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

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All the evidence points out that they were average citizens without a specific propensity for violence. It took only several months for these men to turn into mass murderers who considered exterminating thousands of people a routine. Patrycja Kamionek; etal. (2014). "Łomazy". Virtual Shtetl. Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich . Retrieved 22 June 2014. While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition. I reasoned with myself that after all without its mother the child could not live any longer. It was supposed to be, so to speak, soothing to my conscience to release children unable to live.'

Ordinary Men – HarperCollins

Christopher R. Browning CV" (PDF). University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Archived (PDF) from the original on February 24, 2020. We see a range of justifications for their acts, mainly to do with duty and not letting down comrades. What we do not see is admission of race hate, as the policemens testimony could have lead to serious punishment. The commander of the unit was hanged in Poland in 1947 (ironically for the murder of 86 poles not the 90,000 jews the unit directly or indirectly murdered) Thus: Whilst they aren't lying as to why they themselves participated or refused, you won't find anything very deep from their motivations, which is left to Browning (and ultimately the reader) to find and expose. You will, however, see signs of cognitive dissonance in some of the policemen's explanations, like the one who managed to tell himself he was doing Jewish children a favour by shooting them because their parents had already died and thus "they'd die anyway." 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. Christopher Robert Browning (born May 22, 1944) is an American historian and is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). A specialist on the Holocaust, Browning is known for his work documenting the Final Solution, the behavior of those implementing Nazi policies, and the use of survivor testimony. [1] He is the author of nine books, including Ordinary Men (1992) and The Origins of the Final Solution (2004). [2]

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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. Browning, Christopher R. (1998) [1992]. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Harper Perennial, p.171ff. ISBN 978-0060995065

Reserve Police Battalion 101 - Wikipedia Reserve Police Battalion 101 - Wikipedia

One of the motives behind their behavior might be a fear to look like a coward in the eyes of their comrades. They were probably afraid of “losing face” in public. with Michael Marrus, Susannah Heschel and Milton Shain, eds. Holocaust Scholarship: Personal Trajectories and Professional Interpretations. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1137514189 Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Retrieved June 21, 2011. Gordon Williamson (2004). The SS: Hitler's Instrument of Terror. Zenith Imprint. p.101. ISBN 0-7603-1933-2. 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.

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Struan Robertson, A History of Jews in Hamburg Chapter: Hamburg Police Battalions during the Second World War. Publisher: University of Hamburg.

Daniel J. Goldhagen Christopher R. Browning Leon Wieseltier

The fourth problem is the one I actually find most disturbing. On several actions, Reserve Battalion 101 was assisted by "Hiwis" ( Hilfswilligen), units of POWs from Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania "who were screened on the basis of their anti-Communist (and hence almost invariably anti-Semitic) sentiments, offered an escape from probably starvation, and promised that they would not be used in combat against the Soviet army" (52). Browning describes the drunkenness and cruelty of the Hiwis (from the testimony of the Germans); he never seems to consider that they, too, were "ordinary men." In a creepy way (and although he explicitly rejects this with regard to Poles), he accepts the Germans' evaluation of the Hiwis as untermenschen.

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As Major Trapp said during the first Jewish action “If this Jewish business is ever avenged on earth then have mercy on us Germans.” Trapp was later hanged after the war for carrying out revenge killings of Polish gentiles after a partisan action. Even this Trapp tried to mitigate. I believe the hangman’s noose may have been good medicine for a man that most likely had lived out a tortured existence knowing what he was ultimately responsible for. This is not an easy read. First, it reads like a scholarly thesis paper that someone wrote for a doctoral thesis. Second, the subject matter is awful and there are no heroes. Having said this, Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men is an integral read for those of us trying to make sense of the Holocaust. 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: Post-war, they were full of the usual excuses, all about the people and none about ethics and morality of the actions. Browning says that perhaps the fact that these men weren't highly educated is why they don't give particularly sophisticated explanations as to their motives, which sounds plausible enough.