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

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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. There's a way in which reading this book, for me, forms a ring composition with Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, because Goldhagen spends a great deal of time and energy passionately arguing with Browning.

The last Aktion operation RPB101 undertook was around Lublin. It was called Aktion Erntefest (Operation Harvest Festival) and along with other police battalions, SS troops and Ukrainian Special Service battalions some 43,000 Jews from the Majdanek, Poniatowa and Trawniki concentration camps were murdered over just 2 (two) days. 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. This is one of the essential books of Holocaust literature. When I read it, some years ago now, it changed me.Browning, Christopher (1985). "La décision concernant la solution finale", in Colloque de l.Ecole des Hautes Etudes en sciences sociales, L.Allemagne nazie et le génocide juif. Paris: Gallimard-Le Seuil, p. 19. Would I call them Ordinary Men? It doesn't take an extraordinary man to do what they did. Yet, so many have done what they have, not just in Nazi territory, that I don't know what else to call them. I'd say talking about it to call it anything is better than not talking about it. The ordinary men didn't talk about it, not even when they were talking about it. Browning married Jennifer Jane Horn on September 19, 1970 and had two children: Kathryn Elizabeth and Anne DeSilvey. [7] Work [ edit ] Ordinary Men [ edit ] Daniel J. Goldhagen; Christopher R. Browning; Leon Wieseltier (April 8, 1996). "The "Willing Executioners" / "Ordinary Men" Debate" (PDF). Selections from the Symposium. Introduction by Michael Berenbaum. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. pp.1/48 . Retrieved June 15, 2014. 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. 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 ] The horrifying aspect of this account is how little it took for these men to become transformed psychologically from "normal" people into willing participants. These were not atrocities one has come to expect from war during the heat of battle (Malmedy, My Lai, etc.), rather an institutionalized, bureaucratic government policy. That bureaucracy may be part of the cause. It distances people from their actions. Bureaucrats never saw the hideous result of their actions, seeing only their small paper-shuffling role.Ordinary Men is a new Netflix documentary based on the 1992 book by historian Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (HarperCollins). The hourlong documentary delves into the machinery of the “forgotten holocaust,” taking us on a journey to one of the darkest chapters of recent history from the perspective of the perpetrators. A narrator provides the historical context, which the book naturally offered in much more detail. A key figure in the film is Benjamin Ferencz, the chief prosecutor for the United States Army at the Nuremberg war crime trials, who died at the age of 100 in April 2023.

Of all the books on the reading list for my Ideologies of the Holocaust class, this one is undoubtedly my favorite. 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: 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. 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. There was a perversion of ethical outlook, too. Those few who were revolted by what they were doing and who refused to participate were called cowards. We need to cultivate a society where those who follow individual conscience are the heroes and those who follow the crowd are the cowards.

This construct explains some of the very peculiar rhetorical and logical moves he makes, as for example: 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. Kaplan, Thomas Pegelow; Matthäus, Jürgen; Hornburg, Mark W., eds. (2019). Beyond "Ordinary Men": Christopher R. Browning and Holocaust Historiography. Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh. ISBN 978-3-657-79266-5. And another in our continuing series of depressing books: Christopher Browning examines the motivation of a 500 man police battalion assigned to the rear lines of Germany's Eastern Front. This small group of men was personally responsible for the massacre of over 38,000 Jews and the deportation of some 45,000 more to Treblinka. These were not racial fanatics nor committed Nazis. Their motives were quite ordinary: careerism and peer pressure. Browning's book is based on interviews with the participants collected after the war. They went through their formative period in a pre-Nazi era, came from Hamburg one of the least Nazified cities in Germany, they belonged to social class that had been anti-Nazi, just how could these non-conforming end up killing innocent women, childern and men with little compulasion?