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

Product Information

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.

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. Reading all this is exhausting, even in a fairly short book. The usual disturbing details, hard to understand, crop up, such as that Jews went to their deaths with “quiet composure.” Browning humanizes, or at least reifies, the men of the battalion, drawing incisive sketches of them, as known through the interviews to which he had access. Generally, those few who did not participate, or limited their participation, were usually of a slightly higher social class than the other men. Several were tradesmen who had their own businesses and were not interested in a postwar police career, and so were more independent. Roman Catholics seemed to be the most likely to refuse—but there were few in Hamburg, so this was not a large group, either. But, as one would expect, no one factor dictated a man’s behavior. Or rather, one single factor hard to define did—his character. 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. The essential lesson of Ordinary Men is that genocide is not the exclusive preserve of fanatics, racist thugs and homicidal maniacs. It is part of the human condition, especially of humans living in society.” Readmore...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] 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. This is one of the essential books of Holocaust literature. When I read it, some years ago now, it changed me. The last Aktion operation RPB101 undertook was around Lublin. It was called Aktion Erntefest (Operation Harvest Festival) and along with other police battalions, SS troops and Ukrainian Special Service battalions some 43,000 Jews from the Majdanek, Poniatowa and Trawniki concentration camps were murdered over just 2 (two) days.

I don't consider myself a history buff but I do dare to say I know more about WWII than average person. But this was a blind spot to me, it seems. I knew about executions of Russian POWs and citizens in the conquered territories which the book touches only briefly but I had no idea it was on such scale and done by average people, not sadistic SS soldiers. Doubly so for the main content in this book, public executions of Jews in Poland. Thousands per day. It wasn't 20 people in this town, 30 there in a span of the entire occupation (assuming the rest was deported to camps). No, they were brought to one spot and executed, one group after another, executions going on entire day. Not even ISIS was this efficient and methodical. We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.The title is a nod to Raul Hilberg to whom the book is dedicated; see Hilberg (2003), The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 992: "Ordinary men were to perform extraordinary tasks." 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." This construct explains some of the very peculiar rhetorical and logical moves he makes, as for example: Browning 1998, p.52: " [Hiwis] were screened on the basis of their anti-Communist (and hence almost invariably anti-Semitic) sentiments."

A fascinating book on the role of ordinary policemen in the holocaust. Based on testimony given in the 1960s the author draws out the way in which these men approached and dealt with the systematic murder of Jews in Poland.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. 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 ]