Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland --- Christopher R. Browning
A summary from the Amazon page: "Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever."
Ordinary men. Ordinary people. Ordinary governments.
An unnerving book.
Most people do not know that the "civil" police in Germany were subsumed into the party security apparatus first by Goering and then Himmler, and these units "followed orders" all over the place, particularly in the East. Eventually, about everything went through the banal but murderous Reichsfuhrer-SS/Chef der Deutschen Polizei.
DHS and FEMA are two alphabets essential for doing the same thing in the USA. In a previous life I was in a vol org that - after 9-11 - became nothing more than a FedGov satrapy. I walked, because FedGov had no legitimate reason to be involved. Conformity and control, comrades.
So much so that these otherwise ordinary men often refereed to what they were doing as a ‘’jundenjag'', a ''jew hunt'', as if their victims were ducks or rabbits.