In the course of the deployment, there was an ever greater changeover from shooting with rifle salvos to killing the intended people with single shots or machine pistols. The grounds for this lay in the claim that shooting with rifle salvos took a relatively long time, and moreover, the force of the shots delivered from the shortest distance was so violent that the shooting squad and sundry other persons participating in the action were sprayed with the killed people's blood and bits of brain, a circumstance which raised the mental burden of the men on the execution squad, which was already extraordinary anyway, that often there were misses and therefore the victims' suffering was prolonged.