question: Why did the Germans send people to camps instead of just shooting them, during WWII?
comment: They actually did. But it was so traumatizing for the soldiers who had to do it and way to slow, so they started looking at other options. After a lot of crazy ideas they ended up with the gas chambers. Crazy ideas? Yes. Like blowing people up with TNT in a forrest. Safe to say the people who had to perform this and clean it up weren't less traumatised. They also gassed them with trucks, but that was too slow and petrol was too expensive. Edit: all the people who are sadly mistaken here should read up on the history and stages URL_0
passages: In the course of the deployment, there was an ever greater changeover from shooting with rifle salvos to killing the intended people with single shots or machine pistols. The grounds for this lay in the claim that shooting with rifle salvos took a relatively long time, and moreover, the force of the shots delivered from the shortest distance was so violent that the shooting squad and sundry other persons participating in the action were sprayed with the killed people's blood and bits of brain, a circumstance which raised the mental burden of the men on the execution squad, which was already extraordinary anyway, that often there were misses and therefore the victims' suffering was prolonged.
   The shooters fired from the brink of the smaller pits. For the larger pits, they walked down in the graves among the dead and dying to shoot additional victims. Captain Otto Schulz-Du Bois, of the Engineer Reserves of the German Army, was in the area on bridge and road inspection duties, when he heard "intermittent but persistent reports of gunfire". Schulz-Du Bois stopped to investigate, and because security was weak, was able to observe the murders. A few months later he described what he saw to friends in Germany, who in 1980 reported what Schulz-Du Bois had told them:
   Christopher Browning, most known for his book "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101", relies on an analysis of the men in Reserve Police Battalion 101. The men of the 101st were not ardent Nazis but ordinary middle-aged men of working-class background from Hamburg. They were drafted but found ineligible for regular military duty. Their test as an Order Police battalion first came in the form of Jozefow, a Jewish ghetto in Poland. The Battalion was ordered to round up the men in the ghetto and kill all women, children, and elderly on sight. During the executions, a few dozen men were granted release of their execution tasks and were reassigned to guard or truck duty. Others tried to stall as long as possible, trying not to be assigned to a firing squad. After the executions were completed, the men drank heavily, shaken by their ordeal.
   A year later, the deteriorating war situation required further restrictions on selections, to ensure that every able-bodied worker could be put to work in the war economy. On April 27, 1943, Glücks presented a new circular decree with instructions to "retire" only those prisoners who were mentally ill or disabled.
  
  After these guidelines were issued, only the Hartheim killing center was needed and those at Bernburg and Sonnenstein were closed, bringing the first phase of "Aktion 14f13" to an end.
  
  Section::::Second phase.
   Section::::New camp order.
  
  Theodor Eicke was commissioned to develop a new camp order and a new regulations handbook. He wrote the "postenpflicht" with instructions to fire on prisoners immediately and "without warning". Refusal to obey this order would bring serious consequences for camp personnel: summary dismissal and even arrest.
   BULLET::::16. The shooting of the Częstochowa Stajer
  
  BULLET::::17. Shooting of about 350 prisoners by volleys from submachine guns
  
  BULLET::::18. Shooting of a Polish farmer
  
  BULLET::::- Goldjuden: Prisoners who collected jewelry, money and other valuables (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treblinka_extermination_camp)
   All four main "Einsatzgruppen" took part in mass shootings from the early days of the war. Initially the targets were adult Jewish men, but by August the net had been widened to include women, children, and the elderly—the entire Jewish population. Initially there was a semblance of legality given to the shootings, with trumped-up charges being read out (arson, sabotage, black marketeering, or refusal to work, for example) and victims being killed by a firing squad. As this method proved too slow, the "Einsatzkommandos" began to take their victims out in larger groups and shot them next to, or even inside, mass graves that had been prepared. Some "Einsatzkommandos" started to use automatic weapons, with survivors being killed with a pistol shot.
   BULLET::::1. They were to be present at the arrival of Jewish transports to conduct selektions of those men and women able to work.
  
