Should The Policemen be put on Trial? I personally believe that the policemen in Reserve Police Battalion 101 should be placed on trial for murder. The first chapter of the book states that Trapp explained the men what they had to do, he offered any of the older men among them to leave the mission if they decided that they did not want to carry out with it. That is what I feel is the main argument here. They were given the option to leave, and those who did not leave, and killed the Jews in Jozef ow should be put on trial for murder.
They pulled the trigger, and nobody forced them to do it. Yes, you can argue that they were orders, and they did not want to look like cowards in front of their comrades, but what they are dealing with is murder. That should be enough of a reason not to do it. To kill not only one person, but over a thousand people so that you do not look like a coward in front of your comrades is a very pathetic thing. On the other side of the coin, we have the thought that they should be placed on trial because they committed murder to unarmed civilians, and most of the men did not take up the offer to withdraw from the mission. These German soldiers were to take “The male Jews of working age were to be separated and taken to a work camp.
The remaining Jews-the women, children, and elderly-were to be shot on the spot by the Battalion” (Browning 2).
The men in this battalion were to round up all of these Jews, lie them down, and shoot each and every one in the back of the neck. That is murder. They did this because the Jews had instigated the American boycott that had damaged Germany.
The Essay on John Proctor Abigail Man Trials
At the end of the play, The Crucible, Reverend Hale insists that John Proctor (a man in his middle thirties with a wife and two sons) design to hang instead of admitting he was with the devil is an act of excessive pride on stubbornness. I think that John Proctors last act was an act of honor. Reason being, if someone did not do something why should they say they did it and say they saw others do ...
I do not think that killing thousands of them is the best way to resolve this issue. Many Jews were taken to killing graves, and they began at the last row of the barracks. They would make them undress, and then they would put them into killing graves. Heinrich Boc holt gave a very descriptive account of what he saw. “Behind each shooter stood several other SD men who constantly kept the magazines of the submachine guns full and handed them to the shooter. I definitely remember that the naked Jews were driven directly into graves and forced to lie down quite precisely on top of those who had been shot before them.
The shooter then fired off a burst at those prone victims” (Browning 138-139).
This shows one of the most gruesome acts of murder that I have ever heard of in my life. They would just line them up and kill them. How someone can think that that is not murder is unbelievable. These were unarmed civilians who were just lined up and killed. They had no real reason to be brutally murdered.
The men in the Reserve Police Battalion 101 obviously committed brutal murder on the Jews. They should be put on trial. They brutally murdered civilians who were unarmed, and just regular people. They really had no just reason to do what they did. They were given the option to leave the mission, and few of them did due to the fear of being thought of as a coward. If they are willing to murder thousands of Jews simply because they do not want to be thought of as a coward, that should be even more of a reason to put them on trial for murder.
They could never win by saying that they did it because they did not want to be thought of as a coward. Personally, I think that they are cowards because they did an unjust act because they were afraid of being called a coward.