Lieutenant Kurt Drucker Character Analysis

Christopher Browning uses the alias Lieutenant Kurt Drucker for the commander of the Second Platoon of Police Reserve Battalion 101’s Second Company. At 33 years old, Drucker is one of the youngest commanders in the battalion, although he didn’t join the Nazi party until 1939, which is a bit later than most of the other men who were part of the party. This calls into question whether he joined the party out of ideological conviction or simply a desire to belong to the same party as the German chancellor, Adolf Hitler. Like Sergeant Steinmetz, Drucker leads shooting squads all day long during the massacre at Józefów, which means he is in extremely close proximity to the actual executions from the beginning. Furthermore, as part of the battalion’s Second Company, Drucker plays an important role in leading men during deportations, ghetto clearings, the judenjagd, and other mass executions. Drucker’s personal feelings about the violence aren’t explicitly described, but there are at least two occasions when Drucker offhandedly orders the executions of Jews whom he and his men personally know, which possibly indicates that he has fewer qualms about violence and murder than other leaders, like Major Trapp and Lieutenant Buchmann. After being interrogated and indicted for war crimes in the 1960s, Drucker is sentenced to eight years in prison, but this is later reduced to three and a half years after a lengthy appeals process. Drucker is one of the relatively few Nazis who were tried and found guilty for his role in the Holocaust, but his moral guilt is beyond doubt because Trapp gave him and the other men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 the option to excuse themselves from committing any violence and he chose to take part in it anyway.