"Pervasive racism and the resulting exclusion of the Jewish victims from any common ground with the perpetrators made it easier for the majority of the policemen to conform to the norms of their immediate community (the battalion) and their society at large (Nazi Germany).

...the years of anti-Semitic propaganda (and prior to the Nazi dictatorship, decades of shrill German nationalism) dovetailed with the polarizing effects of war. The dichotomy of racially superior Germans and racially inferior Jews, central to Nazi ideology, could easily merge with the image of a beleaguered Germany surrounded by warring enemies.

Nothing helped the Nazis to wage a race war so much as the war itself. In wartime, when it was all too usual to exclude the enemy from the community of human obligation, it was also all too easy to subsume the Jews into the "image of the enemy," or Feindbild."

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