"There are no extraordinary men... just extraordinary circumstances that ordinary men are faced to deal with" (William Halsey). The same can be said about volatile men. This is the quote Christopher R. Browning thought of when he named this book. The men of the 101st battalion were rarely faced with decisions. Even if it had been proposed by Trapp the morning of Jozefow that "any of the older men who did not feel up to the task that lay before them could step out" (Browning, chapter 7, pg. 57), he
Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland was a book that took us back to the horror of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a mass killing of Jews in Germany that was led by Adolf Hitler. Hitler wanted to get rid of all of the Jews in Europe because he thought they were an inferior race. So Hitler would gather the men who were going to have the job of killing the Jews and they were called the “Ordinary Men”. In this book Browning does a great
What was wrong with the Holocaust? We can spend hours upon hours, days after days if we want to just talk about what was wrong with the holocaust. We all understand that the holocaust was all about the slaughtering of the Jews. But what most people do not understand about the holocaust was the fact that who performed the killing, or why they did the killing. But understanding the holocaust is all about knowing who did the killing, and why they did the killing. We also need to understand the consequences
When hearing the phrase “Ordinary Men” many will think of the teachers, factory workers, and store clerks who live a modest lifestyle. The kind of people who wouldn't be suspected to be cold blooded killers. In Christopher R. Browning’s, Ordinary Men, we find out that these kind of people are capable of being just that, cold blooded killers. Browning poses the question, are these men who carried out thousands of killings throughout WWII simply ordinary? With the combination of obedience, conformity
The thesis of Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men is that men anywhere can become killers/mass murderers in an extreme circumstance(s) as Reserve Police Battalion 101 did. But it is also about the fact that we all have a choice, responsibility as humans as to how we act, our decisions. A strength of Browning’s thesis is that it can be tested. In his book, Browning shows and tells us this when he explains the numerous tests performed by psychologists on participants, specifically Stanley Milgram’s
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