Holocaust Reflection

When I signed up for this course, I had limited knowledge of the holocaust and was not very interested in its history. This course ended up being one of my favorites and the most informational courses that I have taken. Other Political leaders such as Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin had committed mass murders that caused a much higher victim rate than Hitler, so my thoughts were that the holocaust was just another tragedy in human history. This class has given me a different perspective in the way I view the holocaust. It has personalized this horrific event in that it begs a person ask themselves how could this tragedy take place? How come the Jews and the world did not do more to prevent it from happening? The course has spiked my interested in the the holocaust in that I have found that if I come across a holocaust program while watching the television, I will stop to watch that show or read a holocaust article that I would not have read in the past. The four books assigned for reading by Browning, Sierakowiak, Lengyel, and Rajchman expounded on the personalization of the holocaust by giving insight into the experiences of

I was surprised that the soldiers of the Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Browning’s book were willing to shoot the amount of unarmed men, women, and children that they did without more men refusing to do so. Even though the Battalion Commander offered a way out by offering no personal consequences for not participating in the shooting, I would have thought the moral conscience of more men would have made them step out of the formation in order not to participate. Browning’s argument that these were ordinary men and that any ordinary man could have participated in murdering thousands of people in such personal way, showed me that the comradeship and unit cohesion of the men in Police Battalion 101 was stronger than the values of the individual