Ep. 13: Drunk on Genocide: Nazi Perpetrators, Alcohol, and Violence with Ed Westermann

What motivated Nazi perpetrators?  How do we explain the apparent ease with which so many Germans carried out acts of extreme violence?  These are some of the most enduring questions raised by the Holocaust.

And they are questions that scholars still grapple with today.  In this episode, I talked with Prof. Ed Westermann about these questions including issues such as alcohol abuse, sexual violence, and the role of toxic masculinity.  Warning: this does contain some disturbing content.

Ed Westermann a Regents Professor of History at Texas A&M University- San Antonio.

Westermann, Edward. Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany (2021) 

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman (00:00.777)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waipman Born. And today we have a very difficult topic. It's basically looking at perpetrators and it's based on a book by our guest, Ed Westerman, which is, has in the title, Drunk on Genocide. But I think it covers a lot more than just the role of alcohol.

that the role alcohol played in perpetrator motivation and perpetrator enabling perpetrators to kill and those kinds of things. So I do want to provide sort of a content warning for anybody listening. You know, there are going to be troubling, probably discussions about things like sexual violence, as well as extreme violence in general. But also, if you're listening to this podcast, you probably are ready for some of that. So without further ado, Ed, how are you? Welcome.

Ed Westermann (01:01.07)
Well, thanks very much. I appreciate you having me here, Waitman, and it's great to talk to you again.

Waitman (01:08.401)
Yeah. So can you tell us a little about yourself, where you are, what you do, how you got into in general, the field of Holocaust studies? And then we can talk a little about sort of the book that you've written.

Ed Westermann (01:21.13)
You bet. Yeah, so currently I'm a Regents Professor of History at Texas A&M University San Antonio. And I kind of took the long and winding road to get to academe. I spent 30 years in uniform in the Air Force. I went through the Air Force Academy and was a pilot for part of that time and was an exchange pilot actually with the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, for three years.

And coming out of that assignment, I wanted to go back and teach at the Air Force Academy. And having the German language, they ended up sending me to work with Alan Steinweiss, who was at that time at Florida State, who's now up in Vermont. But I worked on a master's thesis that dealt with the German police organization. And ended up going back to the academy.

teaching and eventually the Air Force sent me for a PhD and I did a completely different project for my dissertation looking at German anti-aircraft defenses in World War I and World War II, which became my first book. But the second book was on Hitler's police battalions enforcing racial war in the East that is a kind of macro view at the Ordnungspolizei or the Order of Police.

an organization made famous obviously by Chris Browning's work on police battalion 101 and eventually I retired from the Air Force and was very fortunate to get an academic job, a tenure-track position here in San Antonio at the newest A&M affiliate campus which is A&M San Antonio. So it took a while to get here but I finally made it.

Waitman (03:12.961)
Well, you know, we're sort of two of the unicorns in academia, right? That did some military stuff before we made theirs. But I think that, at least in my case, it's also kind of informed what I do. And I think probably, when we talk about this project, I think it probably informed your take on it as well.

Ed Westermann (03:37.59)
Yeah, you bet. I think our lived experience, and I talk to my students, I think one of the things I've learned from that military experience is the way I look at small unit actions, how I look at organizational culture. You've talked about command climate in your own word, leadership and how leadership influences that culture or that climate. And the way in which men and women, but from the time that I was in, it was largely combat arms, were for men only.

but the way in which men interact together in flying units, in small units. So I think that experience definitely informs the way that I look at what happened in Nazi Germany and what I've looked at as what happens in paramilitary or military organizations. So I think it is powerful to have that background. And when I talk to my students about things they want to study, I also ask them, well, what's your kind of lived experience?

How might it inform the things that you want to study in your own lives or in your own careers? So I think that's a key point.

Waitman (04:45.937)
Yeah. And it's something that, that to be honest, I, there were, there were elements of it that seemed so obvious to me until people who weren't in the military, you know, sort of said something like, you know, you should highlight this, this thing that you've discovered. And I'm like, but this is so, like, who doesn't, who doesn't know this, right? But, but things that we sort of take. And I think that, I think that shows the pluses and minuses, right? And the reason why we need people from all.

backgrounds to work on any historical topic, right? Because I'm sure that we both bring specialized insights, but probably somebody who doesn't have the experience that we've had can bring other insights that aren't sort of burdened by any biases that we may have as well, right? I think it's people ask me sometimes in writing the first book, which was about the German army, you know, like how much...

much of your experience sort of informed this book and you know a lot of it did. But I always say you know it just gives you a different view. It's not necessarily better or more accurate than you because somebody else might again like I remember for example with masculinity which we'll talk about you know one of the people on my dissertation committee sort of said you know why don't you actually explicitly saying in your book you know elements about or in your dissertation?

things about masculinity as it relates to criminality. And I was like, I just, I thought that was obvious. You know, like I didn't, in my mind, I didn't even think about the fact that I should put that on the page because I thought it just sounded like I was being too sort of blatant about it. So yeah, I mean, I think it's, I think it, and it certainly, I think it helps to, it helps to

let us look for things. But then the challenge, I think the challenge always from somebody who has sort of an experiential relationship with the topic is to articulate those things. Um, you know, to, to pull them out of what we think is obvious, right?

Ed Westermann (06:50.394)
Yeah, I think that's, I think that's true. And I'll give you just a couple of examples, because I think this is a very important thing to talk about. So in the military, as we both kind of know from our experience, when you meet somebody, one of the things you're looking

Waitman (07:03.217)
And to be clear, just really quickly, to be clear, yeah, sorry, just be, I was in the military for five years. So like Ed has a far massively greater experience in the military than I do. So I just want to make it clear that I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to equivalent these, make these two things equivalent. You know, I had, I had sort of a very, a taste of it, you know, so yeah. But anyway, sorry, Ed, I interrupted you. Go ahead.

Ed Westermann (07:38.768)
Yeah, no,

Ed Westermann (07:54.242)
that Himmler allowed the order police to wear their military decorations from the Imperial Army seems like maybe to some people that's a very minor thing. But when you understand how important those decorations are or the fact that order policemen could wear the SS runes if they were a member of the SS on their uniform, that some people might just not see that or might not think the importance of it, but internally.

for the individual and the way the individual interacts with their comrades, it's important. And another thing just that I think really does help inform the way I looked at this last book is the idea of when you hear stories of, hey, there were bands or music playing when killings are taking place and these are automatic weapons that are being used and you see people saying, well, they're trying to drown out the sounds of shooting.

