Future actions were easier to handle in part because the killing grew more routine. Also, the policemen found ways to farm out the killing to others. They recruited Hiwis (foreigners) to do the dirty work. This included Russian prisoners (Trawnikis) who would have starved had they not been given the option to serve the Nazis. Also, the Policemen didn’t mind loading the Jews on railcars so that they could be shipped off to a death camp where others could execute them. This was much more preferable than rounding up families and personally killing them. The worst thing was to have to kill innocent people face-to-face. Non solo “assassini da tavolino”, ma esecutori materiali, gente che dovette letteralmente immergersi nel sangue delle vittime uccise a bruciapelo. 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. 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. 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.

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

None of the soldiers objected to serving on the Treblinka transports. They knew that the Jews would be killed but their role ended when the victims were delivered to the camp – “out of sight, out of mind”. It was less easy to evade moral responsibility when directly murdering defenceless civilians. 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. I reasoned with myself that after all without its mother the child could not live any longer. It was supposed to be, so to speak, soothing to my conscience to release children unable to live.'How do normal, law abiding people get into performing abnormal acts of extreme violence? This book takes on that question as regards the members of a German Reserve Police Battalion who participated, often directly, in the murder of over 85,000 Jews, Soviets, Poles and other 'undesirables', many of them women and children, during WWII. Unusually well documented, the activities of these several hundred men are traced from month to month both from the written record and from their own testimonies.

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

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. Lukas, Richard C. (2001). Did the Children Cry? Hitler's War against Jewish and Polish Children, 1939–1945. New York City: Hippocrene Books. See online Chapter IV, Germanization. Project InPosterum - Preserving the Past for the Future (reprint). a b c d e f g Struan Robertson. "Hamburg Police Battalions during the Second World War". Archived from the original on 22 February 2008 . Retrieved 24 September 2009. Browning cites post war academic studies which show that "normal" human beings are capable of great cruelty when placed in positions of power over others. He links this to the actions of police battalion 101, and details the race hate indoctrination prevalent at the time. Dehumanise jews, communists, gays and gypsies and it becomes easier to kill "the other". Browning’s conclusions were strongly criticised by Daniel Goldhagen, author of “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”, a book I haven’t read. This edition contains an afterword in which he responds to those criticisms. There is also an interesting aside about 14 Luxembourgers who were assigned to the Battalion, and whether they behaved any differently from the Germans. Browning doesn’t think they did.We on the Right tend to see this as a threat always over the horizon when the Left dominates, and that is true enough as a historical matter—the vast majority of such twentieth-century ideological killing was conducted by the Left, in an attempt to reach the Utopia that justified sacrifice, or at least the sacrifice of others. And yes, most significant killing by the Right in the twentieth century (leaving aside the Nazis, who had a great deal of leftist ancestry), was measured and usually proportionate, the result of civil war and the need to eliminate direct and existential threats, as in Chile, for example. But the Right should not be complacent—the same demonic, chthonic drives that spur on the Left recur, in their own fashion, in the Right, if less often. We easily forget the Ustasha in Croatia, for example, and, again, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. 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 ] 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.

Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning Plot Summary | LitCharts

National Jewish Book Award for Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland [25] This book suffers from a few significant flaws which I believe demands a re-write of the book - 1) to frame the book for the non-historian and 2) incorporate the studies and arguments which have been presented since the first publication vice having these as addendum. It is imperative that this book be re-written as the information is a critical lesson to humanity and modern societies - the Holocaust was not a unique event in humanity's history. To think it can never happen again in a modern society is hubris of the worst kind. Everyone needs to be aware of not only what happened during the Holocaust, but more importantly why and how it happened - the subject of this book albeit focusing on the study of the Reserve Police Battalions and not the entire nation state. Conflating an answer of how this could happen to "the evil Nazis" is demonstrating an ignorance which will not prevent a re-occurrence of this horror. 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. Post-war, they were full of the usual excuses, all about the people and none about ethics and morality of the actions. Browning says that perhaps the fact that these men weren't highly educated is why they don't give particularly sophisticated explanations as to their motives, which sounds plausible enough.

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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. 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. In recent years there have been so many new discoveries about the Holocaust in Eastern Europe that, although this book was considered groundbreaking when it was published, it is no longer considered as relevant as it once was. This book, a staple of Holocaust studies for twenty-five years, has recently risen to fresh prominence due to repeated mentions of it by Canadian psychologist, and superstar, Jordan Peterson. His focus on the book arises from his own decades-long study of evil regimes, and his thought on how we, you and I, would really react if we lived under an actual such regime. Peterson’s basic point is that we are deluding ourselves if we think we would be heroes; the vast majority of us would fall somewhere on the scale of cooperation with evil. "Ordinary Men" shows that principle in application, in the history of a group of German men who saw militarized police service in Poland during World War II.

Daniel J. Goldhagen Christopher R. Browning Leon Wieseltier

This is one of the essential books of Holocaust literature. When I read it, some years ago now, it changed me. 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 ]Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah (1996). Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1sted.). Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0679446958.