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Papers by Edward Westermann

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, 2021

Australian Association of Jewish Studies, 2020

Drunk on Genocide, 2021

This chapter evaluates the significance of ritual and symbolism to the construction and manifesta... more This chapter evaluates the significance of ritual and symbolism to the construction and manifestation of power under National Socialism. It underlines the importance of practices such as the mammoth party rallies at Nuremberg, the universal displays of the swastika on flags, pins, and armbands and the ubiquitous use of “Heil Hitler” as the standard greeting of the Third Reich under the Nazi regime. The chapter also contends that the creation of Nazi power was accomplished in no small measure by the use of ritual, and, in fact, ritual in the Third Reich served as an expression of “social power” that extended into virtually all aspects of German society. These celebratory events of Nazi power involved daily acts of verbal or physical humiliation of Jews, communists, and socialists, as well as organized and exemplary episodes of abusive behavior. Ultimately, the chapter studies the symbiotic relationship between violence, competition, and male comradeship and how it became manifest in ...

This book reveals how, over the course of the Third Reich, scenes involving alcohol consumption a... more This book 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. The book 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. The book 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. The book 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. ...

Drunk on Genocide, 2021

This chapter focuses on other perpetrators, including Wehrmacht soldiers, non-German auxiliaries,... more This chapter focuses on other perpetrators, including Wehrmacht soldiers, non-German auxiliaries, and local policemen who engaged in acts of brutality and mass murder often in very similar ways. It discusses how foreign auxiliaries, whether serving in German Security or Order Police units, in the labor and death camps in Poland, or with armed formations of the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht, proved a key adjunct to overstretched German forces and critical instruments for mass murder in the East. The chapter also explains how the act of heavy alcohol consumption at village taverns and rural communities of Eastern Europe intertwined perceptions of masculinity and antisemitism. It details the roles of widespread abuse of alcohol among the auxiliaries in the murder of the Jews. The plundering of Jewish goods was an important part of the killing and celebratory ritual among the auxiliaries. Ultimately, the chapter emphasizes how ethnic auxiliaries and local policemen integrated alcohol cons...

Drunk on Genocide, 2021

This chapter reveals the widespread sexual predation by German forces on women, especially Jewish... more This chapter reveals the widespread sexual predation by German forces on women, especially Jewish women, in the occupied eastern territories. The issue of sexual violence offers one of the clearest expressions of the ways in which geography, war, and the colonial mentality of the perpetrators allowed for the transgression of Nazi racial strictures in the East. It assesses how the acts of sexual violence by SS and police forces were commonplace in spite of the Nazi regime's own prohibition against racial defilement (Rassenschande), an act punishable by death or imprisonment. The chapter unveils numerous examples of drunken SS personnel and local auxiliaries operating in the concentration camps, the ghettos of the East, and the killing fields who sexually brutalized women, both Jews and Slavs, on a large scale. Ultimately, the chapter explains how the intersection between alcohol consumption, aggression, and male bravado found repeated expression in crimes of sexual violence in th...

Beyond "Ordinary Men", 2019

Educating Air Forces, 2020

The chapter argues that strategic-level military education should be updated to confront the incr... more The chapter argues that strategic-level military education should be updated to confront the increasingly complex and multifarious environment of modern conflicts. Strategic theory based on the familiar trinity of ends (policy), ways (strategy) and means (tactics) adapted to traditional wars between state actors is insufficient to tackle modern battlespaces such as Syria and Libya, fraught with non-state entities, transnational issues and delicate alliances. Modern counterinsurgency operations and the highly fluctuating globalized political arena demands greater flexibility and adaptability both at a national and international level and in the associated education programs for leaders being prepared to operate in these environments.

Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah

Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust

Central European History

During the Third Reich, alcohol served as both a literal and metaphorical lubricant for acts of v... more 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, ult...

Small Wars & Insurgencies

The American Historical Review

Hitler's Police Battalions

The Journal of Modern History

Western Historical Quarterly

United States Post-Cold War Defence Interests, 2004

Holocaust Studies, 2016

Dachau and the SS studies the concentration camp guards at Dachau, the first SS concentration cam... more Dachau and the SS studies the concentration camp guards at Dachau, the first SS concentration camp and a national ‘school’ of violence for its concentration camp personnel. Set up in the first months of Adolf Hitler’s rule, Dachau was a bastion of the Nazi ‘revolution’ and a key springboard for the ascent of Heinrich Himmler and the SS to control of the Third Reich’s terror and policing apparatus. Throughout the pre-war era of Nazi Germany, Dachau functioned as an academy of violence where concentration camp personnel were schooled in steely resolution and the techniques of terror. An international symbol of Nazi depredation, Dachau was the cradle of a new and terrible spirit of destruction. Combining extensive new research into the pre-war history of Dachau with theoretical insights from studies of perpetrator violence, this book offers the first systematic study of the ‘Dachau School’. It explores the backgrounds and socialization of thousands of often very young SS men in the camp and critiques the assumption that violence was an outcome of personal or ideological pathologies. Christopher Dillon analyses recruitment to the Dachau SS and evaluates the contribution of ideology, training, social psychology, and masculine ideals to the conduct and subsequent careers of concentration camp guards. Graduates of the Dachau School would go on to play a central role in the wartime criminality of the Third Reich, particularly at Auschwitz. Dachau and the SS makes an original contribution to scholarship on the pre-history of the Holocaust and the institutional organisation of violence.

