When viewed as a whole, therefore, there appears to have been very little direct prodding, and certainly no wholesale purging of German public administration (Hilberg, 1989,p. 129]. Most civil servants were relatively comfortable in positions that entailed “morally neutral” functions, such as economic affairs, tax collection, social security, statistics, railroad service, foreign currency, and municipal government, meaning that their work could not be implicated directly in acts they would judge to be immoral, illegal, or unethical. Direct acts of murder and cruelty generally were the provenance of the SS and were not assigned to permanent officials. if indirectly involved in such actions, they would try to be “fair” to the victims and attend to the details of administration within the boundaries of the law. Being of such service may have brought some moral conflict to civil servants in the Third Reich, but most reasoned that matters would only be worse if they failed to cooperate and do their duty (Brecht, 1944, p. 106). A closer examination of these so-called morally neutral functions will show that such activities were not as neutral or peripheral to the killing process as civil servants might have liked to believe. As Hilberg (1989, p. 129] points out, they contributed their share to the destruction of the Jews as a matter of course.