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They aren't ideologically-motivated,
willing executioners.
They're not trained killers.
They're people with civilian jobs, like taxi drivers or plumbers.
In every respect they were completely ordinary men.
They ranged from bakers and craftsmen
to carpenters and tradesmen with office jobs.
That police battalion basically reflected
the average working population of Hamburg.
They were given a fairly abstract description of their mission,
which consisted of securing the German-occupied areas.
Major Trapp, who delivers the order, is an older man
who is very popular with his men
because he's not the typical authoritarian commander.
The men call him "Papa" Trapp.
That indicates what kind of relationship they have.
Major Trapp stands in front of the battalion and says,
"I have a terrible order to give you today."
Telling people to step out if they don't want to participate
requires them to take action.
But when we are faced with a decision
and we don't know exactly what the right thing is to do,
we usually do nothing.
Attention! Dismiss!
From a historical perspective, it's an incredibly interesting situation
because the orders are documented
and it's clear from the way they were issued that the men did not have to kill.
Part of the post-war narrative was that you had to take part,
otherwise you would have been shot yourself.
Here we can clearly show that no, that was not the case.
They could decide.
160,000 men applied to volunteer for the police,
and only 26,000 to 30,000 could be accepted.
They were then trained for six months
and, most crucially, received ideological training
which made it fairly clear to them what would be expected of them.
They were told that, as the master race,
they should ensure that National Socialist policies
were established and executed in the occupied territories.
As early as October or November 1939,
those units began shooting civilians:
Polish resistance fighters, clergy, intellectuals, even Jews,
driving people out, deporting them.
All in all, you could say that those units
put the National Socialist extermination policy into practice.
They don't fit with Hollywood's image of a Nazi perpetrator.
That image is a henchman who is not particularly intelligent
and who only cares about killing as many people as possible.
But the historical reality is that they were nothing like that.
Some of the Einsatzgruppen leaders had double doctorate degrees.
They're mostly middle-class, educated, really sophisticated people
who could definitely hold a conversation about Mozart or Beethoven.
They were taken to a forest.
Then the policemen led them into the forest one by one,
some of them women, some of them children.
The victims feared for their lives
and knew death was moments away.
And the policemen were experiencing an emotional crisis
because they knew they were about to have to kill someone at point-blank range.
Otto Ohlendorf said,
"My men suffered more than the victims."
Looking at that from today's perspective,
that's an absurd reinterpretation.
It's the perpetrators looking for psychological mechanisms
that they can use to cast themselves as victims
because of the fact they had to do things that made them suffer.
The order to liquidate
came from the Führer of the Reich.
So, in that sense, it's a policy determined by the Führer.
They lined us up at the edge of the pit, squeezed together.
Then they started shooting.
I closed my eyes, clenched my fists,
tensed all my muscles and jumped.
The fall seemed to take forever.
Finally, I landed on the bodies.
I hadn't been hit.
After a while, the shooting stopped.
I heard the Germans coming down into the pit...
to finish off those who were still moaning.
Some were still twitching and convulsing in their death throes.
They shot everyone who was still alive.
I played dead, scared of being discovered.
I can still see the image in my mind.
I remember thinking back then
that we didn't have enough earth to cover so many bodies.
I was angry that we had become animals, murderers.
We didn't see Jews as human beings.
He was a popular, respected superior, and he said,
"If I had a choice, I wouldn't give you the order. But..."
He was calling on them for solidarity, to support him with this task,
which didn't come from him,
and asking them not to abandon him.
It was a combination of coercion and free will.
They were told that they could refuse to do it,
but that they would have to accept their comrades having to do it instead.
That combination of,
"It has to be done, the police battalion has to do the job"
and, "If you're weak, you can refuse, but it's at the expense of your comrades."
That combination creates the pressure
which led to most of them taking part in the shootings.
No! We were already hoping it was over.
More potatoes?
Objectively speaking,
nothing bad happened to the objectors.
They were assigned work cleaning latrines and that kind of thing.
They were called names: bastard, dirty rat, sissy and so on.
Those men were not at home,
they didn't go back to their families at the end of the day.
Instead, they were in a group of men for an unforeseeable amount of time,
always with the same people, who could torment them,
insult them and exclude them.
You need to be very self-assured to be able to endure that.
It might be only a social punishment and not a physical one,
but for human beings, a social punishment is one of the hardest things to bear.
The first step towards mass murder
is a categorical distinction between "us" and "them."
Everyone noticed people losing their jobs,
being forced to leave their homes,
having their belongings auctioned off, businesses being "Aryanized."
All of that was a public process.
It wasn't a secret.
And that process reinforces the division.
They are "them," while "we" are the others.
If I define someone as different in theory
and also treat them differently in practice,
the willingness to use violence against that person
will naturally grow.
Our leader told our group of 12 men about our future tasks.
We would have to gather up and shoot the Jewish population.
The convoy stopped about 70 to 90 meters from the pit.
The Gruppenführer divided up his men as follows:
Six men to guard and six men to shoot.
I was tasked with shooting.
The shooting then proceeded as follows:
About 45 to 50 people were separated and led to the pit.
They had to line up facing us.
And that's how they were shot.
Each of the perpetrators developed their own way
of justifying what they were doing.
"Someone has to do the dirty work."
Or maybe, "We have a historical duty to fulfill."
Another factor might have been, "I'm better at this than other people."
They all had justifications
that allowed them to find meaning in the murders.
Ultimately, this shows that mass murder
is committed by thinking people who do not execute orders like a machine,
but who think and comprehend what they are doing.
I tried, and was able, to shoot only children.
The man next to me would shoot the mother, and I would shoot her child.
I told myself that the child, after all,
would not be able to live without its mother.
He translates his truly appalling act
into something morally good in a sense of "redemption."
That's the key to understand why the men did this.
It is not blind obedience.
Instead, they interpret the commands in a way that is acceptable for them
and allows them to see themselves as morally righteous.
Only afterwards did it occur to me that it wasn't right.
You started to flounder,
the clear ideas you used to have were gone.
Stop arguing!
- Stop it! - He started after all!
For God's sake!
- What do you want? - I want to go home!
They always found ways to do it
that would keep the machine running.
Someone would say they were indisposed or they felt too weak that day.
But it wasn't an act of resistance,
it was just an attempt to extract the individual
without questioning the legitimacy of the police battalion as a whole.
We will not let life make us bitter
Don't be afraid Don't be afraid, Rosemary!
Not even when the whole earth shakes
And the world is lifted off its hinges
The terrifying and central issue
in the case of Police Battalion 101
is that you don't need to act out of conviction,
to be motivated by ideology,
to carry out a mass killing.
The prosecution was a disaster.
Lots of material and documents had been collected,
there was really good evidence,
but there was a lack of will to punish those who had been involved in the crimes.
There have been several genocides since the Holocaust.
There have been massacres and mass murders.
There are other contexts
where we find those mechanisms
that lead people to kill others without any personal
or psychological motives.
Wherever people can say to themselves,
"I am only a cog in the wheel, I am not responsible."
With that attitude, almost anything is possible.
Come on, attention. For home.
Yeah, a little cuddling.
Good.