On Obeying Orders

 On Obeying Orders 

In his book Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Timothy Snyder describes horror in the territory roughly bordered by Poland in the west, Ukraine in the east, Estonia in the north, and the Black Sea in the south between the years 1933 and 1945 that is appalling nearly beyond belief. This brief period of twelve years began with the Holodomor, Stalin’s intentional starvation of several million people, most of them Ukrainians. It included the Holocaust, and it ended only with the defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allies, primarily through the forces of the USSR. In those years, two totalitarian regimes, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, intentionally murdered more than ten million people. They shot, gassed, and otherwise killed women, men, and children in simply staggering numbers. I have written here before about how such a thing could be possible. In an earlier post, I said that what it took for it to happen was dehumanization of the other and a secular ideology. I remain convinced that those are two major causes of the horror in the Bloodlands.  

I have become convinced, however, that there was another dynamic at work as well. It is the dynamic of people in uniform or otherwise in an organization that emphasized its members’ duty to obey orders obeying orders no matter how horrific the orders are. Stalin ordered his Communists to starve millions of people to death, and his Communists did it. Hitler authorized the Holocaust, Himmler, Eichmann, and others ordered it, and German soldiers and SS troops carried it out. What is it about Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany that led people to carry out the unspeakably demonic orders they were given? 

Soviet Russia was ruled by a man whose power came from his position as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). That party proudly claimed its identity as a Marxist-Leninist political organization. It’s the Leninist part of that identity that produced people obeying profoundly sinful orders. Lenin’s major contribution to Marxist ideology was his assertion that the Communist Party represented the most class-conscious elements of the people it ruled. The Party was, for Lenin, the cutting edge of a socialist revolution carried out on behalf and for the benefit of the proletariat, the working class of society. Under this aspect of Leninism, what the Party ordered was by definition done to effect the country’s march first toward socialism, under which the workers ruled, and then to communism, under which no one ruled.  

On paper, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was built from the bottom up. Its base consisted of party members spread across the entire country. There was an organizational hierarchy on top of that base. It led from regional party heads to the Central Committee. The Central Committee elected a smaller group of leaders called the Politburo, shorthand for Political Bureau, and a Secretariat. The Politburo and the Secretariat elected a General Secretary, the top position in the party.  

The Soviet Communists said that this structure was based on the principle of “democratic centralism.” In theory, Party members could initially discuss any issue freely. That’s the “democratic” part of democratic centralism. But once the Party leadership had made a decision about any matter, all Party members were required to support and implement that decision and not to object to it. That’s the “centralism” part of democratic centralism.  

In practice, the office of General Secretary became the dominant position in this structure. That was true to a considerable extent when Lenin held that position. That reality was firmly established under Stalin.1 He succeeded Lenin as General Secretary after Lenin’s death in early 1924. He held that position until his own death in 1953. Under Stalin, the CPSU became a top down organization in which the General Secretary, that is, Stalin, made all the final decisions. The entire Party, and indeed the entire Soviet population, was required to effect whatever decision the Genral Secretary made. Because any such decision was by definition for the advancement of the revolution, any disagreement with or refusal to carry out any such decision constituted anti-revolutionary behavior. Anti-revolutionary behavior was punished by measures ranging from expulsion from the Party to a bullet in the back of the head. Dissent of any kind was not tolerated, and what the Party, that is, the Genral Secretary, ordered had to be carried out under the threat of such punishment. Obeying the orders of the CPSU became the standard of behavior in the Soviet Union. It remained the standard of Soviet behavior until the end of the Soviet Union in December, 1991. 

In the early 1930s, Stalin decided that he had to “collectivize” agriculture in the entire country. Local peasants were to be forced to turn over their property, including their land and their farm animals, to a “collective farm” which would make all of the decisions about crops and harvests. Its purpose was to assure compliance with orders and production quotas from the CPSU. Across the country, peasants objected. They resisted collectivization in every way they could. They even slaughtered their animals rather than turn them over to the collective. Resistance was particularly strong in Ukraine. 

