Besides, Himmler quickly came to fear the effect on his men of having to shoot women and children hour after hour, day after day. Indeed, at least one of the Einsatzgruppen commanders, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, later suffered a nervous breakdown, though only briefly. What the Nazi regime needed was a way of killing people that was inconspicuous or, as the SS planners put it, “noiseless” (geräuschlos), and that was more, again as they put it, “humane” . . . to the perpetrators.
