The material is high as it is based on both the questions and the trial many members of 101 ° reserve battalion of the German police in the 1960s by the German Federal Justice, and by confrontations with some of these men and author.
How to understand that a few hundred German citizens, hamburgers, too old to be enrolled in the troops of the line, and thus a priori more mature, practicing all trades, comprising only few of them were able Nazis, in their almost all with the exception of 10 to 20% maximum of them run women, children, old men by the thousands in conditions of bestiality described?
Facts:
1 / numbers of Jews shot by the battalion between July 1942 and November 1943 = 38,000 (minimum estimate).
2 / number of Jews deported to Treblinka = 45,200 (ditto).
Combinations ghettos evacuations, mass murders; everything goes. But their commander Trapp had left the choice, soon before the first massacre of Jozefow in Poland not to commit these crimes. Some (very few) seized this offer. They were not worried - just no German was never prosecuted or even less for refusing deported during World War II to participate in the murder of Jews.
The context of war violence that liberates, identifies the enemy to exterminate Jews, racist ideology, the bureaucratisation of Murder, the explanation of obedience by Milgram's experiments (very relevant) part of the explanation.
"The concepts of loyalty, duty, discipline become moral imperatives annihilate any identification with the victim." Trait revealed by Anna Harendt cited with praise in the book, in its bright Eichmann in Jerusalem.
"Control how people interpret their world, Milgram said, is one of their behavior control tools."
The dehumanization of victims treated like dirty goods more also facilitated the task of these killers.
Christopher Browning also allows us to reaffirm that "human responsibility is ultimately the domain of the individual."
What remarkable work!
