“Wheels and Cogs”

Why Viennese Policemen Guarded Deportation Transports, 1941-43 (PART II)

Abstract

Viennese policemen, as part of the German Schutzpolizei (uniformed police) after March 1938, complied with orders to guard deportation transports of Austrian Roma and Jews between 1941 and 1943. Previous theories about the German police have argued that they engaged in mass murder in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland, due to peer pressure, obedience to authority, ideological training in police schools, or the influence of ideological careerist junior officers. This study, based on the personnel files of sixty-five policemen, 98 percent of whom were hired before the Nazis came to power, contests those theories. It proposes a four-stage, time-dependent hypothesis about why police obeyed orders. The first three stages were covered in the first half of the article, which appeared in volume 11, number 2, of S:I.M.O.N. The article in this issue begins with the fourth stage. During the Second World War, the police overcame cognitive dissonance about deporting people by justifying their actions to themselves: guard duty was part of their job as members of military police units, and the priority during the war was to protect Germans, not “racial outsiders” and foreigners. This part of the study describes the bureaucratic thoroughness with which the deportation trips were organised and how policemen were selected for guard duty. This section also analyses a post-war investigation in which some policemen claimed they had merely “acted under orders”. Similarities in their answers demonstrate that their responses were probably coordinated by higher police officials who wanted to exonerate the policemen and reinstate them on the force. Although some prior historiography has claimed that the Viennese police were totally transformed into a democratic institution after the Second World War, many policemen who had served as deportation guards were rehired. Their actions were swept under the rug because most policemen fitted limited legal definitions that did not connect them to the Nazi Party; some belonged to the SS Police, but disciplinary commissions ruled that this was distinct from voluntarily joining the SS. Furthermore, it appears that the new police administration viewed policemen as men who had suffered from bombardment and family hardship during the war and deserved to have their jobs back.