On July 13, 1942, the Jewish community of Jozefow, Poland was annihilated by Reserve Police Battalion 101, who was working with Einsatzgruppen, the most fanatical members of the SS. This group received orders to collect the town’s Jews and to kill them all, except for the young boys who could perform labor. Christopher Browning’s arguments in his essay, Reserve Police Battalion 101, reveal that the humans who partook in the killings of Jews were just humans doing typical things. They were blindly obedient and pressured by their peers. Also, when people are around their friends, they can have a tendency to be less moral and humane.
The soldiers who were a part of the Police Battalion had a choice to not participate in the mass killings of Jewish
…show more content…
Upon receiving the orders, Major Trapp delivered the news to his Battalion with tears in his eyes while his voice was shaking. To try and make this task easier, he reminded his soldiers that bombs were falling on women and children back home in Germany and that the Jews of this village supported the Partisans. Trapp spent that day in the town of Jozefow in the homes of the local priest and the mayor and ‘weeped like a child’(p.314). Even though Trapp had these feelings and knew that what he was tasked to do was morally wrong and inhumane, he carried out the orders, because ‘orders were orders’(p.314). This is similar to the Stanford prison experiment. This experiment was a simulation of a prison in the basement of Stanford University. Test subjects (university students) were divided into two groups: inmates and prison guards. The prison guards took advantage of their authority and ended up abusing the inmates verbally and physically. After a few days, many of the prisoners went mad. They felt trapped and wanted to hurt the guards. Five of the prisoners were so upset that they quit the simulation early. They had gone insane. The guards, who were regular students had turned into something that they were not; mean and scary prison guards. They ended up having no feelings about what they were …show more content…
He writes, ‘Many simply denied that they had any choice. Faced with the testimony of others, they did not contest that Trapp had made the offer but repeatedly claimed that they had not heard that part of his speech or could not remember it (p. 315). Sometimes, when a person does a terrible thing and is going through a trial, the person tells himself that they are innocent so many times that they end up convincing themselves that they are innocent. ‘As one man admitted, it was not until many years later that he began to consider that what he had done had not been right. He had not given it a thought at the time (p.315).’ This can be compared to David Cash’s story. David Cash was at a casino in Las Vegas with a peer. David’s friend followed an unwatched girl into a restroom, and the two began throwing toilet paper at each other. David’s friend, Jeremy Strohmeyer, took the young girl into a stall and ended up abusing her. David entered the restroom as Strohmeyer was taking the girl into the stall and peeked over the stall wall to see what was unfolding. David did nothing about Jeremy’s actions and left the bathroom. Jeremy followed about 20 minutes later and immediately confessed to killing the girl. David was questioned for a long time afterwards about not taking action and his innocence, but he felt that he had done nothing wrong. Both David and some Reserve Police
The atrocities of war can take an “ordinary man” and turn him into a ruthless killer under the right circumstances. This is exactly what Browning argues happened to the “ordinary Germans” of Reserve Police Battalion 101 during the mass murders and deportations during the Final Solution in Poland. Browning argues that a superiority complex was instilled in the German soldiers because of the mass publications of Nazi propaganda and the ideological education provided to German soldiers, both of which were rooted in hatred, racism, and anti-Semitism. Browning provides proof of Nazi propaganda and first-hand witness accounts of commanders disobeying orders and excusing reservists from duties to convince the reader that many of the men contributing to the mass
The reader is confronted with an interpretation of life in Jedwabne as a shared experience. With the town population of 2,500 and about two-thirds of the residents are Jewish and the rest Polish and Catholic, it was hard for anyone to participate in the economic, social, and political area without inflicting conflict on people with different ideas. Although, Gross claims that religious or ethnic difference did not partake in a role of the engagement between the Non-Jewish and Jew individuals of Poland. He avoids situating the Jedwabne experience among other anti-Jewish mass murders. The Jedwabne experience is represented by Gross's reliance on individual testimonies by direct interviews, interviews done by other interviewers, and memoirs. Court documents from the 1953 trial such the recounts from perpetrators and memoirs from survivors or family of the survivors assist in further evidence of the event. Although, the reliance on testimonials clearly highlights the issue of responsibility. Put another way, rather than providing a clear choice by disregarding the massacre as a hate crime, Neighbors gives the reader the ability to interpret the actions done by the Non-Jewish Poles was completed due the belief of kill or be killed. When a community is demoralized by war,
