Some SS guards held “shooting competitions” in which they sought to demonstrate their marksmanship to their colleagues or to engage in a deadly display of their own masculine prowess. One SS guard at Auschwitz accepted a bet for a bottle of schnapps that he could kill a prisoner with a neck shot at fifty paces using his pistol, while Kurt Franz, an SS officer in Treblinka, sought to impress his colleagues with his “specialty” of “shooting Jews in the eyes.”⁴⁸
In reference to this practice, Abraham Bomba, a prisoner at Treblinka, commented, “The biggest pleasure for them [the SS] was to kill, to shoot at a special place they had in their mind. […] When they succeeded they were just happy.”⁴⁹
SS men in the Janowska camp aimed at the noses or fingertips of the prisoners as they carried stones around the camp.⁵⁰ In another version of this “game,” the SS forced a prisoner to hold a glass of water. “If the glass was hit, the person was allowed to live,” Michael Wind testified. “If the bullet hit his [the prisoner’s] hand, he was killed on the pretext that he was no longer capable of working.”⁵¹
Among these SS men, the ability to drink more than one’s colleague, to inflict a better beating, or to outshoot him became markers of superior manliness.
(Source.)