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

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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. Everyday Lasts a Year: A Jewish Family's Correspondence from Poland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 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. 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.

Honestly, before reading this, I'm not sure I could have named all of the 12 disciples. I think I unconsciously avoided reading this thinking I knew enough about the subject matter. And while, yes, the content is familiar, I also learned a lot and was encouraged by God's work in the Apostle's lives. Valdis O. Lumans (1993), Himmler's Auxiliaries: The Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle and the German National Minorities of Europe, 1933–1945. Univ of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0807820660 This book is an adaptation of a series of messages about the apostles. It gives information about each one according to what was written in the Bible by or about each apostle and includes some extra-biblical sources as well. Upon its return to occupied Poland, on 12 June 1942 the Reserve Police Battalion 101 had the following command structure: [1] 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)The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939– March 1942 (with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-803-25979-4 OCLC 52838928 The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office: A study of Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland, 1940–43. New York: Holmes & Meier. ISBN 978-0841904033 Overall, amazingly insightful book. I learned a lot. However, I saw some things I did not care for.

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. The train journeys with the treatment on the Jewish people, including the sheer numbers placed into carriages, and their loss of life by crush injuries, thirst and heat exhaustion, are described, as are the desperate attempts by some Jews to escape. This is placed alongside the poor organisation of the guards and details of the journey with the need to patch the trains up at various stations along the route as the desparate hands of people clawed away at barbed wire and wooden planking. The guard details had, as they described, little ammunition; but they expended hundreds of rounds each exhausting their supplies on these journeys. 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. Few refused to participate in mass killings, whereas the majority showed conformism and accepted without demur the ‘rules’, sometimes even trying to show themselves “more royalist than the king.”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 Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins. 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.” 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. A book and approach (the 'functionalist' approach to the Holocaust) with which I am quite out of sympathy. According to this view, adopted also by Broszat and Hans Mommsen, the Holocaust was not planned, but came about almost by accident, as local administrators tried to deal with the excess of refugees, and the like. In my opinion, which is certainly only that of the semi-educated layman, this is complete and utter B.S.

Christopher Browning, one of the better known Holocaust scholars today, used evidence from the post-war investigations of Police Battalion 101 to create an image of the "ordinary men" who participated in the massacre of Jews in Eastern Europe. By examining testimony, documents, and diary excerpts, he pieces together a chronological history of the unit’s participation and involvement in the Nazis' Final Solution. Il libro di Browning è anche un’accurata ricostruzione documentaria degli eccidi di massa e delle deportazioni avvenute in Europa dell’Est in quel periodo, a opera non soltanto del Battaglione 101, ma anche di altri reparti militari tedeschi. Documenti agghiaccianti - e purtroppo veri. Am început lectura sperând că o sa aflu mai mult decât se știe dintr-o lectură a Scripturii sau un filmuleț pe YouTube. political and moral eunuchs"? This is possibly the bizarrest eruption of gender politics into an argument not about gender that I have ever seen. Gordon Williamson (2004). The SS: Hitler's Instrument of Terror. Zenith Imprint. p.101. ISBN 0-7603-1933-2.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. 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. 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.