Drunk on Genocide

Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany

Edward B. Westermann

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501754203
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

In Drunk on Genocide, Edward B. Westermann reveals how, over the course of the Third Reich, scenes involving alcohol consumption and revelry among the SS and police became a routine part of rituals of humiliation in the camps, ghettos, and killing fields of Eastern Europe.

Westermann draws on a vast range of newly unearthed material to explore how alcohol consumption served as a literal and metaphorical lubricant for mass murder. It facilitated "performative masculinity, " expressly linked to physical or sexual violence. Such inebriated exhibitions extended from meetings of top Nazi officials to the rank and file, celebrating at the grave sites of their victims. Westermann argues that, contrary to the common misconception of the SS and police as stone-cold killers, they were, in fact, intoxicated with the act of murder itself.

Drunk on Genocide highlights the intersections of masculinity, drinking ritual, sexual violence, and mass murder to expose the role of alcohol and celebratory ritual in the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Its surprising and disturbing findings offer a new perspective on the mindset, motivation, and mentality of killers as they prepared for, and participated in, mass extermination.

Published in Association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

1

ALCOHOL AND THE MASCULINE IDEAL

During the Third Reich, alcohol served as both a literal and metaphorical lubricant for creating camaraderie and contributing to acts of violence and atrocity by the men of the SA, the SS, and the police, and its use and abuse among the perpetrators have been documented extensively in the historical record. In contrast, the relationship between drinking rituals, violence, and perceptions of masculinity among the perpetrators has received much less attention and constitutes the focus of this chapter. From the earliest days of the National Socialist movement, drinking ritual played a visible and important role in acts of violence aimed at the Nazi Party’s putative enemies, whether on the streets of Berlin and Hamburg by storm troopers before the “seizure of power,” in the concentration camps by members of the SS as they prepared for and celebrated their brutalization of prisoners, or in the occupied East by SS and policemen at unit bars on the fringes of Jewish ghettos and in the killing fields. Hjalmar Schacht, the president of the Reich Bank under the Nazi regime, described “drunkenness as a constituent part of Nazi ideology” during his testimony at the International Military Trials of the major war criminals at Nuremberg after the war.1 While such utterances in the dock should be weighed with care, Schacht’s comment does offer an insight into the widespread use and the important role of drinking within the movement.2 Indeed, one Berlin-based newspaper lampooned Munich as “the dumbest city in Germany” and attributed “Hitlerism” and the rise of right-wing ideologies in the Bavarian capital to “500 liters of beer.”3 In this sense, the popular association of Nazi organizations with “beer drinkers” was not without some merit, but such contemporary assertions must be set within the framework of traditional regional antipathies and the role of drinking ritual within specific party organizations.4

The use of alcohol as a manifestation of masculine strength and shared community was not simply a product of the Third Reich but drew upon a much older Germanic “legacy” that prized the “desire for intoxication” and a “culture of alcohol consumption among a broad majority of the population.”5 In early twentieth-century German culture, the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg remarked critically that the “highest manifestation of masculinity” had been one’s ability “to drink everyone else under the table,” with one’s “endurance at the bar [Biertisch]” serving “as a record of masculine upbringing.”6 For his part, Alfons Heck, a former Hitler Youth leader, perfectly expressed the connection between heavy drinking and masculinity with his boast that in the Rhineland, “men were expected to get drunk.”7 While Heck laid his claim under the banner of German regional particularism, such assertions could have been made by Bavarians, Saxons, or Frisians as well. However, as documented in numerous studies from the social sciences, the act of getting “drunk” carries implications beyond the mere process of consumption and into the realm of specific actions. This chapter explores connections between the perpetrators’ consumption of alcohol, their acts of violence, and the use of celebratory ritual as expressions of camaraderie and manifestations of masculinity.

It is important to note that the connection between drinking ritual, violence, and masculinity was not a specific German phenomenon, but in truth a broader manifestation of European and US culture. One study from the social sciences noted that within Western culture, drinking is viewed as “a key component of the male sex role” and that “men are encouraged to drink, and in so doing are perceived as masculine.”8 In her study of drinking in the US between 1870 and 1940, Catherine Gilbert Murdock argued that drinking “remained a potent badge of masculine identity” and closely tied to the concept of “virility.”9 The same was true in colonial Spain, where drinking served as a “warrior’s rite of passage,” with an expectation of men “being able to ‘hold’ their liquor without losing control.”10 For working-class men in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s, neighborhood bars became primarily male spaces and sites of heavy drinking in which the ability to hold one’s liquor was prized equally with the aptitude to use one’s fists.11 In some respects, these beliefs continued into the twenty-first century, as one US-focused study concluded, “The use of alcohol and the license to drink to intoxication are deeply rooted in expectations of male behavior.”12 On the one hand, drinking became an act of male prowess in which “heavy drinking” and “greater consumption is equated with greater masculinity.”13 On the other hand, another study found, “alcohol-related violence perpetrated by men may help to establish and maintain a gendered identity,” and concluded, “Violence and alcohol use simultaneously embodied an image of the masculine. Commitment to aggressive and violent practices as a means of establishing a masculine reputation in a peer group context was evident.”14

Among the SA, the SS, and the police, the consumption of alcohol was part of a ritual that bound the perpetrators together and became a key ingredient in acts of “performative masculinity,” a type of masculinity expressly linked to acts of physical and sexual violence.15 In this sense, performative masculinity refers to a set of male behaviors that establish an ideal for comparing oneself to other men, a practice that may involve the quantity of alcohol one can consume, the number of one’s sexual “conquests,” or one’s aptitude with one’s fists. Among the SA during the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), drinking rituals also served as a means of male bonding and for creating group solidarity that often led to acts of political violence. The emphasis on physical fitness and martial sports (Kampfsport) such as boxing or jujitsu within the Nazi Party’s paramilitary organizations was intended to create a “disciplined masculine fighter” and to prepare these men for confrontations with their political opponents in the streets and in the beer halls.16 Similarly, the pages of the Black Corps, the weekly SS newspaper, celebrated boxing as a means of inculcating “masculine hardness” and preventing the emergence of a “soft gender” (weiches Geschlecht).17

