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One of the more touching stories concerned a "Jew hunt" when the Germans looked for Jews hiding in a forest. They found a group and were checking their papers when they discovered one was a Pole. They offered to let him go.

He told them one of Jews was his wife, and if they were going to shoot her, they could shoot him also.

So they did.

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.

The focus of the investigation was, naturally, what the Germans did, but what struck me when I read it was how often stories of Polish passive (or active) resistance kept cropping up. For example, they complained that the Polish police would disappear or call in sick when a ghetto was liquidated-- they had to threaten to deport the Poles as well sometimes to coerce assistance. Anti-Semites or not, they weren't murderers.

As a side note there were also always a few German soldiers who simply refused to kill innocents (a favored trick was to close their eyes and raise their rifles when everyone else fired). They were assigned KP duty afterwards, but were mainly not subject to any other penalty.

"As a side note there were also always a few German soldiers who simply refused to kill innocents (a favored trick was to close their eyes and raise their rifles when everyone else fired). They were assigned KP duty afterwards, but were mainly not subject to any other penalty."

Incidents like this were more wide spread than many would like to believe. Himmler himself noted the psychological impact this was having on his men, thus the impetus for the infamous death camps...

The statue that always brings tears to my eyes (this isn't relevant to the thread as Janusz Korczak was Jewish) is this one

Why is this man not better known globally? To me he was a bigger hero than many names we know -- he went of his own free will into the gas chamber to ensure that his wards did not feel fear.

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...