially, the Wehrmacht paid no more than 10 Pfennige per hour to male workers; women and adolescents received 7.5 and 5 Pfennige, respectively. Only later on were military employers charged the same amount as private firms, i.e. twice as much, half of it being a rental fee that was demanded by the civil administration which was responsible for ghetto affairs.19 For the Jews, however, these slave wages—which did not even pretend to provide an essential minimum—were of rather minor importance. Since the establishment of the German workshops coincided with the prelude of extermination, a job at a Wehrmacht office was often identical with survival. In particular, the skilled-worker certificates, the infamous Gelbe Scheine (printed on yellowish paper), would soon become the only chance of avoiding the mass murders of the first five months of occupation. During the initial phase of the so-called Aktionen perpetrated by German SS and police units and their Lithuanian auxiliaries in the first six weeks of occupation,20 Wehrmacht officers were frequently able to save their workers from falling victim to the executions. This was by and large due to the fact that the civil administration had not yet arrived. The administrative vacuum during these early weeks was filled by the army whose position was thus strengthened in regard to Security Police and SS Sicherheitsdienst (SD, i.e. the SS secret service).21 Despite the fact that the Wehrmacht had already paved the way through a succession of various anti-Semitic measures, German “Judenpolitik” became considerably more systematic after district commissioner Hans Hingst and his deputy Franz Murer had taken over control, coinciding with a changeover in police responsibilities. In early August 1941, Einsatzkommando 9, one of Himmler’s mobile task forces sent to the east in the wake of the Soviet campaign, was replaced by its fellow Einsatzkommando 3, headed by SS colonel Karl Ja¨ger, the author of the notorious Ja¨ger Report.22 Ghettoization plans were drawn up and implemented in a brutal single-day Aktion on September 6 in which thousands of Jews perished. Once ghettoization was accomplished, control over the ghetto also implied responsibility for the distribution of Jewish labor which was centralized in the German job center. Independent recruitment was henceforth prohibited.23 The link between ghettoization and labor demands soon became visible when the two parts of the new Jewish quarter, left and right of Vokieciu gatve (“German Street”), were used as instruments for the purpose of selection. While the smaller ghetto was chosen as the dwelling for unskilled or unproductive workers, i.e. a group ranging from academics to the old and infirm, the large ghetto became the place for those who were deemed useful by the Germans. In the course of several successive Aktionen in September and October 1941, the smaller ghetto was liquidated, and its inhabitants were brought to the forest of nearby Paneriai where they 392

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were murdered by the Lithuanian death squad Ypatingasis Bu¯rys, commanded by German SS and police officers.24 However, people in the big ghetto were not supposed to feel safe for the time being. In mid-October, during the final mass murders in the small ghetto, new identity cards were distributed by the job center. Printed on yellowish paper, these certified that the holder was an indispensable skilled worker who was to be spared from execution. For those who did not receive a yellow Schein the new differentiation proved to be a catastrophe since they were no longer shielded by their older documents. In fact, the number of Facharbeiterscheine was strictly limited to 3,000; the rest of the population was either doomed to die or forced to go underground. The holders of the yellow cards, on the other hand, were allowed to extend the protection of the Scheine to their spouses and two children each or, if unmarried and under 23, to their parents and one sister, though not to a brother. Thus, 12,000 was the official number of Jews that were to remain after the Gelbe-Scheine-Aktionen between October 24 and November 6, 1941.25 The Wehrmacht had an important say in the distribution of the said certificates. Most of the military workshops fulfilled tasks of supply, repairs, and construction and were consequently classified kriegswichtig, i.e. essential to war. This label in turn provided privileged access to Jewish labor. Schmid, Scho¨nbrunner and Plagge made full use of this opportunity. By January 1942, the Versprengtensammelstelle registered 103 Jewish men and women, and Scho¨nbrunner’s tailor-shop counted as many as 292 workers from the ghetto.26 HKP 562 became a workplace for 261 Jews. These numbers are particularly significant when compared with other employers. Schmid’s office, a minor and rather unimportant one, ranked among the 20 biggest employers of Jewish labor. The tailor-shop even headed the list of all Wehrmacht sections and was second only to Vilnius’ most important fur factory, “Kailis”; Plagge’s garages followed in fourth position in this ranking.27 To a considerable degree, these high scores resulted from the efforts undertaken by the three officers. While Scho¨nbrunner, who was on good terms with the local SD officers,28 was able to triple the original number of his employees of about 100 tailors in these early stages, Schmid managed to secure more working permissions for his workers than he had initially been granted. Instead of the original 15 certificates, he somehow obtained six times as many of the life-saving documents.29 Although the security of the Wehrmacht employment was by far the most important benefit for the Jews, the officers’ influence did not stop there. Schmid was known to instruct those soldiers who escorted the Jews from the ghetto to the workshop in the morning and back there in the evening to prevent all assaults on the workers by the guards at the gate and, if possible, their being frisked for foodstuffs. Likewise, Scho¨nbrunner deliberately ignored the smuggling of food into the Schneiderstube which soon became “famous” among the Ghetto inhabitants, as Yitshkok Rudashevski noted in his diary.30 Finally, the three officers tried to guarantee the humane treatment of their workers. Thus Plagge, as head of HKP 562, did not only set the tone that marked the atmosphere in the Park but also took action to make sure that the more brutal or anti-Semitic 393

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among his subordinates had as little to do with the Jewish workers as possible. Scho¨nbrunner was even summoned to district commissioner Hingst for being too civil with the Jews: someone had denounced him for having shaken hands with a Jewish employee.31 The use of large Jewish labor forces, however, frequently posed more serious problems to the officers in charge. This was basically due to the fact that both German and Lithuanian police often ignored valid papers and arrested individual workers as well as whole battalions on their way to work. At least once, each of the three Wehrmacht officers had to intervene in order to free their employees. In minor cases, Plagge usually instructed some reliable subordinates to request the liberation of HKP workers. However, the arrest of 70 Jews who belonged to his Kraftfahrpark in 1941 must have seemed to him a much more serious problem, since he decided to lodge a personal complaint directly at the Lukisˇkis prison which was known as the penultimate station before Paneriai. Plagge refused to leave without his workers. With some deviation from the exact truth, he claimed that the prisoners in question were irreplaceable experts without whom the HKP would be unable to fulfill its tasks. When finally granted access to the Jewish captives, Plagge also included their families and led the whole group out of jail.32 Oskar Scho¨nbrunner’s fame is based on a very similar, if more adventurous episode. One day in autumn 1941, the paymaster was informed by a Jewish foreman of his tailor-shop, Isaak Glasmann, that 150 workers had been arrested and were now being held at Lukisˇkis. At Glasmann’s insistence, Scho¨nbrunner appeared at the prison the same night and demanded the immediate release of “his” Jews. At first, the SD officer in charge refused to let the people go and asked for permission by the head of Vilnius Security Police. Although Scho¨nbrunner had made no such agreement with any SS representative he successfully bluffed his way through as the guard was not keen on any further investigation. Scho¨nbrunner was allowed to pick his workers from the crowd of arrested Jews in the gaol. From a list that had been prepared by Glasmann he read the names of those people whom he believed to belong to the tailor-shop. Calling out the names of the first 80 people, however, Scho¨nbrunner soon realized that many of the faces were unfamiliar to him. Though recognizing that he had been misled by his foreman, he nevertheless continued to select the remaining 70 men and women whose names had been listed by Glasmann. In what must have been a remarkable scene Scho¨nbrunner then led his putative workforce out of Lukisˇkis and to the tailor-shop, himself in his staff car crawling at walking speed at the head of the procession through night-time Vilnius. Later that night, he and Glasmann provided the former prisoners with labor certificates in order to legalize their stay at the Schneiderstube.33 The workshop activities of the three officers came at different times and to different ends. Anton Schmid was denounced and arrested in February 1942 due to his support of the ghetto resistance movement. In collaboration with the Jewish underground, Schmid had organized and personally carried out largescale transports of Jews in late 1941 to the ghettos of Lida, Grodno, and Białystok, 394

