Christopher Browning 's Ordinary Men

Throughout Hitler’s reign over Germany there was an agenda that existed which led to murders of a great number of innocent people. The agenda was the extermination of Jews from Germany so that Germany could become a pure country in terms of ethnicity. It was Hitler’s idea but he only gave the orders while the SS and the Order Police carried out the orders. One group of people that helped carry out this idea of judenfrei or Jew free Germany was the Reserve Police Battalion 101. The men who made up this group were regular men that had come from a variety of careers. Most the men volunteered because the immunity that they would receive from “conscription into the army” once the volunteers had become part of

The Holocaust can be seen as one of the most devastating genocide that occurred in history and that is well known in many places worldwide. One may assume that those who played a part in the acts done by the Nazis in Germany may have been mentally disturbed and/or sick, evil people. However, the novel Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning provides another alternative to this statement. Browning provides the reader with the idea that anyone is capable of becoming a murderer, especially when the opportunity presents itself. In his book he attempts to prove this statement through multiple ideas and theories and also provides events which took place to analyze some of those ideas.

Each day,6,000 innocent lives were taken at Auschwitz-Birkenau,one of the many concentration camps in Europe. During the “Final solution” two out of every three European Jews were killed. This genocide lasted from 30 January,1933 to 8 May,1945. Elie Wiesel,a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust,shares his personal traumatic,faith breaking and experiences with inhuman treatment in his memoir, Night.

The purpose of history is to understand the past so that we can take wisdom from those experiences and improve the present and the future. The events that occurred during the Final Solution are so horrendous that often it is viewed as so repugnant that we label the people involved as purely evil, they are dehumanized. This is dangerous, as it doesn’t allow us to obtain wisdom, perspective, and empathy for those involved. Ordinary Men allows an opportunity to see these events from the eyes of the perpetrators and their journey that led to what seems to people today as ruthless, unscrupulous murder. When in fact these people were literally ordinary men who were introduced to unordinary circumstances which caused them to abandon their humanity. If we discredit these people as inhuman we fail to learn the lessons of human nature so we can avoid them in the future. Winston Churchill embodies the lessons learned from Ordinary Men as he said “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

The SS and police of the Special Detachment were then transferred to Yugoslavia to engage in anti-Partisan operations; the Jewish forced laborers were shot. (1941 - 1945 Timeline)

If one were to take anything from Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men it is that even the most ordinary, normal men have the capacity to kill. The 101st Reserve Police Battalion executed at least 6,500 Jews at the Polish cities and villages of Jozefow, Lomazy, Serokomla, Lukow, Konskowola, Parczew, Radzyn, Kock, and Miedzyrzec and participated in the deportation of at least 42,000 Jews to the gas chambers in Treblinka (Browning, chapter 14, page 121). There were most likely even more killings that were never documented and much less remembered by the members of the 101st. These men had their first taste of death at Jozefow where they massacred 1,500 Polish Jews (Browning, chapter 8, page 74). It was a brutal and harrowing event where men,

It is now that Browning goes in-depth on the massacre that occurred in Jozefow. Of the perpetrators, Browning mentions that many were middle-aged policemen who were given a choice of whether or not they wanted to take part in killing the Jewish population in this area. The major who offered a reprieve from being involved in the slaughter was Major Trapp, of the 500 men who would be present, only a mere dozen would accept his offer. Afterwards, the slaughter began with one soldier stating “I shot the child that belonged to her, because I reasoned with myself that after all without its mother the child could not live any longer; so to speak, soothing to my conscience to release children unable to live without their mothers. (Browning 73)”

In life, there are many decisions that everyone must make. And with decision-making comes consequences, some that we are ready for , and some that we may not be ready for. The author of ' The Man Who Was Almost a Man,' Richard Wright, portrays a young man who wants to be a man, but shows that he is clearly unprepared for manhood and the consequences that come with that responsibility. Through decision making based on self interest, wanting to gain respect from his family, and wanting to prove his dignity, Richard Wright brings forth the main character, Dave, a seventeen year old boy, whose actions show that he is only 'almost a man.'

The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were just ordinary men, from a variety of backgrounds, education, and age. It would appear that they were not selected by any force other than random chance. Their backgrounds and upbringing, however, did little to prepare these men for the horrors they were to witness and participate in.

Christopher R. Browning’s “Ordinary Men” chronicles the rise and fall of the Reserve Police Battalion 101. The battalion was one of several units that took part in the Final Solution to the Jewish Question while in Poland. The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, and other units were comprised of ordinary men, from ordinary backgrounds living under the Third Reich. Browning’s premise for the book is very unique, instead of focusing on number of victims, it examines the mindset of how ordinary men, became cold-hearted killers under Nazi Germany during World War II. Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men” presents a very strong case that the men who made up the Reserve Police Battalion 101 were indeed ordinary men from ordinary background, and

Christopher Browning describes how the Reserve Police Battalion 101, like the rest of German society, was immersed in a flood of racist and anti-Semitic propaganda. Browning describes how the Order Police provided indoctrination both in basic training and as an ongoing practice within each unit. Many of the members were not prepared for the killing of Jews. The author examines the reasons some of the police members did not shoot. The physiological effect of isolation, rejection, and ostracism is examined in the context of being assigned to a foreign land with a hostile population. The contradictions imposed by the demands of conscience on the one hand and the norms of the battalion on the other are discussed. Ordinary Men

"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 didn't actually allow them any time to truly think about it. He brought it up moments before they were about to go out to the slaughter. They were blind-sided and the men who didn't want to risk the future of their jobs as policemen or the men

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning is an insightful book that provides information as to how ordinary people may be susceptible to committing heinous, evil acts. Browning explains this through analyzing judicial interrogations, which occurred in the 1960’s, of about 125 men of the Reserve Police Battalion 101 (Browning, pg. xviii). The Reserve Police Battalion 101 was a unit of the German Order Police formed in Hamburg, Germany, under the control of the SS which was under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party (Browning, pg. xvi-xvii). They consisted of German police and sheriffs who were middle-aged men of working and lower middle class. The Reserve Police Battalion 101 was formed as the

Some people may say that English is not very important, but without it we would not know much of what we know today. We have gained so much knowledge from the English language and how it has been change throughout centuries. Robert Browning was a successful, famous, and maintained a critical reputation among one of the first rank of English poet. Anyone could learn different writing techniques, but Robert could write about anything without people questioning his work.

     Robert Browning’s, “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” involves a jealous monk with much hatred of, Brother Lawrence, the “perfect” monk. Irony, diction, and syntax are clearly evident in this dramatic monologue.