Well, these executions in most cases were routine and were not a secret. And if you've been on a firing range with automatic weapons, you don't drown out a lot of a lot of shooting with with, you know, weapons fire. So, you know, so then you have to look for a different a different answer. And then when you have a policeman who tells his buddy, hey, it's really cool to shoot to military marching music. Right. You kind of then get a.

different perspective about the behavior of the mindset, but it comes from knowing, right? It comes from knowing what that sound is like. And I think sometimes this is where we have an advantage, those who participated in that way have had that experience. And like you said, in other areas, we may be disadvantaged by the internal biases we have with respect to either the positive nature of camaraderie that sometimes clearly...

overshadows the negative side of that coin as well. So a lot to go with there.

Waitman (09:56.005)
Well, yeah, I remember one of the things that examples of this was when I was when I was researching the first book and you know, I'm reading, you know, a memorandum that's been, you know, some staff officers written about, you know, reminding soldiers they need to be tough or hard when it comes to, you know, civilian and stuff like that, you know, and You know, the military is not always the most rational organization, you know, but rarely do the do people publish

orders or guidances if there's not something to it, right? Either something that they want to prevent, which means there's something that is happening, or there's something they want to promote, right? So clearly, for example, in that example, it meant that somebody was thinking that the soldiers were not being tough enough, and so therefore they needed to do it. Or the dumber but funnier example is I was reading,

I was reading documents from the SS cavalry regiment in Eastern Europe and in Russia. And there was a line in like one of these, you know, memorandums of the day, which was SS troopers are forbidden from fishing with hand grenades. And it's like, you know, you don't put that in there unless SS troopers are fishing with hand grenades, right? And then if you then extrapolate that out to some of the more important things that we'll talk about, you know,

the ways in which people are expected to behave, you know, they become more serious, but equally enlightening, because militaries don't usually put those kinds of things in writing unless there's a problem they're trying to address or a behavior that they're trying to, you know, reinforce or prevent, right? So, I mean, I think that's another place where it sort of becomes second nature when I was reading this stuff, because, you know, I've written similar things, you know, not about...

killing people, but you know, similar prohibitions about thing, dumb things that soldiers can do and they're not supposed to do it. I've written that as a staff officer and I'm sure you've seen that as well. You, so I mean it, it does living in that environment, I think does help. Um, it, from a certain perspective, just recognize things that, that someone, you know, someone who didn't could recognize, but it might be, it might not be as easy for them, right. Um, but maybe we should get to the specifics, I guess, because

Waitman (12:21.065)
you've kind of mentioned a little bit. And this is, you know, as always, you know, our, our podcasts are not sort of book reviews, but there are things inspired by, and the book that we're sort of focusing on here, though, I think there's other parts of your work, I think that are really interesting as well. We might talk about is called drunk on genocide. Um, and. You know, it uses alcohol as sort of, as a, as a framing element. Um, but I think it, I think it does way more than that as well.

by talking about sort of the framework structures and behaviors around mass killing. So can you tell us like, how did you come across this topic? And you know, maybe why alcohol as the sort of entry point to this discussion?

Ed Westermann (13:11.838)
Yeah, it was kind of like a development over time. So it actually, the original idea popped into my head from teaching. And when I roll over, I teach my Holocaust course every spring. And so I like to change the books for the students on a fairly regular basis. So in that rotation over a couple of years, I had had, of course, Chris Browning's Ordinary Men.

which talks about the way these policemen used alcohol as kind of a coping mechanism largely. And then I was reading, I had Father Dubois' Holocaust by Bullets, where you have witnesses talking about the perpetrators' use of alcohol, actually in pretty great detail, and their behaviors. And then Wendy Lauer's book, Hitler Furies.

Hitler's Furies was one of the books I used. And there's quite a discussion of this kind of celebratory behavior and alcohol use in that book as well. And so what really struck me, so this was literally the week before spring break, I think in 2015, and I said, you know, this is a topic that really I would like to explore, how did the perpetrators use alcohol? So I sat down and I wrote.

I wrote for Spring Break, I wrote an article which became the article that appeared in Holocaust and Genocide Studies in 2016, the Stone Cold Killers are Drunk with Murder, looking at how alcohol was used. And that was kind of the entree into this topic. But what I soon realized was that as I was kind of developing the idea for the book,

was that it's not just about literal intoxication. It's not about just drinking. There's a metaphorical intoxication that Wendy's book also talks about, this idea of Ostrausch, the Eastern High, or Imperial High, that German forces get in occupation. So the idea of the control of the land and bodies of others is an intoxication that happens. And as I continued to work through this, I also...

Ed Westermann (15:26.314)
really identified this idea of the role of masculinity. And so Tomas Kuhne has done some really good work with that. Sven Reichardt and some other historians have looked at masculinity in particular. And it was very clear to me that these perceptions of masculinity among these groups, especially among the SS and policemen that I was looking at and to a certain degree as well in these ethnic auxiliaries in the East and the Wehrmacht.

was something that helped also to add another aspect to their behavior that one could really start to disentangle. And those tied oftentimes to drinking rituals and to performative masculinity, performing against other men in this case. So the genesis of the book, which started with that first article, really just at looking at how alcohol was used then.

really continue to evolve and to think about different types of intoxication, how camaraderie and masculinity then also help to inform the actions of the perpetrators that I was looking at. So that's kind of where the book and how the book developed over a course of about five years.

Waitman (16:48.425)
Yeah, so, I mean, maybe a good starting point is literally what is the Nazi attitude towards alcohol, right? Because, you know, some of our more informed listeners, you know, might know that, you know, Himmler was notoriously a teetotaler and Hitler also to a certain extent, right? And but yet you also have this, as you point out, you know, this, this raucous drinking, you know,

side of everything else. And how do we sort of join those things together perhaps? And then how do is there a different sort of Nazi relationship to alcohol than a German relationship to alcohol? Which I think is another question you talk about.

Ed Westermann (17:33.114)
Yeah, I think that's a great question to start with because there's, you know, when we talk about the Third Reich, you and I both know there's these huge paradoxes involved in the Third Reich. And alcohol is one of those because Conti, who is the health minister in the Third Reich, Leonhard Conti, is pursuing what he calls the Getränkefrage, the drinking question.

And the idea, at least from the Nazi Health Ministry, is the recognition that alcohol and tobacco are things that hurt individuals' health. And so they want to limit that. So you have this public, if you will, this public campaign within the old Germany, within the Altreich itself, that's aimed at limiting alcohol and tobacco usage.

