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

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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. Browning argued that the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question," which was first used in 1939, meant until 1941 a "territorial solution.

ORDINARY MEN | Kirkus Reviews ORDINARY MEN | Kirkus Reviews

Born in Durham, North Carolina, Browning was raised in Chicago, where his father was professor of philosophy at Northwestern University and his mother was a nurse. I believe it had little relevance to a reserve policemen being asked to blow a hole at point blank range through a defenseless child’s neck and getting spattered with their brains at times. How was it that a group of middle-aged men from Hamburg, most not even members of the Nazi party, led by a 53-year-old career policeman, carried out some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust? Jose Raymund Canoy (2007), The Discreet Charm of the Police State: The Landpolizei and the Transformation of Bavaria, 1945–1965, BRILL, p. In 1968 after a two-year trial 3 men were sentenced to 8years imprisonment, one to 6years, and one to 5years.One of the motives behind their behavior might be a fear to look like a coward in the eyes of their comrades. The first mass murder known to have been committed entirely by Reserve Police Battalion 101 was the most "messy" for lack of training; uniforms dripping wet with brain matter and blood. 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.

Christopher Browning - Wikipedia

Or husbands take women and rip open their wombs and kill their infants and shoot them behind the ear?After this final massacre, most of the battalion breaks up as men transfer to different units or even form new ones. 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? Yet 80 to 90 percent of the men proceeded to kill, though almost all of them—at least initially—were horrified and disgusted by what they were doing. In the 1960s, charges are brought against 14 men in Reserve Police Battalion 101 for their participation in the mass murder of Jews and 210 former members are interrogated. He is the author of nine books, including Ordinary Men (1992) and The Origins of the Final Solution (2004).