National Jewish Book Award for Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland [25] 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. We see a range of justifications for their acts, mainly to do with duty and not letting down comrades. What we do not see is admission of race hate, as the policemens testimony could have lead to serious punishment. The commander of the unit was hanged in Poland in 1947 (ironically for the murder of 86 poles not the 90,000 jews the unit directly or indirectly murdered)

Ordinary men : Christopher R. Browning : Free Download Ordinary men : Christopher R. Browning : Free Download

Upon its return to occupied Poland, on 12 June 1942 the Reserve Police Battalion 101 had the following command structure: [1] 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. 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.All the evidence points out that they were average citizens without a specific propensity for violence. It took only several months for these men to turn into mass murderers who considered exterminating thousands of people a routine. 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.

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and - Five Books Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and - Five Books

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah (July 13/20, 1992). "The Evil of Banality", Review of Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Police Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. The New Republic, pp. 49–52. Rosenbaum, Ron Explaining Hitler: the search for the origins of his evil New York: Random House, 1998. ISBN 0-679-43151-9 OCLC 317866934 Christopher R. Browning CV" (PDF). University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Archived (PDF) from the original on February 24, 2020. 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. 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.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:

Ordinary Men as Holocaust Perpetrators - Department of Ordinary Men as Holocaust Perpetrators - Department of

Browning si domanda: che cosa pensavano, mentre partecipavano alla ‘soluzione finale’? Come giustificavano il proprio comportamento? Perché obbedirono così efficientemente e prontamente agli ordini? This book paints a very sobering picture to the nature of what humans are. And what can happen at any time to any group of people. Even today. It's an essential read. Thus: The image of all Holocaust perpetrators as fanatical monsters isn't correct. Of course there were those as well (Dirlewanger Brigade, anyone?), but for the "average" perpetrator there was a medley of reasons that compelled them to participate that had nothing to do with racial hate or Nazi doctrine, things like peer pressure, what your brothers-in-arms will think of you, fear of looking cowardly and failing at your job, etc., etc., even simple desensitisation in the classic psychological model.Jerzy Jan Lerski (1996). Historical Dictionary of Poland, 966–1945. Greenwood Publishing. p.642. ISBN 0313260079. with Michael Marrus, Susannah Heschel and Milton Shain, eds. Holocaust Scholarship: Personal Trajectories and Professional Interpretations. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1137514189 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. Gordon Williamson (2004). The SS: Hitler's Instrument of Terror. Zenith Imprint. p.101. ISBN 0-7603-1933-2. Hartmann, Ralph (2010). "Der Alibiprozeß". Den Aufsatz kommentieren (in German). Ossietzky 9/2010. Archived from the original on 2 December 2013 . Retrieved 19 November 2013.

Christopher Browning - Wikipedia

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. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins.Beginning in 1940, Battalion 101 was used to resettle Poles (mostly not Jews) in Western Poland, around Łódź. This was deportation, but not killing or transport to death camps (which did not exist in 1940). At the end of 1940, the battalion took up guard duties at the Łódź ghetto, into which the 160,000 Jews of Łódź had been crammed. Again, this did not involve killing, though it involved mistreatment and dehumanization of Jews, if not by the battalion’s own men, then by other Nazis involved in guard duties. In mid-1941, the battalion returned to Hamburg and was functionally dissolved and re-formed; it these mostly newly enrolled men on whom Browning’s book focuses. The answer lies with the ideology of the German volk, which faced a constant struggle for survival ordained by nature, according to whose laws “all weak and inferior are destroyed” and “only the strong and powerful continue to propagate.” To win this struggle, the Volk needed to do two things: conquer living space to provide for further population growth and preserve the purity of the German race over all other types of ideologies propgating equality of mankind like Christianity, Liberlaism and Marxism.Jews were deemed responsbile for Liberalism and Marxism.