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which were deemed safer than Vilnius.34 Immediately after his imprisonment, the number of Jews working at the Versprengtensammelstelle was reduced by 50%. By the summer of 1942, the office was no longer mentioned among Wehrmacht employers of Jewish labor.35 The tailor-shop did not encounter any substantial problems until the summer of 1943 when Himmler issued an order to transform all remaining ghettos in the east into concentration camps. These were to be placed under the control of the Reichsicherheitshauptamt where Oswald Pohl’s Economic and Administrative Main Office would be responsible for economic exploitation of the camps.36 Himmler’s order did not only require the abandonment of their Jewish labor forces by all civil and Wehrmacht sections, but also the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto as a whole. Unlike Kaunas and Sˇiauliai, where ghettos were re-labeled camps and transferred to SS jurisdiction while remaining essentially intact, the Vilnius ghetto was not to last. In the aftermath of Warsaw, both a ghetto uprising and a substantial strengthening of the partisans in the woods by escaping Jews seemed realistic dangers to the SS. As a perceived hotbed of Jewish resistance, in particular in combination with its proximity to the border regions of Poland and Byelorussia where partisan warfare had lately peaked, the Vilnius ghetto was doomed.37 However, four exceptions from the general dissolution of all Jewish workforces were granted, among them the “Kailis” fur factory, the local Gestapo office, and the hospital of the Spanish Blue Legion in Vilnius. The fourth and only Wehrmacht section to be granted continued access to Jewish labor was HKP 562. Moreover, in the negotiations with the SS, Plagge was able to enlarge his workforce from 394 Jews in July 1943 to more than 1,000 at the time of the liquidation of the ghetto.38 Plagge, now holding the rank of major, had been given the permission for a special “Juden-KZ” by the local head of SD, SS-Obersturmfu¨hrer Rolf Neugebauer, as early as August.39 Having scored this initial victory, however, Plagge seems to have miscalculated the extent of the Security Police’s cooperation and was thus taken by surprise when the first deportations to Estonia heralded the ultimate liquidation of the ghetto. In the course of the third major deportation on September 1, 1943 some 300 workers of the HKP were arrested by the ghetto-liquidator-to-be, SSScharfu¨hrer Bruno Kittel, and loaded onto trains that were ready to leave for Klooga.40 Alarmed by the news, Plagge headed for the station and demanded the liberation of his workers which was immediately undertaken by the policemen at hand. The major then left, leaving some of his subordinates behind to protect his workers. This proved to be a fatal mistake. Soon after, Neugebauer arrived at the station and ordered the reloading of the just-freed Jews. All subsequent efforts of both HKP officers and Vilnius’ Wehrwirtschaftsaußenstelle, the local Wehrmacht economic office, to get into contact with Neugebauer failed. All workers were deported.41 Plagge, who was furious about the defeat, had learned his lesson and made sure that he would not be caught unawares a second time. Soon after the confrontation with the SS, the HKP began recruiting new workers in order to replace the victims of the deportation. For the remaining Jewish laborers this presented the opportunity to secure jobs for family members. Among them were several of Scho¨nbrunner’s 395

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former employees who successfully managed to get into the garages. One week before the final Aktion in which the ghetto would be liquidated and its inhabitants either deported or murdered, Plagge removed his workforce from the Jewish quarter to the new site on Subaucius gatve 37.42 These large tenement buildings which had originally been erected as “cheap housing” for Jewish people on welfare now became the HKP-“Betriebsghetto” from which the workers were driven to the garages in Antakalnis and the Panzerkaserne. In addition, large numbers of inmates remained on the Subaucius grounds where new workshops were added to the flats. These basically continued the activities of the former ghetto workshops and performed jobs that were hardly related to the key tasks of a vehicle repair unit. Thus, joiners, roofers, masons, and shoemakers were found among HKP’s indispensable workers as well as doctors and nurses who provided medical care. Significantly, about 40% of the whole labor force was employed in the workshops on Subaucius street and not in the HKP garages proper.43 Remarkably, Plagge had also managed to include large numbers of women and children arguing that his predominantly male skilled workers could hardly be expected to show any willingness to work without their families. However, Plagge did not rely on this psychological reasoning alone but went to great lengths to secure jobs for the women as well. Efforts to withdraw these female workers met with his fierce resistance.44 In addition, in the first weeks after the establishment of the HKP camp the number of inhabitants grew considerably due to the arrival of Jews who had remained in the ghetto during the liquidation, hiding in malines (secret hiding places), where they were either discovered by police squads or from where they moved into temporary refuge at “Kailis.” Taking into consideration those that were found out and arrested, Plagge convinced the SD head that he could do with another 100 workers in his garages. At about the same time, roughly the same number of illegals were secretly transferred by the Jewish underground from the more vulnerable “Kailis” camp. According to the diary of Grigorij Sˇur, this was done with Plagge’s explicit approval.45 As a result, in early 1944 the HKP number of inmates peaked at more than 1,250, all of whom were comparatively safe from assaults by the German or Lithuanian police. The major exception was the outstandingly brutal so-called Kinderaktion in March 1944. In an unannounced onslaught, more than 200 children and elderly people were arrested and either killed on the spot or brought to Paneriai where they were murdered. By April, the number of remaining Jews had been reduced to some 1,000 people.46 The Kinderaktion anticipated the complete extermination of remaining Vilnius Jewry with military defeat approaching. In July 1944, German occupation came to an abrupt end when the Wehrmacht started to withdraw its sections. Among them was HKP 562 whose camp was to be dissolved and its inmates to be left in the charge of the SS. On July 1, Plagge spoke before a gathering of HKP inmates and warned them in thinly veiled words of their fate, officially labeled an “evacuation to the west.” He informed them that they would be handed over to the SS and, more bluntly, reminded them “how well the SS takes care of Jewish prisoners.” 396

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Luggage, Plagge said in response to questions from the crowd, would not be needed where they were about to go. Some 400 of the inmates managed to find hiding places before the final mass murder on July 4; half of them would not be discovered and survived to see the Red Army enter Vilnius on July 13, 1944.47 III.

Options

The stories of the three men are well worth telling and remembering in their own right. Beyond their anecdotal quality, however, they may serve as a starting point for further analysis, examining the institutional as well as personal conditions that provided the framework in which they could take place. How were the officers able to perform their rescue actions? What made them act the way they did? The first question looks at the opportunities and chances encountered by Wehrmacht soldiers such as Schmid, Scho¨nbrunner, and Plagge, whereas the second tackles more difficult psychological issues. Although neither of the two problems can be dealt with in depth in the present essay, some tentative conclusions shall nonetheless be drawn from the three case studies. The common element of the above-mentioned rescue efforts is tightly linked to the ubiquitous question of labor supply. As Jewish lives depended increasingly on their usefulness as (skilled) workers, the role of the Wehrmacht, probably the single most important employer in the occupied territories, grew proportionally stronger. Labor shortage was indeed one of the most pressing problems of the German war economy. In the Reich proper, the massive rearmament boom had led from largescale unemployment in the early 1930s to an ever-increasing deficit in available manpower by 1939. Though preparing for war, the German economy at the same time lacked the essential prerequisites.48 Even before the attack on Poland, General Georg Thomas, the Wehrmacht’s leading armaments expert, therefore stressed the need to boost industrial production, foreign currency reserves, the production of staple commodities—and the number of “men.”49 While the former problems could be solved at least partially by sustained internal action, the latter exceeded the capabilities even of an enlarged Germany. Indeed, these shortcomings did not only prove to be the precondition but also a major objective of the war to come.50 In particular, the growing discrepancy between the available human resources and the various claims on these posed a severe threat to the German war effort. The recourse to forced labor offered the easiest way out of that dilemma. POWs from Poland as well as from the west, especially from France, were drafted by the thousands and were soon joined by predominantly Polish civilians. By June 1940, 348,000 POWs and 800,000 Polish civilians had been brought to Germany. However, recruitment for operations “Sealion” (GB) and “Barbarossa” (SU) caused a further aggravation of the situation at the home front. From May 1939 to May 1941, the German workforce was reduced by six million and would undergo even further strains once fighting had started. In a mere three months the Wehrmacht lost 520,000 men in the east and by the end of February 1942 the one-million watermark had been passed. Inevitably, the continual 397

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replacements led to a breakdown of the Reich’s labor market. The number of male civilian workers that had peaked at 24.5 million before the Second World War was down to 13.5 million in September 1944.51 Once more, an extensive forced labor program would have been the easiest solution to the German economic deficiencies. But due to mistaken hopes for a rapid victory over the USSR and the ideologically motivated rejection of bringing both “Bolshevists” and “subhumans” to the Reich, no such plans were made in the early stages of the war. Only in October, when the dream of a swift Soviet defeat obviously clashed with reality, did Hitler consent to the recruitment of Red Army POWs and civilians from the eastern territories.52 As Christian Streit has shown, this decision came far too late to be of any help in the short term. Anticipating directives from Berlin, the Wehrmacht had deliberately reduced supplies, housing, and medical care to less than a bare minimum causing the death of hundreds of thousands of Russian POWs. Housing literally turned out to be the equivalent of Go¨ring’s notorious “holes in the ground.” Malnutrition as devised by Herbert Backe was practiced in all camps.53 Thus, Soviet prisoners of war that were to be transferred to Lithuanian camps received a bare 100–200 g of bread and 20–30 g of millet a day while being forced on marches of about 40 kilometers. In Vilnius, the Armee-Gefangenen-Stelle 10, a temporary POW camp, supplied nothing but “100 g millet without bread” as the complete daily ration. Predictably, in October the aerodrome in nearby Kaunas reported a death toll of 130 per day and classified a mere 10% of all prisoners as fit to work.54 This situation presented the German decision-makers with a dilemma since the demand for Red Army prisoners was high, both at home and in the eastern territories where the exploitation of economic resources was now a prime objective of occupational policy. In the Reichskommissariat Ostland this led to a U-turn in the way the Jewish population was treated. In contrast to the first months of occupation, when the Wehrmacht economic sections had reduced the numbers of Jewish employees wherever possible, hoping that they could be replaced by the Lithuanian gentile population and POWs, the ailing and dying Soviet soldiers now made way for Jewish workers.55 Realizing that all efforts to exploit the conquered territories would prove pointless without a sufficient and adequately trained labor reservoir on which to draw, the Wehrmacht increasingly pressed for significant exemptions of Jewish workers from the extermination process. The only case in which their re-introduction into Wehrmacht production necessarily failed was Estonia: here, as the Ru¨stungsinspektion Ostland laconically remarked, there were no Jews left.56 However, the fact that the military units fell back on Jewish labor did not indicate a wholehearted, long-term interest of the Wehrmacht to spare the Jewish population in any of the eastern territories. As there could be no doubt about the general undesirability of Jewish participation in economic life, in the middle run these workers would have to be replaced by local gentiles. Therefore, the availability of the latter would determine the fate of the former. In some cases, the substitution of Jews by gentiles was rapidly and successfully implemented: in Anyksˇcˇiai, in the rayon of Ute˙na, a felt boot factory had lost 40 to 50 Jewish 398

