"...the effects of the division of labor."

Basically, there are two types of jobs of the men involved in the Holocaust: 1. The men doing the grunt work--the transporting of, interacting with, and killing of the Jews. 2. The "men who carry out the 'atrocity by policy'"--the men who sit in an office somewhere performing the tiny steps such as the "scheduling of trains, drafting of legislation, sending telegrams, or compiling lists" (Browning 162). The men running the show, essentially the supervisors of it all, remain distanced from the actual results of their actions, while the officers, such as the men of the Battalion 101, are the ones involved hands-on, pulling the triggers.

This structure creates an interesting kind of dynamic in which those carrying out the policy side are detached from what is being done simply because of the physical distance, and the officers are detached because they feel as if they have no say in what is occurring. Browning noted that as time passed, other officers noticed that the men of the Battalion 101 that were doing the killing seemed to be less fazed and their "sensitivities were dulled" (128). They were making jokes and were growing callous. "After the sheer horror of Jozefow, the policemen's detachment, their sense of not really participating in or being responsible for their subsequent actions in ghetto clearing and cordon duty, is stark testimony to the desensitizing effects of division of labor" (Browning 163). All of this is similar to what is said about the working man in the industrial period by Marx, how the worker no longer feels any connection to what he is doing. I feel that this structure is what made people so much more comfortable with an atrocious disaster. The policy makers killed no one, and the officers made no decisions.