Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 And The Final Solution In Poland (1998) - Plot & Excerpts
Jessica Mitford claimed in her book A Fine Old Conflict that the racism in her new home Oakland, California was from people who moved there from the Southern states (I guess we kept moving there for those acts of racially led police brutality over the years). No one else would be capable of that. Bitch, please! (Of course, I don't have a photo selection of myself with black people I got on well with as she does. So I MUST be a racist, coming from the American South as I do.) I can't help but think of Mitford, that poster child for hypocrisy, for calling something other than what it is for whatever self serving agenda she felt like preaching. Christopher R. Browning's book Ordinary Men Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland is a hell of a book and interesting to me for more reasons than one of my messy goodreads reviews (did I mention that is my 600th?) could cover. Paul Bryant's review says that it changed his life. It also changed mine for those reasons of putting into context human nature aspects I can only suspect and never pin down (it's much, much too big). I want to call something for what it is, pretty much. It changes me again when I have to ask myself if I believe in the will of human nature.You may have heard of author Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. I have, although I've never read one of his pulp(it) tomes. They took the same source information, those interviews for 1960s investigations of war crimes, the same historical texts and came to some important differences. Well, I'd say (without reading Goldhagen's book) that he was looking for an all Germans are anti-Semitic bent to fit everything into. It happened because they were looking for a reason to murder Jews. Hitler just gave them the means. It couldn't have happened to anyone else, anywhere else. Bitch, please! If you want to ignore centuries of history and the present... When someone makes a grab for power like that someone is going to get royally fucked, history says.Browning's work looks at how "Ordinary Men", middle aged Germans who were not professional killers, who did not roam about the countryside shooting civilians by birth for mirth, became well oiled killing machines for the Nazis. Were they just following orders? Not always, at least not in any immediate way. They weren't held at gun point. I found it interesting that only a dozen opted out when given the choice not to kill. Some followed after, some after killing twenty jews. The breaking point, if there was one, was not the same. Definitely not all. One man who went out of his way to prevent himself and his men from killing the Jews they were transporting would later force twenty old men to undress and then instructed his men to grab bats to beat to death the crawling men. What is in one man, their Captain Trapp, to deliver their orders through his tears to continue to do so? Browning says because one group did so did not mean that another would kill if in their place. It doesn't mean that another wouldn't.In the back of my mind while reading 'Ordinary Men' I had the thought that these German men felt about the Jews the way that many elsewhere in the world would feel for prison inmates. Their punishment is abstract. They could say to themselves, "Well, they deserved what they got." That's if they thought about them at all. The execution takes place far away. The possibility of innocence, of falling through the cracks for making a mistake (one of the most depressing things, to me, is how many are in prison because they could not afford the court costs. A fucking evil scam! I am overwhelmed with hatred of society when I think about things like that. Complacency and heartless? distraction takes many forms). They hate us for our freedom. Maybe we shouldn't have freedom, then. Maybe someone else is looking out for things for us. It's okay to drop a devastating bomb far away. Sleeeeeep sheeeeep. The only racists are in the American south. It's not bigotry to hate gays, if you're black. I've heard that one a lot. Pretending something isn't what it is by calling something else in huge bold letters. Evil! Nazis! Just them.I have no doubt that they were thinking about themselves first of all. The way that they rewrote history in their own minds is important. It also cannot be discounted that the interviews were for legal proceedings and no way were they going to even mention direct culpability or anti-Semitism. As Browning points out, that would make it intent and the intent makes it homicide. How much of a looming threat did the Nazi higher ups have that a different mind set some couple of decades later would change their side stepping of the larger implications (they massacred so many people)? I have an idea in the back of my mind that it is complacency out of selfishness. They killed because they didn't want to think about it. That the men didn't ask to leave when the option was no longer presented to them says a lot to me about going to sleep. The killings were routine and it was all something to get used to. Would they have moved for themselves? I don't even know that. (Ten officers to 8,000 Jews and they didn't revolt? We're just being resettled.)Would I call them Ordinary Men? It doesn't take an extraordinary man to do what they did. Yet, so many have done what they have, not just in Nazi territory, that I don't know what else to call them. I'd say talking about it to call it anything is better than not talking about it. The ordinary men didn't talk about it, not even when they were talking about it.Five fucking stars. It is not an ordinary man who will look into the lowest of humankind and not pretend. There was much more I wanted to write here and now my mind is too numb with statistics (600 reviews) that I can't even say anything nice now. People sure can suck. What do I call it, again? (Fascism?)And I realize I didn't break any new ground here but that's really why I love this so much. It's tangible proof of this darkness. I held it in my hand. Not just numbers.