  BULLET::::2. They were to be at the gas chambers to observe the killing procedures and verify that everyone was dead.
   The execution places were each sealed off by Einsatzkommando members or police officials subordinate to them, so that for the people right near the shooting pit waiting for their deaths there was no possibility of escaping their doom. In fact, they had the opportunity – this circumstance demonstrates a particular intensification of their suffering – to hear the crack of rifle salvos or machine pistol shots and in the odd case to observe the shootings to which neighbours, friends and kin fell victim.
   Directly after the Kristallnacht, the possession of any weapons by Jews was prohibited through the "Verordnung gegen den Waffenbesitz der Juden", enacted on 11 November 1938 (RGBl. I, 1573).
  
  A contemporary report of the apostolic nuntius of Berlin to Eugenio Pacelli about the Kristallnacht stated: „Also, all weapons were taken from the Jews; and even though the purpose of that was altogether different, it was good, because the ideation of suicide must have been enormous in some.“
  
  Section::::Contemporary US discourse on gun control.
   Section::::Extermination procedure.
  
  Heinrich Himmler visited the outskirts of Minsk in 1941 to witness a mass shooting. He was told by the commanding officer there that the shootings were proving psychologically damaging to those being asked to pull the triggers. Thus Himmler knew another method of mass killing was required. After the war, the diary of the Auschwitz Commandant, Rudolf Höss, revealed that psychologically "unable to endure wading through blood any longer", many "Einsatzkommandos" – the killers – either went mad or killed themselves.
   At the end of his book, Browning supplies his theory on 101's actions: a combination of authoritative and peer pressure was a powerful coercive tool. First, the Nazi leadership wanted to keep the country's soldiers psychologically healthy, so soldiers were not forced to commit these murders. Throughout the German ranks, nothing negative happened to the soldiers and policemen who refused to join in on a firing squad or Jewish search party. They would simply be assigned other or additional duties, and perhaps subject to a little verbal abuse deriding their "cowardice". For the officers, no official sanction was given, but it was well known that being unable to carry out executions was the sign of a "weak" leader, and the officer would be passed for promotions. Second, Major Trapp, the head of Battalion 101, consistently offered protection from committing these actions, even so far as supporting one man who was blatantly and vocally against these practices. He established "ground" rules in which only volunteers were taking on 'Jewish Hunts" and raids.
   Ohlendorf disliked the use of the oft-employed "Genickschuß" (shot to the back of the neck) and preferred to line up victims and fire at them from a greater distance so as to alleviate personal responsibility for individual murders. All forms of contact between the firing squads and victims were limited—per Ohlendorf's insistence—until the last moments before the killing started, and up to three rifleman were allocated to each person about to be shot. To ensure the group killing mentality, Ohlendorf forbade any commando from taking individual actions and explicitly instructed his men not to take any of the victim's valuables. One of Ohlendorf's most trusted "proper" military-style murderers, "SS-Haupsturmführer" Lothar Heimbach, once exclaimed, "A man is the lord over life and death when he gets an order to shoot three hundred children—and he kills at least one hundred fifty himself."
   ""I knew an SS leader pretty well, and we talked about this and that, and one day he said: 'Listen, if you ever want to film one of these shootings? …I mean, it doesn't really matter. These people are always shot in the morning. If you're interested, we still have a few left over, and we could also shoot them in the afternoon if you like.""
   Initially, only "elite, especially reliable German workers" were allowed to work in the arms industry, but with the outbreak of World War II in 1939 and many men entering the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, workers became harder to find. An agreement was reached between the arms inspector and Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, the "SS-Obergruppenführer" of the General Government, allowing Jews to be used as workers.
   Already some months ago, I shot dead all the Jews I could get my hands on in this area, concentrated all the Jewish women and children in a camp and with the help of the SD got my hands on a "delousing van," that in about 14 days to 4 weeks will have brought about the definitive clearing out of the camp..." "Dr. Harold Turner's letter to Karl Wolff, dated April 11, 1942."
   As the mass shootings continued in Russia, the Germans began to search for more efficient methods of mass murder. Himmler and his subordinates in the field feared that the shootings were causing psychological problems in the SS. In December 1939 and January 1940, experimental gas vans equipped with gas cylinders and a sealed compartment were used to kill the disabled and mentally-ill in occupied Poland. Similar vans, but using the exhaust fumes rather than bottled gas, were introduced to the Chełmno extermination camp in December 1941, and some were used in the occupied Soviet Union, for example in smaller clearing actions in the Minsk ghetto. They also were used in Yugoslavia. Apparently, like the mass shootings, the vans also caused emotional problems for the operators, and the small number of victims the vans could handle made them ineffective.
   In March 1945, the British reprinted a German-language black propaganda postcard, supposedly issued by the Nazi government, giving detailed instructions on how to hang oneself with the minimum amount of pain. There are numerous documented cases where parents killed their children before they killed themselves.
   BULLET::::- Holders of annual hunting permits, government workers, and NSDAP (the National Socialist German Workers' Party) members were no longer subject to gun ownership restrictions. Prior to the 1938 law, only officials of the central government, the states, and employees of the German Reichsbahn Railways were exempted.
  
