Ordinary Men In The Holocaust

Brainwashed, heartless Nazis. Many believe these were the kind of men who were involved in the Holocaust, which makes it much easier to dismiss them and believe we could never become like them. However, this was not truly the case for many of those who participated in the Holocaust. These men were not brainwashed, and some were not even Nazis— they were simply ordinary men.
People often associate the Holocaust with men who had been indoctrinated with the Nazi ideology, but many of the men who joined the police battalion were not initially Party members. From those men who came from the lower-middle class only about 30% of them were a part of the Nazi Party in 1942. While this seems like only a small part of the whole, from the working class
Captain Hoffmann led the Third Company of Reserve Police Battalion 101, which included three platoons. His whole company was scheduled to make Northern Lublin judenfrei, meaning literally “free of Jews.” Captain Hoffmann read from a piece of paper telling his men While his company had been mostly spared from the previous killings, they were ordered to be a part of transporting the Jews in Lublin. Although this was technically a transport job, the men were told to shoot any of the sick, frail, or infants who could not move (115). Meanwhile, Captain Hoffmann began experiencing severe stomach pain which often caused him to stay in bed while his men went out on their assignments. However, it seemed to be more than simply a finicky stomach because Hoffmann’s men realized that Hoffmann’s “‘alleged’ bouts of stomach cramps, confining him safely to bed, coincided all to consistently with company actions that might involve either unpleasantness or danger” (118). The various actions Hoffmann and his men had to perform began to upset his stomach to the point in which he was sick before every action. The way that these killings affected Hoffmann is clear in the way that his body reacted to the “unpleasantness.” Hoffmann is, therefore, a good example of how normal these men really were. It is such a normal human reaction to get a sick stomach over something as atrocious as the murder
As logical as this reason sounds, it is, nonetheless, a historically inaccurate assertion. While Browning only examines one battalion from the Holocaust in his book, it seems reasonable to assume that the consequences those men received for choosing not to kill were common among other battalions as well. For Reserve Police Battalion 101, at the beginning of one of their first assignments they were given the opportunity to opt out. Their leader, Major Trapp, “made an extraordinary offer: if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step out” (2). Not only were they given the option to withdraw at the beginning, some men asked to opt out right before the action at Jósefów, and others withdrew after it started (61). Often, the men who chose not to participate were restationed and assigned jobs, such as driving a truck being on guard duty. The men were not killed for the decision they made, and the consequences they received for this choice were minimal. One of the most obvious “consequences” of a man’s choice not to kill was being considered less manly and more cowardly among his companions. The men might have felt embarrassed among their friends for not having gone through with the killing, it