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workers in a pogrom in the early days of the war. However, to the satisfaction of the German armaments office in Kaunas, this had not caused a halt in production. Instead, the immediate employment of Lithuanians had turned the “Jewish dump [. . .] into an important workshop for the German Wehrmacht.”57 Still, this proved to be the exception to the rule. By spring 1942, a general distrust of German labor policy was virulent among the Lithuanian population, which had significant repercussions on the question of Jewish labor. Of all people, it was Fritz Sauckel, the notorious plenipotentiary of labor service and head of the “biggest slave-labour programme in history,”58 who appeared on the scene just in time. His ever-increasing demands for “volunteers” for the Reichseinsatz delivered the decisive blow to the Lithuanian labor market. Shortly after his appointment, Sauckel fixed the number of men and women to be deported to Germany by October 1942 at 45,000, and by the end of 1943 at 100,000. More than 200 recruiters were sent east, and police and Wehrmacht were asked for support.59 The results were nonetheless disastrous. Of 235,000 Lithuanians who had been ordered to muster in spring 1943, no more than 132,000 actually showed up, most of them after the deadline and only due to the threat and exemplary implementation of severe penalties. Up to February 12, 1944, no more than some 33,000 men, women and adolescents were actually deported to Germany.60 Thus bereft of both Russian POWs and a sufficient Lithuanian labor pool, the German civil and military sections had to rely on Jewish workers to a high degree. In Vilnius, the local Wehrmacht armaments office consequently justified the increase in the number of Jewish workers which had reached 7,238 by referring to the “general employment situation” in July 1942. This trend continued in the following months so that in November the job center counted 8,824 employed Jews, of which 4,061 were working for the military forces, 4,319 for the civilian administration, and another 444 in private companies. Six months later a total of 11,560 Jews were reported to be in employer – employee relationships.61 The liquidation of the ghetto in September 1943 put an abrupt end to the widespread use of Jewish labor. All offices and workshops had to let go of their ghetto workforce, with the above-mentioned four exceptions. The privileged status of HKP 562, which became the single most important employer of Jewish workers in Vilnius for the rest of the war, resulted by and large from the outstanding importance of its tasks. Since the beginning of the war in the east with its strategy of mobile warfare, German motorization had proved to be a troubled area of army equipment. Even in the early days of the attack on the Soviet Union, the German vehicles had been incomplete in numbers, of diverse origins and inadequate for the East European roads and tracks. Special stores with about 2,500 tons of spare parts each had to be established at regular intervals in order to provide a rough overhaul infrastructure. In Vilnius, the Wehrwirtschaftsaußenstelle termed the availability of spare parts to be a blatant catastrophe as early as July 1941.62 The already strained situation deteriorated in the following months. In November 1941 the German chief of staff, General Franz Halder, had to inform Hitler that some 150,000 out of the original 500,000 motor vehicles were defunct; another 200,000 transporters, cars and motorcycles were in need of a complete overhaul. 399

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With an estimated 30,000 repairs per week, German motorization was on the brink of collapse by winter 1941. Repair facilities such as Plagge’s Heereskraftfahrpark were therefore essential for the continuation of warfare—a fact on which Plagge could draw in his negotiations with the SS, whose vehicles, incidentally, were overhauled at HKP as well.63 IV.

Motivations and opportunities

The immense importance of Jewish labor thus provided the background against which Wehrmacht sections could argue for the indispensability of their workers and protect these from the grip of the SS. Moreover, in the summer of 1943, it was possible for Plagge to achieve a special provision and an additional extension of his workforce due to the fact that the problem of labor scarcity and the critical situation of Wehrmacht motorization coincided in the institution of the HKP. These structural prerequisites notwithstanding, it depended on the individual officers whether, and to what extent and with what intentions, they made use of the potential of economic rationales. Indeed, in the overwhelming majority of cases the struggle for Jewish lives undertaken by Wehrmacht sections was due to strictly utilitarian considerations. Nor did all the protagonists of the present sample draw a sharp line between philanthropic reasons for their actions and practical considerations on how their military tasks could best be fulfilled. In fact, at least two of the three men did not make such a distinction. Both Plagge and Scho¨nbrunner explicitly intended to further the German war effort which essentially depended on labor recruitment. Some decades after, in a remarkably self-conscious analysis, Scho¨nbrunner would call his rescue efforts a “double-edged affair.”64 This is not to say that the rescuers’ actions were less than extraordinary. Among thousands of other Wehrmacht soldiers, officers as well as rank and file, they represented a tiny minority, wholly insignificant in terms of quantity, who developed a sense of responsibility for the Jews left at their command. In Vilnius, Schmid, Scho¨nbrunner, and Plagge were the only ones who made extensive use of their competences and who found the courage to help their workers in times of need. Thus, they were the proverbial exception to the rule.65 Altruism studies in general and research on Holocaust rescuers in particular distinguish between two broad categories of factors contributing to actual helping behavior: (1) personality variables (e.g. socialization, religious creed, moral standards, education) and (2) situational variables (such as relevant skills, the presence of others, emotions expressed by the victims, availability of resources, networks, legal and social norms).66 In regard to the first category, however, meaningful sources on the men considered here are weak and do not allow for an empirically valid analysis of their character dispositions, even less so for a comparison. Indeed, the case studies discussed in this essay would suggest a rather skeptical approach to generalizations about motivations and characteristics of rescuers, tempting as they are.67 This is in line with sociopsychological studies of rescuers so far which, despite their professed intentions, have shown that there is hardly such a thing as a “rescuer personality.”68 400

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The three German officers in Vilnius differed substantially in terms of social background, education, religious affiliation, or political convictions. Schmid and Scho¨nbrunner were family men, Plagge was only married. Schmid and Plagge both had stable civilian lives to which they wanted to return as soon as possible while Scho¨nbrunner was a regular officer and was looking out for a military career. Scho¨nbrunner and Schmid adhered to Roman Catholicism, while Plagge had left the church before the war.69 On the other hand, Plagge had joined the NSDAP as early as 1931, whereas the other two lacked any specific political affiliation. Plagge and Schmid had supported Jewish friends before the war, whereas Scho¨nbrunner had had no personal contacts to Jews prior to his transfer to Vilnius.70 Therefore, situational factors seem to have been more decisive in turning the men of the present sample into rescuers. According to the seminal study by psychologists Bibb Latane´ and John Darley, the bystander goes through a five-step decisionmaking process: the notification of an event, its identification as an emergency, the acceptance of individual responsibility, the choice of the form of assistance, and the ultimate implementation of help.71 This process requires a series of decisions which must be arrived at under threat, urgency, and stress. These inhibitory factors, however, can be overcome by positive reinforcements such as a plea for help by the victim, a special competence on the side of the bystander, a relationship between the two, or the absence of witnesses to the act of helping.72 All of these situational factors can be attributed to the cases in question. Judged from this perspective some similarities between the three German officers come to the fore. The ground for their “rescuer careers” was prepared by their being eye-witnesses to the atrocities committed against Jews and hearing even worse stories. The experience of a hitherto unknown degree of brutality—“the horrors and the hell of this war”73—seems to have been a decisive incentive to their efforts.74 The dimensions as well as the details of the extermination policy were well-known facts among German troops in Vilnius. One of Plagge’s men later reported that the term “liquidation” was frequently used when Jewish people from the ghetto were imprisoned and subsequently disappeared. Likewise, the proceedings at Paneriai were talked about rather openly and to the very last detail: from the ditches dug out in advance to the undressing of the victims.75 Significantly, both Schmid and Scho¨nbrunner referred to the fact that Lithuanian policemen had been seen smashing the heads of Jewish children against trees at Paneriai. “I saw such incredible things,” Plagge would state in his post-war testimony.76 Still, their horror at the crimes did not lead to immediate intervention, and none of the three men took action on his own initiative. In fact, the initiation of their rescue efforts uniformly followed a reactive pattern, i.e. the Wehrmacht officials were asked for help.77 Furthermore, the initial acts of support were rather minor— usually starting with the most unspecific of all forms of help: decency—and increased gradually in “an upward curve of risk”78 until they reached a level of strong commitment and potential peril to the rescuers. Schmid first and rather spontaneously provided valid documents to two Jews seeking his help. In a 401