And it also has punitive measures. So about 30,000 individuals in Nazi Germany will be sterilized, forcibly sterilized, on the diagnosis of chronic alcoholism, for example. They're seen as, quote, asocials. So you have this kind of that's the public facing. And for Himmler, you mentioned him, it is also very interesting. He comes up through these German student fraternities.

and so-called Böschenschaften, and he's a member of that, but he can't really handle his alcohol well, so he has to get a drinking dispensation. So that really informs, he's a lightweight is what we would say in contemporary terms, he can't drink, whereas some of these members of these Böschenschaften, they drink a thousand liters of beer a year, and they keep track, right, that kind of performative masculinity. So it's part of that culture.

if you will. But the way that Himmler sees alcohol use for his policemen and his SS men is he recognizes that when they're involved in the duties, especially the duties in the East after the war starts, but even in the concentration camps, he comes up with the idea for the SS of these fellowship evenings that, especially after major killing actions, he wants his guys to be killed.

Ed Westermann (19:50.798)
to come together, not to talk about what they were involved in, but to do things like read poetry, listen to music, sing songs, believe it or not, all these kind of building, group building kind of ideas. And he mentioned specifically in the orders for these fellowship evenings that you should drink one like...

literally one half liter of beer or two beers, no more than that, right? He kind of lays that down. He doesn't want these to become these kind of debauched drunk fests. And he doesn't actually want tobacco to be involved in them either. But what we see the reality, and this is the difference from what the higher headquarters, if you will, in Berlin is saying the standard should be to what we actually, the behaviors we see in the field, is that they very

these kind of uh... south or again literally drinking orgies where these guys are just uh... throwing it back and uh... and that they are talking about what they were involved in for some of the i'm such group and not only are they talking about what they're involved in their dividing some of the loop that they took that day as well at some of these post celebratory uh... these post celebratory uh... kind of get-togethers and uh...

One of the things that really struck me in looking at the rhetoric versus reality of this subject is a Polish waitress, a young woman who remembers and she gives her testimony after the war about how these SS units would come in several times a week and it was clear that they're coming back from shooting activities and how they would drink.

eat and sing in the restaurant. And she talks also about how sometimes they would do like chariot races. So they would put each other in chairs and they'd race around the table against each other. And then after drinking a while, she then also talks about how she had to be very careful because the guys would try to grab her and she'd have to kind of make an escape from the restaurant in that way not to be assaulted.

Ed Westermann (22:10.158)
But if you look at that staging, if you will, of how these men are coming back, and as she said several times a week this would happen, it gives us a really different perspective onto how these men are thinking about what they're involved in. And the way in which I think masculinity comes through in this is also the idea that a policeman coming back from a killing to his base, he likes a German secretary that's there.

And for most of us, we would think, OK, this is up close personal killing that this guy is going to be covered with the blood and body matter of his victims. And we would think that the first thing he would do is want to take a shower before visiting that secretary. But in fact, he wants to go show her how tough he is and goes in there wearing that uniform. So we kind of get insights since we can't look into the perpetrator's minds.

I think what really is fascinating about this topic is the behaviors allow us to kind of really get a hold of and think about what the perpetrators are thinking in a way that maybe we wouldn't get to if we weren't using some of this kind of like the lens of masculinity or looking at this celebratory ritual that's part of some of these killings.

So I think that that's really a key insight in the paradox of alcohol use. Like you said, Hitler's a tea totaler, but I talk about my students, free history for 100. This is free history for 100. Hitler drinks at the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923. He's still a drinker. When he gives up alcohol and meat is actually at his time at Landsberg. So that's when he...

He becomes really a vegan and a non-drinker. So he talks about how he felt better about his health after that. And as you mentioned, Himmler's a lightweight. He smokes tobacco. He definitely smokes cigars. I've got pictures of him doing that. But he doesn't drink in the way that I talk about the SS and policemen. It's not in that really masculine way.

Ed Westermann (24:28.81)
So you see this regime that is often riven by these paradoxes. And there's one story, if you don't mind, I just want to keep with these paradoxes, because one of the things that struck me in writing the book was at Auschwitz, a lot of people may not know that it was actually an SS game preserve as well. So the surrounding area, they had an SS man who had the additional duty of being the game ward.

And if you wanted to shoot a deer or a fox at Auschwitz, you needed to get a permit from the game warden. And so I have this case of an SS man who's shooting at a fox, actually hits a deer and kills the deer, and is punished, literally punished, for killing a deer without a permit. And all that SS guard needed during the day to kill a Jew was a pretext, right?

And so we see these horrific kind of ironies in that system. And that's just another example of a horrific irony that you need a pretext to kill a person, but you need a permit to shoot a deer at Auschwitz.

Waitman (25:39.009)
Well, yeah, I remember, you know, I wanted to, there's something I want to go back to, but I remember also I read an incident in the Soviet Union where, you know, an SS guy had, you know, shot a bunch of people and he got in trouble, not because he'd shot them, but because he basically left them lying by the side of the road. And, you know, that was deemed to be, you know, problematic for whatever reason. And he hadn't cleaned up his mess or whatnot. But I want to go back to something you said that I think is really insightful.

And something that I've noticed as well, because you're working on perpetrators. And this book in some ways, I think in a lot of ways is somewhat about motivation and sort of what is driving these people. And we can't, it's very difficult as historians to parse this because almost always we can't actually interview them.

And a lot of the sort of ego documents that we have from them, you know, I know the ones that you used and the ones that I use well, a lot of them come from court cases and so you already have a, we'll call it a problematic environment in which the, the person is testified, which doesn't mean that what they're saying, that some of what they're saying isn't true, but it's obviously a sort of confrontational environment and there, there's a very clear

interest for them to sort of play down certain things and play up other things. And I agree 100%. I think what you said was really, really important, which is that in the, in the absence of being able to literally put them on the couch and sort of ask them how they felt and that kind of thing, all we have is, is their behavior. And we have to then kind of extrapolate, you know, what is a reasonable.

explanation for their mindset based on how they're behaving, which is, which is, you know, not always a 100% accurate methodology, but it's all we have. Right. So can you talk a little bit about how alcohol is used in these various places? Because I think there's also an important geograph- there are a series of important geographical distinctions that you make as well in your work. Right. We have, we have camps sort of

Waitman (27:57.629)
general camps, we'll say, not the extermination centers. We have the extermination centers. And then we also have sort of these mass shootings, Einsatzgruppen kinds of behaviors as well as ghettos. So maybe there's two layers of questioning there. Like one is sort of, what do the behaviors suggest about how the perpetrators are feeling, thinking about what they're doing? And then maybe how does the geography matter or does it in these scenarios?

