Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland Paperback Author: Visit Amazon's Christopher R. Browning Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0060995068 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Amazon.com Review
Shocking as it is, this book--a crucial source of original research used for the bestseller
Hitler's Willing Executioners--gives evidence to suggest the opposite conclusion: that the sad-sack German draftees who perpetrated much of the Holocaust were not expressing some uniquely Germanic evil, but that they were average men comparable to the run of humanity, twisted by historical forces into inhuman shapes. Browning, a thorough historian who lets no one off the moral hook nor fails to weigh any contributing factor--cowardice, ideological indoctrination, loyalty to the battalion, and reluctance to force the others to bear more than their share of what each viewed as an excruciating duty--interviewed hundreds of the killers, who simply could not explain how they had sunken into savagery under Hitler. A good book to read along with Ron Rosenbaum's comparably excellent study
Explaining Hitler.
--Tim AppeloFrom Publishers Weekly
Browning reconstructs how a German reserve police battalion composed of "ordinary men," middle-aged, working class people, killed tens of thousands of Jews during WW II.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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- Paperback: 304 pages
- Publisher: Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (April 24, 1998)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0060995068
- ISBN-13: 978-0060995065
- Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Browning has written a very important book. He looks at the Reserve Police Battalion 101 from Hamburg made up of mostly middle-aged men mostly of artisans and working class non-career police reservists. The kind of men that were either too old for normal front-line service and those who had no desire to persue a career in the police outside their role in this reserve unit.
Browning uses incredible documentation from postwar German interrogations of men of this unit involved in wartime attrocities. He had access to more than 400 testimonies of the over 500 men that made up this unit during the war. As such he is able to analyse the actions and thinking in greater detail than most other German units.
He describes the insidious use of these units as first guards on trains to transport Jews to extermination camps, to their eventual use in rounding up Jews in the Polish Ghettos, and their use as actual shooters in the extermination of whole villages.
That this unit of 500 men --- made up of police reservists, not trained in combat, and seemingly tangential to entire holocaust programme --- could be directly responsible for the shooting deaths of 38,000 people and the transportion of 100,000s of thousands of others to their deaths, makes depressing reading indeed.
Unfortunately, although Browning documents the horror of this representative small unit, he does not really answer his question of how a father with loving kids in Germany, with no combat experience could one day, be ordered to a village in Poland and in the small hours of the morning kill women and children just because they are Jewish.
Christopher Browning describes how the Reserve Police Battalion 101, like the rest of German society, was immersed in a deluge of racist and anti-Semitic propaganda. Browning describes how the Order Police provided indoctrination both in basic training and as an ongoing practice within each unit. Many of the members were not prepared for the killing of Jews. The author examines the reasons some of the police members did not shoot. The physiological effect of isolation, rejection, and ostracism is examined in the context of being assigned to a foreign land with a hostile population. The contradictions imposed by the demands of conscience on the one hand and the norms of the battalion on the other are discussed.
Ordinary Men provides a graphic portrayal of Police Battalion 101's involvement in the Holocaust. The major focus of the book focuses on reconstruction of the events this group of men participated in. According to Browning, the men of Police Battalion 101 were just that--ordinary. They were five hundred middle-aged, working-class men of German descent. A majority of these men were neither Nazi party members nor members of the S.S. They were also from Hamburg, which was a town that was one of the least occupied Nazi areas of Germany and, thus, were not as exposed to the Nazi regime. These men were not self-selected to be part of the order police, nor were they specially selected because of violent characteristics. These men were plucked from their normal lives, put into squads, and given the mission to kill Jews because they were the only people available for the task. Surprisingly, these ordinary men proved to be completely capable of killing tens of thousands of people.
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