Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

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The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office: A study of Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland, 1940–43. New York: Holmes & Meier. ISBN 978-0841904033 In closing, there was an interesting but surprising additional afterword in my audio book. In essence this is for want of a better description, Professor Browning's view and response to a professional spat with Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust where each interpret different aspects of RPB101's sources and seem to have done this for many years since both books were published in the 1990s. The detail, especially around research on what makes "ordinary" men kill like this was interesting but wrapped around the disagreements the two have all felt rather unseemly to me. A remarkable—and singularly chilling—glimpse of human behavior. . .This meticulously researched book...represents a major contribution to the literature of the Holocaust."— Newsweek The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning Plot Summary | LitCharts

I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce “ordinary men” to become their “willing executioners.” Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland and the Jewish Policy of the German Foreign Office 1940–1943"(1975) Dieter Pohl. Hans Krueger and the Murder of the Jews in the Stanislawow Region (Galicia) (PDF file from Yad Vashem.org). pp.12/13, 17/18, 21. It is clear that a massacre of such proportions [committed on 12 October 1941] under German civil administration was virtually unprecedented. Of all the books on the reading list for my Ideologies of the Holocaust class, this one is undoubtedly my favorite. This book suffers from a few significant flaws which I believe demands a re-write of the book - 1) to frame the book for the non-historian and 2) incorporate the studies and arguments which have been presented since the first publication vice having these as addendum. It is imperative that this book be re-written as the information is a critical lesson to humanity and modern societies - the Holocaust was not a unique event in humanity's history. To think it can never happen again in a modern society is hubris of the worst kind. Everyone needs to be aware of not only what happened during the Holocaust, but more importantly why and how it happened - the subject of this book albeit focusing on the study of the Reserve Police Battalions and not the entire nation state. Conflating an answer of how this could happen to "the evil Nazis" is demonstrating an ignorance which will not prevent a re-occurrence of this horror.Future actions were easier to handle in part because the killing grew more routine. Also, the policemen found ways to farm out the killing to others. They recruited Hiwis (foreigners) to do the dirty work. This included Russian prisoners (Trawnikis) who would have starved had they not been given the option to serve the Nazis. Also, the Policemen didn’t mind loading the Jews on railcars so that they could be shipped off to a death camp where others could execute them. This was much more preferable than rounding up families and personally killing them. The worst thing was to have to kill innocent people face-to-face. An attempt to settle the difficulties at a conference between Himmler, Göring, Frank and Greiser at Göring's Karinhall estate on February 12, 1940 was scuttled in May, when Himmler showed Hitler a memo, "Some Thoughts on the Treatment of Alien Population in the East," on May 15, 1940, which Hitler called "good and correct." [23] Himmler's memo, which called for expelling all of the Jews of German-ruled Europe to Africa, reducing Poles to a "leaderless laboring class" and Hitler's approval of the memo led, as Browning noted, to a change in German policy in occupied Poland along the lines suggested by Himmler. [22] Browning called the Göring/Frank-Himmler/Greiser dispute a perfect example of how Hitler encouraged his subordinates to engage in turf battles with one another without deciding for one policy or another but hinting at the policy he wanted. [24] Awards [ edit ] Lukas, Richard C. (2001). Did the Children Cry? Hitler's War against Jewish and Polish Children, 1939–1945. New York City: Hippocrene Books. See online Chapter IV, Germanization. Project InPosterum - Preserving the Past for the Future (reprint). Since this book was published, millions of Jewish Holocaust survivor testimonies have demonstrated over and over how their non-Jewish neighbors, people with whom they had friendly, warm relationships for generations, turned on them during the Holocaust. Browning doesn't make the case that peer pressure, not antisemitic ideology, turned thousands of ordinary family men into mass murders. For more insight and understanding on this phenomenon, please read: This story of ordinary men is not the story of all men. The reserve policemen faced choices, and most of them committed terrible deeds. But those who killed cannot be absolved by the notion that anyone in the same situation would have done as they did. For even among them, some refused to kill and others stopped killing. Human responsibility is ultimately an individual matter.”

Christopher Browning - Wikipedia

This construct explains some of the very peculiar rhetorical and logical moves he makes, as for example: This book, a staple of Holocaust studies for twenty-five years, has recently risen to fresh prominence due to repeated mentions of it by Canadian psychologist, and superstar, Jordan Peterson. His focus on the book arises from his own decades-long study of evil regimes, and his thought on how we, you and I, would really react if we lived under an actual such regime. Peterson’s basic point is that we are deluding ourselves if we think we would be heroes; the vast majority of us would fall somewhere on the scale of cooperation with evil. "Ordinary Men" shows that principle in application, in the history of a group of German men who saw militarized police service in Poland during World War II. Westermann, Edward B. (2004). " 'Ordinary Men' or 'Ideological Soldiers'? Police Batallion 310 in URSS, 1942". In Martel, Gordon (ed.). The World War Two Reader. Routledge. p.218. ISBN 0415224020 . Retrieved 6 December 2014. A book and approach (the 'functionalist' approach to the Holocaust) with which I am quite out of sympathy. According to this view, adopted also by Broszat and Hans Mommsen, the Holocaust was not planned, but came about almost by accident, as local administrators tried to deal with the excess of refugees, and the like. In my opinion, which is certainly only that of the semi-educated layman, this is complete and utter B.S.Reading all this is exhausting, even in a fairly short book. The usual disturbing details, hard to understand, crop up, such as that Jews went to their deaths with “quiet composure.” Browning humanizes, or at least reifies, the men of the battalion, drawing incisive sketches of them, as known through the interviews to which he had access. Generally, those few who did not participate, or limited their participation, were usually of a slightly higher social class than the other men. Several were tradesmen who had their own businesses and were not interested in a postwar police career, and so were more independent. Roman Catholics seemed to be the most likely to refuse—but there were few in Hamburg, so this was not a large group, either. But, as one would expect, no one factor dictated a man’s behavior. Or rather, one single factor hard to define did—his character. Beginning in 1940, Battalion 101 was used to resettle Poles (mostly not Jews) in Western Poland, around Łódź. This was deportation, but not killing or transport to death camps (which did not exist in 1940). At the end of 1940, the battalion took up guard duties at the Łódź ghetto, into which the 160,000 Jews of Łódź had been crammed. Again, this did not involve killing, though it involved mistreatment and dehumanization of Jews, if not by the battalion’s own men, then by other Nazis involved in guard duties. In mid-1941, the battalion returned to Hamburg and was functionally dissolved and re-formed; it these mostly newly enrolled men on whom Browning’s book focuses. For the most part, the following table is based on the 1968 verdict of the Hamburg District Court, [55] and compared with relevant data from the Museum of the History of the Polish Jews and other searchable databases. [4] Murder operations of the Reserve Police Battalion 101 in occupied Poland Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Retrieved June 21, 2011. Where did "truth" come from? This is a hypothesis about motivation, nothing more, and it's kind of odd even as a hypothesis. A far more likely one is that, again, as they were testifying to prosecutors, nobody wanted to damn himself by admitting Nazi sympathies. Robert Jay Lifton ( The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide) found in his interviews with Nazi doctors that most of them began by asserting compliance with current societal norms, but the longer he talked to them, the more their old Nazi beliefs would start to emerge.