During these years, and indeed up until it declared independence from the USSR in 1991, Ukraine was one of the “republics” of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In reality, it was mostly ruled not by Ukrainians but by Russians. And whatever the Party ordered had the force of law. The Party required both Party members and non-members to carry out its orders. Ukraine’s history is quite different from Russia’s. That history resulted in the reality that Ukrainians consider themselves to be more western than the Russians are. They have long resented being ruled by Russians, but under Stalin they had no choice but to obey orders though they mostly came from Russians not Ukrainians. 

Stalin decided to overcome Ukrainian resistance to Russian rule and collectivization by starving the Ukrainians to death. He ordered Party operatives in Ukraine to take all food away from peasants and to prohibit any food being imported into Ukraine. Those operatives obeyed his order. They confiscated grain harvests. They took farm animals. They forced their way into people’s homes and took whatever food they found there. Famine became widespread in Ukraine. People began starving to death in enormous numbers. Still, all through 1933 and into 1934, Stalin kept his orders in place. He knew millions of people were starving to death, which was precisely what he wanted. That’s what his Party underlings effected. Precise numbers are hard to come by, but perhaps as many as four million Ukrainians starved to death before Stalin lifted his order and allowed Ukrainians to possess food again. 

With the Germans, it’s almost become a joke. “I vas just following orders!” Indeed, a very large number of members of the Wehrmacht and especially of the SS carried out orders to kill millions of people in the Bloodlands between 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, and the end of the war in 1945. The Nazis had a long-term plan that that would eventually include killing most Slavs, though not immediately, through starvation, and reducing any who remained to slavery. Hitler saw the broad plains of the USSR and especially the fertile soil of Ukraine as “Lebensraum,” living space, for the Germans. His plans included removing all Jews from the territory he intended to occupy. At first, he did not plan to kill all of them. He had various schemes in mind for deporting them from their land so Germans could move in. One scheme involved deporting eastern Europe’s Jews to Madagascar, but the British navy made that impossible. He thought that perhaps he could relocate them in Siberia east of the Urals. That became impossible when he failed to conquer the USSR.  

So he decided he had to kill all eastern Europe’s Jews if he were to have any hope of executing his plan for German expansion. Of course, he also hated Jewish people. He saw all Jews as subhuman but nonetheless responsible for all of Germany’s problems. There were actually few Jews in Germany itself. But to the east of Germany there were millions. Many Jews had moved there centuries earlier when Spain and other western European nations expelled them all. The Spanish did it in 1492, a year famous in the Americas for something else. Beginning with Catherine the Great (ruled 1962-1796), the Russians moved all Jews in the empire to western regions, mostly of Ukraine and Belarus, into what was called “the Pale of Settlement.” There were fewer than 200,000 Jews in Germany itself, but Poland and the Pale of Settlement had become a homeland for an enormous number of Jewish people. 

Beginning in about 1942, Hitler changed his plan for the Jews from deportation to extermination. The death camps the SS constructed and operated at Auschwitz and elsewhere are famous, and a great many Jews died in them. But most of the Jews killed in the Holocaust were shot not gassed. German forces would compel the Jews of a particular area to dig pits, then they would shoot them so that their bodies fell into the pits they had dug. An area that had been rich with Jewish people, Jewish faith, and Jewish culture to this day is an area with very few Jews. Hitler didn’t kill all of the Jews in eastern Europe, but he came damned close. 

German citizens carried out orders to murder millions of people. The explanation of how they could do it has both similarities with and differences from the reasons Soviet citizens did essentially the same thing. Germany had a long history of militarism. Beginning in Prussia, German military forces had played major roles in any number of European wars. Germans highly valued the military. Their emperor, the Kaiser, often strutted his stuff as supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, the German army. Discipline in the German army was strict. Orders were to be obeyed. Orders were to be obeyed even when they were orders to commit genocide. 

Obeying orders is, of course, expected in any military organization. They’re all based on a hierarchy of authority. People at a lower level of authority must obey orders from people at a higher level of authority. The purpose of any military is to kill people and destroy property. Soldiers routinely obey orders to do precisely that. I’m no military expert, but I suppose no military could function as a military without a hierarchy of authority and a rule and an ethic of obeying orders.  

