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

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Gordon Williamson (2004). The SS: Hitler's Instrument of Terror. Zenith Imprint. p.101. ISBN 0-7603-1933-2. 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. Christopher R. Browning". University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Archived from the original on February 24, 2020. 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. National Jewish Book Award for Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland [25]

It was an interesting book and I learned quite a bit about the apostles and saw them in a new light. However, there were a few things that took away from the content. This is one of the essential books of Holocaust literature. When I read it, some years ago now, it changed me. Browning married Jennifer Jane Horn on September 19, 1970 and had two children: Kathryn Elizabeth and Anne DeSilvey. [7] Work [ edit ] Ordinary Men [ edit ] Browning is very good at laying out the progress of Reserve Battalion 101 through their assigned area of Poland, at making a coherent historical narrative from the testimony of battalion members taken in the 1960s. He's very good at describing exactly what these men participated in, and very good at showing the persistence of the Nazis in their self-appointed task. Jews might escape from the initial deportation, but escaping once wasn't enough. One of Reserve Battalion 101's principal duties was the Judenjagd, the "Jew Hunt": going out into the countryside and the Polish forests, hunting down, and shooting every last hidden Jew. Browning describes these routine atrocities vividly. I don't consider myself a history buff but I do dare to say I know more about WWII than average person. But this was a blind spot to me, it seems. I knew about executions of Russian POWs and citizens in the conquered territories which the book touches only briefly but I had no idea it was on such scale and done by average people, not sadistic SS soldiers. Doubly so for the main content in this book, public executions of Jews in Poland. Thousands per day. It wasn't 20 people in this town, 30 there in a span of the entire occupation (assuming the rest was deported to camps). No, they were brought to one spot and executed, one group after another, executions going on entire day. Not even ISIS was this efficient and methodical.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. Johnson, Eric W. (October 28, 2015). "UW Welcomes Visiting Professor Christopher Browning". University of Washington. 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.

Browning si domanda: che cosa pensavano, mentre partecipavano alla ‘soluzione finale’? Come giustificavano il proprio comportamento? Perché obbedirono così efficientemente e prontamente agli ordini? Browning, Christopher R. (1998) [1992]. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (PDF). Penguin Books. Archived (PDF) from the original on 19 October 2013 . Retrieved 7 May 2013. We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.Browning analizza i verbali degli interrogatori postbellici di 210 uomini che avevano fatto parte del Battaglione 101: 500 poliziotti riservisti (uomini comuni per l’appunto, come dice il titolo della sua ricerca storica), che fra il 13 luglio 1942 e il 5 novembre 1943 assassinarono una per una circa 38.000 persone in Europa orientale, e parteciparono al rastrellamento e alla deportazione a Treblinka di altri 45.000 Ebrei. Thus: Befehl ist befehl had its limitations, and there were loopholes the size of Goering's paunch to slip through. And they could escape punishment, too, in fact all of them who refused escaped reprisals.

Browning, Christopher R. (2001). "Historians and Holocaust Denial in the Courtroom". In Roth, J. K.; Maxwell, E.; Levy, M.; Whitworth, W. (eds.). Remembering for the Future The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp.773–778. doi: 10.1007/978-1-349-66019-3_49. ISBN 978-0-333-80486-5.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. The essential lesson of Ordinary Men is that genocide is not the exclusive preserve of fanatics, racist thugs and homicidal maniacs. It is part of the human condition, especially of humans living in society.” Readmore... The title is a nod to Raul Hilberg to whom the book is dedicated; see Hilberg (2003), The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 992: "Ordinary men were to perform extraordinary tasks." Browning’s conclusions were strongly criticised by Daniel Goldhagen, author of “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”, a book I haven’t read. This edition contains an afterword in which he responds to those criticisms. There is also an interesting aside about 14 Luxembourgers who were assigned to the Battalion, and whether they behaved any differently from the Germans. Browning doesn’t think they did.