Should The Policemen be put on Trial?
I personally believe that the policemen in Reserve Police Battalion 101 should be placed on trial for murder. The first chapter of the book states that Trapp explained the men what they had to do, he offered any of the older men among them to leave the mission if they decided that they did not want to carry out with it. That is what I feel is the main argument here. They were given the option to leave, and those who did not leave, and killed the Jews in Jozefow should be put on trial for murder. They pulled the trigger, and nobody forced them to do it. Yes, you can argue that they were orders, and they did not want to look like cowards in front of their comrades, but what they are dealing with is murder. That should be enough of a reason not to do it. To kill not only one person, but over a thousand people so that you do not look like a coward in front of your comrades is a very pathetic thing.
On the other side of the coin, we have the thought that they should be placed on trial because they committed murder to unarmed civilians, and most of the men did not take up the offer to withdraw from the mission.
These German soldiers were to take “The male Jews of working age were to be separated and taken to a work camp. The remaining Jews-the women, children, and elderly-were to be shot on the spot by the Battalion”(Browning 2). The men in this battalion were to round up all of these Jews, lie them down, and shoot each and every one in the back of the neck. That is murder. They did this because the Jews had instigated the American boycott that had damaged Germany. I do not think that killing thousands of them is the best way to resolve this issue.
Many Jews were taken to killing graves, and they began at the last row of the barracks. They would make them undress, and then they would put them into killing graves. Heinrich Bocholt gave a very descriptive account of what he saw. “Behind each shooter stood several other SD men who constantly kept the magazines of the submachine guns full and handed them to the shooter. I definitely remember that the naked Jews were driven directly into graves and forced to lie down quite precisely on top of those who had been shot before them.
The atrocities of war can take an “ordinary man” and turn him into a ruthless killer under the right circumstances. This is exactly what Browning argues happened to the “ordinary Germans” of Reserve Police Battalion 101 during the mass murders and deportations during the Final Solution in Poland. Browning argues that a superiority complex was instilled in the German soldiers because of the mass publications of Nazi propaganda and the ideological education provided to German soldiers, both of which were rooted in hatred, racism, and anti-Semitism. Browning provides proof of Nazi propaganda and first-hand witness accounts of commanders disobeying orders and excusing reservists from duties to convince the reader that many of the men contributing to the mass
Then those who were too young or too old to work were sent to the showers. Once the showers were tightly packed, the Nazi’s would turn on the water and drop in canisters of chemicals that would react with the water and release a deadly gas. Within minutes, everyone in the shower would be dead. The bodies would be hauled out and burned. Those who were not selected to die didn’t fair much better.
The violent actions of the Germans during this event force an image upon them that conveys the message that the Germans had little respect for the life of a person, specifically that of a follower of Judaism, and their capability to act viciously. If the Germans are acting so cruelly and begin to act this way as an instinct towards the Jews, they are losing the ability to sympathize with other people. This would be losing the one thing that distinguishes a human from any other species, and this quote is an example of the dehumanization of the victim, as well as the perpetrator. Later on in the night, all the Jewish prisoners discover their fate at the camps and what will happen to people at the crematorium. They respond by saying to the people around them that they “.can’t let them kill us like that, like cattle in the slaughterhouse” (Wiesel 31).
This was just one of the many forms of punishment; there were many more and some were just as bad. The second form of punishment is forced labor. Forced labor was almost exactly like slavery; slavery of the Jewish race. There was a minimum working day of eleven hours in all of the concentration camps; they were forced to work for free at many different companies that manufactured weapons and other things for the war against their own people.... ...
When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs. Without passion or hate, they shot their prisoners, who were forced to approach the trenches one by one and offer their necks. Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns. " (Wiesel 6)". The Jews were scared and frightened by the Germans, they listened to everything they had told them to do in fear of dying.
The events which have become to be known as The Holocaust have caused much debate and dispute among historians. Central to this varied dispute is the intentions and motives of the perpetrators, with a wide range of theories as to why such horrific events took place. The publication of Jonah Goldhagen’s controversial but bestselling book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” in many ways saw the reigniting of the debate and a flurry of scholarly and public interest. Central to Goldhagen’s disputed argument is the presentation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust as ordinary Germans who largely, willingly took part in the atrocities because of deeply held and violently strong anti-Semitic beliefs. This in many ways challenged earlier works like Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” which arguably gives a more complex explanation for the motives of the perpetrators placing the emphasis on circumstance and pressure to conform. These differing opinions on why the perpetrators did what they did during the Holocaust have led to them being presented in very different ways by each historian. To contrast this I have chosen to focus on the portrayal of one event both books focus on in detail; the mass shooting of around 1,500 Jews that took place in Jozefow, Poland on July 13th 1942 (Browning:2001:225). This example clearly highlights the way each historian presents the perpetrators in different ways through; the use of language, imagery, stylistic devices and quotations, as a way of backing up their own argument. To do this I will focus on how various aspects of the massacre are portrayed and the way in which this affects the presentation of the per...
