Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men
What was the situation of the Police Battalion 101 that prompted their actions?
"How did a battalion of middle-aged reserve policemen find themselves facing the task of shooting some 1,500 Jews" in a Polish village (Browning 3). This is the central question of Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men. The policemen were not fit for military duty, but they were subjected to the same political and military propaganda as the more famous perpetrators of Hitler's infamous 'Final Solution.' This solution was not introduced gradually. In fact, it was within eleven months from 1942-1943, that the major casualties of the Holocaust occurred (Browning xv). As the Jewish people began to understand that the repatriation to work camps was actually a death march, the Germans encountered more and more resistance and tried to catch the Jews by surprise as they drove them to their mass graves. "Mass killing on such a scale required planning and preparation...Jewish prisoners were put to work digging trenches," ostensibly intended as "protection against air raids," but were actually intended as burial sites (Browning 137).
While the stench of so many corpses was described as gruesome, by then most of the police had become accustomed to the carnage. Over the course of his narrative Browning describes how the men -- whom were before relatively ordinary people with unremarkable histories -- became mass killers. The men's view of morality became "morally inverted" (Browning 150). It became moral to act murderously and immoral not to do so. Although some men later protested they could do nothing and...
Himmler himself came up with an explanation for those who could not obey orders, in spite of their unconditioned obedience, so that their comrades and the rest of the population get a message of a condition in their mental health, rather than a disobedience dictated by their human nature. Almost a century and a half after the official abolition of slavery of the U.S., a comparison comes to mind. The
Introduction In the decades that followed World War Two and the unspeakable horrors of The Holocaust, much study has been conducted to both learn the details of all the interlocking forces that enabled these atrocities. Scholars and historians today have much data about how the Germans engaged in and perpetuated The Holocaust. There is a robust comprehension about the motivating factors of how the Holocaust was carried out. There isn’t a
Ordinary Men Christopher R. Browning is a history professor at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. His work on holocaust historiography has allowed Browning to contribute to the world's most important compendium of holocaust history at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. The sources used to write Ordinary Men were primary sources only: documentary evidence mainly emerging in the legal trials that ensued. Therefore, the author is well qualified to address the matter
Clearly, the reason lies within fervent nationalism and Hitler's mad scheme known as the "Final Solution." As to the book's strengths and weaknesses, Browning conveys the true brutal face of World War II via his highly-detailed analysis of Battalion 101 and its members; he also very forcefully relates to the reader that the war was fought for many reasons, the most important being the destruction of Hitler's Nazi Germany and
In the horrifying details regarding a mass execution operation conducted by a series of German platoons, one man recalls that "it was in no way the case that those who did not want to or could not carry out the shooting of human beings with their own hands could not keep themselves out of the task."(Browning, 65). Browning indicates that many Germans felt inclined by responsibility to follow the
(Browning 168-169) He points to Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiments where some subjects proved so amenable to authority that they were willing to repeatedly shock and possibly kill other people if an authoritative figure ordered them to do so, while refusing if a less authoritative figure gave the same orders. (Browning, 167) Browning suggests that there is an element of calculation and free will here that goes against the notion
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