Ed Westermann (28:27.174)
Yeah, I think that's a great question to deal with. And I do want to also mention something about getting into the minds of the perpetrators first, because you're absolutely right, Waittman. We deal with these court cases. Sometimes we're lucky with the EGO documents. We get letters where the Einsatzgruppen, whether it's Kretschmer's letters back to his wife and his children or Landau's diary or different things. But

One of the things that I was most struck by is recently in the last 10, 15 years, we've really started to focus on, hey, we don't want to just get the perpetrator's perspective, but what's the victim and eyewitness perspective? And that was a big turn in Holocaust historiography to get away essentially from a focus on the German documents to look also at these other areas that the victims experience.

And one of the things that really struck me in that respect was what became known as Horban Sprach, the destruction language, which was a Yiddish variant that is created during the Shoah. And so as these SS and police units, as these German military units are moving into East European towns and villages,

The people that live in those villages are trying to interpret what the killers are doing, what the perpetrators are doing, and they're looking for a language to do it. And the language they choose, for example, is things like using a wedding metaphor or a ball, a gala, right? And so they're using this Yiddish language that translates to those terms.

And when I read that, it was kind of a eureka moment for me because as I was thinking about, if we're in Eastern Europe in this time period in a small village, what's going to be essentially the most celebratory day in the year of a hardworking small community? It's going to be a wedding because there's going to be music, there's going to be food, there's going to be drink, and there's going to be celebration. And when I got to the point where

Ed Westermann (30:46.782)
When I kind of thought about that, taking the victims and the witnesses at their word, they were seeing, they're interpreting what the perpetrators are as a wedding atmosphere, right? So, they're using that language to describe the behavior of the perpetrators, just like many talk about the amusement or the enjoyment or the laughter and the kind of laughter that the perpetrators demonstrated.

when they were involved in these actions. And I think that, you know, for me, that was really a moment when I said, I really have to take seriously the words that the victims are using because that's their interpretation of the reality that they're seeing. So I think that was really a key point in my own kind of development of some of these ideas. But to get back to the idea of geography and...

and how alcohol is used differently. I think Donald Bloxson's Zones of Exception really is a great way of talking about before the war, talking about the camps, because the camps under SS control especially, they become these kind of, if you will, sites of exception where the law outside doesn't apply. The SS essentially has complete control over the bodies.

of those individuals who are in those camps. And what really struck me as I was looking at the pre-war, at the pre-war period here, is how these SS men oftentimes at night, the central role of the SS canteen, which would be the kitchen and the bar for these SS men, how they would be having like fellowship and drinking or eating.

and either decide to go into the camp area, the barracks, to kind of, if you will, humiliate or play games with the prisoners, or how they would have prisoners brought into the canteen and make them perform or humiliate them there, right? These rituals of humiliation or games that are played with the victims.

Ed Westermann (33:07.818)
oftentimes under the influence of alcohol where it would generate, if you will, this kind of facilitation towards acts of violence or atrocity, I think was really one of those areas that really stuck in my mind. And that kind of behavior is, after 1939, when we look at the geography of the East, especially occupied Poland, the areas in the Baltics.

The Balkans, I think, we can take the whole East, in this case, occupied Soviet Union as well, that we see these behaviors are also exhibited in these areas which are themselves a zone of exception. So one of the things you mentioned earlier is Himmler has to repeatedly order his SS and policemen not to take pictures, not to take photographs of killings.

Well, why does he have to repeatedly issue that order? Because he knows that the guys are doing it anyway. And just in the case of alcohol, he has to repeatedly issue orders about, hey, these get togethers aren't to be drunk fast, you're not supposed to be drinking on duty. So there's one order for Minsk in particular where the order has to be repeated every week.

And in Auschwitz, we also see these, the orders coming out of the Auschwitz administration where they're talking about not alcohol use on duty, on duty time, avoiding, for example, a methyl alcohol, all these things. So what we're seeing is we're seeing that the reason you've got to have these orders is because the guys are doing it. And then some of the behaviors that are coming out of.

out of these kinds of situations are the behaviors of Physical violence that can lead to playing games So I know your work which I'm really excited about on the enough ska camp You know you have cases where you have shooting competitions between SS men and so you have the ideas a Prisoner is forced to hold a glass Up in it up in his hand

Ed Westermann (35:28.526)
And the two policemen then, or two SS men in this case, their object is who can shoot the glass out of the prisoner's hand to demonstrate their superior marksmanship, right? And if the glass is shot out of the hand of the prisoner, then that guy wins and that's good. If he happens to hit the hand of the prisoner, then the prisoner is executed because he's no longer capable of work. So using prisoners as a prop for performative masculinity.

It happens in Unowska, but it happens in Auschwitz. The idea that for a bet, for a bottle of vodka, a guy will bet that he can shoot a prisoner in the neck from 50 meters using his pistol to demonstrate his marksmanship. These kinds of games that are incorporated in really horrific kinds of games in some cases. The idea of using

you know children there's one i talk about in the book where the object of the game as explained to the policeman as you take uh... a child a young child and you have to throw in the air uh... over like twenty meters or so and the object of the game is for the for the child to hit their head on this tree trunk essentially kills the child and then you get a shot uh... you know you get a shot of booze if you're able to do that

But this kind of behavior that is also often associated with drinking in these locations, I think really opens up and complicates our view of the way in which alcohol is used. Now, the main theme, if you look at the historiography before this book came out of alcohol use, was really about coping. And certainly, coping does take place.

ordinary men really talks about how PB 101, how at the end of the day that many of these guys seek kind of refuge in alcohol. And that's certainly something that does happen. But what I saw in the historiography is if people really talked too much about alcohol, I mean really got into discussing it, it would normally be either a sentence or a paragraph where the discussion would pretty much be, and the only way that they could do this was to drink.

Ed Westermann (37:51.106)
And the more and more I kept looking for that bottle in the haystack, as I talked about, I found a lot of bottles in the haystack, by the way. And the more I saw that, I saw that explanation needed complication because it certainly wasn't the case for these SS men who, it's December 31st of 1942, and they're celebrating like many of us maybe on New Year's Eve.

this year by drinking and having a party, but what is it they decide to do after the clock strikes 12? They decide to go into an occupied ghetto in occupied Poland to hunt Jews and the survivor who talks about it remembers these drunken guys who were doing it as kind of like a sport in the ghetto.

