[gadrael]

The book "Ordinary Men" is based on thousands of pages of transcripts from a war crimes investigation in Hamburg in the early '60s, where almost a whole reserve police unit made up mostly of mainly men from Hamburg who survived the war and went back to Hamburg were interviewed and the interviews cross-referenced.

This book seems interesting, so I googled some reviews... One of the first hits was summary written by some student from Kenya, which may serve as a good explanation why Polish Government is sensitive about such things. Few quotes:
"The mass atrocities leading to these deaths were mainly carried out in Nazi Poland. "
"This was the group that carried out the atrocious killing and mass evacuations of Jews in some parts of Polland.They were, according to him, ordinary men. They were men who were drawn from ordinary citizens. They were probably before the holocaust working class individuals in Poland. According to Browning the members of this battalion were mainly from Hamburg area. "

The sad truth is that most of the people now nothing about history, and when they see wordings like "polish death camps" they draw the wrong conclusions...

[pierrem15]

One of the facts that surprised the author was almost all of the working class men were members of the social-democratic party before the war.

Guess he was surprised that all the left-wing cosmopolitanism and working class solidarity he expected was completely absent from the men's behavior.