Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times Highlight

But if no one resists, how can those who passively submit or even actively comply be judged, much less held accountable? How can we respond to members of Reserve Battalion 101 who, in interviews years later, insisted they had strict orders and were merely doing what anyone in their position would have? One way is by recognizing that this wasn’t exactly true. At Józefów and elsewhere, the executioners “cannot be absolved by the notion that anyone in the same situation would have done as they did,” observed Christopher Browning. “For even among them, some refused to kill and others stopped killing.”