[wideawake]

SS concentration camp guards were not conscripts.

Multiple posters on this thread keep repeating this strange fabrication as if it was the equivalent of claiming that water is wet.

[Corporate Democrat]

Your fantasy scenario - that the SS specially sought out and conscripted Breyer and threatened his family with death if he did not work at Auschwitz is a bizarre exercise in fiction.

My fantasy scenario? I don't recall commenting on anything other than how difficult it might be to betray a police state in reality, especially when your family is at the mercy of said police state.

[Peter Libra]

SS concentration camp guards were not conscripts. I find this may be a moot point. Initially if an individual was impressed into service, I would call him a conscript. Your point seems to be that once given a choice, the individual had a choice.

That choice could be serving in the Army on active service or (it is said) a concentration camp guard. At first the propaganda of the authorities was that these camps were a work camp. This was to allay suspicions. This by the unfortunate people who were then sent to these camps. Of course, once the system was in place, we in England became aware of the atrocities. I saw the films in 1944.

I offer that a 19 year old could not have known of the horror within. By then it was too late. My problem is of knowing just how many of any population would dare to go in the face of psychopaths. If those thugs could destroy them. Not too many, I fear.

Of course most present day Germans would have stood up to the Gestapo. (s)