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

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Valdis O. Lumans (1993), Himmler's Auxiliaries: The Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle and the German National Minorities of Europe, 1933–1945. Univ of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0807820660 Even though Browning is writing as a scholar, with the intent of persuading through academic argument, his writing is clear and uncluttered. He approaches the subject with an easy-to-follow framework, providing a balanced look at how the battalion went from routine duties in occupied territories to the violent slaughter of Jewish civilians. Christopher R. Browning". University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Archived from the original on February 24, 2020. The train journeys with the treatment on the Jewish people, including the sheer numbers placed into carriages, and their loss of life by crush injuries, thirst and heat exhaustion, are described, as are the desperate attempts by some Jews to escape. This is placed alongside the poor organisation of the guards and details of the journey with the need to patch the trains up at various stations along the route as the desparate hands of people clawed away at barbed wire and wooden planking. The guard details had, as they described, little ammunition; but they expended hundreds of rounds each exhausting their supplies on these journeys.

Everyday Lasts a Year: A Jewish Family's Correspondence from Poland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.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 biggest theme of this book is how God selected the unworthy and the unqualified. It was solely the work of God to mold and shape these very ordinary men to do the work of the kingdom; displaying how God truly chooses the poor and humble of this world to accomplish His goals. Throughout Ordinary Men, Browning provides a window into the daily life of the unit and its purpose in the hierarchy and structure of the Third Reich. The often personal glimpses demonstrate the slow and methodical change in Nazi policy towards Jewish civilians, as the German leadership shifted towards the Final Solution. 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. Westermann, Edward B. (2004). " 'Ordinary Men' or 'Ideological Soldiers'? Police Batallion 310 in URSS, 1942". In Martel, Gordon (ed.). The World War Two Reader. Routledge. p.218. ISBN 0415224020 . Retrieved 6 December 2014.

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview. 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 DetailsA. Dirk Moses (2004), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children..., Berghahn Books (Google Print), p.260. ISBN 1571814108 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. Browning indaga, presenta fonti e materiali, introduce ipotesi e interpretazioni diverse, critica e polemizza, sempre lontanissimo dalla retorica, sempre a ciglio asciutto. Non solo “assassini da tavolino”, ma esecutori materiali, gente che dovette letteralmente immergersi nel sangue delle vittime uccise a bruciapelo.

Hartmann, Ralph (2010). "Der Alibiprozeß". Den Aufsatz kommentieren (in German). Ossietzky 9/2010. Archived from the original on 2 December 2013 . Retrieved 19 November 2013. The combination of the peculiar circumstances embedded in the Nazi regime paved the way for such moral distortion. A climate of political violence and frenetic hatred cultivated towards those regarded as ‘racially inferior’ could not fail to take its toll on these men. They had been living in a society where violence and repression were common currency long enough to imbibe the ‘values’ characteristic of the Third Reich. From here it completed numerous operations, which I need not recount in detail but readers of this review will understand by now, even if one is new to the Holocaust, that the killings were done with no regard to human life. The tactics and how people were rounded up, including Poles denouncing or reporting Jewish hideouts, transported to and organised and then shot is described very clearly and chillingly in the men's own words. 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 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. The Path to Genocide: Essays on launching the Final Solution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Browning has acted as an expert witness at several Holocaust-related trials, including the second trial of Ernst Zündel (1988) and Irving v Penguin Books Ltd (2000). [5] Early life and education [ edit ] The horrifying aspect of this account is how little it took for these men to become transformed psychologically from "normal" people into willing participants. These were not atrocities one has come to expect from war during the heat of battle (Malmedy, My Lai, etc.), rather an institutionalized, bureaucratic government policy. That bureaucracy may be part of the cause. It distances people from their actions. Bureaucrats never saw the hideous result of their actions, seeing only their small paper-shuffling role.

Qualcuno si sentì male, qualcuno si rifiutò la prima volta, qualcuno ebbe scrupoli: ma tutti sostanzialmente svolsero il loro compito, e sin dal primo giorno di Polonia, il battaglione 101, protagonista di questo studio, aveva radunato casa per casa e trucidato oltre 1500 ebrei. 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... 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 ] Beginning in 1940, Battalion 101 was used to resettle Poles (mostly not Jews) in Western Poland, around Łódź. This was deportation, but not killing or transport to death camps (which did not exist in 1940). At the end of 1940, the battalion took up guard duties at the Łódź ghetto, into which the 160,000 Jews of Łódź had been crammed. Again, this did not involve killing, though it involved mistreatment and dehumanization of Jews, if not by the battalion’s own men, then by other Nazis involved in guard duties. In mid-1941, the battalion returned to Hamburg and was functionally dissolved and re-formed; it these mostly newly enrolled men on whom Browning’s book focuses. This is one of the essential books of Holocaust literature. When I read it, some years ago now, it changed me.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. The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939– March 1942 (with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-803-25979-4 OCLC 52838928 The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942. 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.