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

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The central theme of the documentary is that anyone can become a murderer if their government is determined to mold them into one.

The legacy of their greatness is the church, a living, breathing organism which they helped found and of which they became the very foundation stones.Thus: Through desensitisation and routinisation, by the end all these men were so brutalised that even those who had initially refused to shoot did, in the end, shoot. With a minimum of psychobabble, Browning tries to compare the actions of the Policemen with some University studies where students acting as prisoners were given fake shocks. When discussing Peter as a leader and what it took to get him there, there is a paragraph about recent school shootings (page 44). Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Japanese perpetrated massacres weren’t sanctioned by high command or the Imperial Government. Zur Genesis der "Endlösung" Eine Antwort an Martin Broszat" pages 96–104 from Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Volume 29.

Post-war, they were full of the usual excuses, all about the people and none about ethics and morality of the actions. A third group, between 10% and 20%, asked to be excused from shooting Jews or otherwise evaded doing so. The infants, the old, and the infirm were shot by Battalion 101 during the early morning roundups on 17 August 1942.Browning says that perhaps the fact that these men weren't highly educated is why they don't give particularly sophisticated explanations as to their motives, which sounds plausible enough. In my review of "Our Crime was Being Jewish" I said that the men and women who perpetrated the Holocaust should be hunted down and tried for these crimes until they take their last breath on earth.

Il libro di Browning è anche un’accurata ricostruzione documentaria degli eccidi di massa e delle deportazioni avvenute in Europa dell’Est in quel periodo, a opera non soltanto del Battaglione 101, ma anche di altri reparti militari tedeschi. I think because this was a sermon series originally, each of the chapters probably needed to be about the same length. It's this tapestry of documentation that pulls together a remarkable look at how the extermination of European Jews occurred: through an evolving policy rather than a pre-determined course.

Even more horrifying is that they were not fanatical Nazis - so how did they come to gaze so deeply into the abyss? Professor Browning ably takes the reader (listener in my case) through these early beginnings and the deportation operations, describing the background structure to the battalion and the detail to the deportations and the locations the Jews were to be transported to. 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.

Browning studies one of the Nazi Police Battalions (Reserve Police Battalion 101) deployed in Poland during the Second World War. One of the motives behind their behavior might be a fear to look like a coward in the eyes of their comrades. Few refused to participate in mass killings, whereas the majority showed conformism and accepted without demur the ‘rules’, sometimes even trying to show themselves “more royalist than the king.The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office: A study of Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland, 1940–43. In fact, the soldiers found it much more difficult to kill German speaking Jews, especially those who had fled Germany. I believe the hangman’s noose may have been good medicine for a man that most likely had lived out a tortured existence knowing what he was ultimately responsible for. The men from the Battalion in question were part of those who directly perpetrated crimes of the Holocaust.