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second step the ghetto underground contacted Schmid asking for his assistance.79 Scho¨nbrunner started his rescue activities by making his influence felt when family members of his employees had been arrested. Tellingly, his major feat would eventually be conceived by the Jewish foreman Glasmann, highlighting that German rescue efforts and the Jewish struggle for survival were often rather indistinguishable. Likewise, Plagge gave his support to arrested Jews and Poles whose names had been indicated to him by their friends and relatives. In a rather typical case, after a personal conversation, Plagge provided a Jewish physician and his ageing father with documents, declaring them skilled workers in the service of the Heereskraftfahrpark.80 In addition, Schmid, Scho¨nbrunner, and Plagge all benefited from their relative autonomy in their respective fields of action. While the Versprengtensammelstelle was detached from both Schmid’s battalion and his commanding officers in terms of tasks and location, Scho¨nbrunner had not only been the guiding spirit behind the establishment of the tailor-shop but also remained single-handedly in charge of it until its dissolution. Moreover, Scho¨nbrunner was able to count on his commanding officer’s indifference. Zehnpfenning did by no means support Scho¨nbrunner’s efforts when he learned about them, but neither did he take disciplinary action against his subordinate.81 In the case of HKP 562, Plagge was the quasi-sovereign head of the repair unit. His work was hardly ever supervised, provided that everything went smoothly.82 The autonomous disposition over available resources was thus a trait common to all three cases. Being removed from control, either in terms of hierarchy or geography or both, meant that the threat of sanction was significantly reduced (although a sword of Damocles it remained). One might also argue that the three protagonists were somewhat less exposed to the influence of obedience and peer group pressure as highlighted in the well-known experiments by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo.83 Despite these parallels, the risks taken by each of the three men differed considerably. Schmid went far beyond ordinary support when he decided to assist the Jewish resistance movement in Vilnius and actively participated in the transports to other ghettos. Miscalculating the feasibility of his actions he would pay a high price for them in the end. In February 1942, he was arrested by the military secret police, tried before a court-martial and sentenced to death. As he remarked in one of the last letters to his wife, he would die just because he had saved human beings “which was bad, according to the court.”84 Scho¨nbrunner and Plagge, in contrast, were certainly more aware of the limits of their respective scopes of action and moved rather cautiously, if more successfully. Much was at stake, and Plagge, for instance, was not keen on any confrontation with the SS: “I always tried to help my conversation partner to see the situation clearly. To that end I used a certain tactic which consisted of [sic] not provoking my conversation partner nor enraging him.”85 At times, this careful policy put Plagge in a catch-22 situation with serious moral implications. When in late 1943 two inhabitants, a married couple who had tried an unsuccessful escape from the HKP camp, were to be hanged publicly, this was done “in accord with the Park-leader Major Plagge,” as Neugebauer reported to 402

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his superordinate in Kaunas. Although Plagge left the place of execution before the hanging took place and is said to have expressed shame for his fellow Germans’ deeds afterwards, he apparently had not thought it worthwhile to protest against the penalty as such.86 Worse, the Heereskraftfahrpark, under Plagge’s direction, supplied more than once vehicles and drivers to the SS and Security Police for the purpose of transporting old and infirm Jews to Paneriai where they were to be murdered.87 In moral terms this made Plagge as much a collaborator, though an unwilling one, as he was a rescuer, but it was arguably a rational choice. Neither Schmid nor Scho¨nbrunner nor any other single officer in Vilnius was able to protect his workers as long as Plagge did: some 150 to 200 people out of the original number of 1,250 in HKP 562 would eventually survive the war. V.

Conclusion

In the end, there are no easy categories or types to be applied to the three protagonists. All of them started as mere bystanders who had been ordered accidentally to one of the most terrible sites of mass murder in the Second World War. Neither in political nor in sociological or psychological terms did they seem likely to be singled out from their German compatriots and Wehrmacht comrades to become rescuers. Still, they did. The only common denominator and the minimum requirement they met, trite as it may sound, was the fact that they did not entertain any specifically anti-Semitic prejudices. This, of course, did not prove to be a sufficient cause for helping behavior. Rather, situational factors seem to have contributed decisively to the three men’s move from bystander passivity to rescuer action which meant crossing an inhibitive threshold, i.e. the point where net benefits exceeded net costs or, in more tangible terms, where the moral reward of ethical behavior at least matched the level of fear and risk.88 In fact, this did not take shape as a single decision to embark on a rescuer career but as a process in which the threshold was gradually lowered. Four variables sped up the process,89 none of which seem to have been a sufficient cause for rescuer behavior in their own right but rather worked in conjunction with the other stimuli. First, their being eye-witnesses to the atrocities prepared the ground for the subsequent actions of the three officers. Second, the fact that they were asked for help had a significant influence on their involvement in rescues as it did not require initiative or resolve, but a spontaneous reaction with little time to weigh consequences and risks. Third, all of the three men relied on key resources and means to provide help, including personal networks in their respective units as well as (semi-)autonomous positions. This also meant that there were few occasions where they were forced to disobey superior orders directly. In fact, fourthly, there was also little need to disobey instructions since the officers’ actions could be said to (and actually did) help them fulfill their military tasks and assignments.90 What they did was mostly in accord with the needs of the German war economy, reducing the risk of sanctions substantially. Thus Plagge said after the war: “I didn’t have the feeling that I was exposing myself to [any] special danger because my arguments were always reasonable, honorable 403

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and undisputable on the humane as well as the technical level. [. . .] [N]o one dared to interfere with [the] war economy.”91 The latter two variables point to the significance of the institutional framework in which rescue actions took place, namely the economic dimension of German occupation policy. The exported problem of labor shortage in the Reich combined with the effects of German extermination policy in the east, causing the death of hundreds of thousands of Soviet POWs in the first months of the war, transformed the significance of Jewish lives from a quantity of negligible worth to a valuable supply of labor when such was scarce. This gave legitimacy to the requests of military units like Schmid’s, Scho¨nbrunner’s, and Plagge’s to sustain or even expand their Jewish workforce. These could hardly be refused as long as economic reason had a say in German warfare. It may well be that this utilitarian drive also made the three men sensitive to the plight of their Jewish laborers in the first place. In any case, thanks to labor shortage and the dire straits the German war economy was in, the effective risks the three men had to accept were limited, easing the transformation from bystander to rescuer. This was particularly true for Plagge and Scho¨nbrunner who tried to remain on safe ground for the most part of their actions and who deliberately asserted that their activities served both humanitarian and military means. Thus, they might fit into that “grey zone” of individual behavior during the Holocaust described so poignantly by Primo Levi.92 Although they went beyond the passiveness of bystanders and did contest the German extermination policy, they fell somewhat short of being outright resistance fighters. The same cannot be said of Anton Schmid, however, who paid dearly for his good-hearted, if naı¨ve nature and ultimately fell victim to the regime whose murderous policies he had opposed. But then, what about Max Zehnpfenning? On the one hand, Vilnius’ military commander contributed significantly to the policies of discrimination and extermination. On the other, he covered up his paymaster’s actions and thus might also be said to belong to the grey zone, though occupying a position at its far end. A “grey zone” may not clear up historical sight, nor does it provide us with a contrastive picture. But that is what the color grey is all about: ambivalence and ambiguity, shadows rather than contours. And “[n]ot only is ambivalence difficult to pigeonhole, but it [is] fluid and dynamic, able to respond to different impulses and demands in an unpredictable manner.”93 Such, it seems, was individual behavior in the face of the Holocaust. That notwithstanding, there were concrete institutional settings and frameworks, open to empirical analysis, which created chances and opportunities that helped bystanders turn into rescuers who otherwise might not have, and which accounted for a lighter shade of grey.

Epilogue Anton Schmid was honored posthumously as a hasidei umot ha’olam, Hebrew for the Righteous Among the Nations, in 1957. He has become one of the best-known rescuers and certainly the most popular German sergeant ever.94 404

