Einsatzgruppen's Role In Ww2

In the early 1930s, the residents of the picturesque city of Dachau, Germany, were completely unaware of the horrific events about to unfold that would overshadow their city still today. The citizens of Dachau were oblivious that their city was going to become the origin of concentration camps and of the Holocaust, the mass murder committed by the Nazi s in World War II. Dachau Concentration Camp, which would soon be placed on the edge of their community, would serve as a model for all Nazi extermination camps. This perfect prototype of a Nazi killing machine has come to represent the start of the horror-filled Holocaust and the Nazi's determination to achieve a perfect society during World War II.

The first time I walked through the streets of Warsaw, the most populated ghetto, housing over four hundred thousand Jews was June 1, 1937. From over the ghetto’s fence, the smell of retched death seeped over. Every man with me pinched their faces in disgust. An officer walked over to greet us at our station wagon. The excitement in his eyes of meeting greeting me was admiring. He reached his hand out and nervously stated, “I can’t believe I am meeting the one and only Adolf Hitler. How do you do, Sir? Sargent? General?” I shot my hand out confidently, and shook his hand, “Good Day, officer. I have finally gotten the time to visit Warsaw, my apologies for waiting so long. You know what they say,

The book written by Christopher R. Browning titled Ordinary Men is an interesting, engaging, anomaly in the genre of non-fiction books pertaining to the topic of World War Two and the Holocaust. Browning’s analysis of what possessed ordinary German men, who’s ideas where non pertinent in relation to Nazism is one worthy of academic study and discourse. Browning is delving into the intricacies of what specifically pushed “ordinary” men in the Reserve Police Battalions 101 of Nazi Germany to perpetrate the action of moving thousands of Polish Jewry into box cars, and sequentially taking part in perhaps the worst enormity in human history. Browning’s argument is an ever unsettling one, an argument that reveals to the reader what “normal” people

From 1941 to 1945, Jews were systematically murdered in one of the deadliest genocides in history, which was part of a broader aggregate of acts of oppression and killings of various ethnic and political groups in Europe by the Nazi regime. Every arm of Germany 's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics and the carrying out of the genocide. Other victims of Nazi crimes included Romanians, Ethnic Poles and other Slavs, Soviet POWs, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah 's Witnesses and the mentally and physically disabled. A network of about 42,500 facilities in Germany and German-occupied territories were used to concentrate victims for slave labor, mass murder, and other human rights abuses. Over 200,000 people are estimated to have been Holocaust perpetrators. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Gypsies, were transported to the Polish ghettoes. Every person designated as a Jew in German territory was marked with a yellow star making them open targets. Thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR. Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz and many more. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust. Beginning in late 1941, the Germans

The investigation assesses the Nazi regime from 1933 – 1945 in regards to the totality of their actions. In order to evaluate the Nazi regime on whether or not they were more evil than other genocidal regimes, the investigation evaluates how the Nazis controlled their country. The investigation will start in the early years of the Nazi regime in how they set up their totalitarian government and how they expanded their control. Then the Holocaust will be looked at for how the Nazis treated those they were exterminating. Accounts from soldiers and Jewish people who lived through the Nazi control will be mostly used to evaluate if the Nazis were more evil than other genocidal regimes. Two of the sources used in this essay, “The Liberation of Dachau” by Chuck Ferree, and “Fate did not let me go” a letter by Valli Ollendorff are then evaluated for their origins, purposes, values and limitations.

Out of these marches, most occurred during the winter when the conditions were the worst. The biggest death marches took place in late 1944 and early 1945 when the Soviet army began its liberation of Poland. The first large-scale death march during the Holocaust was during the summer of 1941. On May 2nd, 1945, the SS loaded 7,500 prisoners onto a german ship and ordered the crew to set sail into the Baltic Sea. The Nazi’s knew their enemies were approaching quickly and would bomb any German ships in sight. Just a few days later, the ship was bombed. There are no known survivors. Many dates of the marches were undetermined because the Nazis tried to hide and burn all of the existing evidence of their

In the pre-war years, the Nazi Party wanted to find a solution to the “Jewish question” – meaning what to do with them (“Final Solution” Learning). On July 31, 1941, Heydrich submitted the “draft of the measures he proposed to undertake ‘to implement the desired final solution of the Jewish Question’” (“SS”). In the fall of 1941, the Nazi soldiers implemented the plan and began to effectuate it by experimental gassings in the Auschwitz extermination camp and then moving forth to surrounding camps (“Final Solution” Learning). Between then and 1945, the top SS soldiers continued to give the orders to torture, mass shoot, gas (especially in constructed extermination camps), enforce murderous labor, and other means (“Holocaust”). The ideas, which were thought of by Himmler, Eichmann, and Heydrich, are what allowed for this brutality to cause such a large scale genocide. Despite the eleven million