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, 2021

Australian Association of Jewish Studies, 2020

Drunk on Genocide, 2021

This chapter evaluates the significance of ritual and symbolism to the construction and manifesta... more This chapter evaluates the significance of ritual and symbolism to the construction and manifestation of power under National Socialism. It underlines the importance of practices such as the mammoth party rallies at Nuremberg, the universal displays of the swastika on flags, pins, and armbands and the ubiquitous use of “Heil Hitler” as the standard greeting of the Third Reich under the Nazi regime. The chapter also contends that the creation of Nazi power was accomplished in no small measure by the use of ritual, and, in fact, ritual in the Third Reich served as an expression of “social power” that extended into virtually all aspects of German society. These celebratory events of Nazi power involved daily acts of verbal or physical humiliation of Jews, communists, and socialists, as well as organized and exemplary episodes of abusive behavior. Ultimately, the chapter studies the symbiotic relationship between violence, competition, and male comradeship and how it became manifest in ...

This book reveals how, over the course of the Third Reich, scenes involving alcohol consumption a... more This book 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. The book 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. The book 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. The book 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. ...

Drunk on Genocide, 2021

This chapter focuses on other perpetrators, including Wehrmacht soldiers, non-German auxiliaries,... more This chapter focuses on other perpetrators, including Wehrmacht soldiers, non-German auxiliaries, and local policemen who engaged in acts of brutality and mass murder often in very similar ways. It discusses how foreign auxiliaries, whether serving in German Security or Order Police units, in the labor and death camps in Poland, or with armed formations of the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht, proved a key adjunct to overstretched German forces and critical instruments for mass murder in the East. The chapter also explains how the act of heavy alcohol consumption at village taverns and rural communities of Eastern Europe intertwined perceptions of masculinity and antisemitism. It details the roles of widespread abuse of alcohol among the auxiliaries in the murder of the Jews. The plundering of Jewish goods was an important part of the killing and celebratory ritual among the auxiliaries. Ultimately, the chapter emphasizes how ethnic auxiliaries and local policemen integrated alcohol cons...

Drunk on Genocide, 2021

This chapter reveals the widespread sexual predation by German forces on women, especially Jewish... more This chapter reveals the widespread sexual predation by German forces on women, especially Jewish women, in the occupied eastern territories. The issue of sexual violence offers one of the clearest expressions of the ways in which geography, war, and the colonial mentality of the perpetrators allowed for the transgression of Nazi racial strictures in the East. It assesses how the acts of sexual violence by SS and police forces were commonplace in spite of the Nazi regime's own prohibition against racial defilement (Rassenschande), an act punishable by death or imprisonment. The chapter unveils numerous examples of drunken SS personnel and local auxiliaries operating in the concentration camps, the ghettos of the East, and the killing fields who sexually brutalized women, both Jews and Slavs, on a large scale. Ultimately, the chapter explains how the intersection between alcohol consumption, aggression, and male bravado found repeated expression in crimes of sexual violence in th...

Beyond "Ordinary Men", 2019

Educating Air Forces, 2020

The chapter argues that strategic-level military education should be updated to confront the incr... more The chapter argues that strategic-level military education should be updated to confront the increasingly complex and multifarious environment of modern conflicts. Strategic theory based on the familiar trinity of ends (policy), ways (strategy) and means (tactics) adapted to traditional wars between state actors is insufficient to tackle modern battlespaces such as Syria and Libya, fraught with non-state entities, transnational issues and delicate alliances. Modern counterinsurgency operations and the highly fluctuating globalized political arena demands greater flexibility and adaptability both at a national and international level and in the associated education programs for leaders being prepared to operate in these environments.

Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah

Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust

Central European History

During the Third Reich, alcohol served as both a literal and metaphorical lubricant for acts of v... more 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, ult...

Small Wars & Insurgencies

The American Historical Review

Hitler's Police Battalions

The Journal of Modern History

Western Historical Quarterly

United States Post-Cold War Defence Interests, 2004

Holocaust Studies, 2016

Dachau and the SS studies the concentration camp guards at Dachau, the first SS concentration cam... more Dachau and the SS studies the concentration camp guards at Dachau, the first SS concentration camp and a national ‘school’ of violence for its concentration camp personnel. Set up in the first months of Adolf Hitler’s rule, Dachau was a bastion of the Nazi ‘revolution’ and a key springboard for the ascent of Heinrich Himmler and the SS to control of the Third Reich’s terror and policing apparatus. Throughout the pre-war era of Nazi Germany, Dachau functioned as an academy of violence where concentration camp personnel were schooled in steely resolution and the techniques of terror. An international symbol of Nazi depredation, Dachau was the cradle of a new and terrible spirit of destruction. Combining extensive new research into the pre-war history of Dachau with theoretical insights from studies of perpetrator violence, this book offers the first systematic study of the ‘Dachau School’. It explores the backgrounds and socialization of thousands of often very young SS men in the camp and critiques the assumption that violence was an outcome of personal or ideological pathologies. Christopher Dillon analyses recruitment to the Dachau SS and evaluates the contribution of ideology, training, social psychology, and masculine ideals to the conduct and subsequent careers of concentration camp guards. Graduates of the Dachau School would go on to play a central role in the wartime criminality of the Third Reich, particularly at Auschwitz. Dachau and the SS makes an original contribution to scholarship on the pre-history of the Holocaust and the institutional organisation of violence.