The motion picture A Few Good Men challenges the question of why Marines obey their superiors’ orders without hesitation. The film illustrates a story about two Marines, Lance Corporal Harold W. Dawson and Private First Class Louden Downey charged for the murder of Private First Class William T. Santiago. Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, who is known to be lackadaisical and originally considers offering a plea bargain in order to curtail Dawson’s and Downey’s sentence, finds himself fighting for the freedom of the Marines; their argument: they simply followed the orders given for a “Code Red”. The question of why people follow any order given has attracted much speculation from the world of psychology. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, conducted an experiment in which randomly selected students were asked to deliver “shocks” to an unknown subject when he or she answered a question wrong. In his article, “The Perils of Obedience”, Milgram concludes anyone will follow an order with the proviso that it is given by an authoritative figure. Two more psychologists that have been attracted to the question of obedience are Herbert C. Kelman, a professor at Harvard University, and V. Lee Hamilton, a professor at the University of Maryland. In their piece, Kelman and Hamilton discuss the possibilities of why the soldiers of Charlie Company slaughtered innocent old men, women, and children. The Marines from the film obeyed the ordered “Code Red” because of how they were trained, the circumstances that were presented in Guantanamo Bay, and they were simply performing their job.
The arguments of Christopher Browning and Daniel John Goldhagen contrast greatly based on the underlining meaning of the Holocaust to ordinary Germans. Why did ordinary citizens participate in the process of mass murder? Christopher Browning examines the history of a battalion of the Order Police who participated in mass shootings and deportations. He debunks the idea that these ordinary men were simply coerced to kill but stops short of Goldhagen's simplistic thesis. Browning uncovers the fact that Major Trapp offered at one time to excuse anyone from the task of killing who was "not up to it." Despite this offer, most of the men chose to kill anyway. Browning's traces how these murderers gradually became less "squeamish" about the killing process and delves into explanations of how and why people could behave in such a manner.
Activities in the concentration camp struck fear within the hearts of the people who witnessed them, which led to one conclusion, people denied the Holocaust. Nazis showed no mercy to anybody, including helpless babies. “The Nazis were considered men of steel, which means they show no emotion” (Langer 9). S.S. threw babies and small children into a furnace (Wiesel 28). These activities show the heartless personality of the Nazis. The people had two options, either to do what the S.S. told them to do or to die with everyone related to them. A golden rule that the Nazis followed stated if an individual lagged, the people who surrounded him would get in trouble (Langer 5). “Are you crazy? We were told to stand. Do you want us all in trouble?”(Wiesel 38). S.S guards struck fear in their hostages, which means they will obey without questioning what the Nazis told them to do due to their fear of death. Sometimes, S.S. would punish the Jews for their own sin, but would not explain their sin to the other Jews. For example, Idek punished Wiesel f...
Murders inflicted upon the Jewish population during the Holocaust are often considered the largest mass murders of innocent people, that some have yet to accept as true. The mentality of the Jewish prisoners as well as the officers during the early 1940’s transformed from an ordinary way of thinking to an abnormal twisted headache. In the books Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi and Ordinary men by Christopher R. Browning we will examine the alterations that the Jewish prisoners as well as the police officers behaviors and qualities changed.
He “wanted to be sure to simulate a real prison experiment.” (Zimbardo, 5th paragraph) This reveals that within the fake prison environment, it created a deindividuation adjacent to the loss of self-awareness of one's self and self-restraint in a definite group, for the guards.
The events which have become to be known as The Holocaust have caused much debate and dispute among historians. Central to this varied dispute is the intentions and motives of the perpetrators, with a wide range of theories as to why such horrific events took place. The publication of Jonah Goldhagen’s controversial but bestselling book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” in many ways saw the reigniting of the debate and a flurry of scholarly and public interest. Central to Goldhagen’s disputed argument is the presentation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust as ordinary Germans who largely, willingly took part in the atrocities because of deeply held and violently strong anti-Semitic beliefs. This in many ways challenged earlier works like Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” which arguably gives a more complex explanation for the motives of the perpetrators placing the emphasis on circumstance and pressure to conform. These differing opinions on why the perpetrators did what they did during the Holocaust have led to them being presented in very different ways by each historian. To contrast this I have chosen to focus on the portrayal of one event both books focus on in detail; the mass shooting of around 1,500 Jews that took place in Jozefow, Poland on July 13th 1942 (Browning:2001:225). This example clearly highlights the way each historian presents the perpetrators in different ways through; the use of language, imagery, stylistic devices and quotations, as a way of backing up their own argument. To do this I will focus on how various aspects of the massacre are portrayed and the way in which this affects the presentation of the per...
