Most scholars agree with Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen that there were not significant punishments for those who refused to partisipate in the Holocaust. In short, they had a choice. Even local collaborators such as the Ukrainian Volksdeutsche guards at Sobibor, or the Lithuanian partisans who assisted the Einsatzgruppen, had a choice. The camps were considered an "easy" assignment, an easy way to avoid combat and to gain wealth.

The guards and staff did not face the squalid conditions the prisoners did and both lived in fairly comfortable housing and most guards got significant wealth through theft of goods from the prisoners sent to be killed. The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess lived essentially in the camp, but in a different world. He and his family (including his children) lived in luxury. In fact many of the commandants lived in or directly next to the camps, in quite luxurious homes. The guards and staff lived in comfort, having access to comfortable living conditions, good food, unimaginable amounts of loot, and often to women who were forced into sexual slavery. The extermination camps extracted huge amounts of wealth from the people they killed. Jewish prisoners of the kanadakommando (camp esperanto for the workers in the barracks where personal belongings were kept before being shipped to Germany) have testified to the fact that many guards stole jewelry and other valuables, and that most could be bribed for better food with the contents of the hundreds of thousands of suitcases.

Many of the staff of death camps were volunteers, others were offered (offered rather than ordered) their positions as a promotion from working in Operation T4 or in a concentration camp, or as a promotion after fighting on the Eastern Front (in the case of Josef Mengele for example). Franz Stangl, for example, worked first in Operation T4, killing disabled people in Germany, then was promoted by Himmler to be the first commandant of Sobibor, then was promoted again by Odilo Globocnik to be the commandant of the larger death camp of Treblinka. It was seen as a good career path, to work in a death camp.

The question of why they would choose to work as full time murderers and torturers is one of the hardest questions of the Holocaust, and unfortunately I don't have answers that satisfy me. Most of the guards and staff were not violent criminals before the war, though some were, and most were not after the war either. For the most part these were just normal people influenced by hatred, prejudice, and greed.