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. 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. I emphasized universal attributes of human nature and social-psychological factors shaping group dynamics, such as conformity, deference to authority, and adaptation to roles within an occupation unit stationed in enemy territory during wartime.”

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. I found out about Ordinary Men from Jordan Peterson around the time 12 Rules came out. I think he mentioned it repeatedly in a few interviews and it immediately jumped to my TBR though I got to it only now, years later. This was the pre-industrial phase of the Holocaust, before the purpose-built death camps at Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec were opened for business. 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".

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Gordon Williamson (2004). The SS: Hitler's Instrument of Terror. Zenith Imprint. p.101. ISBN 0-7603-1933-2. Our servers are getting hit pretty hard right now. To continue shopping, enter the characters as they are shown

National Jewish Book Award for Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland [25] Thus: Whilst they aren't lying as to why they themselves participated or refused, you won't find anything very deep from their motivations, which is left to Browning (and ultimately the reader) to find and expose. You will, however, see signs of cognitive dissonance in some of the policemen's explanations, like the one who managed to tell himself he was doing Jewish children a favour by shooting them because their parents had already died and thus "they'd die anyway." 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. But first I want to talk about what this book does well, because there are things it does very well indeed. 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.Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning 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 Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942. The Comprehensive History of the Holocaust. With contributions by Jürgen Matthäus. Lincoln / Jerusalem: Univ. of Nebraska Press / Yad Vashem. ISBN 0-8032-1327-1. The legacy of their greatness is the church, a living, breathing organism which they helped found and of which they became the very foundation stones..the church, now some two hundred years old, exists today because these men launched the expansion of the gospel of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth."

Jerzy Jan Lerski (1996). Historical Dictionary of Poland, 966–1945. Greenwood Publishing. p.642. ISBN 0313260079. Further information: Nazi crimes against the Polish nation Expulsion from Warthegau. Poles led to cattle trains as part of the ethnic cleansing of western Poland, utilizing Battalion 101 Battalion 101 operations [ edit ] Of all the books on the reading list for my Ideologies of the Holocaust class, this one is undoubtedly my favorite. 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. 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.Upon its return to occupied Poland, on 12 June 1942 the Reserve Police Battalion 101 had the following command structure: [1] 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 11 and the Final Solution in Poland: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

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”.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 Overall, amazingly insightful book. I learned a lot. However, I saw some things I did not care for.