...test, it is hard not to draw some parallels. Milgram noticed that if people did not have direct contact with the people they were inflicting pain on, two-thirds of the subjects inflicted what was considered extreme pain. If they had visual and voice feedback, only forty percent obeyed orders. The number fell to thirty percent if they were in direct contact with the person they were shocking. Browning also points out that the social pressures of conformity were quite apparent. "Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets the moral norms. If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?" (Browning, 189) In closing, these men, who appeared to be quite ordinary, became extraordinary in their brutality and killing, no matter what the reason. Decidedly, their contribution to the genocide was quite significant. It is a shame that many received little, or no punishment for the slaughter they participated in.
soldiers during the Jewish Holocaust, knew that the Nazi’s actions were inhumane and cruel; hence, he commanded his soldiers to not confiscate property from the Jews. Although the Nazi soldiers did not take valuables away from the Jews, they still dehumanized and exterminated the Jews, rega...
Milgram arranged this experiment to find any justification of the acts of genocide by those accused at the Nuremberg War Criminal trials. He was intrigued because most of the defenses against the court was based on that they were simply just following the orders of their superiors. A year after Adolf Eichmann’s, a German Nazi SS officer that organized much of the holocaust, trial in 1960, Milgram constructed this examination to answer his question “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” (McLeod 1). His main focus point was to see how easily people were influenced during WWII to commit such atrocities.
This may have surprised some people but it does not surprise me. It would take a very cold hearted and mean person to be able to treat people like this and lead them to their death. Not just people, but innocent people and children, just because they were Jewish. Knowing that they were leading human beings to brutal living conditions and eventually their death had to have taken a toll of many of the officers, thus leading to some of them helping in secrecy, which was the right thing to do.
The atrocities of the Belgian Congo and the Holocaust are two of the main events in history that have been responsible for the mass murdering of millions of people. Although these events significantly changed the course of humanity, and the story behind each one is very different, there are significant factors that make them alike as well as different. Many would agree that comparing two atrocities that affected the lives of so many people and gave a 180-degree turn to each of their countries would be something very difficult to achieve. However, by comparing the behavior of both the perpetrators and the victims of both cases, we might be able to further understand the lack of morality and the inspiration that led to these awful events. The perpetrators in both atrocities tended to have a similar pattern of behavior when it came to the way they saw their victims.
History always finds a way of repeating itself. A Tale of Two Cities, depicts the French Revolution and the citizens living through it. Many citizens go along with the leaders want, in order to avoid being executed, this is taking part in mob mentality because although they might not be doing what they want, they are doing what everybody else is doing, so they can fit in. Some people can participate in something so vulgar even when they do not mean to. In “Top 10 Instances of Mob Mentality”, author S.Grant says that, “Looking back on Nazi Germany, it’s difficult to comprehend how ordinary people acted so ruthless and inhumane. Even if you assume the average German citizen didn’t know what was happening in the concentration camps, there were still 24,000 members in the “Death’s Head Unit,” a special section of the Schutzstaffel (SS) that was in charge of the concentration camps. These Death’s Head
The holocaust attested that morality is adaptable in severe conditions. Traditional morality stopped to be contained by the barbed wires of the concentration camps. Inside the camps, prisoners were not dealt like humans and thus adapted animal-like behavior needed to survive. The “ordinary moral world” (86) Primo Levi refers in his autobiographical novel Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man or Survival in Auschwitz), stops to exist; the meanings and applications of words such as “good,” “evil,” “just,” and “unjust” begin to merge and the differences between these opposites turn vague. Continued existence in Auschwitz demanded abolition of one’s self-respect and human dignity. Vulnerability to unending dehumanization certainly directs one to be dehumanized, thrusting one to resort on mental, physical, and social adaptation to be able to preserve one’s life and personality. It is in this adaptation that the line distinguishing right and wrong starts to deform.