On March 16, 1968, in the Quang Ngai region of Vietnam, specifically My Lai, the United States military was involved in an appalling slaughter of approximately 500 Vietnamese civilians. There are numerous arguments as to why this incident even had the capacity to occur. Although some of the arguments seem valid, can one really make excuses for the slaughter of innocent people? The company that was responsible for the My Lai incident was the Charlie Company and throughout the company there were many different accounts of what happened that reprehensible day. Therefore there are a few contradictions about what had occurred, such as what the commanding officers exact instructions for the soldiers were. Even with these contradictions the results are obvious. The question that must be posed is whether these results make the American soldiers involved that day “guilty”. There is the fact that the environment of the Vietnam War made it very confusing to the soldiers exactly who the enemy was, as well as providing a pent up frustration due to the inability to even engage in real combat with the enemy. If this is the case though, why did some soldiers with the same frustrations refuse the orders and sit out on the action, why did some cry while firing, and why then did one man go so far as to place himself between the Vietnamese and the firing soldiers? If these men who did not see the sense in killing innocents were right with their actions, then how come the ones who did partake were all found not guilty in court? The questions can keep going back and forth on this issue, but first what happened that day must be examined.
I stated before about how I would have forgave Karl for his wrongdoing to the Jewish people and others. The Holocaust was a tragic thing and we can all agree to that. When I think of the military, I think about learning respect for your commanding officers and other soldiers and civilians. Karl was commanded to shoot anyone who was trying to escape from the burning house so he listened to his orders when a family did jump. If I was there in Karl 's shoes, I for one would have shot the family when they jumped even though it would have been wrong and I wouldn 't want too. In the symposium responses, Lawrence L. Langer stated, "When we call the murder of a helpless Jewish father and a child a 'wrong, ' we ease the crime into the realm of familiar and forgivable transgressions and relieve ourselves of the burden of facing its utter horror" (188). No matter what word we use to describe the killing of millions of helpless Jews, it will still feel like what Langer
The massacre of the Jews during the hail of Hitler was much like the Salem witch trials; both used blame, during the witch trials if someone in the town didn’t like someone they could say they used witchcraft, and they’d be tortured. Just like during the Holocaust, the Jews didn’t do anything wrong but they still got blamed for events they didn’t do, and they were punished, tortured, and killed every day. The witches and the Jews couldn’t explain their selves; they were mistreated, and had no rights like the regular people. Also, the groups were led by one power to exterminate the people being accused, the council led the witch hunt in Massachusetts, and Hitler led the genocide of the Jews. Ultimately, Hitler was successful with the genocide of the harmless Jewish people in Germany, the council in Salem wasn’t as successful, the council tortured and killed many innocent people.
The Nuremburg trials were well thought out and fair. While many of the Nazis were in fact punished, few received harsh punishments at all. Mos...
The movie, Training Day, demonstrates how some police officers take advantage of their positions which is realistic. Mikkelsen states that, ?The new movie Training Day is an excellent fictional demonstration of how the State, in this case the police, provide a ?legalized channel for crime? (Mikkelsen 1).? It is hard to define the line between doing the right thing and doing the wrong thing to stop a crime. As Mikkelson explains, ?Many of the events are to be expected: violence against suspects, confiscation and use of drugs and especially money, violations of due process, graft (Mikkelsen 1).? At the end of the movie the main character is murdered and the police department makes up a story venerating his death in a positive manner. In all truth Harris was murdered by the Russians because he lost his temper and killed someone who was ?talking trash? about him. This is shown when Mikkelsen says, ?The state must defend cops, when possible, because publicity about ?bad cops? does not reflect well o...
First of all, to get a proper understanding of the events in my book, I did some research to paint a picture of the holocaust. The reason that the Germans started the holocaust a long time ago was because they believed that the Jewish people were minions of the devil, and that they were bent on destroying the Christian mind. Many Christians in Germany were also mad at them for killing Jesus in the Bible. Throughout the holocaust, Hitler, the leader of Germany at the time, and the Nazis killed about six million Jewish people, more than two-thirds of all of the Jewish people in Europe at the time. They also killed people who were racially inferior, such as people of Jehovah's Witness religion, and even some Germans that had physical and mental handicaps. The concentration camp that appears in this story is Auschwitz, which was three camps in one: a prison camp, and extermination camp, and a slave labor camp. When someone was sent to Auschw...
When Hitler said they were relocating them to someplace else to live for a while he just dumped all of them into these concentration camps. He ordered many of them to be killed right at the start of getting them getting to these camps. They could be killed in gas chambers, shot in front of eve...
Soot and ashes soil the mud where the Jews are kneeling down to weep at their dead brethren. Still to this day the ash remains of the Jews burned at Auschwitz lays a few feet under the ground buried and when the ground ices over and thaws, it pushes the ashes to the surface as if it wants you to be a witness to uncover the horrors that happened there. The smell of them gassing the Jews had to be horrid, not just the soldiers had to deal with the smell, the Jews did as well, but the Jews had no idea what the smell was because they were unaware of what happened to the others that did not pass through the selection. The Jews were completely in the dark about what happened if you did not pass the
In order for a military to execute its function, every platform of the chain of command must expect and demand obedience to commands (Montrose, 2013), because if this does not happen many lives can be at stake. A simply failure to comply with the orders given can not only jeopardize the lives of the soldiers, it can compromise the safety of all military personnel involved, even in the matter of national security. Utilitarianism has a core theory that some actions may be considered right or wrong relying on the effects of the outcomes. This theory is mostly what could be applied this situation of the detainees in the military prisons. During this time, national security was weak, the country was being attacked and threatened, and thousands of innocent civilians lost their lives. The military could was only looking out for the interest of the country and many interrogation techniques were used to get information that could lead the capture of Al-Qaeda leaders. Soldiers are sent to warzones without the ability to deny their own obligation to war, just because they believe it to be morally wrong. They are sent and receive orders under the assumption the government has all the information needed to make the best decision for the country. According to the periodical, Unjust War and a Soldier’s Moral Dilemma, individual soldiers who have