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Oskar Scho¨nbrunner returned to Bavaria as well as to civilian life after the war. In 1978, he too received the honorary title of a Righteous Among the Nations; several other high decorations in Israel and Germany followed.95 Karl Plagge resumed his former position in a Darmstadt-based company after the denazification trial. In 1957 he suffered a heart attack and died. A request by several Holocaust survivors to include Plagge among the Righteous was agreed to by the Yad Vashem Commission in 2004, so that eventually he too has been granted a place among the hasidei.96 Acknowledgements This essay has a long history of its own and the author gladly acknowledges the contribution the “Plagge research group” made to its genesis. He is deeply indebted to the painstaking research the members of the group have undertaken in order to shed light on Karl Plagge’s life with the help of survivors’ memoirs, documents, and photographs. Likewise he is grateful to two anonymous referees of the Journal of Genocide Research, whose comments helped to improve his line of reasoning, and to Therese Teutsch for proofing his English. The essay partially draws on previous research but builds on a much broader base of archival sources as well as on a different analytical framework. Notes and References 1 For the denazification policy in the US occupational zone, see Lutz Niethammer, Die Mitla¨uferfabrik. Die Entnazifizierung am Beispiel Bayerns, 2nd ed. (Bonn and Berlin: Dietz, 1982). 2 Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden, Abt. 520 D-Z Nr. 519.760, Spruchkammerakte Karl Plagge (henceforth referred to as HHStAþdocument), Minutes, 9.2.1948, fol. 9; interview of Konrad Hesse by the author, July 4, 2001. 3 For a similar case, see Kurt R. Grossmann, Die unbesungenen Helden. Menschen in Deutschlands dunklen Tagen, 2nd ed. (Berlin: arani, 1961), p 164. 4 When details of Plagge’s story first spread in 2001, public interest increased rapidly. A great number of newspaper articles as well as several TV documentaries portrayed the “Schindler from Darmstadt”; for a summary of both Plagge’s deeds and his posthumous career see the account from the perspective of the survivors and their families: Michael D. Good, The Search for Major Plagge. The Nazi who Saved Jews (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 5 Accounts of rescuers during the Holocaust are abundant although most of them are anecdotal rather than analytic; cf. Martin Gilbert, The Righteous. The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (London: Doubleday, 2002); the most authoritative collection with a wealth of references is The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, ed.-in-chief Israel Gutman (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2003). For German rescuers, see the unfinished research project by Manfred Wolfson, “Zum Widerstand gegen Hitler: Umriß eines Gruppenporta¨ts deutscher Retter von Juden,” in: Joachim Hu¨tter, Reinhard Meyers and Dietrich Papenfuss (Eds.), Tradition und Neubeginn. Internationale Forschungen zur deutschen Geschichte im 20. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Heymanns, 1975), pp 391 –407. Recently excerpts from the Wolfson Collection have been published: Beate Kosmala and Revital Ludewig-Kedmi (Eds.), Verbotene Hilfe. Deutsche Retterinnen und Retter wa¨hrend des Holocaust (Zu¨rich: Auer, 2003); cf. Beate Kosmala ¨ berleben im Untergrund. Hilfe fu¨r Juden in Deutschland 1941–1945 and Claudia Schoppmann (Eds.), U (Berlin: Metropol, 2002). 6 Raul Hilberg was among the first to identify bystanders as one of three groups of protagonists in the murder of European Jewry, adopting the term along with its institutional rather than individual meaning from Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History (London: Penguin, 1987), pp 156–183; cf. Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders. The Jewish Catastrophe 1933– 1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 1992); in the same vein, except for the contributions by D. Cesarani and S. Persson: Bystanders to the Holocaust: A

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7

8 9 10

11

12 13 14

15 16

17 18 19 20

Re-evaluation, edited by David Cesarani and Paul A. Levine (Journal of Holocaust Education, Vol 9, Nos 2 – 3, 2000). In the present essay the term applies strictly to individuals. Ervin Staub, “The psychology of bystanders, perpetrators, and heroic helpers,” in: Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (Eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp 11–42, distinguishes between internal (in-group) and external (out-group) rescuers. Victoria Barnett, Bystanders. Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1999) does not contribute significantly to bystander analysis. Recently, there has been much discussion on the heuristic potential of applying neurobiological findings to the historical analysis of human behavior; for an overview and a critical assessment see the contributions in: Christian Geyer (Ed.), Hirnforschung und Willensfreiheit. Zur Deutung der neuesten Experimente (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004); see also the critical remarks by Alexander Kraus and Birte Kohtz, “Hirnwindungen— Quelle einer historiografischen Wende? Zur Relevanz neurowissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse fu¨r die Geschichtswissenschaft,” Zeitschrift fu¨r Geschichtswissenschaft (ZfG), Vol 55, No 10, 2007, pp 842– 857. The following analysis cannot boast a similarly elaborate framework but may suggest one possible field of study where such concepts might prove useful. On the other hand, this essay points to the limits of the “cognitive turn” (be it psychological, neurological, or both) in regard to the availability as well as the meaningfulness of sources. Cf. Tony Kushner, “‘Pissing in the wind?’ The search for nuance in the study of Holocaust ‘bystanders’,” Journal of Holocaust Education, Vol 9, Nos 2– 3, 2000, pp 57– 76. One of the few exceptions was the Latvian city of Liepa¯ja: Margers Vestermanis, “Ortskommandantur Libau. Zwei Monate deutscher Besatzung im Sommer 1941,” in: Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (Eds.), Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941–1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995), pp 241– 259. Born in 1889, Zehnpfenning had fought in World War I, subsequently joining the paramilitary Freikorps. After a failed commercial career Zehnpfenning re-entered the Reichswehr in 1934, eventually being promoted to the rank of colonel; Personal file Max Zehnpfenning, Bundesarchiv-Milita¨rarchiv (BA-MA) Freiburg, Pers/6, No 9694. Bericht u¨ber die Ta¨tigkeit des Divisionsstabs in Wilna, o.D. [1941], BA-MA, RH 26-403/4a, unfol.; Maßnahmen zur Sicherung und Befriedung des Gebietes Stadt und Land Wilna, 7.7.1841, BA-MA RH 24-403/4a, unfol.; Announcements, 7.7. and 8.7.1941, Lietuvos Centrinis Valstybe˙s Archivas (LCVA) R 677-2-91, fol. 7/8; Correspondence FK 814, 10.7.1941, LCVA R 677-1-1, fol. 57; Bericht u¨ber Sonderaktion, 21.7.1941, LCVA R 677-2-92, fol. 11/12; for the role of the Wehrmacht in the early days of occupation in Lithuania, see also Kim C. Priemel, “Sommer 1941. Die Wehrmacht in Litauen,” in: Vincas Bartusevicˇius, Joachim Tauber and Wolfram Wette (Eds.), Holocaust in Litauen. Krieg, Judenmorde und Kollaboration im Jahre 1941 (Ko¨ln: Bo¨hlau, 2003), pp 26–39. For more details, see Kim C. Priemel, “Rettung durch Arbeit, Handlungsspielra¨ume von Wehrmachtsangeho¨rigen im Kontext des Holocausts in Vilnius, Litauen,” unpublished MA thesis, University of Freiburg, 2002. Letter by Oskar Scho¨nbrunner, December 7, 2001; Befo¨rderungsverfu¨gung vom 30.4.1945, Bundesarchiv, Zentrale Nachweisstelle, card index; Kurzer Bericht und Schilderung perso¨nlicher Erlebnisse u¨ber Rettung von Juden vor Erschießung oder Lagereinweisung, 9.8.1982, BA-MA MSg 2/2822, fol. 1. HHStA, Political CV, 30.7.1947, pp 1– 4; see also Marianne Viefhaus, “Fu¨r eine Gemeinschaft der Einsamen unter ihren Vo¨lkern. Major Karl Plagge und der Heereskraftfahrpark 562 in Vilnius,” in: Wolfram Wette (Ed.), Zivilcourage. Empo¨rte, Retter und Helfer aus Wehrmacht, Polizei und SS (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2003), pp 97– 113. For more biographical details on Schmid: Manfred Wieninger and Christiane M. Pabst, “Feldwebel Anton Schmid: Retter in Wilna,” in: Wolfgang Benz and Mona Ko¨rte (Eds.), Solidarita¨t und Hilfe Vol 4, Rettung im Holocaust. Bedingungen und Erfahrungen des u¨berlebens (Berlin: Metropol, 2001), pp 189–190. “Aktennotiz u¨ber eine Besprechung der Staatssekreta¨re vom 2. Mai 1941,” Der Prozeß gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Internationalen Milita¨rgerichtshof (Nu¨rnberg 1947– 49) [henceforth: IMT], Vol 31, p 84; cf. Alex J. Kay, “Germany’s Staatssekreta¨re, mass starvation and the meeting of 2 May 1941,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol 41, No 4, 2006, pp 685– 700. For critical remarks on Kay’s sources see the somewhat biased response by Klaus Jochen Arnold and Gert C. Lu¨bbers, “The meeting of the Staatssekreta¨re on 2 May 1941 and the Wehrmacht: a document up for discussion,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol 42, No 4, 2007, pp 613–626. Aktennotiz, IMT, Vol 31, p 84. Priemel, Rettung durch Arbeit, pp 89, 94, 101. Richtlinien fu¨r den Einsatz der ju¨dischen Arbeitskra¨fte, 30.9.1941, LCVA R 626-1-4, fol. 11/12. Yithzak Arad, Ghetto in Flames. The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews of Vilna in the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1980), pp 41– 79; Christoph Dieckmann, “Der Krieg und die Ermordung der litauischen

