Title: Ordinary Men Pdf Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
A remarkable - and singularly chilling - glimpse of human behavior...This meticulously researched book...represents a major contribution to the literature of the Holocaust." (Newsweek) Now available in audio for the first time, Christopher R. Browning s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews - now with a new afterword and additional photographs. Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. 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. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever. While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition. Ordinary Men is a powerful, chilling, and important work with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
This book fails to answer the central question it poses: Why did "ordinary men" do what they did in Eastern Europe between 1939-1943? In so doing (or not doing), however, it asks another, more important question.The book shows how a relatively small number of men, from moderate and mainly non-military backgrounds, carried out their work. And their work was murder, either in direct one-on-one shootings of eastern Jewry, or indirectly, forcing these terrified souls onto the cattle trains that had as their final destinations the death camps of Sobibor, Treblinka et al.Without living in that awful period it is hard to imagine the mindset of the oppressors, let alone the oppressed and the horrors they were subjected to. And that is why it is always going to be hard to understand how these humdrum Germans did what they did. The final third of the book is a rather laboured attempt to explain, to contextualise their actions. I just do not think it can be done.Thus the book raises another - far more unsettling - question: Given that these men did what they did, would you or I have done anything markedly different, had we been in their shoes? This is not rhetoric: "Ordinary Men" (very well researched, written in a straight-matter-of-fact manner) is likely to make you question your assumptions. Unsettling indeed.This (226 page) book is by Christopher Browning, an American history professor. It's an account of the Reserve Police Battalion 101's brutality in Poland in 1942-43 when it (500 men) shot 38,000 Jews and sent 45,000 by train to Treblinka. The book discusses why ordinary men (in mid-life having grown up in the pre-Nazi Germany) were willing to commit atrocities. Why did so few refuse orders?The book's in 3 parts: a history (massacres, "Jew hunts", deportations to Treblinka), chapter 18 which discusses why ordinary men would do such things, and an afterword where the author discusses his views vis- -vis those of Daniel Goldhagen ("Hitler's Willing Executioners"). The first 2 sections are excellent, the last long and less relevant because Browning doesn't alter his views. He rejects Goldhagens view that anti-Semitism created a permissive climate.The causes of the events are not easy to disentangle. For example, the atrocities were unusual in being institutionalised, bureaucratised, ... as opposed to excesses of individuals. Whilst most perpetrators said they were following orders, policemen who refused to obey were treated leniently. I was tempted to sum up by saying the climate was anti-semitic, orders are orders (few question authority), and group solidarity binds men together; ... no doubt these were important factors. But there are deeper forces at work. Christopher Browning argues that war, with it's heightened tensions, provides a medium in which barbarous acts arise. I'm tempted to think Mr Browning is assuming people are more rational than they are. Individual actions often arise from half-understood fashions or trends in life, and to some extent have roots outside reason (as opposed to being based on firm conviction). Perhaps men follow the herd because their humanity has shallow roots and following is easier than making a stand.Very interesting book, showing the human cruelty and extreme capabilities of of human evilness! :/
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