Tyler Young

Professor Wertz Orbaugh

UWRT 1102
9 February 2015
The topic of my article is the trial of an SS officer who killed thousands of Jews with his
unit. They would kill the Jews but they were very public about it compared to other SS soldiers.
They would take pictures to send home, or when they got back on base they would show the
pictures to everyone of what they had done. Max Taubner is the name of the soldier who would
end up being punished for their actions. He is the only known soldier in the SS to be punished
for killing Jews from his own government during the war.
The writer in this story talks about how he believes if Taubner and his other soldiers had
not been so open or public about their killings he believes they would not have been punished.
He also talks about how this platoons killing of the Jews was unexceptional because this unit was
a maintenance repair platoon. The way the author talks about the unit like almost makes it seem
as if he were a German soldier during World War II.
The author did do a good job in writing the article though. The author would give you
facts for a few paragraphs and then we would include a few sentences that seemed to be his own
opinion. The author at the end of the article states how Taubner was almost lucky because since
his own government during the war punished him, he would not be convicted for crimes after the

war since he had already been punished. Taubner only served two years in prison if he had not
been punished till after the war he could have served a lot more jail time.
I think this article was a very well written article with information on the SS that I
had not even thought about looking up. The article was well written by the layout of the article.
It first gave what Taubner and his soldiers did that were considered crimes to the German
government and would later get Taubner in trouble. The article would then move into the SS
investigation of the crimes, next was Taubners trial, then it was the postwar trials, and last was
the conclusion. To me this makes it a well written article because the information is portrayed to
you as a story and you are almost watching this story unfold.
Before I started to read this article I was weary that the article might be very author
biased. When I am studying the topic that I have for the inquiry project it is okay for articles to
have authors opinions but the whole article does not need to be completely opinionated, there
needs to be facts. So I was weary this article would be too opinionated but it was not at all. Also
another reason I believe this was a very good article is because it was written over a topic of the
SS that I had never even thought about so it has led me to ask myself new questions about the
topic of the SS, and come up with new questions that I can search for my inquiry topic. Lastly
there is one part where I do not think I would use the article for my project. My project is I want
to know why the SS was created, what was life like in the SS, and their role in the war. With
these as my topic areas for my project I do not think I would use this article for information in
my project because it is just facts about a group of soldiers who got in trouble for what all the
soldiers were doing, but the one soldier got in trouble because they were very public about it
with detailed stories and pictures.