What did those guys have to decide? They'd been drinking celebrating. It's the new year What's the thing they wanted to do to start the new year? It was to go into a ghetto and kill Jews and I think again those kinds of behaviors you know that really does complicate our understanding of alcohol use and In these guys and their behaviors there. So those are several I think of the things that I noticed and

To your point, I think it's really important to understand that alcohol serves a variety of functions. So coping is one. It's also a reward, an incentive for the killers. It's used in that way. It facilitates acts of violence, as I talked about. There's also the idea of what I call disinhibition, what I tell my students, it's the so-called spring break effect.

And what I mean by that is that alcohol, drinking alcohol, allows someone to cross a threshold to do something. And in the case of some of the killers, killing women and children was a threshold activity that alcohol would help them kind of cross that threshold. And the reason I use the spring break effect is because when I'm talking to my students to give them an example of what I mean.

Ed Westermann (40:01.482)
It's the idea that when you go down to Daytona Beach and you check in your hotel and you've got a third floor balcony that overlooks the pool and it's 10 a.m. in the morning, you're going like, wow, I've got a great room. This is a great view of the beach. But then at midnight that night, after maybe having too much to drink, when you're back in the room with your buddies and one of them says, you know, I bet you could reach the pool from this balcony. I bet you could jump into the pool.

you know all the sudden now right that becomes oh yeah I think you're right and that's that disinhibition that alcohol can uh... can cause and it's also a little bit of that performative masculinity yeah you're right I can do it I'm gonna show you I can do it so again trying to make some of these processes uh... you know understandable in those terms I think is important and uh... the last thing I if I could say on this which I think is really important

I think you and I both agree that social sciences offer us as historians a lot of powerful insights that we might not otherwise get from the documents we look at. And one of the things that was really important to me as I was doing the book was looking at how psychology, criminology, sociology, how that literature related to alcohol use and related to alcohol and aggression.

the studies that have been done, whether it's university fraternities or rugby teams or whatever, that we also start to get insights into the way in which male bonding and alcohol use can lead to acts of violence, both physical violence but sexual violence, as you talked about earlier as well.

Waitman (41:51.121)
Yeah, I mean one of the things that really struck me in this conversation as well is and something that I noticed because and again this is this is not about the Inovskit book, but I One of the challenges that I had when I was writing that was trying to explain some of these things that you've mentioned Because to me and again, it's all sort of relative and qualitative but you know, some of the things they were doing seemed really above

above and beyond in terms of the brutality and the sadism and things like this. And the shooting is something that I got into it in some detail in the book. And one of the, one of the suggestions that I make there is that, and I'm curious what your response is based, because this is something that we see elsewhere is, is that there's a sort of inferiority complex for the SS and the police that are engaged in murdering civilians as compared to

the Wehrmacht or the Waffen SS that are actually fighting, right? Because we know that one of the things that Nazi masculinity privileges is, is fighting combat, you know, that kind of thing. And these guys aren't doing that. And they know they're not doing that. And they know that they're sort of, that they have kind of a cushy existence that is safe. And, um, and so it seemed to me that one explanation and the alcohol might play into this as well.

for why they do things like the shooting, which is a very sort of martial demonstration of masculinity, is to kind of pretend like they're actually soldiers doing actual soldier things, which is, you know, marksmanship and that kind of thing. And perhaps the hunting too, because you have a really chilling example in the book of literally the SS taking prisoners, Jews out into the woods.

and saying run and then hunting them down. Yeah, I just, that, that struck me as well. But I wonder if there's also this. I did an attempt to sort of sell that, that we are, we are also fighting a war. You know, we're, we're just fighting a war on a different front, but we're fighting the sort of this racial war.

Ed Westermann (44:05.906)
Yeah, I think that that's a really interesting question. So when I think about especially some of the killing sites, we also look at the Reinhardt camps, for example. We see this really brutalized behavior. I know you had Martin Kupras on the podcast earlier and the Sobibor album. Right?

One of the things that when I talk about this, when I give this presentation on the book, I have now included photos from Sobibor. Many of those photos are focused around that canteen, the SS canteen, the casino that's there, right? You see these guys sitting, playing music, women serving them, Polish or Ukrainian women who are serving them then.

That the way in which they're at this location enjoying the that location but to think you know Maybe 500 meters away is the site of mass killing and the smell that we know is Oftentimes in that, you know that permeates that area, right? To think about how these guys are in a social scene kind of enjoying that social scene is really to me kind of a

Kind of another striking way to think about what's going on in those in those sites of those sites of killing but I do think that That the men especially in those camps They definitely realize that they're not in the front line and I wonder You know you get every once in a while that some of them don't want to go to the front line, right? That that's what happens when you screw up at Auschwitz you get sent to you know, you get sent to the front line

that somehow they're taking advantage of that as you will, as you talked about this kind of cushy job in their perspective, where they're at. But I do think that, again, their self-perception is built on first being an SS man. It's not being an SS man in combat. And policemen, one of the 10 commandments of the German police,

Ed Westermann (46:27.33)
is you are a bearer of a firearm, right? And I think this is again something that we sometimes forget, that the idea that these men could carry a firearm and use it means a lot to them in the way they think about themselves and how they're seen as well. And so.

you know their ability to use that fire arm and their willingness to use it i think it is part of that kind of uh... culture that develops in and you get on top of that this belief in themselves as being tough and hard men able you know able to do these things it's like the uh... max toy not who is an s lieutenant uh... who actually gets tried uh... yet in could talk a little bit about that but he's a guy that boasts

He's gonna be in an SS logistics unit. So he's not gonna be on the front lines, but he's talking about how he's going to the East and he's going to kill 20,000 Jews. That's his goal, he talks about. He brings his accordion and he plays his accordion at some of the killing sites for the men, right? And what gets him into trouble is not the fact that his unit's involved in killing, but the fact that he sends the film home

to his wife to have it developed commercially of some of the pictures that he took at one of these killing sites. And then the investigation also shows that he had his wife have an abortion, which is for the SS, a huge no-no. And so this guy ends up really getting into trouble and imprisoned, not because of the killing he was involved in, but really for the things that he allowed it to kind of seep out.

and the fact that his wife had the abortion. And so it shows this, what I'm trying to get at here is how this SS mentality is so warped, right? And that when we understand that, just like the idea of you need the permit to kill a fox, but a pretext to kill a Jew, it shows an internal mentality that is so warped that it gives us kind of an insight into the way they still think about themselves. Now to...

Ed Westermann (48:46.438)
For these guys to wear a knight's cross or an iron cross, I agree to have these military decorations does mean something. It is important to note that the men in the concentration camps aren't getting iron crosses. They're getting the German war cross, which is a non-combat normally, a non-combat kind of decoration.

