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

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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. To admit an explicitly political or ideological dimension to their behavior, to concede that the morally inverted world of National Socialism--so at odds with the political culture and accepted norms of the 1960s--had made perfect sense to them at the time, would be to admit that they were political and moral eunuchs who simply accommodated to each successive regime. That was a truth with which few either wanted or were able to come to grips. (150) Browning indaga, presenta fonti e materiali, introduce ipotesi e interpretazioni diverse, critica e polemizza, sempre lontanissimo dalla retorica, sempre a ciglio asciutto. 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. 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 : Christopher R. Browning : Free Download Ordinary men : Christopher R. Browning : Free Download

Holocaust Encyclopedia (2014). "Ghettos". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 15 August 2012 . Retrieved 30 June 2014.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 Browning cites post war academic studies which show that "normal" human beings are capable of great cruelty when placed in positions of power over others. He links this to the actions of police battalion 101, and details the race hate indoctrination prevalent at the time. Dehumanise jews, communists, gays and gypsies and it becomes easier to kill "the other". 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?

Christopher Browning - Wikipedia

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 ]

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This is one of the essential books of Holocaust literature. When I read it, some years ago now, it changed me. 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. 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.

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final

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. 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] This year and half period from the Józefów massacre to the battalion's participation in Erntefest in November 1943 is a horrifying journey of death. By war's end these "ordinary men", the majority conscripted middle-aged working-class men from Hamburg, shot c38,000 Jews and moved c45,000 others to the Treblinka gas chambers. After this RPB101, with the war going against the Germans and the Eastern front consuming the majority of Reich combat troops and resources, they continued fighting in anti-Partisan operations. Browning married Jennifer Jane Horn on September 19, 1970 and had two children: Kathryn Elizabeth and Anne DeSilvey. [7] Work [ edit ] Ordinary Men [ edit ]

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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. 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. This construct explains some of the very peculiar rhetorical and logical moves he makes, as for example: From here it completed numerous operations, which I need not recount in detail but readers of this review will understand by now, even if one is new to the Holocaust, that the killings were done with no regard to human life. The tactics and how people were rounded up, including Poles denouncing or reporting Jewish hideouts, transported to and organised and then shot is described very clearly and chillingly in the men's own words. Before WWII most of them, as the title of the book implies, were just ordinary men. Most of them had families and ordinary occupations.

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

Leo Tolstoy once said that “ to understand everything is to forgive everything.” However, this is not always the case, and this book shows it. Rosenbaum, Ron Explaining Hitler: the search for the origins of his evil New York: Random House, 1998. ISBN 0-679-43151-9 OCLC 317866934 Browning places so much weight on peer pressure as the main motivation for these gruesome mass murders. He fails to understand how much anti-Jewish propaganda dehumanized and demonized, Jews. Browning claims that these men were not deeply anti-Semitic, simply because they themselves claim this while they were under criminal investigation. Yet, these same policemen lived in Nazi Germany under Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbel.

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Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins. 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. a b c d e f g Struan Robertson. "Hamburg Police Battalions during the Second World War". Archived from the original on 22 February 2008 . Retrieved 24 September 2009.