Up-Close Killers, Then and Now

What kind of human being is capable of walking up to another person — an innocent, defenseless, unarmed civilian — and, at close range, shooting him or her?

That question must be on the minds of many who are reading about the Palestinian Arab terrorist attack on bus passengers in Jerusalem this week. The killers were within a few feet of their victims.

Prof. Daniel Goldhagen considered this question in his famous book, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.” There are those who dislike comparisons between contemporary terrorists and the Nazis. Let’s take a closer look at Goldhagen’s analysis and consider whether it’s valid to compare up-close killers, then and now.

Goldhagen focused on a particular German police unit, Reserve Police Battalion 101, which carried out up-close shootings. That segment of the genocide, which historians today call “the Holocaust by bullets,” took place before gas chambers became the Germans’ primary means of mass murder.

In June 1942, 500 battalion members were assigned to the town of Jozefow, in German-occupied southern Poland. They were instructed to force local Jews out of their homes, take them to a nearby forest, and shoot them point-blank.

When a truck unloaded its Jewish prisoners at the edge of the Józefów forest, each of the waiting policemen selected a victim. The two then walked together to the nearby execution site. Many of the captives were children. The walk “afforded each perpetrator an opportunity for reflection,” Goldhagen noted. “It is highly likely that, back in Germany, these men had previously walked through woods with their own children by their sides. … In these moments, each killer had a personalized, face-to-face relationship to his victims.”

Goldhagen wondered if the typical killer ever “asked himself why he was about to kill this little, delicate human being who, if seen as a little girl by him, would normally have received his compassion, protection and nurturing.” Or perhaps it was that the killer could only “see a Jew, a young one, but a Jew nonetheless,” and therefore accepted “the reasonableness of the order, the necessity of nipping the believed-in Jewish blight in the bud.”

The killing mechanics were necessarily “a gruesome affair,” Goldhagen noted. “Each of the Germans had to raise his gun to the back of the head, now face down on the ground, that had bobbed along beside him, [and] pull the trigger.” They had to “remain hardened to the crying of the victims, to the crying of women, to the whimpering of children,” and to the bloody corpses at their feet. The reserve police officers slaughtered defenseless Jews in this manner for hours on end.

Goldhagen emphasized the formative role of antisemitic ideology in facilitating the deeds of these killers. The German government-controlled news media and schools dehumanized Jews, depicting them as rats, spiders, or lice that needed to be destroyed. The only solution to the “Jewish problem” was the “final solution,” death.

The atrocities of Oct. 7 echoed the savagery of the Jozefow forest. Shooting disabled children and elderly people at close range, binding and executing entire families together, beheading infants. Until just a few years ago, the Oct. 7 perpetrators, like this week’s killers in Jerusalem, were all students in schools run by the Palestinian Authority (PA) or Hamas, where they were taught to hate Jews and glorify violence.

The Jerusalem terrorists, Muthanna Amro, 20, and Mohammad Taha, 21, came from the towns of Qubeiba and Qatanna, respectively. Since 1995, those towns have been governed by the PA. As they were growing up, the boys’ teachers, religious authorities and news media taught them to view Jews as less than human, and to idolize perpetrators of anti-Jewish violence.

Only such indoctrination can explain how terrorists were capable of murdering the two youngest Israeli hostages in Gaza, four-year-old Ariel Bibas and his nine-month-old brother, Kfir, “in cold blood, with their bare hands,” as the pathologist reported. Or how other terrorists could walk up to defenseless bus passengers in Jerusalem and shoot them point-blank.

Just two weeks ago, official PA Television aired a sermon in a mosque by a PA-salaried Shariah judge named Abdallah Harb. He proclaimed: “O Allah, strengthen our stance and grant us victory over the infidels … count them one by one, kill them one by one, and do not leave even one …” PA TV has aired the sermon at least seven times in the past year, Palestinian Media Watch reports.

The Jerusalem bus killers heard such rhetoric every day of their lives. And then they acted on it.

Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His book “The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews” will be published on October 1, 2025, by The Jewish Publication Society / University of Nebraska Press.