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21 22

23 24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33

34 35 36

37

Juden,” in: Ulrich Herbert (Ed.), Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik 1939– 1945. Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1998), pp 292– 329; Priemel, Rettung durch Arbeit, pp 46–51. For a comparison see also the Riga case study: Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, Die “Endlo¨sung” in Riga. Ausbeutung und Vernichtung 1941– 1944 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006). See Priemel, “Sommer 1941,” pp 26–39, as well as the forthcoming publication of Christoph Dieckmann’s PhD thesis on the Holocaust in Lithuania (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2008) which will deal extensively with the interaction of the different German authorities. Ja¨ger’s second and best-known report: Gesamtaufstellung der im Bereich des EK. 3 bis zum 1. Dez. 1941 durchgefu¨hrten Exekutionen, 1.12.1941, Bundesarchiv Berlin (BAB) R 70 SU/15, fol. 81– 89 (for a printed version see Bartusevicˇius et al., op cit, pp 303– 311). For an analysis of the internal dynamics of the EK 3 which were crucial for scale, scope, and speed of the extermination process in Lithuania: Alexander Neumann, Petra Peckl and Kim C. Priemel, “Praxissemester Osteinsatz. Der Fu¨hrernachwuchs der Sipo und der Auftakt zur Vernichtung der litauischen Juden,” Zeitschrift fu¨r Genozidforschung, Vol 7, 2006, pp 8– 48. Verordnung Nr. 1, 2.8.1941, LCVA R 677-1-1, fol. 34; Verordnung Nr. 11 (Landrat Kreis Wilna), 21.8.1941, LCVA R 689-1-2, fol. 44; Anordnung u¨ber die Behandlung des ju¨dischen Vermo¨gens im Reichskommissariat Ostland, 13.10.1941, LCVA R 614-1-3, fol. 73; Arad, op cit, pp 110/111. Gesamtaufstellung der im Bereich des EK. 3 bis zum 1. Dez. 1941 durchgefu¨hrten Exekutionen, 1.12.1941, BAB R 70 SU/15, fol. 81–89; letter by the head of police in Wilna, 9.9.1941, in: B. Baranauskas, K. Ruksˇenas and E. Rozauskas (Eds.), Documents accuse (Vilnius: Gintaras, 1970), pp 217– 218; Arad, op cit, pp 108 –117. On Paneriai see: Rachel Margolis and Jim G. Tobias (Eds.), Die geheimen Notizen des K. Sakowicz. Dokumente zur Judenvernichtung in Ponary (Nuremberg: Antogo, 2003). Instruktion, o.D., LCVA R 1421-1-2, fol. 2; Yitshkok Rudashevski, The Vilna Ghetto Diary (Tel Aviv: Ghetto Fighter’s House, 1973), p 36; Marc Dvorjetski, La Victoire du Ghetto (Paris: France-Empire, 1962), pp 58–60; Grigorij Schur, Die Juden von Wilna. Die Aufzeichnungen des Grigorij Schur 1941– 1944 (Munich: dtv, 1999), pp 64– 65. Later, Scho¨nbrunner reported that he had initially employed some 500 Jewish workers. However, these data are not corroborated by contemporary sources; Interrogation Oskar Scho¨nbrunner, 21.11.1960, Bundesarchiv Ludwigsburg (BAL) B 162/2522, fol. 7241. Statistische Angaben u¨ber bescha¨ftigte Inhaber der gelben und blauen Ausweise, 25.1.1942, LCVA R 626-1209, fol. 100–102. Report by O. Scho¨nbrunner, BA-MA MSg 2/2822, fol. 7/8, 10; Interrogation O. Scho¨nbrunner, 12.4.1961, BAL B 162/2526, fol. 8037/8038. Report by O. Scho¨nbrunner, BA-MA MSg 2/2822, fol. 5/6; Eidesstattliche Erkla¨rung M. Schumelis and F. Komras [25.5.1947], Yad Vashem (YV), Department of the Righteous, M 31/1167, fol. 6; Testimony Shlomo Bernovsky, YV M 31/55, fol. 21/22. Rudashevski, Diary, September 13, 1941, pp 51, 165 (fn. 24). HHStA, Affidavit Plagge, July 30, 1947; HHStA, Affirmation Alfred Stumpff, p 2; BA-MA MSg 2/2882, fol. 6; interview with O. Scho¨nbrunner, November 19, 2001. HHStA, Affidavit Georg Raab, 1; HHStA Affirmation Christian Bartholomae, p 1; HHStA, Affidavit Heinz Zeuner, 1; Affidavit Gita Kamenmann, 12.6.1972, BAL B 162/2576, fol. 1300; Affidavit Lidia Radokwszczyk, 3.6.1970, BAL B 162/2552, fol. illegible; Interrogation Albert Weller, 17.4.1961, BAL B 162/2626, fol. 7903; similar: Affidavit Elias Gurewicz, 15.6.1959, BAL B 162/2502, fol. 1489/1490. Affirmation, YV M 31/1167, fol. 6, 7, 58; Report by Oskar Scho¨nbrunner, BA-MA MSg 2/2822, fol. 9/10; Interview Scho¨nbrunner 24.11.2001. Similar efforts by Schmid to free imprisoned Jews have been reported; ¨ sterhowever, firm evidence of these actions is still lacking; see e.g. Erika Weinzierl, Zu wenig Gerechte. O reicher und Judenverfolgung 1938–1945, 2nd ed. (Grazl: Styria, 1985), p 132. Report by Hermann Adler, YV M 31/55, fol. 70; Affidavit Bernowsky, YV M 31/55, fol. 22; Chaika Grossmann, The Underground Army. Fighters of the Bialystok Ghetto (New York: Holocaust Library, 1987), pp 34– 37; Dvorjetski, Victoire, p 191. Verzeichnis der Arbeitsstellen und der dort bescha¨ftigten ju¨dischen Arbeitern [sic] per 27. Februar 1942, 27.2.1942; LCVA R 626-1-209, fol. 106; Aufstellung der Arbeitsstellen und der dort eingesetzten ju¨dischen Arbeitskra¨fte zum 26. August 1942, 25.8.1942, LCVA R 626-1-209, fol. 43–46. Befehl des RFSS an den HSSPF Ostland und den Chef des WVHA, 21.6.1943, BAB NS 19/1740, fol. 20. In Vilnius proper, the first plans to restrict employment of Jewish labor to large work forces and limited fields of action had been contemplated as early as November 1942: KTB Wwi Kdo Kauen, 4.11.1942, BA-MA RW 30/19, fol. 14. Lagebericht 7/43 des KdS Litauen, 31.7.1943, BAB R 90/122, fol. 1484; Lagebericht 9/43 des KdS Litauen, undated, LCVA R 1399-1-62, fol. 60; Aktenvermerk u¨ber Besprechung beim Kommandeur der Sipo und des SD, Wilna, OStuF Neugebauer, 5.8.1943, BA-MA RW 30/85, fol. 32.