So there is a distinguishing that's taking place in the way they're being evaluated. I guess I really don't know how much they're compensating. I'm really struggling with thinking about how much of it's a compensatory rhetoric, a compensatory mechanism, as to how much of it is just part of the idea. And as we both know, these SS units and the

police units that go into anti-partisan operations, right? Essentially, they're used as infantry. They fight on the front lines. And as you've talked about in your work on Mogilev and others, right? That the idea that Jews become partisans in the mind of Himmler, in the mind of the SS and the police, and they're executed as such. But when you see the...

You read the after action reports, you know, yeah, X number of partisans, hundreds of partisans were executed. And then they'll tell you, oh, they're women and children, how many of them were women and children, and five weapons were confiscated. So immediately as you're reading that document, you know that the partisan, it's a fictive euphemism, right, for mass slaughter in this case. So you know, I just think that the idea of the normalization.

of murder within the SS and police complex for me is really the thing that sticks in my mind. How normalized it becomes and how easy in many cases it becomes. And I'll give you one more example. Walter Manna, who was an Austrian policeman, we have his letters to his wife and he writes to his wife the night before his first killing action.

Ed Westermann (51:04.21)
And he tells her he's been issued with 28 rounds of pistol ammunition. And he says to her, I'm not sure it's going to be enough. And so we have a subsequent letter where he's writing to his wife about having been in the action. And he talks at the beginning. He says, you know, my hands were shaking the first couple of groups. But he says by the 10th group, his hands weren't shaking anymore. And he's able to do it.

And he adds to his wife that he becomes involved in that killing game that I talked about throwing the children. So I think again, right, that how long did it take him to make that transition from the first to the 10th group is what it took. And these are the kinds of really kind of shocking things about this kind of hanging in the group.

showing that you can do what the other guys can do, that you're tough enough. That to me really kind of exemplifies the way in which these men kind of see themselves or want to be seen by their comrades. So that's, you know, again, a long way around the mountain to get to your question, but that's kind of where I come to.

Waitman (52:24.061)
Well, and one of the things that comes through, I think really strongly in what you've written, and you've already mentioned some here already, is what I would call the intimacy of the violence. Because there's one level of intimacy, which is just a row of people is placed in front of me, I shoot them, a row of people is placed in front of me, I shoot them, or I take people to the gas chamber or whatnot, but when one is as inventive,

Um, and imaginative about all the different ways, even just the physicality of having to, you know, cut someone's hair or whatnot. It's a really, it's a really interesting, not a revelation, but I mean, it's a, it's a very interesting perspective. That, that you, that may not sort of have a certain logical rationality in it in the sense that, you know, on the one hand, we, we like to think that these are people that.

that they thought were horrendous and inferior, which is true. But yet they're also getting very intimately connected with them. You know, they are placing themselves voluntarily in close proximity, you know, having to hold someone down. And in one instance, you mentioned to carve a swastika in someone. I mean, these are these are physically very intimate and close range kinds of behaviors.

Can you talk a little about that? Because I think it's fascinating that you sort of, you have this amongst people that one would imagine on the on the on the surface would just be repulsed and would not want to have them anywhere near them.

Ed Westermann (54:03.59)
Yeah, and again, this I think is an important point because when we hear about prisoners being given 25 strokes or 50 strokes as a beating, we think about as we should how that must affect the prisoner that's being beaten like that. But to deliver 25 or 50 strokes with a whip or a rod,

on the part of the person doing that, that takes a great deal of physical effort and commitment on the part of the person that's abusing that individual. And what I noticed several times is how you would also see in the camps, how guards and how prisoners would remember how the guards would attempt to outdo each other, compete against each other. Who can deliver the best beating?

And I talk in the book about how some of these guards like to get their nicknames. One's called the boxer, right? And there are many SS guards that have the nickname boxer. And in this one case of the individual I talk about, though, what he prides himself on is the ability to stand across from a prisoner and with one blow of his fist to knock a prisoner out, right? And that's something he prides himself

practices. That's something he wants to demonstrate in front of his buddies that he's doing that. And, you know, we also see that can cross gender lines. So, Braunstein, who was a female concentration camp guard, I believe at Ravensbrück, gets her nickname the mare, like the mare is in a horse, because she tramples prisoners to death.

which is a very physically tiring and difficult way to kill somebody, but she prides herself on her ability to do that. And I talk in the book about a case where an SS man is delivering these blows, this punishment blows to a prisoner and a female SS guard takes the whip out of his hand and says, you're not doing it right. And she begins then to beat the prisoner.

Ed Westermann (56:19.462)
And what really struck me when I came across that, and we talked about zones of exception, in the camp, right, the idea that we have in Nazi Germany, very defined gender roles of what men are and men do and what women should do, you know, have children, take care of the home, right? But this is again where the camp for women can be a zone of exception, where this woman, she is not, she's rejecting

that kind of traditional gender role for a woman in Nazi Germany and she's Adopting the gender role of the male SS man and trying to do him better, right? And so I think again, this is where this is an example in my mind where I was like, okay Wow, this is showing me how this mindset of hardness in toughness Is it can even be it can even cross genders in certain places? like where Wendy talks about

Erna Petrie, she's infamous, notorious for finding these Jewish children who were obviously roaming near her estate in the east in Ukraine. And what she does is she wants to wait for her husband to come home because she knows that they're going to be killed. She gives them food and her husband's not home. And so what does she decide to do? She decides to go ahead and shoot the kids.

Waitman (57:18.689)
Mm-hmm.

Ed Westermann (57:46.358)
herself in the area where her husband normally executes these people that are found wandering on the state, these Jewish children or Jewish people who have escaped. And it was only during her incarceration in East Germany, this eventually comes out for different reasons, she and her husband are investigated by the East German police and they're put through a long series of interrogations.

But finally she admits to the East German interrogator, why did you do that? Why did you kill those kids? And she says, I didn't want to stand behind the men. I wanted to prove, right? I wanted to prove I was as tough as my husband. I was a real SS wife, if you will, in that case. And again, that's where the East is also that zone of exception. But we see how those kinds of mindsets permeate

these SS households in some cases in the way in which they can be adopted by even women in certain cases.

Waitman (58:51.593)
And there's also, just in that example, there's this really interesting, I think, connection with this idea of settler colonialism, right? And that in this sense of like the Nazis viewing themselves as settlers in Eastern Europe, right? In many ways, I mean, like I think about some of these places in the context of a plantation, I mean, you know, where the white slave owner can do whatever he wants to the enslaved people.

on his land, you know, because a plantation is also in some ways a zone of exception, certainly for the African American people on it, right, who don't have the same rights or are not viewed as humans in the same way, right? So there's also the, I think that gets back to your original comment about sort of the intoxication of essentially, you know, being someone with no rules, whom rules don't apply to, right?

