It is always difficult to understand what motivated Germans
and their collaborators to do such things. It remains a dilemma to know whether
they specifically hated Jews and wanted to kill them, or whether they were ordinary
people caught up in the evil of the Nazi regime.
If they were just ordinary men and women, the question is whether, today, we
would behave in a similar way in similar circumstances.
‘The
next day sixty Jews were herded into a garage forecourt for forced labour. When
the work was finished, the militia started a new bout of beatings, using crow-bars,
spades and rifles. Many were killed on the spot’.
Waldemar Ginsburg.
Lithuanian
collaborators murder Lithuanian Jews, Kaunas, 1941.
