This is Jocco Podcast number 85 with Echo Charles and me, Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo.

Good evening.

I was given a very old man who could not or would not keep up with his countrymen because he repeatedly fell and then simply lay there.

I regularly had to lift him up and drag him forward. Thus I only reached the execution site when my comrades had already shot their Jews.

At the sight of his countrymen who had been shot, my Jew threw himself on the ground and remained lying there.

I then cocked my carbine and shot him through the back of the head.

Because I was already very upset from the cruel treatment of the Jews during the clearing of the town and was completely in turmoil, I shot too high.

The entire back of the skull of my Jew was torn off and the brain exposed.

Parts of the skull flew into Sargent, Stein Metz's face.

This was grounds for me after returning to the truck to go to the first Sargent and ask for my release.

I had become so sick that I simply couldn't anymore.

I was then relieved by the first Sargent.

Systematic murder.

That's what we're talking about. This is the Nazis final solution, which was not always carried out in the relatively detached method often fought of when we think of the Holocaust.

When we think of the Holocaust, because when we think of the Holocaust, a lot of times we think of this big mechanism, we think of trains, we think of gas chambers, we think of process, we think of a massive bureaucratic machine that is doing the killing.

And maybe that in some way is easier for us to understand, and that's why we focus on that piece.

It's easier for us to accept that, but it wasn't all like that.

Many lives were taken, many murders committed by hand at close range, point blank.

So what kind of monsters committed those atrocities, those personal atrocities up close and personal murders that covered the murderers in the blood of their victims?

What kind of men were those? And how did they end up there?

And what can we do to prevent it from occurring again?

Now to answer or at least try and come to some understanding, we're going to explore a book that is called Ordinary Men.

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