I think an example, which is not anywhere near this, but when after 9-11, right? I was at Fort Hood and they locked down the entire base and they put us all on gate guard basically, right? Because they, they weren't, we weren't doing a hundred percent ID checks for all 40,000 people coming on Fort Hood before 9-11, but afterwards we were and they didn't have that people. And one of the things I noted very quickly was soldiers and NCOs and some officers, you know, like.

there was a sense of power, right? You had, you could stop any car. And so I had to stop soldiers from like repeatedly pulling over cars with like attractive women in them, you know? And I'd say, you can't, you just can't do this, right? I mean, this is wrong. But again, it's this, I mean, and obviously that is a tiny example compared to Nazi Germany. But I think the analogy holds, right? Where people are given sort of sweeping powers and the tendency is very quickly to sort of

get high off of that and abuse them for your own purposes.

Ed Westermann (01:00:50.954)
Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, in addition to teaching the Holocaust, I teach the Civil War and Reconstruction. So what you mentioned, when we look at things of spectacular violence and celebratory violence, when we think about lynching, for example, in the Jim Crow South, for example, we have the way in which these scenes are commemorated, the people, men, women, and children that are there, sometimes food involved in this, right?

So I do think that some of these attitudes that we see in the case of racial prejudice in our own country, in the US and the way that played out, we can take some of that literature and we can take some of those insights and think about the quote unquote racial state of Nazi Germany and how it itself also, how individuals in that state

took advantage of a perception of racial superiority that allowed them to transgress and to become involved in violence. And, you know, if you go back to the WPA slave narrative, so when the WPA was gathering in the 1930s, the slave narratives and former female slaves talking about the ubiquity of sexual violence against slave women, for example.

that make it into those transcripts. This is where, again, where if we think traditionally many people go, well, number one, yeah, this was the racial defilement, Ras and Shonda, these Germans weren't involved in sexual violence against Jewish women or Eastern women. And then we have, as Regine Mollheuser and others have shown, even the SS and police

50% of SS and policemen have been involved in sexual, you know, what would be sexual violence or sexual relations with quote unquote inferior women. In this case, they're looking at Eastern women, Slavic women, or they're looking, you know, Jews. But the idea here is how widespread it is. And I think that that's again where Patrick Dubois, Holocaust by bullets, you know,

Ed Westermann (01:03:14.422)
those witnesses in Ukraine who remember how these SS men took Jewish women as concubines and then after they were done with them, you know, a period of days or weeks, then they execute them, right? So again, what does that tell us about the perpetrator mindset, right? When we start to think about these men and what they're doing and those examples, you know, that's, there's many examples from that. So

I do think that it really does this intoxication of control, metaphorical intoxication, is a very powerful force, you know, and despite its problems, the Zimbardo, you know, the Stanford Prison Experiment, you know, we see a little bit about that. It's problematic as, you know, in using that as a one-for-one, but there are certainly attitudes that develop in control over others.

that can lead to abuse as we know.

Waitman (01:04:16.553)
Yeah, I mean, and the sexual violence piece is, I think, a really powerful example of that, because it's layers of violence. Because, you know, as you point out, that certainly, I think it's fair to say that the SS men engaging in that kind of sexual violence and assault knew that it was, from a Nazi perspective, wrong for the racial reasons. Right. But because of their impunity in Eastern Europe, they knew they could kill the evidence, essentially.

Um, and they, they could remove the evidence by killing a human being. Um, and that would not be, and everybody else is winking at it anyway. So it's, it's not a thing you get in trouble for unless somebody else has it out for you for a different reason. And then that's the way they can sort of, sort of get you on that. Um, I want one more question before we sort of move on to the end. I w I was curious because I think one of the things that you've, you've said that I think is really insightful as well.

Is this idea of the nature of the celebration, the nature of alcohol use in general, right? Because I think you're right. And I hadn't really thought about it that way. But that for a lot of time, the historiography is a little bit apologetic in the sense of thinking that, you know, these guys are just going and drinking themselves into oblivion, trying to forget what they've done. But what you pointed out, I think quite well.

especially from survivors, you know, is that these are these are sort of celebratory events. So it's not, you know, that the survivor doesn't walk by and see all these guys with their heads slumped, you know, doing shot at their shot until they fall over because they just can't they can't handle it. They're actually quite excited about it. So I'm curious if and I guess this is the this is not a great question to ask historians because it's unfair. But could you could you give an estimate of sort of

the percentages or extent to which, you know, these particular group of people are sort of all in and motivated sort of killers versus, you know, those who may be just sort of joining the crowd for the drinking, but maybe not be sort of as dedicated, I suppose. Because I guess one perspective could be that, well, these are the worst examples.

Ed Westermann (01:06:36.334)
Thanks for watching!

Waitman (01:06:46.857)
that you could find, but how representative are they with the understanding that you're already talking about a specific group of people, not all Nazis or all Germans.

Ed Westermann (01:06:56.686)
Yeah, no, I'm really glad you asked that question because one of the things that the book does, as you'll notice, is there's lots of examples. And the reason some people have said, wow, man, you're really recounting just so much. Do you need that much detail? And my response to that is, yeah, I think I do. And the reason I do is because the historiography has been so far in the other direction.

that to really bring this home, I've got to show you a lot of details. And of course I don't put every case in there. You know, it'd be like the black book, the Jewish black book that shows all these investigations that were conducted. And if you read through that, those investigations, I mean, just horrific event after horrific event, right? It's hundreds of pages of stuff, right? So I did think it was important to include a lot of examples.

because I am arguing against, I think, a historiographical kind of belief in coping as being the primary mechanism. And I think this gets back, brings us almost full circle to where we started, actually. I think it's the reason, it's a vice and a virtue that historians think that coping is the answer. Because

The virtue is we don't think like Nazis. And so as we're seeing these horrendous things, we're saying, well, of course, the only way anyone could do that is to be drunk. No, there's no other, you can't be sober and do that, right? And so it's kind of also like when we have guys like Friedrich Jekyll and others who are, you know, after the war or when they're, when we're looking at their correspondence, they have these,

trouble sleeping and they have stomach issues, right? And so what do a lot of historians wanna do? Well, they wanna say, well, that's psychosomatic reaction to them being involved in all these killings. This is their body rebelling against them. Well, if you look at the physiological effects of high alcohol use that I talk about, one of the symptoms is difficulty sleeping, poor sleep, and another one is like.

