Ww2 And The Holocaust Analysis

History
WWII and the Holocaust

Policemen in the holocaust did not obey orders to kill Jews voluntarily and were just ‘ordinary men’ pulled out of Germany to fight for their country. Christopher Browning argues, that the policemen in the holocaust did not voluntarily kill jJews against Daniel Goldhagen whose side of the argument is that Policemen did voluntarily kill on command. Browning shows the reader that a majority of the nazi policemen opted out of the killings and tried to stay out of the massacres as much as possible.

The Holocaust, conducted by Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, started in 1933 when Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany. Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and sparked World War II in Europe. Hitler and the Nazi’s had a …show more content…
Some only shot children because they knew the children could not survive without their mothers.“Trapp tried to keep his men out of the thick of things succeeding in having them do no more than comb the woods, leaving the killing and burning of villages to the hiwis”(241). Some commanders tried to keep the men in their battalions out of the murder sprees. Men were drafted from Germany to join the killing squads, some of these men were at a young age and voluntarily killed because their lives had been formed around nazi ideals. The older men with more experience in Germany who were drafted knew that the killings were wronged and the victims were innocent. “Others had limited their participation in the killing process, refraining when the could do so without great cost or inconvenience”(127). Policemen tried their best to stay out of the massacres and away from the individuals who were involved with them as best as they could. The ones who were against the killings were often looked down upon by their peers, thinking of them as weak because they would not participate. Often, kin of the policemen disagreed with the killings and shamed the members of the family who participated in the crimes. “I was sitting at breakfast one morning with my husband when an ordinary policeman of my husbands platoon… and told me that i’d get in deep trouble for talking that way”(127). Members of the …show more content…
Policemen drafted from germany joined killing squads for the purpose of murdering jews in eastern Europe. These men were ruthless killing machines who wiped out six million jews in a few years. Policemen had become used to killing and treated it as a normal everyday activity. "In the months since jozefow many had become numbed, indifferent, and in some cases eager killers”(38). Policemen had gotten to the point where they wanted to kill because they felt as if the victims deserved it. Men were often shown laughing and enjoying themselves while killing like it was a hobby. They had become ‘numb’ to the fact that they were murdering other human beings and this was all because of the Nazi propaganda displayed back home.“What was trapps attitude towards killing poles? I can still recall very vividly that our battalion commander was very shaken after this action. He even wept. He was what one would call a fine human being and I deem it impossible that he was the one who ordered the killing of the hostages”(240). A policeman had recollections of the commander of Police Battalion 101, Major Trapp and his emotions when it came to killing poles. Trapp is seen crying on the scene when ordered to kill poles and did not order them himself. Although later in the statement the Policeman “does not say that Trapp became unsettled and

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Ww2 And The Holocaust Analysis

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