Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. This period, from 1942-1943, is among the most violent, bloody, and horrifying in World War II, due in no small part to the violence in major ghettos and extermination camps. This book, which is, Christopher Browning’s study of the interrogation of a battalion of German soldiers sent to take part in the ‘final solution’ in Poland in 1942, is quite astounding in terms of what he found out about ‘ordinary’ human cruelty and viciousness. However, this should not detract from what is a book that offers an angle to the wider catalogue of Holocaust books. Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J.

Daniel J. Goldhagen Christopher R. Browning Leon Wieseltier

Takes as its basis the detailed records of one squad from the Nazis' extermination groups and explores in its composition, its actions, and the methods by which it was trained to perform acts of genocide on an industrial scale. 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. 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. Zur Genesis der "Endlösung" Eine Antwort an Martin Broszat" pages 96–104 from Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Volume 29. 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.More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon. Several thousand Jews (estimated at 4,500) [45] from the transit ghetto were massacred by the Sonderdienst battalion of Ukrainian Trawnikis under police control in an assembly-line manner and dumped in hastily excavated mass graves. One of the motives behind their behavior might be a fear to look like a coward in the eyes of their comrades. 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. This was a bunch of middle-aged German guys who were unfit for military service, so they were given an easier job, which was to shoot Jewish people and bury them in woods (okay, the last bit could be hard, but generally you could get the Jewish people to do all the digging before you shot them).

Ordinary Men – HarperCollins

For the next half-year, beginning 28 November 1940, Police Battalion 101 guarded the new ghetto in Łódź, eventually crammed with 160,000 Jews. I believe that these Jews would have preferred to have been shocked a few times or even shipped off to Abu Ghraib to live out the war forming naked pyramids. Many of these factors are present in most people’s everyday lives, which leads to one important question: if the men in RPB 101 were transformed into killers under such common circumstances, are there many people who wouldn’t? These men weren't indoctrinated fanatics, they were the most ordinary of ordinary men: middle and working class, craftsmen and tradesmen, blue collar workers if you will. A specialist on the Holocaust, Browning is known for his work documenting the Final Solution, the behavior of those implementing Nazi policies, and the use of survivor testimony.

The military developments of the Second World War and to turf wars within the German bureaucracy made expulsion lose its viability such that by 1941, members of the bureaucracy were willing to countenance the mass murder of Jews. These deportations were often accompanied by violence as Jews tried to escape or even died of heat exhaustion in the trains. Additional 11,000–12,000 Jews were deported from ghettos in Izbica, Piaski, in Lubartów, Zamość and Kraśnik with the aid one of Trawnikis battalions of Karl Streibel.