Word: battalion
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Goldhagen's indictment focuses on the citizenry's complicity in three specific "institutions of mass killing": Germany's police battalions; the so-called work camps in which Jews were incarcerated; and the death marches from those camps by prison guards and their charges near the end of the war. The police battalions, which played a major role in rounding up the Jews of Eastern Europe and shipping them to death factories like Auschwitz and Treblinka, were mostly composed of military reservists. Of the 500 or so officers and men who served in 1942 with one typical unit that Goldhagen details...
Were the men of Battalion 101 cowed or coerced into taking part? No, insists Goldhagen. One of the battalion's commanders, Trapp by name, offered to excuse the squeamish from killing duty. Only a handful of guards took up the offer. Far from hating their work, the men of Battalion 101 even took pictures of the roundup, which they proudly mailed to wives or girlfriends, who would not have been too surprised by evidence of such brutality. Germany, Goldhagen writes, was "saturated" with prison camps where Jewish inmates were in essence worked to death under conditions scarcely better than those...
MPRI is ready. "The Bosnians need training at the company level, putting battalion staff together, that sort of thing," says retired Army Lieut. General Harry Soyster. "It can be done pretty quickly." Formerly the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Soyster, MPRI's operations chief, is the only official who speaks publicly for the company. For the past year, MPRI has had 15 men in Croatia, a group headed by retired two-star General Richard Griffitts. They have been teaching the Croats to run a military force in a democracy, and recently signed a second contract to reorganize Croatia...
...Rabin was participating in the daring sabotage raids for which the Palmach was renowned. In Syria his job was to slither up telephone poles and cut the wires so the pro-Nazi forces of Vichy France could not send for reinforcements. By 1944 he had been promoted to deputy battalion commander and had developed such a reputation as a shrewd military strategist that senior officers regularly sought his advice or opinions...
...steep hillside. I was a quarter of the way back in the column, the customary place for advisers. As usual, we were moving in single file, which meant that the V.C. could halt the entire column by picking off the first man. I had urged Hieu to break the battalion into three or four parallel columns, but the forest was so dense and the passes so narrow in places that Hieu let this bit of American wisdom go politely unheeded...