Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
Christopher R. Browning
Language: English
Pages: 271
ISBN: 0060995068
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews.
Armoured Warfare and the Fall of France: Rare Photographs from Wartime Archives
Barbarossa Derailed: The Battle for Smolensk 10 July-10 September 1941, Volume 1
Guerre totale à l'Est: Nouvelles perspectives sur la guerre germano-soviétique (1941-1945)
That it was a Jewish action and declined. Thus, he had not gone with First Company to either Miédzyrzec or Serokomla. Talcyn did not begin as a Jewish action, however, and Buchmann was in the school when Trapp carried out the selection of the Poles, though it was no accident that Trapp sent him directly back to Radzyń before the killing of Jews from the Kock ghetto began. In Radzyń Buchmann had made no effort to hide his feelings. On the contrary, he “was indignant about how the Jews were.
Experiences they’d had during an action. From their stories I could gather that they had just finished a shooting action. I remember as especially crass that one of the men said now we eat ‘the brains of slaughtered Jews.’ “26 Only the witness found this “joke” less than hilarious. In such an atmosphere it was quite easy for the officers and NCOs to form a “Jew hunt” patrol or firing squad simply by asking for volunteers. Most emphatic in this regard was Adolf Bittner.* “Above all I must.
Policemen from the rank and file sample of 174 managed to put their reserve service to good use and made a postwar career in the police. Not surprisingly, the interrogations contained little information about the ease with which these twenty-six men continued in the police. While only two of the reservists had been Party members, nine of the NCOs had belonged, and three had been in the SS as well. Hoffmann and Wohlauf, of course, had also been in both the Party and the SS. Hoffmann mentioned a.
Police Battalion 101 must, of course, be used with considerable caution. Problems of judicial calculation, involving both self-incrimination and incrimination of comrades, weighed heavily upon each witness. The effects of twenty-five years of memory loss and distortion, even when not feigned for judicial convenience, were equally important. Psychological defense mechanisms, especially repression and projection, crucially shaped the testimony as well. Nowhere do all these qualifications about the.
Policies they were asked to carry out. Fourth, ideological tracts like those prepared for the Order Police certainly reflected the wider ambience within which the reserve policemen were trained and instructed as well as the political culture in which they had lived for the previous decade. As Lieutenant Drucker said with extraordinary understatement, “Under the influence of the times, my attitude to the Jews was marked by a certain aversion.” The denigration of Jews and the proclamation of.