population?What about the people who helped the Nazi’s, who were not German? According to Goldhagen, “Germans stood up for Poles” and when seventy-eight out of three hundred Poles were to be killed to set an example Trapp was remembered as being “very shaken after this action. He even wept. He was what one would call a fine human being and I deem it impossible that it was he who had ordered the shooting of the hostages.” This event, according to Goldhagen, illustrates the juxtapositions the Germans and in this specific case the Reserve Battalion 101, had toward the Poles, for they indeed did kill them but spared more then they were ordered to. This clearly exemplifies to Goldhagen a very disturbing view that they could kill Jews by the thousands at a time but to kill seventy-eight Poles was a tragedy. The way I see it, the Germans were not fighting against the Poles, it would have been like killing the United States killing British soldiers when they were fighting against the Germans. In war, there is always an enemy and, in a twisted point of view, the Germans believed that their enemies were the Jews. This again does not prove to me that these men were ‘ordinary Germans’ and ‘fanatic anti-Semites’. According to Browning the “German police quite naturally had considerable contact with Poles who collaborated in the Final Solution and helped them track down Jews… Often unwilling to make accusatory statements about their comrades or to be truthful about themselves, these men must have found considerable psychological relief in sharing blame with the Poles.” Browning continues on to explain how the Poles helped the Germans either by showing them were the Jews were hiding, “ The residential district was searched again. In many cases with the aid of the Poles” , or just bringing them flasks of alcohol to ease their troubles. What seems to trouble me...