Christopher Browning, one of the better known Holocaust scholars today, used evidence from the post-war investigations of Police Battalion 101 to create an image of the "ordinary men" who participated in the massacre of Jews in Eastern Europe. By examining testimony, documents, and diary excerpts, he pieces together a chronological history of the unit’s participation and involvement in the Nazis' Final Solution. Even though Browning is writing as a scholar, with the intent of persuading through academic argument, his writing is clear and uncluttered. He approaches the subject with an easy-to-follow framework, providing a balanced look at how the battalion went from routine duties in occupied territories to the violent slaughter of Jewish civilians.Throughout Ordinary Men, Browning provides a window into the daily life of the unit and its purpose in the hierarchy and structure of the Third Reich. The often personal glimpses demonstrate the slow and methodical change in Nazi policy towards Jewish civilians, as the German leadership shifted towards the Final Solution. 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. Combined with the personal accounts of battalion members, it is easy to see the slow progression of anti-Jewish doctrine, as well as the frequently unmentioned nuances of its executioners, the most revealing of which — the lack of disciplinary action for those who refused to take part in the massacres and "Jew hunts" -- reveals a great deal about the make-up of the actual perpetrators. Afterword: The more recent edition of Ordinary Men has an afterword from Browning dissecting his ongoing debate with Daniel Goldhagen (author of Hitler's Willing Executioners). Personally, I’ve been surprised at how many people bought into Goldhagen's rather contradictory and ill-conceived thesis, and yet, because of that, Browning decided to add this clear-cut statement about his own conclusions in order to refute Willing Executioners' assertion that Germans are anti-Semitic by their very nature.
What do You think about Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 And The Final Solution In Poland (1998)?
This book is a very sobering reminder of the depravity of man's fallen nature. It examines the history of one battalion of police in Nazi Germany, and how they went from normal civilians to mass murders, by killing tens of thousands of Jews as part of the Holocaust. Browning shows that they were ordinary men - not unusually violent or anti-Semetic. At first they killed with reluctance. But due to peer pressure, the desensitization to violence, and other factors, they all participated in murders.One lesson I took away was to allow no internal negotiations with evil. Perhaps 10-20% of the battalion was uncomfortable with the murders, and strove to avoid participating whenever possible. However, they did nothing to try to stop them. Instead they were assigned other roles, such as finding Jews, and reasoned that acting in those capacities were fine, since they were only assisting and not actually pulling the trigger. Guarding the prisoners seemed fine in comparison with a place on a firing squad, even though they were still fully participating in the atrocities."There but for the grace of God go I."
—Joshua Horn
Ordinary men is a revealing and sobering analysis of the conduct and background of a particular police battalion that wreaked havoc in German-controlled Poland in 1941-42. Especially the last chapters are worth your while because Browning meets one of his strongest critics, Daniel Goldhagen, head-on and completely unravels the latter's monocausal explanation of why it is that ordinary German men wound up to be the perpetrators of such extraordinarily gruesome crimes. It is hard not to agree with Browning that, contrary to Goldhagen's beliefs, it was not predominantly anti-semitism that led this battalion to inflict atrocities upon the Jews but more plain and, this is the unnerving bit, ultimately human characteristics like the inclination to group conformity and solidarity, the inclination to obey a powerful authority, and even the simple fear of punishment and sober career-mindedness. Goldhagen and his adepts have long held the idea that German Jew-slayers were all very ardent executioners but the dire reality is that most of these "policemen" did not enjoy their nasty work. Their responsibility and culpability for those crimes of course is an entirely different matter. All these policemen in the end still had a choice to make, there were those few heroes who managed to resist to peer pressure and loss of face and managed to refrain from all the gore and ghastliness. But where to draw the line exactly, between too eager participation and virtuous resistance remains a difficult question.
—Lukas
I VOLENTEROSI CARNEFICI DI HITLERChe cosa spinse i tedeschi comuni a diventare esecutori dell’Olocausto? Non solo “assassini da tavolino”, ma esecutori materiali, gente che dovette letteralmente immergersi nel sangue delle vittime uccise a bruciapelo.Poliziotti, operai, commercianti, impiegati, artigiani, 'ordinary people', tutti ‘riservisti’, furono chiamati a partecipare, a dare il loro contributo diretto al massacro. Qualcuno si sentì male, qualcuno si rifiutò la prima volta, qualcuno ebbe scrupoli: ma tutti sostanzialmente svolsero il loro compito, e sin dal primo giorno di Polonia, il battaglione 101, protagonista di questo studio, aveva radunato casa per casa e trucidato oltre 1500 ebrei. Browning indaga, presenta fonti e materiali, introduce ipotesi e interpretazioni diverse, critica e polemizza, sempre lontanissimo dalla retorica, sempre a ciglio asciutto. Grande libro.PSNessuno di quelli che si rifiutarono subì pesanti punizioni.
—orsodimondo
