"...it legitimized and upheld "toughness" as a superior quality. For the anxious individual, it had the added advantage of posing no moral challenge to the murderous policies of the regime, though it did pose another problem, since the difference between being "weak" and being a "coward" was not great.

Insidiously, therefore, most of those who did not shoot only reaffirmed the "macho" values of the majority-according to which it was a positive quality to be "tough" enough to kill unarmed, noncombatant men, women, and children—and tried not to rupture the bonds of comradeship that constituted their social world. Coping with the contradictions imposed by the demands of conscience on the one hand and the norms of the battalion on the other led to many tortured attempts at compromise...

Only the very exceptional remained indifferent to taunts of "weakling" from their comrades and could live with the fact that they considered to be "no man."

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