The New Jersey Police Chief Magazine | June 2017
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but where there is now a plaque in the ground). Viktor Brack, an SS Oberfuerher, a civil servant within the Chancellory, made the decision as to who would be killed in the programme, as he had been given the permission to develop the programme wider, for the mentally disabled people of Germany only at this time. The SS used the programme to identify different ways of killing people, using the idea of carbon monoxide gas in vehicles, trucks specifically, in which the pipe carried the fumes to the back of the truck. The poor people in the trucks were removed from hospitals, the German ' s called them the ' useless eaters ', imagine that! After being driven around for a short time, they would be emptied from the trucks, all actions carried out within the laws of the land.
We now know that 70,000 at first elderly people and then children that were disabled, were killed in this way in 1939 / 40.
But, it ' s the only time that we know of someone who was in a position of responsibility spoke out! The Bishop of Munster, within the religious community, spoke out, to his congregation, and this was something that had not normally been tolerated in Germany. Hilter backed off somewhat, and the T4 programme is squashed in Germany, but not in the occupied territories until the war neared its end. Historians believe the T4 programme was the precursor for gas technology throughout the death camps. But what lesson is there here? Well, this is on the syllabus of all high schools across the State of NJ, and this episode reminds us that it is not simply the perpetrators that are criminals here. Daniel Goldhagen ' s book, ' Hitler ' s Willing Executioners ' reminds us that everyone is culpable.. its not just those that worked in the death camps, not just those found guilty at the end of the war and executed, but it was everyone else, the train drivers, the engineers, the technicians, those fitting out the vehicles, everyone knew what it was for.
The question as to how such a great nation could allow this to happen is well documented in yesterday ' s overview referencing the Allport scale( Part One).
But the Germans try to hide the death camps as the Russians press on at the end of the war, but too many people knew about them. So with these reflections at the forefront of our minds, we moved onto Arnhem from the same direction as the allied forces took for Operation Market Garden in 1944( Market referred to the Airborne troops and Garden referred to the ground troops!).
For leadership lessons here we specifically are focusing on the mindset of leaders, the dangers of over-reach of resources, and failure to use intelligence correctly in times of crisis.
To set the scene, the town of Arnhem sits at the head of the Siegfried line, which stretches some 390 miles south to north( The German ' s called it the Western Wall). Around the line were a number of SS Panzer divisions, the German army in some 18,000 bunkers, mortar posts, minefields, V2 rocket deployment sites, and a series of antitank devices, such as dragon ' s teeth, to name but a few. Operation Market Garden was the largest airborne operation ever planned in history, and took place between 17 September and 25th September 1944, almost 10 full days of fighting involving over 35,000 allied paratroopers being dropped into Holland.
As our facilitator Dean Hollands explained, The Battle for Arnhem is a particularly important battle for the British, the 1st Airborne Division, who up until that time had not seen any ' action ', having been held in reserve( albeit they were nearly deployed on two earlier occasions, this did not transpire.). Unlike the American ' s 101st Airborne
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