The age of the men meant they had been well into adulthood by the time the Nazis took power. They had not spent their formative years under the “inverted morality” of Nazism. Moreover prior to 1933 support for the Nazis had been weak in Hamburg. Most working-class people in the city had supported either the Communists or the Social Democrats. It’s reasonable to conclude that most of the Battalion’s troops were not committed Nazis. So what led these ordinary German family men to commit such horrendous crimes? Dieter Pohl. Hans Krueger and the Murder of the Jews in the Stanislawow Region (Galicia) (PDF file from Yad Vashem.org). pp.12/13, 17/18, 21. It is clear that a massacre of such proportions [committed on 12 October 1941] under German civil administration was virtually unprecedented. a b Olga Skorupka; etal. (2014). "Józefów. Lata okupacji". Virtual Shtetl. Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich . Retrieved 1 May 2017. Valdis O. Lumans (1993), Himmler's Auxiliaries: The Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle and the German National Minorities of Europe, 1933–1945. Univ of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0807820660 Browning divides the officials of the General Government of occupied Poland into two factions. The "productionists" favored using Jews of the ghettos as a source of slave labor to help with the war effort. The "attritionists" favored letting them starve and die of disease. At the same time, there were struggles between the Schutzstaffel (SS) and Hans Frank, the Governor-General of occupied Poland. The SS favored " The Nisko/Lublin Plan" to create a "Jewish reservation" in Lublin, in occupied Poland, into which all the Jews of Greater Germany, Poland and the former Czechoslovakia would be expelled. Frank was opposed to the "Lublin Plan" on the ground that the SS were "dumping" Jews into his territory. Frank and Hermann Göring wished for the General Government to become the " granary" of the Reich and opposed the ethnic cleansing schemes of Heinrich Himmler and Arthur Greiser as economically disruptive. [22]

There's a way in which reading this book, for me, forms a ring composition with Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, because Goldhagen spends a great deal of time and energy passionately arguing with Browning. The train journeys with the treatment on the Jewish people, including the sheer numbers placed into carriages, and their loss of life by crush injuries, thirst and heat exhaustion, are described, as are the desperate attempts by some Jews to escape. This is placed alongside the poor organisation of the guards and details of the journey with the need to patch the trains up at various stations along the route as the desparate hands of people clawed away at barbed wire and wooden planking. The guard details had, as they described, little ammunition; but they expended hundreds of rounds each exhausting their supplies on these journeys.

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We see a range of justifications for their acts, mainly to do with duty and not letting down comrades. What we do not see is admission of race hate, as the policemens testimony could have lead to serious punishment. The commander of the unit was hanged in Poland in 1947 (ironically for the murder of 86 poles not the 90,000 jews the unit directly or indirectly murdered) Rosenbaum, Ron Explaining Hitler: the search for the origins of his evil New York: Random House, 1998. ISBN 0-679-43151-9 OCLC 317866934 The legacy of their greatness is the church, a living, breathing organism which they helped found and of which they became the very foundation stones..the church, now some two hundred years old, exists today because these men launched the expansion of the gospel of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth." Daniel J. Goldhagen; Christopher R. Browning; Leon Wieseltier (April 8, 1996). "The "Willing Executioners" / "Ordinary Men" Debate" (PDF). Selections from the Symposium. Introduction by Michael Berenbaum. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. pp.1/48 . Retrieved June 15, 2014. Thus: Befehl ist befehl had its limitations, and there were loopholes the size of Goering's paunch to slip through. And they could escape punishment, too, in fact all of them who refused escaped reprisals.

Qualcuno si sentì male, qualcuno si rifiutò la prima volta, qualcuno ebbe scrupoli: ma tutti sostanzialmente svolsero il loro compito, e sin dal primo giorno di Polonia, il battaglione 101, protagonista di questo studio, aveva radunato casa per casa e trucidato oltre 1500 ebrei.

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The last Aktion operation RPB101 undertook was around Lublin. It was called Aktion Erntefest (Operation Harvest Festival) and along with other police battalions, SS troops and Ukrainian Special Service battalions some 43,000 Jews from the Majdanek, Poniatowa and Trawniki concentration camps were murdered over just 2 (two) days. I reasoned with myself that after all without its mother the child could not live any longer. It was supposed to be, so to speak, soothing to my conscience to release children unable to live.' Reading all this is exhausting, even in a fairly short book. The usual disturbing details, hard to understand, crop up, such as that Jews went to their deaths with “quiet composure.” Browning humanizes, or at least reifies, the men of the battalion, drawing incisive sketches of them, as known through the interviews to which he had access. Generally, those few who did not participate, or limited their participation, were usually of a slightly higher social class than the other men. Several were tradesmen who had their own businesses and were not interested in a postwar police career, and so were more independent. Roman Catholics seemed to be the most likely to refuse—but there were few in Hamburg, so this was not a large group, either. But, as one would expect, no one factor dictated a man’s behavior. Or rather, one single factor hard to define did—his character. Zygmunt Puźniak, Eksterminacja ludności cywilnej i zagłada Żydów józefowskich [Killing of civilians and the annihilation of Jews of Józefów] Rzeczpospolita Jozefowska.wordpress.com, see: Zygmunt Klukowski, Dziennik z lat okupacji, "17 lipca"; and T. Bernstein, Martyrologia, opór i zagłada ludności żydowskiej w dystrykcie lubelskim. Retrieved 27 June 2014.