One contemporary described the stakes of SA battles fought in beer halls during this period as “the fight for the soul of the German man and the new Germany . . . [a battle involving] fists and chair legs in order . . . to drive out the racially alien ‘leaders’ and their bodyguards.”18 In Munich’s egalitarian beer halls, “frequent brawls and riots” accompanied political rallies during which “heavy earthenware steins, emptied of their liquid bliss, became dangerous weapons.”19 The political policeman Hans Bernd Gisevius described the ideal of an SA man at the time as one who “tested his biceps at the bloody brawls that were part of the routine of every political meeting.”20 After the outbreak of war, the exaltation of martial skills within the SS remained an important marker of masculine prowess. For example, Franz Schalling, a policeman attached to the Einsatzgruppen, remembered boxing and jujitsu training at Pretzsch in preparation for the invasion of Russia in June 1941.21

In his survey of comradeship in the Wehrmacht, Thomas Kühne remarked, “Excessive drinking, tales of sexual adventures, misogynistic rhetoric, rowdyism, even collective rape—all this gained its social momentum from being ‘celebrated’—practiced, reported, or applauded—together.”22 What was true for the German armed forces, a demographically diverse group of some eighteen million men in total, proved even more valid for the much smaller and largely self-selected men of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary arms and the German police, as the consumption of alcohol became “central to a pattern of male bonding” among the perpetrators and a key part of celebratory ritual conducted prior to, during, and after mass killings.23 Indeed, along with alcohol use, membership in paramilitary organizations like the SS, the SA, and the police “shape[d] and inform[ed] masculinity constructs.”24 Heavy drinking as a manifestation of masculinity may have found its apotheosis under the Third Reich, but the connection between the consumption of alcohol and perceptions of manliness predated the Nazi seizure of power.

Within Imperial Germany, the departure of the “boy” from his home and his enlistment as a soldier into the all-male community of barracks life entailed a belief in the loss of youthful innocence and the acquisition of masculine identity. Based on his own experience, Hitler reflected on this process and described the German army as the “institution that educated our people into manhood.”25 For many German males, their entry into the ranks began in a pub in which drinking and physical “excesses” became a “ritual of farewell.” The connection between alcohol, martial identity, and entry into manhood was anchored in “leave-taking rituals” in which military recruits would solicit donations from the local community prior to their departure, with these monies being turned into a “farewell drink” or “drinking bout.”26

These practices continued in Weimar Germany as paramilitary groups from both ends of the political spectrum battled one another in the streets and engaged in acts of performative masculinity by drinking and fighting.27 On the right, the Freikorps, mostly groups of demobilized soldiers, battled against Red Guards with a brutality that facilitated acts of atrocity on both sides. For these foot soldiers of the nascent fascist movement, “Fantasies of violence—which were, of course, frequently acted out—were a means by which the ‘soldierly man’ . . . could find release.”28 In the words of Ernst von Salomon, “We saw red: we roared out our songs and threw grenades after them. We no longer had anything of human decency left in our hearts. The land where we had lived groaned with destruction.” He concluded, “And so we returned, swaggering, drunken, laden with plunder.”29 In Salomon’s testimony, he and his fellow combatants were “intoxicated on glory and valor” and established camaraderie through heavy drinking that promoted vocal and physical aggression and masculine swagger as men “sung over the tenth [mug of beer]” expressing their martial, nationalist, and ideological beliefs.30 In fact, such “songs of revolt” became an instrument for expressing verbal aggression among parties of both the left and the right under Weimar.31

In Munich, alcohol consumption combined with political extremism led to politically motivated murder in the spring of 1919. In one case, twelve men were taken at night from their homes in the Bavarian town of Perlach and transported to Munich’s Hofbräuhaus, where they were “leisurely shot in pairs” that evening as the killers drank mugs of beer between the executions. In another instance, a witness recalled the beating deaths of fourteen men in the town of Gerlach, as “the soldiers, some of them drunk, trampled the prisoners.” After the killings, two of the participants “slung their arms around each other . . . [and] began an Indian warrior dance next to the corpses. They shouted and howled.”32 In the first example, alcohol consumption and male camaraderie were integrated into a fraternal ritual of murder. The second case exposes triumphant ritual in the form of a “war dance” as part of the humiliation of the deceased and the celebration of the perpetrators’ act, a practice also adopted by SS guards at Sachsenhausen who integrated an “Indian victory dance” into a communal beating of a prisoner in March 1940.33 In both cases, drinking accompanied these acts as part of a ritual of shared purpose and comradeship among the killers.

The experiences of the Freikorps and other right-wing groups found continued expression under Weimar within the SA in their “celebration of a heroic and martial masculinity” and their renown as the “heroes of bar-room brawls.”34 In fact, it was in beer halls and SA taverns that the nascent Nazi movement’s paramilitary forces were formed and won their infamy as the saviors of the “new Germany.” One witness, Friedrich Klaehn, described the entry of an SA unit into a meeting hall in messianic...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Alcohol and the Masculine Ideal
• 2. Rituals of Humiliation
• 3. Taking Trophies and Hunting Jews
• 4. Alcohol and Sexual Violence
• 5. Celebrating Murder
• 6. Alcohol, Auxiliaries, and Mass Murder
• 7. Alcohol and the German Army
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index