Reserve Police Battalion 101 was founded on May 6, 1940. During World War II, paramilitary organizations were formed under the leadership of the SS. The 101 was mainly comprised of men in their 30's, who were considered too old to join the regular Army. To begin with, 101's assignment was to guard Polish prisoners of war behind German lines. They also participated in the expulsion of Polish residents from occupied areas, and the kidnapping of Polish children for "Germanization". Later on, in March and April 1942, 101 transported Jewish people from Lublin to concentration camps. The mass murders that they committed were simply atrocious. They were provided with alcohol and extra ammunition. They rounded up Jewish people, spent seventeen hours shooting them at point blank range while they begged/screamed/cried/tried to escape. They left the bodies laying where they fell, looted. Their uniforms were bloody and full of body tissue. This scene was repeated over and over. Estimates suggest that they were responsible for the murders of 83,000 Jewish people. Just their Battalion...there were others just like it. That is a massive amount of people.

I think that it is important to look at these events from all sides. People voluntarily join military organizations all over the world. People are drafted or conscripted into military service in times of war. Some countries even have a mandatory minimum service requirement. People generally find this reasonable and acceptable. The men of 101 fit into these generally reasonable and acceptable categories. What separates them from most other military organizations is the wide scale of their war crimes and the documentation of them. There is a saying about what is done in the dark, rises to the light...but they did their dark in the middle of the day. It was seen. It was photographed. It was documented. I do not think that most of these men were inherently evil people, and I am certain they were plagued by images and flashbacks for the rest of their lives about things they had done and experienced. (As they should have been.) A few times in the book, it was mentioned that they voluntarily let them switch out or sent those who could not continue back to the trucks, so I know it affected at least some of them. I doubt seriously that you could be party to the execution of 83,000 people and it not stay in your mind. I think that it is really interesting to consider how and why these men found themselves in this position to begin with, how they managed to carry out this gruesome and murderous work, and how some of them found themselves enjoying it. I find it interesting to consider the implications of an uprising to protest or refuse to do these crimes. Were they afraid they would be murdered? Likely. Were they born and raised into obedience without question? Likely. Were they anti-Semitic and thought this was really the best way to rid German society from the plague of people that were targeted demographics? Probably. The entire Holocaust is fascinating because of these multifaceted questions and how groups of people let themselves believe nonsense and follow orders and do horrible things to human beings. This is just a drop in the bucket of that, and a great topic for a discussion on human nature.

I thought the book itself was quite well written and researched. Reading material like this is not for the faint of heart, because it was really grim. It is an important book and important topic for several reasons. The people who were murdered deserve to have their stories known. Knowing how and why this type of action came to be carried out and accepted is important so that society may not travel down that path again. It is important to the discussion of human nature and the willingness to follow leaders. For those reasons, it was a great book, despite the subject matter being horrific.