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In contrast to Buchmann, First Company commander Captain Julius Wohlauf, having spent his pre-war years joining Hitler's National Socialist Party, SA, and SS, was an established soldier prior to the onset of the Final Solution. The inculcation of Hitler's ideology combined with the SS doctrine of strength and obedience determined Wohlauf’s existence as a soldier and fostered a sense of loathing toward weakness. He refused to entertain the idea of excusing his subordinates from the duty to which they were assigned; killing Jews. He responded to any such request by indicating that those who wished to be excused, “could lie down alongside the victims.”<ref>Browning, 62.</ref>
Policemen under Wohlauf’s command who were opposed to the idea of killing innocent victims, yet very well aware of their commander’s intolerance of “cowards,” were thus faced with a moral dilemma. Executing civilians, regardless of ethnicity, political agenda, or religion, did not coincide with the humane composition of certain individuals, yet the alternative, implied by officers such as Wohlauf, was to face corporeal corporal punishment, imprisonment, or even death. In order to appease these concurrently existing opposing ideas, reservists of this ilk deflected their actions and subsequent consequences onto their superiors, thereby alleviating their sense of guilt over murdering unoffending civilians. A stark example of this is put forth by Browning when discussing the actions of Major Wilhelm Trapp after the conclusion of the massacre at Jozefow.
==== Jozefow Massacre====
Reserve Police Battalion 101 executed 1500 Jewish civilians in the woods outside of Jozefow, Poland in July 1942.<ref>Browning, 225.</ref> It was not until the night before the shootings were to begin that Major Trapp reluctantly conveyed the orders to his policemen. A veteran of the Great War and recipient of the Iron Cross First Class, Trapp was nonetheless not considered to be an appropriate SS candidate. Customarily, SS men were career oriented, professional soldiers who accepted authority without question and held an unwavering belief in Hitler's ideology and the wisdom of their führer. Participating in the First World War provided Trapp with experience in killing: however, the lives he took during military operations were those of enemy soldiers. Jozefow was an event for which an ordinary soldier could not prepare.
Trapp’s voice cracked with emotion while giving the order to round up and kill Jewish women and children and he even went so far as to offer his men the opportunity to excuse themselves from the imminent slaughter. By doing this, Trapp tacitly asserted his opposition to the killings, thereby deflecting the responsibility to his superiors and cleverly disallowing his men of deflecting the burden onto him. Those who did not excuse themselves due to haste and pressure (all but a dozen men) no longer had the ability to assert they were forced into killing as Trapp did indeed give them a choice. However, at the end of the day when his policemen were numbing themselves with alcohol in their barracks, Trapp walked amongst his men and in an attempt at consolation placed “responsibility on higher authorities.”<ref>Browning, 67.</ref> He was witnessed crying throughout the day. While his men were in the woods committing murder, Trapp was seen weeping “bitterly.”<ref>Browning, 58.</ref> Tears and excuses were not the normative traits of willing murderers. Browning emphasizes that German society during the Nazi period was filled with individuals fundamentally akin to no different than any other society.
For seventeen hours the Reserve Police Battalion 101 participated in mass murder in July 1942. The inexperienced marksmen, performing under surreal circumstances, turned what was expected to be a “routine” execution into a gruesome nightmare. One account provided by Browning is from policeman August Zorn* who remembered shooting “‘too high,’” with his first victim so that the “entire back of the skull of [this] Jew was torn off and the brain exposed.”<ref>Browning, 67.</ref> This was not the only such case as the novice shooters were given improper instruction, thus mutilating their victims and causing the men to emerge from the woods “gruesomely besmirched with blood, brains, and bone splinters.”<ref>Browning, 65.</ref>
