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Major General Walter Bruns’s description contains a number of astonishing details, including the length of the line of people waiting to be put to death and the enormous number of individuals this entailed. Another significant fact concerns those doing the shooting. Together with the procedure of having the victims line up in rows, this detail confirms the serial, mechanistic character of the executions. ²⁰⁶ Finally, we should also take note of the reference to the sexual aspect of the “Jewish actions.”

Bruns describes the mass execution as a highly organized procedure utilizing division of labor. In the removal of the victims’ clothes and the shifts of the shooters, for example, the perpetrators had clearly come up with an arrangement that allowed the killings to proceed in orderly fashion. That had not been the case with the earliest executions. The event Bruns described was the result of a swift professionalization of killing. As historian Jürgen Matthäus has summarized, executions followed a standardized schema: “Jews were first rounded up in raids and taken in groups of various size to a more-or-less nearby firing range. Immediately upon their arrival they were made to dig a mass grave. Then they were forced to disrobe and line up in front of the pit so that the force of the bullets propelled their bodies into the grave. Those who followed were made to lie down on top of those who had already been killed before they themselves were shot. What the perpetrators like to portray as an ‘orderly’ execution process was in reality a bloodbath. Near larger cities, although it was officially prohibited, something approaching an ‘execution tourism’ arose. Various types of Germans, sometimes while on duty and sometimes in their own free time, would visit the firing ranges to watch or take pictures.”²⁰⁷