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.19A similar social fabric characterized the German Border Police Stationin Novy SÄ…cz, Poland, from late 1939 on.There, a group of 20 to 30 240 Thomas KühneGerman police officers managed to murder thousands of Jews and sendanother 15,000 or more to Belzec and other death camps.Novy SÄ…cz,or, in German, Neu-Sandez, was located 50 miles south-east of Krakowin West Galicia.On the evening of 28 April 1942, the Germans werehaving a hot party in the local Gestapo casino.About 20 of them, mem-bers of the Gestapo, some Wehrmacht soldiers, civil service officers andalike gathered to enjoy an evening of drinking.Most of them had con-cluded a nasty but, as they saw it, necessary job only a couple of hoursbefore.At the Jewish cemetery, they had killed 300 Jews.It had beenchaos.Although most of these men were used to torturing, humiliat-ing and even murdering individuals, they had never organized a massshooting action.Sometimes, the executioners hit the aortas of their vic-tims, so that their blood poured forth over the hands and weapons oftheir murderers.Or they did not hit their victims lethally, so these diedonly slowly.Some SS men felt nauseated by their own deeds and thoseof their comrades and tried to dodge away.Repeatedly, SS men startedquarrelling with each other about how to do their job most efficientlyor, as they put it, in a more human way.The point is: the group did not fall apart but concluded what it con-sidered as its job.These men stuck together and experienced themselvesas a community not least by coping with their internal disputes.Eventually, when the job was done, the Germans marched back to theGestapo station, singing the Horst Wessel song, the most popular Nazianthem, which glorified one of the first martyrs of the early Nazi move-ment, called for revenge, and promised freedom and bread , that is theparadise on earth, only for one s own community that has cleansed theearth of its enemies: Flag high, ranks closed,/ The S.A.marches withsilent solid steps./ Comrades shot by the red front and reaction/ marchin spirit with us in our ranks./ The street free for the brown battalions,/The street free for the Storm Troopers./ Millions, full of hope, look up atthe swastika;/ The day breaks for freedom and for bread. 20The Gestapo of Novy SÄ…cz did not content itself with conjuring autopia of togetherness and community; it rather anticipated that visionthrough drunken gatherings as well as through collective violence.Theuncrowned king of Novy SÄ…cz was the head of the local Gestapo sta-tion, SS-Obersturmführer Heinrich Hamann.When gathering his menin the Gestapo casino, he loved to demonstrate his toughness und bru-tality by biting on a glass or pulling a safety pin through his cheek.Inthe casino, he and his men lived it up.On the evening of 28 April 1942,the crowd enjoyed themselves by shooting at a series of glasses on thebar.At midnight, such boyish pleasures no longer sufficed.Hamann The Pleasure of Terror 241suggested kicking up a fuss.He wished to check on his lambs in theJewish ghetto, as he put it.Would they be doing well or were they aboutto moan about what had happened earlier in the afternoon? The entirecircle had to come with him to make a racket in the ghetto.Excuseswere not accepted.In the ghetto, they stormed houses, forced their wayinto apartments, kicked in doors and windows, and shot down whoeverstood around or dared to show up.The police officers entered bedroomsand shot randomly at couples sleeping in bed.The fuss Hamann s menkicked up ended in an orgy of brutality.21What happened in Novy SÄ…cz on 28 April 1942 cannot be explainedsolely by sadism, by hatred of Jews, by obedience or by group pressure the established explanations of Holocaust perpetrator actions althoughthese all mattered.What is at stake here is group pleasure, collective joy,the experience of togetherness and belonging.It would be wrong toassume that all men equally enjoyed such cruel collective joy.Many ofthem despised Hamann s brutality.The German crowd in Novy SÄ…czwas comprised of men of different ideological, social and generationalbackgrounds, just as German society was.Some acted willingly, somerefused to take part and some stood aside.They were involved on dif-ferent and even opposing levels of the death machine.But the whollydiverse attitudes were neutralized by a sociological mechanism thatmerged collective joy and collective crime.Heinrich Hamann frequently cited an order from Himmler accordingto which everyone had to carry out executions, and he actually testedthe readiness of new members of his detail to obey orders to murder.Community building through crime worked in other units as well.22Bruno Müller, head of Einsatzkommando 11b began a mass executionin Southern Russia in August 1941 by picking a two-year-old child andshooting it, then killing the mother.Having set the model, he asked theother officers to follow.23 Everyone, he said, had to shoot at least oneperson.To become one of us , you had to kill at least once.As HannahArendt said in her essay on violence, only through an irreversible actthat burned the bridges to respectable society could you be trusted and admitted into the community of violence.24Freedom of action still existed in most police and SS units.The crucialpoint is that those who indeed dissented and refused to murder actuallysupported the hegemonic genocidal culture they tried to escape.Talkingto comrades who joined in, or to their superiors, they did not claimto be too good to kill.They would rather say, I am too weak. 25 Theydid not question the genocidal morality of the community.They ratherjudged their own constitutions as abnormal.Thus, they too provided 242 Thomas Kühnean essential part of the internal structure of the group.In a culture of tough masculinity, of brutality and mercilessness, they represented theinbuilt other of the group, thus helping to bring the hegemonic idealinto sharp focus.Bullies like Hamann could not have assumed alpha-male positions without the weaklings.This was the basis of an exchangedeal that guaranteed even the dissenters a place within the group.Thus,they got a chance to belong as well.And many took the chance
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