Ed Westermann (01:09:14.59)
stomach and intestinal ulcers from the kind of drinking that we see. Now what I'm not saying is that my answer is right and others have been wrong, but what I am saying that because we're not Nazis and because we want to have an explanation that helps us make these guys sound a little bit more like us, that we choose that, we choose the psychosomatic or we choose the coping.

And I think that that's something that we really need to kind of move away from. But to finish back to your point, I think the power of the group is really important here. So what you see in the case of Kretschmer, who is part of the Einsatzgruppe, and as he's writing back to his wife and his kids, he mentions that post-killing, that they like to play Scott. They like to play German card games together, and they drink afterwards.

and he has this uh... he has this uh... in his uh... letter he says in one can't not be there right you need to be there uh... in just like we see in other cases where guys are talking about if you tell the group kate and i guys i'm not going to join you after the killing action i can join you for beer or schnapps together what the group interprets that as is not only are you rejecting their

Waitman (01:10:20.769)
and just

Ed Westermann (01:10:39.49)
to be part of the group, you're rejecting the actions that they were involved in that day as well, right? And that's where you get the way in which people are called feminized names, weakling, mama's boy, schlappschwanz in German, limp dick, these kinds of things, the guys who can't measure up, if you will, to these standards. So I do think that peer pressure, which Chris's book obviously...

ordinary men talks about. It's a powerful thing. This idea of kind of what I look at as kind of genocidal camaraderie is an idea that I've been kind of working on here. How that camaraderie in these groups, not just Germans, but in other places, Rwanda, we see some of these manifestations of this as well. So I think that we see this in multiple places. So to get to a hard number,

I think you're right, it's really going to be impossible. But I do think the key thing for me is to just again really start to complicate our understanding of these men in ways that help us maybe gain new insights into motivation that we otherwise wouldn't have had and to kind of also question maybe some of the things that we accept now as truisms in that way as well.

Ed Westermann (01:13:39.17)
Thanks for watching!

Waitman (01:14:30.622)
Can you hear me?

Ed Westermann (01:14:31.962)
I know I can hear you. Yeah, you just came back. Yeah

Waitman (01:14:33.526)
Okay. Luckily, that's why I have this website because it uploaded all stuff to the cloud, like simultaneously. So we didn't lose the track. I just lost wherever you were, which I'll have to sort out.

Ed Westermann (01:14:46.)
Okay, okay.

Ed Westermann (01:14:53.376)
Okay.

Ed Westermann (01:15:01.12)
Okay.

Waitman (01:15:03.754)
Which is okay. I don't know exactly when. It says I have an hour and 14 minutes.

So OK, no worries. And we can just, I can edit and add this on as well. Sorry about that.

Ed Westermann (01:15:19.066)
Yeah, and you know, if you want to wait, man, no, no problem. If you want to write that before the last question, if it only is part of it, you know, you don't get enough and you can't edit, you can just cut the question, right. And then we'll just transition to the finale. If that works for you, don't

Waitman (01:15:36.73)
Yeah, no worries. Well, I'll just go ahead and transition now to the, uh, to our, to our final question, uh, and then we'll, I'll go back and monkey with it. Um, cause I really, it was really interesting conversation. Um, I was really enjoying the conversation and all of a sudden it just, I don't know, but that's the first time it's happened to me. Um, but you know, comma, right? You can talk about us, but you can't talk without us. Um, okay, cool. So, um, I will just pause here for a second.

Ed Westermann (01:15:46.452)
Okay.

Waitman (01:16:06.462)
It'll show up on my screen.

Waitman (01:16:12.478)
Well, Ed, thank you so much for coming on. And I want to close with the question that I always ask our guests, which is, if you could recommend one book on the Holocaust that you found important or meaningful to you, which one would it be?

Ed Westermann (01:16:30.198)
Yeah, I think we've kind of hit on that a little bit already. And we both know Chris Browning very well. You worked with him at UNC. And I've known him for a long time. Ordinary men, for those of us who do perpetrator studies, was really something that really opened the door and really made the topic. Social scientists like Jim Waller and Harald Welser and others kind of came on board with that.

I think Chris's work is there. I do think one of the things that I would say, what I really liked about Wendy Lauer's book, Hitler's Furies, and what my students like is they don't think about women as perpetrators. So thinking about genocidal societies, it's a society and it's genocidal. That crosses the line into men and women. But I guess I would also say that...

I don't think, I've never not, so I'm going to do a double negative here, I've never not learned something new from reading survivors' memoirs. And I know you've worked with Leon Wells' work, which I think is really a very powerful discussion of Yanovska in ways. I think, you know, everyone here will be familiar with Knight, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi's work.

Richard Glazer's trap with a green fence for example seed of Sarah Judith Magyar Isaacson Olga Lin yells five chimneys, and I know I'm throwing a lot in there But I do think is really important that the voices of those who participated Charlotte del beau after Auschwitz Those who were there? Really, I think I could read those books

50 times in a given year and I'd still find new insights every time I went back into them. So I do think that that's extremely important that the voices of the survivors are something that's really represented in the way we talk about what's important for Holocaust historiography.

Waitman (01:18:40.09)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and I'll just, I'll second that as well, you know, for our listeners, you know, it's also important essentially not to let the perpetrators have the last word, I suppose, in a way of thinking, you know, not, not taking, and I think the scholarship has been trying to move in this direction for a long time, you know, Sol Friedlander's idea of it, or basically, you know, challenge that we need to write an integrated history that

you know, uses all perspectives, right? I think is really important. And it's always a good reminder, you know, that just because they may have been victims or may have been on the victimized side doesn't mean that those people don't have insights to tell us or that their descriptions, their memories or their recollections and their interpretations of behavior at the time aren't correct either.

Right. So I think that that's a really, a really great way to sort of finish it off. For everyone else, as always, please, if you are finding this podcast to be interesting and useful, thought provoking, please leave a rating and a comment. Those are all great things to help us as far as the metrics go. And I will put in the show notes links to.

Professor Westerman's books, as well as obviously always to the book he's recommended. And lastly, of course, remember that there is a link to all of the books that all of our guests have recommended on my website under the Holocaust history podcast web page. Ed, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

Ed Westermann (01:20:30.562)
Well, thank you, Waichman. It was great talking to you and great to reconnect with you, and congratulations on your latest work too.

Waitman (01:20:38.09)
Thanks so much.