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Loading... Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in… (1992)by Christopher R. Browning
None. A haunting book that shows the utter evil that humankind will sink to when treating its own species. Wonderfully researched by Browning, this book will send chills down your spine when reading it. Yet another example of the horrors of the Holocaust. (  ) rsplenda477 | Mar 27, 2013 |  If you are interested in the Holocaust, this account from the perspective of those that carried out Hitler's orders is gruesome yet riveting. The first attempt to read this book usually ends in disgust. If you can get through it the stories are astounding and it gives a more complet picture of Hitler's final solution. ( ) becks2611 | Nov 10, 2012 | Nya ? kunskaper om andra världskriget som kanske inte har lyfts fram lika mycket som dödandet i förintelselägren. pilvi | Sep 11, 2012 | A very interesting read on how ordinary men can become willing killers if the circumstances are right but that eventual everyone had a choice to comply or object. Some objected, most did not or were indifferent. Highly recommended ( ) bakabaka84 | Apr 27, 2012 | "Ordinary Men" came on my radar after reading the Wikipedia.org entry on the Belzec concentration camp, a place I'd never heard of, which in turn was surfaced after learning about Jane Yolen's "The Devil's Arithmetic". This book looks at a 400-500 man paramilitary (not active or regular military) unit that assisted in the deaths of thousands. The early-middle and middle-aged Hamburgers are startled by their first murders but then we follow the group as some continue and grow proficient while others try to avoid further killing. Browning does a tremendous job of walking through the history of this unit, based on German government documents and other sources. It's a horrific business as he approaches each massacre or other action in a scholarly, almost antiseptic way. In this way the text is a bit mechanical, but heavily documented and supported with citations. The author walks you through the descent of this group into its significant participation in Hitler's Final Solution. If the idea of reading the historic accounting of these murderers is too much, skip to Chapter 18. Browning looks at the possible reasons that ordinary, non-descript, not terribly partisan individuals could make these choices. He calls on pyschology research done by Milgram and others, looks at Nazi indoctrination, and other variables that might cause people to choose murder. Browning doesn't see any of these variables as exculpatory, but it's interesting to see him draw the threads together and gain the vantage of what being a member of this police unit might have entailed. (  ) davidpwhelan | Oct 27, 2011 | no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0060995068, Paperback)Shocking as it is, this book--a crucial source of original research used for the bestseller Hitler's Willing Executioners--gives evidence to suggest the opposite conclusion: that the sad-sack German draftees who perpetrated much of the Holocaust were not expressing some uniquely Germanic evil, but that they were average men comparable to the run of humanity, twisted by historical forces into inhuman shapes. Browning, a thorough historian who lets no one off the moral hook nor fails to weigh any contributing factor--cowardice, ideological indoctrination, loyalty to the battalion, and reluctance to force the others to bear more than their share of what each viewed as an excruciating duty--interviewed hundreds of the killers, who simply could not explain how they had sunken into savagery under Hitler. A good book to read along with Ron Rosenbaum's comparably excellent study Explaining Hitler. --Tim Appelo(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 03 Jan 2013 18:59:12 -0500) In the early hours of July 13, 1942, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of the German Order Police, entered the Polish Village of Jozefow. They had arrived in Poland less than three weeks before, most of them recently drafted family men too old for combat service--workers, artisans, salesmen, and clerks. By nightfall, they had rounded up Jozefow's 1,800 Jews, selected several hundred men as "work Jews," and shot the rest--that is, some 1,500 women, children, and old people. Most of these overage, rear-echelon reserve policemen had grown to maturity in the port city of Hamburg in pre-Hitler Germany and were neither committed Nazis nor racial fanatics. Nevertheless, in the sixteen months from the Jozefow massacre to the brutal Erntefest ("harvest festival") slaughter of November 1943, these average men participated in the direct shooting deaths of at least 38,000 Jews and the deportation to Treblinka's gas chambers of 45,000 more--a total body count of 83,000 for a unit of less than 500 men.Drawing on postwar interrogations of 210 former members of the battalion, Christopher Browning lets them speak for themselves about their contribution to the Final Solution--what they did, what they thought, how they rationalized their behavior (one man would shoot only infants and children, to "release" them from their misery). In a sobering conclusion, Browning suggests that these good Germans were acting less out of deference to authority or fear of punishment than from motives as insidious as they are common: careerism and peer pressure. With its unflinching reconstruction of the battalion's murderous record and its painstaking attention to the social background and actions of individual men, this unique account offers some of the most powerful and disturbing evidence to date of the ordinary human capacity for extraordinary inhumanity.… (more) |
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