Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men

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Christopher Browning shows how the Police Battalion 101 was given a lot of racist of propaganda against the Jewish people. Browning says in his book, Ordinary Men, Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, how the police helped in training and the practice of killing many people at once when forming the Battalion 101. Many of the members were not expecting to kill thousands of Jewish people. Browning shows why some of the new police members did not shoot the Jews that they were told to kill. The problem was caused by the moral beliefs of the men that were chosen to murder the Jews, and the orders that were given by the German Police members. Ordinary Men is a good representation of Police Battalion 101's involvement in the Holocaust. The book is about showing the events this group of men participated in and how they reacted to them. Browning said that the men of Police Battalion 101 were just like any other person in Germany, normal and ordinary. They were five hundred working, middle aged men from Germany. They were from Hamburg, which was a town that was a part of Germany that was least influenced by Nazi beliefs and way of life. These men were selected to be part because they could show violent behaviors. These men were taken away from their families and put into groups. These groups were and given the mission to kill the Jews. Why they took normal people, I don’t know but that shows how much the Nazis were willing to do to kill all the Jews in Europe. They were chosen because they were the only people available for the mission. Shockingly these men, that had no intension of killing people, were completely capable of killing tens of thousands of people and the way they killed was so great, they surprised th...

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...ading this book I believe that this book had a lot of information in is and made a good point because it made the reader put them in the shoes of the Battalion 101. I was able to see the inhumane actions of Police Battalion 101, and it showed a in an easy and understandable way the genocide throughout the Holocaust. The book showed the truth, such as these policemen were given opportunities to get out of killing Jews. However, many did walk away and instead becoming mass murders of Jews. I would recommend this book to anyone that loves history or the Holocaust because it shows a different point of view about the men who killed Thousands of Jews.. I love history and this is one of the reason I love it so much, because history is how you look at things so we need to get the truth every time we look at a historical event because if we don’t then history can be changed.

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