There was a constant tendency to assign the actual shooting duties to these units, in order to shift the psychological burden from the German police to their collaborators. This psychological burden was serious and extended even to Bach-Zelewski himself. Himmler’s SS doctor, reporting to the Reichsführer on Bach-Zelewski’s incapacitating illness in the spring of 1942, noted that the SS leader was suffering “especially from visions in connection with the shootings of Jews that he himself had led, and from other difficult experiences in the east.”
