One of the most elusive tasks facing historians of any event is to uncover the attitudes and mindset of the “ordinary” people who “make history” but leave behind no files of official documents and precious few diaries and letters. When “ordinary” people behave in ways completely at odds with the previous patterns of their everyday life and become the perpetrators of “extraordinary” crimes, this task becomes both more difficult and more essential to undertake. But how to undertake this task is a difficult question in its own right. In the case of Nazi Germany, one approach has been to shift the focus of study from the prominent and high-ranking perpetrators of the SS to the many individuals of the bureaucracy and business community, the medical and legal professions, the German railways, and even the German churches who contributed to the implementation of Nazi Jewish policy in one way or another. Among the new subjects of study, attention has been drawn in recent years above all to the German Order Police.

It is no longer seriously in question that members of the German Order Police, both career professionals and reservists, in both battalion formation and precinct service or Einzeldienst, were at the center of the Holocaust, providing a major manpower source for carrying out numerous deportations, ghetto-clearing operations, and massacres.

The professional or career Order Police, who were merged with the SS in 1936, differed in age, career aspirations, institutional identification, training and indoctrination, and percentage of party and SS membership from the reservists.