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KIM C. PRIEMEL 38 Abschlußbericht der Kommission zur Nachpru¨fung des Einsatzes ziviler Arbeitskra¨fte bei den Wehrmachtsdienststellen in Wilna, 2.8.1943, BA-MA RW 30/85, fol. 21. 39 Besprechung Hptm. Klipfel mit OStuF Neugebauer vom SD Wilna u¨ber Judeneinsatz bei Wehrmachtsfertigung im Ghetto, 4.8.1943, BA-MA RW 30/85, fol. 30; Aktennotiz u¨ber Besprechung beim Kommandeur des Wilnaer SD, OStuF Neugebauer, am 3.8.1941, BA-MA RW 30/85, fol. 31. For Neugebauer’s career see his personal file in Bundesarchiv-Zwischenarchiv Dahlwitz-Hoppegarten, ZR 661A.06, fol. 47– 56. 40 Moshe Feigenberg, Wilne untern Nacy-Joch (Landsberg, 1946), pp 18, 20, 22. For the extermination process in Estonia see: Ruth-Bettina Birn, Die Sicherheitspolizei in Estland 1941–1944. Eine Studie zur Kollaboration im Osten (Paderborn: Scho¨ningh, 2006). 41 Schur, Juden von Wilna, 182; HHStA, Affirmation Friedrich Asmus, fol. 1; HHStA, Affidavit Georg Raab, 1; KTB Wwi Außenstelle Wilna, fol. 1, 6. and 7.9.1943, BA-MA RW 30/85, fol. 48, 49, 51. In the aftermath of the deportation, according to the affidavits of his subordinates, Plagge severely clashed with the local SD section; Plagge was “desperate and incredibly furious” (Raab). 42 Sollsta¨rken November 1943, LCVA R 1421-1-511, fol. 183; Feigenberg, op cit, S. 23; Samuel Esterowicz, “The memoirs of Samuel Esterowicz,” ed. Pearl Good, quoted from: Priemel, Rettung durch Arbeit, Materialien, p 28 (the memoirs are available at http://www.hometown.aol.com/michaeldg/memoirssmesterowicz. doc); Arad, op cit, p 421; Leyzer Ran (Ed.), Jerusalem of Lithuania, Illustrated and Documented, Vol 1 (New York: Vilno Album Committtee, 1974), p 142; Irina Guzenberg, “The 1942 general population census in Lithuania: the labor camps of Vilnius Ghetto,” in: Vilniaus Getas: Kalinu˛ sarasˇai/Vilnius ghetto: List of prisoners, Vol 2 (Vilnius: Valstybinis Vilniaus Gaono Zˇydu Muziejus, 1998), p 49. 43 Aufstellungen und Facharbeiterlisten, undated, LCVA R 1421-1-511, fol. 51, 51ap, 100ap; Aufstellung des medizinischen Personals im Arbeitslager K.P. Ost, Subotschstr., undated, LCVA R 1421-1-511, fol. 60; Affidavit Herbert Mu¨ller, 21.4.1961, BAL B 162/2526, fol. 7990. 44 Letters from Plagge to Heeresunterkunftsverwaltung 190, February 14–17, 1944 (copies), published in: Good, op cit, pp 153–155. 45 Schur, Juden von Wilna, pp 202/203, 207; Esterowicz, op cit, p 31; Sollsta¨rken November 1943, LCVA R 1421-1-511, fol. 160–183; Arad, op cit, p 443. 46 Sollsta¨rken 25.3.1944 und 12.–14.4.1944, LCVA R 1421-1-511, fol. 48, 26–31; Affidavit Mosche Feigenberg, 17.1.1960, BAL B 162/2515, fol. 6512/6513; Schur, op cit, pp 202/203. 47 Quoted from “Memoirs of Pearl Good,” available at http://www.members.aol.com/michaeldg/ MemoirsP.rtf; Interview Martin and Liza Taub; Interview Molly Kadan (both used by friendly permission of Michael D. Good); Affidavit Mosche Feigenberg, 17.1.1960, BAL B 162/2515, fol. 6515. 48 For a comprehensive and well-argued account see Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction. The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Allen Lane, 2006). 49 Vortrag des General Thomas vor Herren des Auswa¨rtigen Amtes, May 24, 1939, in: IMT, Vol 36, pp 119, 127. See also: Georg Thomas, Geschichte der deutschen Wehr- und Ru¨stungswirtschaft (1918–1943/45), ed. Wolfgang Birkenfeld (Boppard: Boldt, 1966), pp 195– 198. 50 The literature on German labor market policy and the use of forced labor has grown substantially in the past decades; for the following consult: Edward L. Homze, Foreign Labor in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp 8 –12, 232; Ulrich Herbert, Fremdarbeiter. Politik und Praxis des “Ausla¨nderEinsatzes” in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches, 2nd ed. (Bonn: Dietz, 1999), pp 51– 53; Walter Naasner, Neue Machtzentren in der deutschen Kriegswirtschaft 1942–1945. Die Wirtschaftsorganisation der SS, das Amt des Generalbevollma¨chtigten fu¨r den Arbeitseinsatz und das Reichsministerium fu¨r Bewaffnung und Munition/Reichsministerium fu¨r Ru¨stung und Kriegsproduktion im nationalsozialistischen Herrschaftssystem (Boppard: Boldt, 1994), p 30; Mark Spoerer, Zwangsarbeiter unter dem Hakenkreuz. Ausla¨ndische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangene und Ha¨ftlinge im Deutschen Reich und im besetzten Europa 1939–1945 (Stuttgart: DVA, 2001). 51 Bernhard R. Kroener, “Die personellen Ressourcen des Dritten Reiches im Spannungsfeld zwischen Wehrmacht, Bu¨rokratie und Kriegswirtschaft 1939–1942,” in: Milita¨rgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (MGFA) (Ed.), Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Vol 5/1. Kriegsverwaltung, Wirtschaft und personelle Ressourcen, 1939–1941 (Stuttgart: DVA, 1988), pp 746, 758, 877–885, 957–960; Ulrich Herbert, Geschichte der Ausla¨nderpolitik in Deutschland. Saisonarbeiter, Zwangsarbeiter, Gastarbeiter, Flu¨chtlinge (Mu¨nchen: Beck, 2001), pp 130–136; Homze, op cit, pp 26– 44, 232; [Franz] Halder, Kriegstagebuch (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1964), Vol 3, pp 47, 257, 409; Bernhard R. Kroener, “‘Menschenbewirtschaftung’, Bevo¨lkerungsverteilung und personelle Ru¨stung in der Zweiten Kriegsha¨lfte (1942–1944),” in: MGFA (Ed.), Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Vol 5/2. Kriegsverwaltung, Wirtschaft und personelle Ressourcen 1942– 1944/45 (Stuttgart: DVA, 1999), pp 821, 948; Naasner, op cit, p 30. 52 Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941–1945, 2nd ed. (Bonn: Dietz, 1991), pp 193–200; Herbert, Fremdarbeiter, pp 156–161; Naasner, op cit, pp 54–62.

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INTO THE GREY ZONE 53 For the German starvation policy see Dieckmann, op cit, pp 310–323; Kay, op cit; Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999); Christian Gerlach, Krieg, Erna¨hrung, Vo¨lkermord. Forschungen zur deutschen Vernichtungspolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1998); RolfDieter Mu¨ller, “Die Konsequenzen der, Volksgemeinschaft.” Erna¨hrung, Ausbeutung und Vernichtung,” in: Wolfgang Michalka (Ed.), Der Zweite Weltkrieg. Analysen, Grundzu¨ge, Forschungsbilanz (Mu¨nchen and Zu¨rich: Piper, 1989), pp 245–246. 54 Bericht u¨ber Besichtigungsfahrt v. 26.– 29.7.1941 durch Oberst Marschall, 29.7.1941, BA-MA RH 22/251, fol. 116; KTB Ru¨ Kdo Kauen, Bericht fu¨r Monat Oktober, BA-MA RW 30/16, fol. 20; KTB Ru¨ In Ostland, Bericht fu¨r Monat September, BA-MA RW 30/1, fol. 96; Entwurf v. 11.11.1941 zu Vermerk u¨ber Ausfu¨hrungen Go¨rings v. 7.11.1941, IMT, Vol 27, p 67. 55 Christoph Dieckmann has referred to these dynamics as “Opfertausch,” i.e. the replacement of one group of racially defined victims by another; for a detailed discussion see the forthcoming publication of his PhD thesis. 56 KTB Ru¨ In Ostland, Lagebericht fu¨r den Monat Januar 1942; BA-MA RW 30/2, fol. 43. 57 Vortrag des KVR Dipl.-Ing. Weber, V.O. des Wi Kdo Kowno im Gebiet Wilna, Chefingenieur des Ru¨ Kdo Kauen, 17.11.1941, BA-MA RW 30/79. 58 Ulrich Herbert, Arbeit, Volkstum, Weltanschauung. u¨ber Fremde und Deutsche im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1995), p 121. 59 The recruitment policy was usually implemented by force, often by means of sheer brutality; cf. Babette Quinkert, “Terror und Propaganda. Die, Ostarbeiteranwerbung’ im Generalkommissariat Weißruthenien,” ZfG, Vol 47, No 8, 1999, pp 700–721; Markus Eikel, “‘Weil die Menschen fehlen’: Die deutschen Zwangsarbeiterrekrutierungen und -deportationen in den besetzten Gebieten der Ukraine,” ZfG, Vol 53, No 5, 2005, pp 405–433. 60 KTB Ru¨ Kdo Kauen, 20.11.1941, BA-MA RW 30/16, fol. 33/34.; KTB Ru¨ Kdo Kauen, 8.10.1942, BA-MA RW 30/19; Bericht u¨ber das 1. Vierteljahr 1944, 4.5.1944, KTB Wwi Kdo Kauen, BA-MA RW 30/21, fol. 65; Statistik der Musterungsaktion bis zum 23.8.1943, LCVA R 1399-1-61, fol. 170/171; Lagebericht fu¨r die Zeit 1. – 31.3.1943 d. KdS Litauen, LCVA R 1399-1-61, fol. 31; Bericht u¨ber das 1. Vierteljahr 1944, 4.5.1944, KTB Wwi Kdo Kauen, BA-MA RW 30/21, fol. 65; Priemel, Rettung durch Arbeit, pp 77– 79. 61 Aufstellung der Arbeitsstellen und der dort eingesetzten ju¨dischen Arbeitskra¨fte zum 25. November 1942, LCVA R 626-1-209, fol. 5 –13; Passierscheine und Einsatz in J. 1942 u. 1943, LCVA R 626-1-214, fol. 1. 62 KTB Wwi Außenstelle Wilna, 8.7., 9.7., 22.7., 25.– 28.7., 17.12.1941, BA-MA RW 30/79, fol. 3 –22,72; Halder, op cit, Vol 2, pp 403, 411/412; Adolf von Schell, “Grundlagen der Motorisierung und ihre Entwicklung im Zweiten Weltkrieg,” Wehrwissenschaftliche Rundschau, Vol 13, No 3, 1963, pp 221–223. 63 Halder, op cit, Vol 3, pp 294, 299; Schell, op cit, p 225; for the awareness of his strong position see the letter of Karl Plagge to Raphael Strauss, April 4, 1956, in: Good, op cit, p 225. 64 Interview with O. Scho¨nbrunner by the author, November 19, 2001. 65 In two other cases information on presumed rescuers—one a German soldier, the other a Reichsbahn official—is too sketchy to allow for an evaluation of their respective deeds; letter by Wolfram F., January [19]67, BAL B 162/2574, fol. 684–688. More peculiar is the case of the captain in the medical corps of FK 814. According to Solon Beinfeld the physician issued skilled-worker certificates to the Jewish medical staff and displayed a benevolent interest in the ghetto hospital but firmly remained within the limits of his official scope of action; see Solon Beinfeld, “Health care in the Vilna ghetto,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies (HGS), Vol 12, No 1, 1998, pp 67– 68, 91– 92 (fn. 4). For rescue efforts by Lithuanians see the dated synopsis by Sarah Neshamit, “Rescue in Lithuania during the Nazi Occupation,” in: Rescue Attempts During the Holocaust. Proceedings of the Second Yad Vashem International Historical Conference (New York and Jerusalem: KTAV/Yad Vashem, 1974), pp 289–331, and Gilbert, op cit, pp 65–86. 66 Pearl M. Oliner, Saving the Forsaken. Religious Culture and the Rescue of Jews in Nazi Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), p 4, splits the latter category into two aspects, situational and external. Others draw a sharp line between sociological and psychological variables which are subsumed under the same denominator for our purposes. 67 The pioneering study was Perry London, “The rescuers: motivational hypotheses about Christians who saved Jews from the Nazis,” in: J. Macaulay and L. Berkowitz (Eds.), Altruism and Helping Behavior (New York: Academic Press, 1970), pp 241– 250. Cf. Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness. Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Samuel P. Oliner and Pearl M. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality. Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust (New York and London: Free Press, 1988); Eva Fogelman, Conscience & Courage. Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust (London: Cassell, 1995); Eva Fogelman, “The rescuer self,” in: Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (Eds.), The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed and the Reexamined