Then there was the Nazi party. It wasn’t as organized as the CPSU was, but it had at its top a man called “der Führer,” the leader. The Nazi party was essentially the party of Adolf Hitler. Hitler had established a totalitarian regime in Germany that tolerated dissent no better than the CPSU did. He created two instruments of terror. One was the Gestapo, an acronym for the Germans words that mean the secret state police. At least one of the purposes of the Gestapo was to arrest anyone who publicly expresses any kind of opposition to the Nazi regime. The other was the SS, the Schützstaffel, the “protection squadron.” The members of the SS were Hitler’s especially brutal and especially effective killers. They shot many if not most of the Jews the Nazis executed with bullets rather than gas. They ran the death camps. They were particularly willing to commit unspeakable atrocities like genocide. No one wanted to come to the attention of either the Gestapo or the SS. Those organizations crushed all dissent. They enforced compliance with Nazi law. Crossing them was no safer for the Germans than crossing the CPSU was for the Soviets.  

In the years 1933 to 1945, Soviet and German citizens obeyed orders to kill millions of innocent people. The horror of what they did is beyond comprehension, or at least it’s beyond my comprehension. I said here earlier that dehumanization of the other and a secular ideology explain how it could happen. I need to add a third factor, the factor of people’s willingness to obey orders even when they are orders to commit crimes against humanity. I also, however, need to make a distinction here. In freer societies, people in uniform may obey orders because the law and military regulations says they must. They may also, however, believe that it is their patriotic duty to participate in the military the way the military says they are to participate. They may obey both out of compliance with rules and regulations and out of a sense of duty. 

People in totalitarian systems may obey orders in part for those same reasons. After all, Nazi Germany was still Germany, and most Germans were very patriotic. The Soviet Union was, in effect, still the Russian Empire albeit with a far more brutal government, and the Russian people will always fight to the death to defend “Mother Russia.” But in both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, there was an additional incentive. It was terror. It was legitimate fear of the consequences of disobeying an order. In both systems, disobedience could get you a bullet in the back of the head.  At the least, it could get you a long prison sentence in a prison that was hell on earth, especially in the USSR. I don’t mean to excuse either the Holodomor or the Holocaust. Both are atrocities most people couldn’t even have imagined until they happened and are utterly inexcusable. I just want to make my distinction between freer societies and radically unfree societies like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. 

In the United States today, we may be on the brink of a crisis around our military obeying orders. In theory, soldiers may disobey illegal orders, but, frankly, I think that is unlikely to occur except in a few isolated instances. The crisis will almost certainly be upon us if Donald Trump ever becomes president again. He has said he will use the military against open demonstrations of which he disapproves. He may well intend to use the military to round up immigrants here without proper documentation. He will no doubt order the military to suppress any real open opposition to him or to his policies. Federal law prohibits the used of the armed services against civilians. There is one federal law that the president can invoke that may make doing so legal, but the tradition in this country is that soldiers must not obey illegal orders. 

There is no doubt that Trump would give the US armed forces illegal orders. Would American soldiers carry out such orders? I fear that the answer is, “Yes.” The obligation to obey orders is so deeply entrenched in American military culture that it would, I fear, occur to very few soldiers to disobey any order. Yet soldiers disobeying illegal orders may be the only recourse we have to stop Donald Trump from becoming the American dictator he so badly wants to be. Perhaps our hope lies with the highest levels of military command. A member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff might be willing to refuse to pass an illegal order from the president to the troops who would have to carry it out. We can at least hope that to be true. 

The United States is neither the Soviet Union nor Nazi Germany. I don’t think even Donald Trump would give an order to the military to kill millions of innocent civilians, though he might very well give it an order to round up and detail an enormous number of immigrants. When Trump was president, we came as close as this country has ever come to a president issuing a clearly illegal order to the US military. We will certainly be in that position again if the American voters are stupid and fearful enough to put Trump back in office. May it not be so.