Every time in that past that I had studied the Holocaust I have always studied it from the perspective of the Jews; as I read Ordinary Men, I was able to learn from the quite different perspective of those perpetrating this atrocity. I thought before that the men who perpetrated this atrocity were all morally corrupt and inherently bad people, but I was wrong. What alarmed me most of all was the fact of how easy it was to get a large group of ordinary (and by ordinary I mean “morally” too) men to kill and torture thousands of people including defenseless women and children. The alarming thing was the process that they went through to get to this point. I think the attitude of Major Trapp exemplifies this process.
In the beginning the men, and especially their leader, did not like the…show more content… The book said of Trapp when he was ordered to kill the Jews in Józefów: “[his] distress was a secret to no one” (58). He obviously did not like the idea of taking thousands of innocent people into the woods and shooting them in the back of the head, this visibly affected him to the point that he often broke down crying and often was found pacing the room. We can see that this sentiments is obviously shared by many men of the 101 battalion by the way many of them could not stomach taking part in the massacre after starting it. The scary thing though, is that even though they did not like doing it, almost all held the same reaction as major Trapp: “Man… such jobs don’t suit me. But orders are orders” (58). Even though many (if not all) of the men felt an incredible amount of guilt and knew what they were doing was very, very wrong, they did it anyways because “orders are orders.” This is a dangerous thing, because it allows one person
