There is no remorse in Waldemar Klingelhöfer’s eyes.
A picture from the “Einsatzgruppen trial” shows the SS-Sturmbannführer or “assault unit leader” staring calmly into the camera. His checkered shirt is buttoned all the way up; his brows are furrowed, but his face shows no emotion.
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The photograph would have been taken during the Nuremberg trials in 1947 or 1948, just before Klingelhöfer was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity and membership in a criminal organization.
From opera singer to killer for the Nazis
Before he joined Hitler’s killing forces, Klingelhöfer was an opera singer. In 1935, he left the Kassel state theater to take over the Cultural Department of the SD, the Nazis’ intelligence agency led directly by Reinhard Heydrich, and indirectly by Heinrich Himmler. Among other tasks, Klingelhöfer analyzed the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda.
In 1941, the Russian-speaking Klingelhöfer joined Einsatzgruppe B, initially as a translator, according to his own testimony. During the Holocaust, the Einsatzgruppen were Heinrich Himmler’s special units responsible for exterminating the Jewish population of Eastern Europe.
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There, Klingelhöfer rose to the rank of assault unit leader — one of the highest ranks — of the Vorkommando Moscow, a position in which he ordered and personally carried out countless executions of innocent people.
What would drive an opera singer to leave the stage — and then a comfortable office job — to kill on Hitler’s orders?
‘Ordinary men’ and loyal career changers
Christian Gläßel, a political scientist at the Centre for International Security at Berlin’s Hertie School and co-author of “Making a Career in Dictatorship,” has a simple answer: “plain career pressure,” he tells DW.
So far, many researchers have assumed that ideological conviction plays a dominant role for those who are willing to carry out crimes against humanity on the regime’s behalf. In “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” Daniel Goldhagen argued that it was pure antisemitism that turned Hitler’s men into murderers.
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30 years before Goldhagen, Hannah Arendt came to a different conclusion upon observing war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem: “I don’t think he was particularily hungry for power. He was the typical bureaucrat. I don’t think ideology played a very large role,” she remarked in a conversation in 1964 with the author Joachim Fest.
Underperformance as a motivation
Gläßel and his co-author Adam Scharpf found empirical support for Arendt’s observation in the data of thousands of Argentine army officers. In the dataset containing information on promotions, graduation ranks, and retirements of military personnel since 1870, they discovered a pattern: The worse an officer performed, the greater the risk that he would be kicked out — and the more likely he was to join the secret police. Gläßel and Scharpf found that the ranks of the secret police were filled with underperformers during Argentina’s military dictatorship. By torturing and murdering on the regime’s behalf, these men could prove themselves and advance their careers.
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“They are often people who have been rejected by a system or can no longer climb the ladder,” Gläßel explains. “That’s when people resort to extreme measures and demonstrate their loyalty by doing the regime’s dirty work that nobody else wants to do.”
Not ideology but career pressure
The researchers’ interest was sparked by an offhand remark. During a visit to Argentina, Adam Scharpf met someone who casually commented that during Argentina’s military dictatorship, the secret police had been full of “idiots.”
At first, Scharpf assumed the remark was meant as an insult. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the comment, and the longer he and Christian Gläßel discussed it, the more suspicious they got. What if the statement was to be taken literally?
“It’s really a puzzle,” says Gläßel. “Why would a dictator, who depends on an effective secret police force, rely on idiots?”
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After analyzing the Argentine data, the researchers realized that they were onto something. Career records showed that the Argentine military had long operated as a meritocratic institution.
“In other words, those who perform well climb the ladder; those who don’t eventually get kicked out,” Gläßel explains.
For underperformers, the secret police functioned as a shortcut up the career ladder. Those with poor records could salvage their careers through this detour.
They would spend a few years in the secret police and later be rewarded with better-paid positions elsewhere in the military. The greater the pressure they faced, the more likely they were to torture and kill in order to save their careers.
Meritocracy: A danger to democracy?
For Christian Gläßel, this is a side effect of systems — like meritocracies — that produce winners and losers. “The losers are a human re
Gläßel believes that meritocracy neither protects against the erosion of democratic institutions nor against authoritarian rule. On the contrary, his and Scharpf’s research suggests that performance-based systems can drive ordinary people to commit extreme crimes.
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“What’s perfidious is that performance motivates people. If you know you’re falling behind, you’ll go the extra mile,” says Gläßel.
The researchers did not limit their investigation to Argentina. They also examined individual cases from Nazi Germany, Gambia, and the Soviet Union. And one of those cases was that of opera singer Waldemar Klingelhöfer.
For Nazi Germany, there is no comprehensive dataset comparable to the Argentine records. But there are individual biographies that allowed Gläßel and Scharpf to know more about the “ordinary men” of Nazi Germany.
‘They were often newcomers’
Most had little or no experience in police work and therefore felt a stronger need to prove themselves, they argue. According to the researchers, Nazi leaders such as Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler deliberately exploited this dynamic.
Klingelhöfer was not the only newcomer in the upper ranks of the Einsatzgruppen. Among them were lawyers, professors, art historians, dentists, and even a pastor: Ernst Biberstein.
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Biberstein was one of the first Protestant pastors to join the Nazi Party. He worked his way up to the Nazi’s Ministry for Church Affairs while simultaneously spying for the SD.
When the ministry eventually became dissatisfied with his work, he pursued a career in the SD and the SS. In 1942, he became the commander of Einsatzkommando 6 within Einsatzgruppe C in Kyiv, where he ordered the murder of thousands of innocent people.
‘Promotion by no means guaranteed’
Career pressure also played a role within the SS and SD, with Heydrich and Himmler said to have deliberately fostered a climate of competition.
Himmler argued that it was necessary from time to time “to conduct a thorough selection process and thin down the ranks so that the remainder will work all the harder, because they know that their promotion is by no means guaranteed.”
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Heydrich described the service in the Einsatzgruppen as “an opportunity to prove oneself and earn a distinction.”
Nevertheless, it would be too simplistic to deny that ideology played any role at all. The SS and SD Einsatzgruppen were heavily indoctrinated, and commanders such as Biberstein and Klingelhöfer were personally selected by Heydrich and Himmler.
Klingelhöfer himself had joined the antisemitic association “Young German Order” in 1920 and published a book about the “influence of Jews and Freemasons on political developments in Russia” before his time at the SD.
Learning from history
Christian Gläßel hopes his research will also serve as a warning. In his view, even systems that appear stable, like democracies, produce winners and losers, and as a result, there will always be loyal newcomers eager to climb the ladder — and are potentially willing to commit crimes to do so.
Even today, there is no lack of newcomers in contemporary democracies. Take US Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who previously worked as a Fox News host. Or the former Brazilian police officer, Marcelo Xavier da Silva, who headed Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency FUNAI under former President Jair Bolsonaro, despite being an outspoken opponent of Indigenous rights.
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“Those who do not learn from history will be overtaken by it,” says Gläßel.
Somehow though, history did not catch up with Waldemar Klingelhöfer.
Although he was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg Trials in 1948, his sentence was reduced to life imprisonment in 1951. Further commutations followed, and in 1956, he was released on parole. He subsequently worked as an office employee in the town of Villingen in the west German state of Baden-Württemberg, where he died aged 76.
This article was originally written in German.