Summary: This article was an introduction to the Holocaust. The German Nazi’s thought that the Jews were a community. Not only the Jews were targeted, anyone with a racial inferiority was targeted. For example, although the Jews were the main threat the gypsies, Jehovah’s witnesses, and homosexuals and the disabled were also targeted. The Holocaust was a way to decrease the Jewish population; the final solution was to murder the Jews of Europe or anyone that was a threat to their German culture. Many died of incarceration and maltreatment. During the war they created ghettos, forced-labor camps between 1941 and 1944 the Nazi German Authorities would deport the Jews to extermination camps where they were murdered in gassing facilities. May 7, 1945 the German armed forces surrendered to the allies.

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

On March 19th, 1944, Lieutenant Colonel Karl Adolf Eichmann, stood at the head of one-hundred and forty military vehicles. It was his twenty-eighth birthday. On this day, he was doing no other than finding Hungary’s 750,000 Jewish individuals; deciding if anyone was physically fit to be transferred to labor camps or to be executed on the spot. Contrary to popular belief, Karl Adolf Eichmann was the enforcer of the Holocaust because militarily he was executing The Final Solution.

In Christopher Browning’s book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, he explains to us all about his study of German Order Police Reserve Unit 101 and their experiences during the Holocaust. During the time of the Holocaust, Reserve Unit 101 committed many massacres and round-ups of the Jewish population for deportation to the Nazi concentration camps occupied by Germany in Poland. These men of Unit 101 were normal middle-aged men, who were drafted to be Nazi soldiers, but found ineligible for regular military duty. Upon their return to Poland in 1942, they were ordered to terrorize the Jewish population in Poland and

In Christopher Browning’s book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland tells the story of Battalion 101, a group of 500 policemen in their 30’s and 40’s who were sent into Poland to participate in a ‘special action’ without being told exactly what they are doing. Overtime they realized their mission is to Kill Jews and racially purify Europe. Most of the killing during this period of mass murder took place in Poland. Battalion 101 together with other Order Police battalions contributed to the manpower needed to carry out this enormous task. Browning comments that these men all went through their developmental period before the Nazis came into power. These were men who had known political standards and moral norms other than those of the Nazis. Most men came from Hamburg; one of the least ‘nazified’ cities in Germany and the majority came from a social class that had been anti-Nazi in its political culture. In seems this would not seem to have been a very promising group from which to recruit mass murderers on behalf on the Nazi vision of a racial utopia free of Jews. However, their actions helps us understand not only what they did to make the Holocaust happen, but also how they were transformed psychologically from the ordinary men into active participants in the most horrific offence in human history. In doing so, it aims on the human capacity for extreme evil and leaves this subject matter with the shock of knowledge and the

The main sources for this book consist of archival documents and court records of the Holocaust. The specific testimony, court records, investigation records, and prosecution documents of members of the Reserve Police Battalion 101 members are used as sources. In this book, Christopher Browning shows in minute detail the sequence of events and individual reactions that turn ordinary men into killers. His arguments make sense. He makes no unwarranted assumptions. The cause and effect statements made and arguments presented are logical and well developed. Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning accounts for the actions of the German Order Police (more specifically the actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Poland) and the role they played in the Second World War during the Jewish Holocaust. Police Battalion 101 was composed of veterans from World War One and men too old to be

It was between 1942 and 1944 that the Germans decided to eliminate the ghettos and deport the ghetto populations to extermination camps. Killing centres equipped with gassing facilities in Poland. This was known as the “Final Solution to the Jewish question”, implemented after a meeting of senior German officials in late January 1942 at a villa in Wannsee. It was official state policy, the first ever to advocate the murder of an entire people. It was also the first time Non-Nazi

The mobile killing units were formed to kill any racial or political enemies of germany some of these are Jews gypsies and the handicapped many scholars believe that this could have been the first step that they used in the “final solution”. When they started using the mobile killing units they only killed jewish men but they decided to start killing men women and it never mattered what age and the bodies were just thrown in massive graves. When they were told the hiding locations of jews they would made the jews march or they were transported to the execution sites and would in some occasions have to dig their own graves. There most common way of killing was shooting the victims but they needed a more convenient way to kill them this ended