Reserve Police Battalion 101

In the first place, the actions taken or refused by individual members of the battalion varied greatly. This variation indicates that even under circumstances designed to smother conformity and produce a group of cold-blooded murderers who obey every order given, there were still individuals who refused to carry out such murderous orders directly or indirectly.

Therefore, there is an assumption in the question, or "notion," which is not supported by the facts--everyone in the battalion did not behave as cold-blooded murderers, and therefore it cannot be argued that "anyone" would behave as the worst and most murderous of the members of the battalion behaved.

In fact, Major Trapp himself provided loopholes in the "situation" which allowed some policemen to defy orders from on high:

From the time Major Trapp, with choked voice and tears streaming down his cheeks, offered to excuse those "not up to it" . . . and protected the first man to take up his offer . . . , a situation of putative duress did not exist in the battalion (171).

There also existed in the unit "a set of unwritten 'ground rules'" which included these provisions:

For small shooting actions, volunteers were requested or shooters were chosen from among those who were known to be willing to kill or

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eedom and meaning. Relevant to Browning's study is Frankl's discussion of the responsibility of the individual to recognize his or her freedom of choice, despite the conditioning circumstances which prevail, and to take action based on that freedom which will transcend that conditioning. By basing his book and his logotherapy on the experiences he endured in a concentration camp, Frankl makes it possible for the reader to see that an individual can be free under any conditions. If Frankl and other camp victims can do it, then anybody can. Frankl writes: "Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn" (107). Here Frankl is suggesting that there are good and bad men in every social group. Just as there were individuals who quickly chose to surrender to the conditioning and cooperate with the Nazis in order to advance their own personal agenda, so were there Nazis who, despite their own social conditioning, showed kindness to the camp victims. Frankl's point is that, like physiological conditioning, social conditioning cannot be used as an excuse for one's action or lack of action, or for one's use of freedom or decision to not act in freedom. In both cases, the meaning of one's li
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1283
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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