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

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As Major Trapp said during the first Jewish action “If this Jewish business is ever avenged on earth then have mercy on us Germans.” Trapp was later hanged after the war for carrying out revenge killings of Polish gentiles after a partisan action. Even this Trapp tried to mitigate. I believe the hangman’s noose may have been good medicine for a man that most likely had lived out a tortured existence knowing what he was ultimately responsible for. The fourth problem is the one I actually find most disturbing. On several actions, Reserve Battalion 101 was assisted by "Hiwis" ( Hilfswilligen), units of POWs from Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania "who were screened on the basis of their anti-Communist (and hence almost invariably anti-Semitic) sentiments, offered an escape from probably starvation, and promised that they would not be used in combat against the Soviet army" (52). Browning describes the drunkenness and cruelty of the Hiwis (from the testimony of the Germans); he never seems to consider that they, too, were "ordinary men." In a creepy way (and although he explicitly rejects this with regard to Poles), he accepts the Germans' evaluation of the Hiwis as untermenschen.

The Men Who Pulled the Triggers - The New York Times The Men Who Pulled the Triggers - The New York Times

Ordinary Men has been admired all over the world and is now published in the UK for the first time. It takes as its basis the detailed records of one squad from the Nazis' extermination groups and explores in detail its composition, its actions, andthe methods by which it was trained to perform acts of genocide on an industrial scale. He introduces us to cheerful, friendly, ordinary men who killed without hesitation or apparent remorse for years on end, in docile obedience to an authority theyhappily accepted as legitimate. It is a valuable corrective to the idea of German uniqueness and offers a much more chilling picture of human beings as avidly suggestible and desperate for an organising purpose in their lives, however disgusting. Read more Details 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. RPB101 deployed on active service as part of the Poland invasion force in September 1939 rounding up polish soldiers and guarding prisoner-of-war camps. In December 1939, some 100 regular career policeman were recalled to form additional police units with RPB101's replacements being middle-aged men. After this, the battalion undertook training and then deployed again to Litzmannstadt (Lodz) in Poland in May 1940 to undertake "resettlement" operations, which it completed in April 1941, returning again to its home area of Hamburg. It then undertook three Jewish deportation operations within the Hamburg area taking these unfortunate people by train to ghettos at Litzmannstadt, Minsk and Riga. Perpetrators did not become fellow victims (as many of them later claimed to be) in the way some victims became accomplices of the perpetrators. The relationship between perpetrator and victim was not symmetrical. The range of choice each faced was totally different.” 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.Everyday Lasts a Year: A Jewish Family's Correspondence from Poland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil. 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.

Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning - AbeBooks Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning - AbeBooks

urn:oclc:850510094 Republisher_date 20120306052826 Republisher_operator [email protected];[email protected] Scandate 20120305205827 Scanner scribe10.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Source 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.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. Would I call them Ordinary Men? It doesn't take an extraordinary man to do what they did. Yet, so many have done what they have, not just in Nazi territory, that I don't know what else to call them. I'd say talking about it to call it anything is better than not talking about it. The ordinary men didn't talk about it, not even when they were talking about it. 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.

Ordinary Men - Penguin Books UK Ordinary Men - Penguin Books UK

What, then, is one to conclude? Most of all, one comes away from the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 with great unease. This story of ordinary men is not the story of all men. The reserve policemen faced choices, and most of them committed terrible deeds. But those who killed cannot be absolved by the notion that anyone in the same situation would have done as they did. For even among them, some refused to kill and others stopped killing. Human responsibility is ultimately an individual matter.” 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] Rosenbaum, Ron Explaining Hitler: the search for the origins of his evil New York: Random House, 1998. ISBN 0-679-43151-9 OCLC 317866934 The reason this is such an important book is that when you study the Holocaust you ask almost immediately: How could people do this? How could men who had their own children, go out and murder other children? Or husbands take women and rip open their wombs and kill their infants and shoot them behind the ear? This book raised that question in a very, very strong and powerful way, based on firsthand testimony.” Readmore...Johnson, Eric W. (October 28, 2015). "UW Welcomes Visiting Professor Christopher Browning". University of Washington. Here we come full circle to the mutually intensifying effects of war and racism noted by John Dower, in conjunction with the insidious effects of constant propaganda and indoctrination. Pervasive racism and the resulting exclusion of the Jewish victims from any common ground with the perpetrators made it all the easier for the majority of the policemen to conform to the norms of their immediate community (the battalion) and their society at large (Nazi Germany). Here the years of anti-Semitic propaganda (and prior to the Nazi dictatorship, decades of shrill German nationalism) dovetailed with the polarizing effects of war. The dichotomy of racially superior Germans and racially inferior Jews, central to Nazi ideology, could easily merge with the image of a beleaguered Germany surrounded by warring enemies.” 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. 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. The corollary that one can draw from this micro-historic research is quite scary. Almost any person might under certain circumstances turn into a monster. Peer pressure and natural conformism could negatively influence an individual's personality.

Ordinary Men – HarperCollins Ordinary Men – HarperCollins

The age of the men meant they had been well into adulthood by the time the Nazis took power. They had not spent their formative years under the “inverted morality” of Nazism. Moreover prior to 1933 support for the Nazis had been weak in Hamburg. Most working-class people in the city had supported either the Communists or the Social Democrats. It’s reasonable to conclude that most of the Battalion’s troops were not committed Nazis. So what led these ordinary German family men to commit such horrendous crimes?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”. Lccn 91050471 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL1566486M Openlibrary_edition At the conclusion of the Erntefest massacres, the district of Lublin was for all practical purposes judenfrei. The murderous participation of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in the Final Solution came to an end... For a battalion of less than 500 men, the ultimate body count was at least 83,000 Jews. [50] Postwar history [ edit ] 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.