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Drinking Rituals, Masculinity, and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2018

Edward B. Westermann
Edward B. Westermann*
Affiliation:
Texas A&M University—San Antonio
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Abstract

During the Third Reich, alcohol served as both a literal and metaphorical lubricant for acts of violence and atrocity by the men of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Schutzstaffel (SS), and the police. Scholars have extensively documented its use and abuse on the part of the perpetrators. For the SA, the SS, and the police, the consumption of alcohol was part of a ritual that not only bound the perpetrators together, but also became a facilitator of acts of “performative masculinity”—a type of masculinity expressly linked to physical or sexual violence. In many respects, the relationship among alcohol, masculinity, sex, and violence permeated all aspects of the Nazi killing process in the camps, the ghettos, and the killing fields. After the outbreak of war in September 1939, such practices were increasingly radicalized, with drinking and celebratory rituals becoming key elements for these closed male communities of perpetrators, who used them to prepare for acts of mass killing and, ultimately, genocide.

Für die Gewalt- und Gräueltaten der Männer von SA, SS und Polizei während des Dritten Reiches diente Alkohol im wörtlichen wie auch im übertragenen Sinn als Schmiermittel. In der Forschung ist der Gebrauch und Missbrauch von Alkohol seitens der Täter ausführlich dokumentiert worden. Alkoholkonsum gehörte für die SA, die SS und die Polizei nicht nur zu einem Ritual, das sie als Täter zusammenschweißte, sondern half ihnen auch zu Taten „performativer Männlichkeit“—eine Männlichkeit, die ausdrücklich mit physischer oder sexueller Gewalt verbunden war. Diese Verbindung zwischen Alkohol, Männlichkeit, Sex und Gewalt durchdrang alle Aspekte der nationalsozialistischen Vernichtungspolitik in den Lagern, Ghettos und auf den „killing fields“. Nach dem Kriegsausbruch im September 1939 wurden solche Praktiken zusehends radikalisiert: In diesen geschlossenen männlichen Tätergemeinschaften wurden Trinken und feierliche Rituale zu Schlüsselelementen, um sich auf Massenmord und letzten Endes Genozid vorzubereiten.

Type
Article
Information
Central European History , Volume 51 , Special Issue 3: Masculinity and the Third Reich , September 2018 , pp. 367 - 389
Copyright
Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association 2018 

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Footnotes

The author would like to thank Dagmar Herzog, Billy Kiser, Thomas Kühne, Jürgen Matthäus, Yves Müller, Andrew Port, Amy Porter, and the anonymous referees for their insights, comments, and suggestions.

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129 Sanday, “Rape Free versus Rape Prone,” 343. Sanday's example concerns a case of gang rape by a group of men in a university fraternity, but her argument also can be applied to the actions of the SS in the occupied East. Sanday's findings about the group-bonding motive for gang rape is supported by Cohen, Dara Kay, Rape during Civil War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 30Google Scholar.

130 In addition to Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen, other important works on this subject include Hedgepeth, Sonja and Saidel, Rochelle, eds., Sexual Violence against Women during the Holocaust (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Waitman Beorn, “Bodily Conquest: Sexual Violence in the Nazi East,” in Mass Violence in Nazi Occupied Europe: New Debates and Perspectives, ed. David Stahel and Alexander Kay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming). I would like to thank Waitman Beorn for sharing the prepublication draft of this chapter.

131 Na'ama Shik, “Sexual Abuse of Jewish Women in Auschwitz-Birkenau,” in Herzog, Brutality and Desire, 232.

132 Mermelstein, Mel, By Bread Alone: The Story of A-4685 (Huntington Beach, CA: Auschwitz Study Foundation, 1979), 152Google Scholar.

133 Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 141.

134 Quoted in Theweleit, Klaus, Male Fantasies: vol. 2: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, trans. Carter, Erica and Turner, Chris (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 300-1Google Scholar.

135 Ibid., 301.

136 Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen, 98-99; Müller, “Männlichkeit und Gewalt,” 136-37; Burds, “Sexual Violence,” 45-46.

137 For more on these activities in the killing fields, see Westermann, Edward B., “Stone Cold Killers or Drunk with Murder? Alcohol and Atrocity in the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 30, no. 1 (2016): 1-19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

138 For an extended discussion and critique of Theweleit's work, see Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 240-46.

139 Quoted in Ibid., 244.

140 Kahn, Leo, No Time to Mourn: A True Story of a Jewish Partisan Fighter (Vancouver: Laurelton Press, 1978), 57Google Scholar.

141 For a discussion of the relationship of masculinity to hunting, see Mangan, J. A. and McKenzie, Callum, Militarism, Hunting, Imperialism: “Blooding” the Martial Male (London: Routledge, 2010)Google Scholar.

142 Lanzmann, Claude, Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4:00 pm (Paris: Les films Aleph, 2001)Google Scholar.

143 Knoke, Heinz, I Flew for the Führer: The Story of a German Fighter Pilot, trans. Ewing, John (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1953)Google Scholar, 31, 62, 67, 70, 111, 136, 142, 151-52.

144 Lower, Wendy, The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2011), 112Google Scholar.