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

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How do normal, law abiding people get into performing abnormal acts of extreme violence? This book takes on that question as regards the members of a German Reserve Police Battalion who participated, often directly, in the murder of over 85,000 Jews, Soviets, Poles and other 'undesirables', many of them women and children, during WWII. Unusually well documented, the activities of these several hundred men are traced from month to month both from the written record and from their own testimonies. This book paints a very sobering picture to the nature of what humans are. And what can happen at any time to any group of people. Even today. It's an essential read. The good stuff: Bases itself clearly on scripture, has helpful insights about the nature of apostleship and how Jesus organized and led His apostles. Many good and helpful points. Particularly helpful in describing Peter and John, of whom much is known.

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. The combination of the peculiar circumstances embedded in the Nazi regime paved the way for such moral distortion. A climate of political violence and frenetic hatred cultivated towards those regarded as ‘racially inferior’ could not fail to take its toll on these men. They had been living in a society where violence and repression were common currency long enough to imbibe the ‘values’ characteristic of the Third Reich. The Battalion members had opportunities, it seems, of not doing at least some of the things they committed. Escaping direct participation in the massacres was possible. Often, at least at the beginning, their refusal would not have to entail any dire consequences. As the shooting went on, and as the battalion members found themselves covered with blood, brain tissue and bone splinters from the Jews they had shot at point-blank range, a few felt ill.” Overall, amazingly insightful book. I learned a lot. However, I saw some things I did not care for.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. Who is "us," in this case? Ordinary Men is a book with a strongly implied audience. Without doing a formal analysis of its rhetoric, I still feel fairly certain of my ground in saying that that audience is normative American, i.e., sharing white professional-class values. The implied audience is not Jewish. Nor is it German. Nor is it working-class. It's a little harder to tell about the gender question, because by choosing to study a reserve police battalion, Browning had no choice but to study men. And in general, if you're studying Nazis, you're studying men. (One of the books on my list is about women in Nazi Germany, but fundamentally, everyone in a position of power in Hitler's Germany was male.) But there are some indications that the implied audience is made up of men, too.

Izbica Jewish Cemetery Commemoration Project. Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland. Retrieved 12 April 2012. RPB101 deployed on active service as part of the Poland invasion force in September 1939 rounding up polish soldiers and guarding prisoner-of-war camps. In December 1939, some 100 regular career policeman were recalled to form additional police units with RPB101's replacements being middle-aged men. After this, the battalion undertook training and then deployed again to Litzmannstadt (Lodz) in Poland in May 1940 to undertake "resettlement" operations, which it completed in April 1941, returning again to its home area of Hamburg. It then undertook three Jewish deportation operations within the Hamburg area taking these unfortunate people by train to ghettos at Litzmannstadt, Minsk and Riga. Throughout Ordinary Men, Browning provides a window into the daily life of the unit and its purpose in the hierarchy and structure of the Third Reich. The often personal glimpses demonstrate the slow and methodical change in Nazi policy towards Jewish civilians, as the German leadership shifted towards the Final Solution. Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland and the Jewish Policy of the German Foreign Office 1940–1943"(1975) Christopher R. Browning". University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Archived from the original on February 24, 2020.The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942. What was special about this battalion was not its composition, or its actions, which were roughly the same as several similar battalions. Rather, it’s that we can know a lot of what these men actually did, which is not the case for most such units, lost among the fog of war and the desire to conceal the past. In the 1960s the German authorities conducted and transcribed, as part of a criminal investigation, extensive interviews with all the surviving Battalion 101 members they could find. Apparently this was one of the few battalions whose membership list was extant at that time, hence the focus on this battalion. It was these court records to which Browning, in the late 1980s, was able to gain access (though he was forbidden from revealing actual names except for those few men actually convicted of crimes, so he uses pseudonyms throughout), and which he used to construct what is part history and part psychological analysis. In more recent years additional such data has been mined and published, but Browning was the first to conduct a study of this type. He is very cautious in his approach, noting that no individual’s testimony can be taken at face value, but claiming, I think accurately, that by judicious and open-minded examination of the mass of testimony, triangulating claims against each other and against known history, a great deal can be determined with a high degree of certainty. Most people seek social approval. They could do this by trying to ingratiate themselves with their fellow citizens, colleagues, or those on whom they depend. When societal norms resemble those prevalent under the Nazi, it is little wonder that the men from the Battalion did what they did. 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

National Jewish Book Award for The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 [25] We on the Right tend to see this as a threat always over the horizon when the Left dominates, and that is true enough as a historical matter—the vast majority of such twentieth-century ideological killing was conducted by the Left, in an attempt to reach the Utopia that justified sacrifice, or at least the sacrifice of others. And yes, most significant killing by the Right in the twentieth century (leaving aside the Nazis, who had a great deal of leftist ancestry), was measured and usually proportionate, the result of civil war and the need to eliminate direct and existential threats, as in Chile, for example. But the Right should not be complacent—the same demonic, chthonic drives that spur on the Left recur, in their own fashion, in the Right, if less often. We easily forget the Ustasha in Croatia, for example, and, again, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. This book, which is, Christopher Browning’s study of the interrogation of a battalion of German soldiers sent to take part in the ‘final solution’ in Poland in 1942, is quite astounding in terms of what he found out about ‘ordinary’ human cruelty and viciousness. These were ordinary men, as the title suggests. Yet they participated in absolutely brutal slaughter of completely innocent people. This wasn’t even in the context of organised war.” Readmore... Before WWII most of them, as the title of the book implies, were just ordinary men. Most of them had families and ordinary occupations.Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah (July 13/20, 1992). "The Evil of Banality", Review of Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Police Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. The New Republic, pp. 49–52. 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

Voices on Antisemitism Interview with Christopher Browning, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 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.Am început lectura sperând că o sa aflu mai mult decât se știe dintr-o lectură a Scripturii sau un filmuleț pe YouTube. The police unit was formed from men unsuitable for the regular army, taken from one German city - Hamburg- and represented a cross section of society.