Tom Cruise lost an eye for his cause, what did you lose?

At the end of the reading, Browning questions the actions of the men at the historical event at Jozefow. After all, these men “were not from a generation that had been reared and educated solely under the Nazi regime and thus had no other political norms or standards by which to measure their behavior” (127). Because of this, I don’t believe that the Reserve Police Battalion 101 mass murdered the Jews because of anti-Semitism. Many of the men worked alongside Jews at one point and did not see the reason in killing them. It is thought that the younger men and career policemen did not want to ruin their chance of a future career by backing out of the job and taking Major Trapp’s offer to not take part in the killing. But the older men who had another career and knew what they were doing is wrong, why did they kill? Many of them denied that they had known about Trapp’s offer, or they claimed they did not hear that part of the speech. Others believed they did not have a choice in the matter, while some did not want to be considered a coward. On the other hand, some men said quite frankly that they were cowards; they did not have the courage to stand up for what was right.
By reading this I was kind of reminded of the movie “Valkyrie” with Tom Cruise. The plot is basically about a group of traitors in the Nazi party conspire to assassinate Hitler so that they can save Germany. I don’t think their motives were to save the Jews at the same time, but I just connected this movie to Browning in the way that there were men in Germany who did not agree with everything Hitler was doing, and they had the courage to attempt to stop it- unlike many of the men at Jozefow who proceeded to kill when they didn’t even have to.
In the last paragraphs of Browning’s work, he mentions that he knows of no other case in which a commander offered the nonparticipation in mass murder. Although, the offer did not matter in any way, because, like every other unit during the Holocaust, the battalion killed the Jews they were told to kill. I think the main reason why those men killed is that they eventually would forget. Whether they drank away the memories or refused to talk or think about it so that it never happened in their minds, they forgot. But, like Browning stated, “One is tempted to wonder if the silence speaks louder than words, but in the end—the silence is still silence, and the question remains unanswered” (128).