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68 69

70 71

72

73 74 75

76

77 78 79 80 81 82

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp 663– 677; Kristen Renwick Monroe, The Hand of Compassion. Portraits of Moral Choice during the Holocaust (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). More balanced is Mordecai Paldiel’s account, The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers of the Jews During the Holocaust (Hoboken: KTAV, 1993). Cf. David Gushee, “Many paths to righteousness: an assessment of research on why righteous gentiles helped Jews,” HGS, Vol 7, No 3, 1993, pp 372–401, who emphasizes that information on personality traits of rescuers represent for the most part “soft data,” ibid, p 392. For a general discussion of the significance of religious creed: Oliner, Saving the Forsaken; skeptical conclusions are drawn by John M. Darley and Daniel C. Batson, “‘From Jerusalem to Jericho’: a study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behaviour,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 27, No 1, 1973, pp 100– 108. For biographical details see: Priemel, Rettung durch Arbeit; Good, op cit. As a result of his Vilnius experience Plagge broke with his National Socialist creed; letter of Karl Plagge to Anke Plagge, June 21, 1944 (private copy). Bibb Latane´ and John M. Darley, The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn’t He Help? (New York: Meredith, 1970), pp 31–32. Methodological objections to the experimental designs of Latane´ and Darley have been put forward by Russel D. Clark and Larry E. Word, “Where is the apathetic bystander? Situational characteristics of the emergency,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 29, No 3, 1974, pp 279–287. More general criticism has recently been raised by Rachel Manning, Mark Levine and Alan Collins, “The Kitty Genovese murder and the social psychology of helping,” American Psychologist, Vol 62, No 6, 2007, pp 555–562. The authors argue that the distorted representation of the Kitty Genovese case, which triggered bystander research, had a one-sided but lasting effect on how studies of helping behavior were conducted, and therefore limited their heuristic scope. Latane´ and Darley, op cit, pp 33– 40. The presence of witnesses, however, has two sides to it. Psychological research suggests that, depending on the situational norms which define the status of the victim, actual help is only provided subject to “a cost –reward matrix,” i.e. the social costs associated with helping need to be below those of non-helping or to be outweighed by social rewards; Irving M. Piliavin, Judith Rodin and Jane A. Piliavin, “Good Samaritanism: an underground phenomenon?,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 13, No 4, 1969, pp 289– 299. Letter from Plagge to D. Greisdorf, February 20, 1948 (copy), published in: Good, op cit, pp 163 –164. For the impact of visual cues see Piliavin/Rodin/Piliavin, “Good Samaritanism,” pp 290, 298. Interrogation Albert Weller, 17.4.1961, BAL B 162/2526, fol. 7903; Affidavit Alfred Stumpff, 2.11.1961, BAL B 162/2509, fol. 4401; Interrogation O. Scho¨nbrunner, 21.11.1960, BAL B 162/2522, fol. 7242. These features mirrored the standard proceedings by the infamous Rollkommando Hamann which was responsible for the murder of the Jewish rural population in Lithuania; Knut Stang, Kollaboration und Massenmord. Die litauische Hilfspolizei, das Rollkommando Hamann und die Ermordung der litauischen Juden (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996), pp 257– 268. Quoted from HHStA, Minutes, 9.2.1948, p 2; report by O. Scho¨nbrunner, BA-MA MSg 2/2822, fol. 5, 7; Interrogation O. Scho¨nbrunner, 12.4.1961, BAL B 162/2526, fol. 8037–8038; cf. Arno Lustiger, “Feldwebel Anton Schmid. Judenretter in Wilna 1941–1942,” in: Wolfram Wette, Retter in Uniform. Handlungsspielra¨ume im Vernichtungskrieg der Wehrmacht (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2002), p 62. In the Oliner sample some 67% of the interviewed rescuers had been asked for help; Oliner and Oliner, Altruistic Personality, p 135. Fogelman, Rescuer Self, p 664. This has also been called the “foot in the door phenomenon”; Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil. The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp 80, 167. Priemel, Rettung durch Arbeit, p 89. Letter from Mira Korischky, 2001 (private copy); HHStA, Affidavits Georg Raab, Christian Bartholomae, Heinz Zeuner; Minutes, 9.2.1948; HHStA, Affidavit Plagge, p 4. Report by O. Scho¨nbrunner, BA-MA MSg 2/2822, fol. 10; letter by O. Scho¨nbrunner to the author, December 7, 2001. Plagge’s only superior in the Ostland rarely visited Vilnius. The major was both aware and proud of his strong position. To his wife he confided that the HKP was “all mine” and was exclusively based “on my person, and it will perish when I am gone”; letter of Karl Plagge to Anke Plagge, June 21, 1944 (copy). Significantly, there are two other cases of HKP officers who were involved in rescue actions; for Captain Hans Hartmann of HKP 547 in Lvov (Galicia) see his file YV M 31/8. Another case in Riga is reported by Margers Vestermanis. Here, the head of HKP 641 is said to have saved the lives of more than a hundred Jewish women in 1941; Margers Vestermanis, “Rettung im Land der Handlanger. Zur Geschichte der Hilfe fu¨r Juden in Lettland wa¨hrend der ‘Endlo¨sung’,” in: Solidarita¨t und Hilfe. Regionalstudien II: Ukraine, Frankreich, Bo¨hmen und Ma¨hren, ¨ sterreich, Lettland, Litauen, Estland (Berlin: Metropol, 1998), p 236. O

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INTO THE GREY ZONE 83 Cf. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Craig Haney, Curtis Banks and Philip Zimbardo, “Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison,” International Journal of Criminology and Penology, Vol 1, 1973, pp 69–97. 84 Letter by Anton Schmid, quoted from Lustiger, op cit, p 62; Affidavit Hermann Adler, 19.9.1959, BAL B 162/2507, fol. 3629. 85 Letter of K. Plagge to R. Strauss, April 26, 1956, in: Good, op cit, pp 224–225. 86 Telegram of Security Police Wilna to KdS Litauen, 29.10.1943, LCVA R 1399-1-2, fol. 57; Affidavit Rosa Perlstein, 31.8.1961, BAL B 162/2528, fol. 8491/8492; Esterowicz, op cit, 35; interview with Harry Sheres by Michael D. Good (courtesy of Michael D. Good). 87 Interrogation Albert Weller, 17.4.1961, BAL B 162/2526, fol. 7904; Interrogation Heinrich Pro¨pper, 1.12.1960, BAL B 162/2522, fol. 7282–7283. 88 Cf. Mark Granovetter, “Threshold models of collective behavior,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol 83, No 6, 1978, pp 1420–1443, in particular p 1424. 89 These are not supposed to form a compulsory list, nor do they represent a complete enumeration. 90 Inversely, this seems to support Ervin Staub’s contention that “helpers of German origins had to distance themselves from their group” (Staub, Psychology, p 32), i.e. that they had to overcome the psychological impediment of becoming outsiders. Having little need for acts of outright disobedience and a clear conscience in regard to their contribution to the war, Plagge and Scho¨nbrunner might have been able to avoid this painful process of distancing, all the more as there was some backing or tolerance by Plagge’s subordinates and by Scho¨nbrunner’s superior, respectively. 91 Letter of K. Plagge to R. Strauss, April 26, 1956, in: Good, op cit, pp 225–226. 92 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (London: Abacus, 1988 [Reprint 1998]), pp 22– 51. For a wide range of applications of Levi’s term see the recently published volume Gray Zones. Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath, edited by Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2005). 93 Kushner, op cit, p 69. 94 Schmid’s reputation has been boosted by the second Wehrmacht exhibition, see: Hamburger Institut fu¨r Sozialforschung (Ed.), Verbrechen der Wehrmacht. Dimensionen des Vernichtungskrieges 1941–1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002), pp 623–627. 95 Letter of the Bundespra¨sidialamt, Ordenskanzlei, to the author, January 2, 2002. 96 For the survivors’ efforts to honor Plagge see Michael Good’s vivid tale; Good, op cit.

Notes on Contributor Kim C. Priemel was educated at the Universities of Freiburg, Germany, and St Andrews, Scotland. He earned his PhD at Freiburg University (2007). He is currently holding the post of Lecturer at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder). He has published several articles on forced labor, German occupation and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, as well as a book-length study on the history of the Flick combine.

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