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The Making of an SS Killer: The Life of Colonel Alfred Filbert, 1905–1990Alex J. Kay

2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/hgs/dcz021

8756-6583

Richards Plavnieks,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

In The Making of an SS Killer, Alex J. Kay provides an astonishingly well-sourced and detailed account of the life of SS Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Alfred Filbert, the first commander of Einsatzkommando 9, which killed over 18,000 Jews in Lithuania and Belorussia. Kay notes that “of the seventy-five men who commanded one of these groups or commandos in the German-occupied Soviet territories during the years 1941–1944, biographies exist for merely three of them” (p. 2). His choice of Alfred Filbert recommends itself for several reasons. Filbert directly oversaw the crucial transition to total genocide in late July 1941 as a mid-level perpetrator, in fact “the first commander to also murder women and children” (p. 3). Ironically, although Filbert ended the war with the same rank as Adolf Eichmann, he was dogged throughout his career by the fact that his brother Otto was in a concentration camp for “treachery” (p. 37). Finally, Filbert’s postwar trajectory was strangely public: tried, convicted, and released early, he went on to star in a film that “addressed the continuity of Nazi biographies in the Federal Republic of Germany” (p. 3) and was cast as himself. Filbert exited the war unrepentant: the same self-promoting, self-absorbed bigot who originally entered the Nazi Party. Kay’s study shows that fitting perpetrators into single categories of motivation is too imprecise: in perhaps most cases several motives were at work.