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

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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. Upon its return to occupied Poland, on 12 June 1942 the Reserve Police Battalion 101 had the following command structure: [1] 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. This construct explains some of the very peculiar rhetorical and logical moves he makes, as for example:

Ordinary Men Quotes by Christopher R. Browning - Goodreads Ordinary Men Quotes by Christopher R. Browning - Goodreads

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. Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0-393-07019-0 OCLC 317919861. This book earned Browning the 2011 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. Jerzy Jan Lerski (1996). Historical Dictionary of Poland, 966–1945. Greenwood Publishing. p.642. ISBN 0313260079. a b Anna Nowak (2014). "Działania eksterminacyjne batalionu policyjnego 101"[Police Battalion 101 extermination actions] (in Polish). Uniwersytet Marii Curie Skłodowskiej. Archived from the original on 20 October 2014. {{ cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= ( help) Izbica Jewish Cemetery Commemoration Project. Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland. Retrieved 12 April 2012.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. At the conclusion of the Erntefest massacres, the district of Lublin was for all practical purposes judenfrei. The murderous participation of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in the Final Solution came to an end... For a battalion of less than 500 men, the ultimate body count was at least 83,000 Jews. [50] Postwar history [ edit ] This is one of the essential books of Holocaust literature. When I read it, some years ago now, it changed me. There are, however, problems. The first is a global judgment call about the testimonies of the members of Reserve Battalion 101: "many of these testimonies had a 'feel' of candor and frankness conspicuously absent form the exculpatory, alibi-laden, and mendacious testimony so often encountered in such court records" (Browning xvii). In other words, Browning has decided to believe that these men are telling the truth about everything. But as a reader, I found much of the quoted testimony to be exculpatory and alibi-laden, and I had grave doubts about the truthfulness of the men who claimed to have avoided killing Jews. They were giving this testimony in the 1960s, in the context of prosecutions for the genocidal crimes their battalion committed. Browning doesn't give any further evidence or explanation for this "feel" of candor and frankness, and without that evidence, without something other than Browning's claim to authoritative judgment, I don't understand why we should believe these claims of (even relative) innocence. C.R. Browning studies one of the Nazi Police Battalions (Reserve Police Battalion 101) deployed in Poland during the Second World War. Not surprisingly, Ordinary Men is a difficult read. Talking about books that describe world tragedies is never easy. Nevertheless, I will try to summarize the impressions the book left on me.

The Men Who Pulled the Triggers - The New York Times The Men Who Pulled the Triggers - The New York Times

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.Browning divides the officials of the General Government of occupied Poland into two factions. The "productionists" favored using Jews of the ghettos as a source of slave labor to help with the war effort. The "attritionists" favored letting them starve and die of disease. At the same time, there were struggles between the Schutzstaffel (SS) and Hans Frank, the Governor-General of occupied Poland. The SS favored " The Nisko/Lublin Plan" to create a "Jewish reservation" in Lublin, in occupied Poland, into which all the Jews of Greater Germany, Poland and the former Czechoslovakia would be expelled. Frank was opposed to the "Lublin Plan" on the ground that the SS were "dumping" Jews into his territory. Frank and Hermann Göring wished for the General Government to become the " granary" of the Reich and opposed the ethnic cleansing schemes of Heinrich Himmler and Arthur Greiser as economically disruptive. [22] Zygmunt Puźniak, Eksterminacja ludności cywilnej i zagłada Żydów józefowskich [Killing of civilians and the annihilation of Jews of Józefów] Rzeczpospolita Jozefowska.wordpress.com, see: Zygmunt Klukowski, Dziennik z lat okupacji, "17 lipca"; and T. Bernstein, Martyrologia, opór i zagłada ludności żydowskiej w dystrykcie lubelskim. Retrieved 27 June 2014. 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.

Ordinary Men as Holocaust Perpetrators - Department of Ordinary Men as Holocaust Perpetrators - Department of

The expulsions of Poles, along with kidnappings of Polish children for the purpose of Germanization, [20] were managed by two German institutions, VoMi, and RKFDV under Heinrich Himmler. [21] In settlements already cleared of their native Polish inhabitants, the new Volksdeutsche from Bessarabia, Romania and the Baltics were put, under the banner of Lebensraum. [22] Battalion 101 "evacuated" 36,972 Poles in one action, over half of the targeted number of 58,628 in the new German district of Warthegau (the total was 630,000 by the war's end, with two-thirds of the victims being murdered), [23] but also committed murders among civilians according to postwar testimonies of at least one of its former members. [18] Hartmann, Ralph (2010). "Der Alibiprozeß". Den Aufsatz kommentieren (in German). Ossietzky 9/2010. Archived from the original on 2 December 2013 . Retrieved 19 November 2013. Johnson, Eric W. (October 28, 2015). "UW Welcomes Visiting Professor Christopher Browning". University of Washington. The author concludes that the relentless and pervasive denigration of Jews in Nazi Germany did affect the attitudes of the men of RPB101, but he also argues that deference to authority and pressure of conformity were uppermost in explaining their participation in mass murder. Those soldiers who did not participate in the shootings were derided by the others as weak or cowardly. They were also viewed as shirkers who relied on their comrades to do “dirty work”. Browning married Jennifer Jane Horn on September 19, 1970 and had two children: Kathryn Elizabeth and Anne DeSilvey. [7] Work [ edit ] Ordinary Men [ edit ]Jose Raymund Canoy (2007), The Discreet Charm of the Police State: The Landpolizei and the Transformation of Bavaria, 1945–1965, BRILL, p. 70. ISBN 9004157085 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.

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