  BULLET::::- Manufacture of arms and ammunition continued to require a permit, with the proviso that such permits would no longer be issued to any company even partly owned by Jews; Jews could not manufacture or deal in firearms or ammunition.
   The United States adopted the German tactic of hostage execution in occupied lands. (In our timeline, this was not covered by the 1907 Hague Convention.) If a U.S. soldier was killed by a civilian, at least 10 civilians were shot in retaliation. This law was even more harsh in Utah, with the penalty being 50 civilian executions for every U.S. soldier murdered.
   On 31 January 1941, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: "Discussed with Bouhler the question of the silent liquidation of the mentally ill. 40,000 are gone, 60,000 must still go. This is difficult, but necessary work. And it must be done now. Bouhler is the right man to do it." The planned figure of 100,000 victims mentioned here was not achieved according to the Hartheim Statistics and the diary entry is cited as evidence that the programme was prematurely halted.
   In the Jahnke trial in the early 1970s, the West German court in Hamburg found that a purpose of the Jeckeln system was to conceal the murderous purpose until the very last. The court further found:
  
  BULLET::::- That by the evening meeting on November 29, 1941, the intermediate commanders knew the full extent of the intended murders;
  
  BULLET::::- That the intermediate commanders also knew that the 20 kilogram luggage rule was a ruse to deceive the victims into a belief that they were truly being resettled;
   Similarly, in "Ordinary Men" (1992), [[Christopher Browning]] examined the deeds of German [[Reserve Police Battalion 101]] of the "[[Orpo battalions|Ordnungspolizei]]" ("order police"), used to commit massacres and round-ups of Jews, as well as mass deportations to the death camps. The members of the battalion were middle-aged men of working-class background from Hamburg, who were too old for regular military duty. They were given no special training. During the murder of 1,500 Jews from [[Józefów, Biłgoraj County|Józefów]] in Poland, their commander allowed them to opt out of direct participation. Fewer than 12 men out of a battalion of 500 did so. Influenced by the [[Milgram experiment]] on obedience, Browning argued that the men killed out of peer pressure, not bloodlust.
   In 1992, the American historian Christopher Browning published a book titled "Ordinary Men" about the Reserve Police Battalion 101, which had been used in 1942 to massacre and round up Jews for deportation to the Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland. The conclusion of the book, which was much influenced by the Milgram experiment on obedience, was that the men of Unit 101 were not demons or Nazi fanatics but ordinary middle-aged men of working-class background from Hamburg, who had been drafted but found unfit for military duty. In the course of the murderous Operation Reinhard, these men were ordered to round up Jews, and if there was not enough room for them on the trains, to shoot them. In other, more chilling cases, they were ordered simply to kill a specified number of Jews in a given town or area. In one instance, the commander of the unit gave his men the choice of opting out of this duty if they found it too unpleasant; the majority chose not to exercise that option, resulting in fewer than 15 men out of a battalion of 500 opting out. Browning argued that the men of Unit 101 agreed willingly to participate in massacres out of a basic obedience to authority and peer pressure, not blood-lust or primal hatred.
   BULLET::::6. Attendance at "judicial" camp executions was required to certify death.
  
  BULLET::::7. They had to be attend the corporal punishment of prisoners in order to examine the prisoner serve as an impediment.
  
  BULLET::::8. They had to conduct forced abortions on non-German women, up to the fifth month.
  
presuppositions: During WWII, the Germans never shot people instead of sending them to camps. They sent people to camps instead of shooting people.
corrections: During WWII, the Germans shot people as well as sending them to camps. They did shoot people to.
raw_presuppositions: During WWII, the Germans never shot people instead of sending them to camps. They sent people to camps instead of shooting people.
raw_corrections: During WWII, the Germans shot people as well as sending them to camps. They did shoot people to.