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Small point -- the soldiers generally guarding the ghettos were not actually soldiers per se, but Ordnung Polizie. When the Nazis took over, the police force was nationalized under Himmler, who organized a system of battalions where police would be rotated into and out of units of OrdPo being used in eastern Europe. The chilling part is that except for a few thousand younger men assigned to the OrdPo, the OrdPo was made up of men too old to be drafted into military service, whi had grown up before the Nazis took power. One of the reasons Himmler used his own organization was because he didn't believe the military would cooperate. The OrdPo were armed and trained ina similar manner to the army, but wore distinctive off-green uniforms.

Records show that much of the "work" of the Holocaust was put to Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Trawniki auxilaries while OrdPo would form a perimeter and turn their backs to whatever was going on -- after a few trial runs of mass murder, Himmler's 2nd man (can't recall his name) decided that the emotional trauma was causing the OrdPo to be too ineffectual for what Himmler had planned. He also determined that large quantities of alcohol should be issued before and after "Jewish actions," which caused numerous incidents of friendly fire. At Slutka, a unit of Lithuanian auxiliaries wholesale opened fire on German army troops interfering with a roud-up.