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If the German military offensive of 1942 was ultimately a failure, the blitzkrieg against the Jews, especially in Poland, was not.
Never before had I seen the monstrous deeds of the Holocaust so starkly juxtaposed with the human faces of the killers.
The grass-roots perpetrators became “professional killers.”
the mass-murder policies of the regime were not aberrational or exceptional events that scarcely ruffled the surface of everyday life.
mass murder and routine had become one. Normality itself had become exceedingly abnormal.
I must recognize that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader—both were human—if I want to understand and explain the behavior of both as best I can.
they do not reveal the personal dynamics of how a group of normal middle-aged German men became mass murderers.
These were men who had known political standards and moral norms other than those of the Nazis.
one that was more efficient, less public, and less burdensome psychologically for the killers.
At some point in the afternoon, someone “organized” a supply of alcohol for the shooters.
By the end of a day of nearly continuous shooting, the men had completely lost track of how many Jews they had each killed. In the words of one policeman, it was in any case “a great number.”
“Through the point-blank shot that was thus required, the bullet struck the head of the victim at such a trajectory that often the entire skull or at least the entire rear skullcap was torn off, and blood, bone splinters, and brains sprayed everywhere and besmirched the shooters.”
Ultimately, everyone was to shoot, but the idea was to allow frequent relief and “cigarette breaks.”
Most of those who found the shooting impossible to bear quit very early.67 But not always.
They ate little but drank heavily. Generous quantities of alcohol were provided, and many of the policemen got quite drunk.
Those who had not been in the forest did not want to learn more.81 Those who had been there likewise had no desire to speak,
By silent consensus within Reserve Police Battalion 101, the Józefów massacre was simply not discussed.
But repression during waking hours could not stop the nightmares. During the first night back from Józefów, one policeman awoke firing his gun into the ceiling of the barracks.
the pressure for conformity—the basic identification of men in uniform with their comrades and the strong urge not to separate themselves from the group by stepping out.
Truthfully I must say that at the time we didn’t reflect about it at all. Only years later did any of us become truly conscious of what had happened then.… Only later did it first occur to me that had not been right.”
Even twenty or twenty-five years later those who did quit shooting along the way overwhelmingly cited sheer physical revulsion against what they were doing as the prime motive but did not express any ethical or political principles behind this revulsion.
Politically and ethically motivated opposition, explicitly identified by the policemen as such, was relatively rare.
The problem that faced Trapp and his superiors in Lublin, therefore, was not the ethically and politically grounded opposition of a few but the broad demoralization shared both by those who shot to the end and those who had not been able to continue.
The entire Jewish population was to be shot.
Like much else, killing was something one could get used to.
Out of sight was truly out of mind.
The men of First Company, if not their captain, could still feel shame.
Search squads of German police entered the ghetto and proceeded to grab anyone they could find, regardless of age or sex. Older Jews who could not march to the shooting site were gunned down on the spot.
Shooting and beating were employed without restraint to maximize the number of Jews crammed into each cattle car.
Jurich discovered that many Jews were missing, he shot the head of the Jewish council on the spot.
all judicial procedures would be dispensed with, and Jews found outside the ghettos would be shot on the spot.
Their sense of detachment from the fate of the Jews they deported was unshakable.
they saw their victims face to face, and the killing was personal. More important, each individual policeman once again had a considerable degree of choice.
the “Jew hunt” was not a brief episode. It was a tenacious, remorseless, ongoing campaign in which the “hunters” tracked down and killed their “prey” in direct and personal confrontation. It was not a passing phase but an existential condition of constant readiness and intention to kill every last Jew who could be found.
Jews of Poland had clung to the all too understandable but mistaken assumption that even the Nazis could not be so irrational by utilitarian standards as to kill work Jews making essential contributions to the German war economy.
A “bestial stench” dominated the area.
The Jews accepted their fate; they practically lay down to be shot without waiting to be told.
the composure of the Jews was “astonishing” and “unbelievable.”15
By 1942 standards of German-Jewish relations, a quick death without the agony of anticipation was considered an example of human compassion!
The Holocaust, after all, is a story with far too few heroes and all too many perpetrators and victims.
under particular circumstances most people have a capacity for extreme violence and the destruction of human life.
For him the exception—the real “sleeper”—is the rare individual who has the capacity to resist authority and assert moral autonomy but who is seldom aware of this hidden strength until put to the test.
Controlling the manner in which people interpret their world is one way to control behavior, Milgram argues. If they accept authority’s ideology, action follows logically and willingly.
The behavior of any human being is, of course, a very complex phenomenon, and the historian who attempts to “explain” it is indulging in a certain arrogance.
If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?
Hitler’s conservative allies favored deemancipation and segregation of the Jews as part of the counterrevolution and movement of national renewal.
though this was scarcely a priority equal to dismantling the labor unions, Marxist parties, and parliamentary democracy, or to rearmament and the restoration of Germany’s great-power status.
Most important, however, a gulf had opened up between the Jewish minority and the general population.
“Ordinary Germans knew how to distinguish between an acceptable discrimination … and the unacceptable horror of genocide….
“the road to Auschwitz was built by hatred, but paved with indifference.”
