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Title: Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning ISBN: 0-06-099506-8 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 17 March, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.39 (36 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Ordinary Men, Extraordinary Brutality
Comment: When the Second World War ended in Europe in May of 1945, some six million Jews had been killed in what the Nazis termed the Final Solution. In its barbarity, the Final Solution is unprecedented in this the history of Western civilization. However, some 50 years after the war, the question still remains: what type of person could carry out this genocide? Christopher R. Browning delves into this aspect of the Holocaust in Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.
Like many other such battalions, Police Battalion 101 was organized for the purpose of policing and pacifying territories captured by the advancing German during the early years of the war in the east. Their role in Hitler's quest for new Lebensraum for the German people was significant. They were, however, a non-combat unit. For this reason, the unit was mostly comprised of men in their forties and those unfit for combat duty.
Browning classifies the men of Police Battalion 101 as being ordinary: he points out that most were conscripted white-collar types from Hamburg and Luxembourg, who, unlike the SS and other German units, were not overtly indoctrinated with Nazi ideology. But, as the reader eventually discovers, regardless of individual variances in belief, the involvement of the majority of Police Battalion 101 in the Final Solution is undeniable.
By mid-1942, Police Battalion 101 was stationed in Lublin District in central Poland. Over the course of the next 12 months they would participate in a series of massacres, deportations, and a lengthy "Jew hunt." The profound psychological transformation that the men of the unit underwent while undertaking these operations is startling.
Some men initially refused to participate in the first killings, with dissension being the norm and, later, an accepted fact even among the officers of the unit. Yet in time most would become willing participants.
By November 1943, the once reluctant Police Battalion 101 would conduct, without hesitation or remorse, massacres at Majdanek and Pontiawa that, in total, took over 30,000 lives.
The majority of the details about the Battalion come from trials held in Germany in the 1960s. Many accounts and testimonies by former unit members were recorded at the time, but Browning admits that their information is limited. He reminds the reader that some 20 years after the fact the participants were in a situation where those testifying could downplay their role by intentionally being ambiguous or forgetful.
"Quite simply," states Browning in the preface to Ordinary Men, "some men deliberately lied, for they feared the judicial consequences of telling the truth as they remembered it. Not only repression and distortion but conscious mendacity shaped the accounts of the witnesses."
Taking this into consideration, Browning's ability to fashion a clear, accurate and consistent account of the horrific conduct of Police Battalion 101 is excellent. Deciphering the ambiguities and willful contradictions made by the testifiers, the author successfully presents the story critically and objectively. The end result is a work that is essential to understanding the perplexing conduct of those supposedly "ordinary men" who participated in the Final Solution.
Rating: 5
Summary: A brilliant study.
Comment: A modern classic. This book, first published in 1992, is an extremely important study about the Holocaust. Browning describes how a unit of ordinary, middle-aged, conscripted reserve policemen without the special ideological indoctrination of the type received by the members of the SS, became active participants in the murder of several thousands of Polish jews. The book starts by an analysis of the first occurences of Final Solution policies in occupied Russia in 1941, and then describes the actions of the Reserve Battalion 101 in Poland in the fall of 1942 and in 1943. The last two chapters contain extremely insightful and penetrating observations about the processes that could have transformed five hundred ordinary men into a group of mass murderers. In the Afterword to this British edition the author examines the critique the original American edition was subjected to by Daniel Goldhagen in his best-selling book "Hitler's Willing Executioners." Goldhagen's biased methodology, lack of consistency, his double standards, and his skewed use of, and sometimes disregard for, the sources, is here brilliantly and devastantingly exposed. This book is a remarkable work of serious scholarship that do help us to understand (in)human behaviour not only in Nazi Germany but also in our own time. Indispensable!
Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent Analysis
Comment: Although our world has seen many events occur which defy explanation and simply boggle the mind, thus far none has matched the Holocaust in the intensity and sheer damage that it caused the world and more significantly the Jewish population of Europe. Yet, to this day who should be blamed for the Holocaust has still been an open question, yes it was Hitler's plan and original idea, but was he the only one behind it? All along it was the idea that the Jews had been the downfall of the German empire and something has to be done about them. A large factor in these ideas was the use of Einzatsgruppen and Police detachments behind the Army Front in clearing out and containing the Jewish populations in Ghettos or simply to eliminate them. Who these men were and what they represented is what Christopher R. Browning discusses in his book "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland." We are shown what kind of men comprised this unit, Party members, members of the SS, which social class did they come from, working or privileged upper higher classes, and so on. The first killings are examined and how individuals reacted to them. None of the members of Police Battalion 101 had any idea that their first shooting of unarmed Jews was to take place, thus when asked by the commander of the Battalion those who wish to step out can, and they will be assigned other jobs, at first one man stepped out and was immediately berated by his commanding officer. After Trapp (the commander of the battalion) "had taken Schmike (the man who stepped out) under his protection, some ten or twelve other men stepped forward as well. They turned in their rifles and were told to await a further assignment from the major (pg. 57)." Later on even more men would step out or at least be asked to be excused after they had shot five or six people while others simply milled about at different junctures of the area trying to avoid being asked to be part of the shooting squads. No one was punished, which goes to show that the Germans did have a choice in taking part in the Holocaust or being left out. Another large part of the job that Police Battalion 101 did was to have Jews board trains which would take them to concentration or death camps, they would have tens of thousands sent to their death. Eventually as the battalion partook in a larger number of operations to round up and execute Jews they would grow more and more accustomed to it and at times would even joke about it. The last job that the Police Battalion had was to form hunting units to hunt down Jews who had run away and hid in the forests or elsewhere in the country side, these actions would have hundreds of casualties on the Jewish side while rarely would the Germans encounter opposition from Partisan type units. A helping hand was given to the Germans in their executions by groups like Ukrainians and Latvians, they would get thoroughly drunk and start to shoot carelessly and widely usually wounding the Jews and then shooting more and more victims on top of those wounded without administering any 'mercy shots.' Although the Poles were not used in these kinds of units many did help the Germans by showing them where Jews were hiding out, the Germans would write how they often 'betrayed' the Jews to them, whereas I doubt the Poles thought the same way about the Jews. While 'betraying' might be used when talking of a friend or family member, the Poles saw Jews as neither. After we are taken through all the actions of Police Battalion 101 we are presented with the question of what could have made them do something like this? Although some would say it was the battlefield position they found themselves in, this is incorrect. Those who participated saw mostly no battlefield experience, they were mostly older men who would not see service in the German Wehrmacht and were used for rear area security. The book is an excellent introduction and analysis to help us understand why those in the Police Battalion took actions against the Jews, and at the same time see that those who did not want to or could not, for whatever reason, were not punished but adopted for other work.
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Title: Hitler's Willing Executioners : Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen ISBN: 0679772685 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 28 January, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Survival In Auschwitz by Primo Levi ISBN: 0684826801 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 1995 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland by Jan T. Gross ISBN: 0142002402 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt ISBN: 0140187650 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 1994 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Perpetrators Victims Bystanders : Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945 by Raul Hilberg ISBN: 0060995076 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 15 September, 1993 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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