Reminds me of **Ordinary Men. Lots of parallels to draw.

https://archive.ph/m0IAd

In the end, what disturbs the reader more than the policemen's escape from punishment is their capacity -- as the ordinary men they were, as men not much different from those we know or even from ourselves -- to kill as they did.

Battalion 101's killing wasn't, as Mr. Browning points out, the kind of "battlefield frenzy" occasionally seen in all wars, when soldiers, having faced death, and having seen their friends killed, slaughter enemy prisoners or even civilians. It was, rather, the cold-blooded fulfillment of German national policy, and involved, for the policemen, a process of accommodation to orders that required them to do things they would never have dreamed they would ever do, and to justify their actions, or somehow reinterpret them, so that they would not see themselves as evil people.

Fulfillment of hospital/CDC policies.

Mr. Browning's meticulous account, and his own acute reflections on the actions of the battalion members, demonstrate the important effect that the situation had on those men: the orders to kill, the pressure to conform, and the fear that if they didn't kill they might suffer some kind of punishment or, at least, damage to their careers. In fact, the few who tried to avoid killing got away with it; but most believed, or at least could tell themselves, that they had little choice.

But Mr. Browning's account also illustrates other factors that made it possible for the battalion's ordinary men not only to kill but, ultimately, to kill in a routine, and in some cases sadistic, way. Each of these factors helped the policemen feel that they were not violating, or violating only because it was necessary, their personal moral codes.

Protocols. Mask Nazis. Power trips.

One such factor was the justification for killing provided by the anti-Semitic rationales to which the policemen had been exposed since the rise of Nazism, rationales reinforced by the battalion's officers. The Jews were presented not only as evil and dangerous but also, in some way, as responsible for the bombing deaths of German women and children. Another factor was the process of dehumanization: abetted by Nazi racial theories that were embraced by policemen who preferred not to see themselves as killers, Jews were seen as less than people, as creatures who could be killed without the qualms that would be provoked in them were they to kill fellow Germans or even Slavs. It was particularly when the German policemen came across German Jews speaking their own language, especially those from their own city, that they felt a human connection that made it harder to kill them.

Treating unvaxxed different than vaxxed. Didn’t someone just say unvaxxed should be flown somewhere and shot by kids with Ak47s?

The policemen were also helped by the practice of trying not to refer to their activities as killing: they were involved in "actions" and "resettlements." Moreover, the responsibility wasn't theirs; it belonged to the authorities -- Major Trapp as well as, ultimately, the leaders of the German state -- whose orders they were merely carrying out. Indeed, whatever responsibility they did have was diffused by dividing the task into parts and by sharing it with other people and processes. It was shared, first of all, by others in the battalion, some of whom provided cordons so that Jews couldn't escape and some of whom did the shooting. It was shared by the Trawnikis, who were brought in to do the shooting whenever possible so that the battalion could focus on the roundups. And it was shared, most effectively, by the death camps, which made the men's jobs immensely easier, since stuffing a Jew into a cattle car, though it sealed his fate almost as surely as a neck shot, left the actual killing to a machine-like process that would take place far away, one for which the battalion members didn't need to feel personally responsible.

Protocols. Standard of care. Evidence based care. Trust the Science.