ABSTRACT
The main point was that the members of the various branches of the Civil Service did not merely express opinions but made concrete propositions. There was a certain cold professionalism as Nazis went about their murders. It was a job to do, it had to be done; for one’s career and as a matter of honor, one should do it well. There were the common disputes between trainman, dispatcher, and transportation bureaucrat over the rules governing the unscheduled passage of a freight train through a particular station. Even the rhetoric the Nazis used in public to refer to their mass murders was by itself professionally banal, washed of direct meaning and moral connotations. There were many other such words, some of which had so sunk into the German consciousness that they became natural ways to describe the most horrible practices. Thus, the Germans often stopped the killing by their allies unless it fit into their own plans.
