Ukrainian Self Defense Legion

Goldhagen’s view of the perpetrators of the Holocaust can be seen as super-intentionalist in the way he views the German population to have largely willingly colluded with the Nazi regime because they to held the same eliminationalist anti-Semitic views. To make this point, he uses what he sees as the willingness of ordinary, largely untrained and unindoctrinated Germans in the Reserve Police Battalions to carry out mass killings of Jews (Goldhagen: 1997:206). This means he portrays the perpetrators of the Jozefow massacre as “willing executioners” and goes at great length to show them to simply be “ordinary Germans” based on their political, socio-economic and geographical background (Goldhagen: 1997: 213). Central to Goldhagen’s argument that the Policemen massacred Jews willingly, is their reluctance to excuse themselves from the operation when given the opportunity. The main “opportunity” in which to do this, is the moment before the massacre, when Major Trapp (the officer in charge of the

Simon Wiesenthal was born in Poland, December 31, 1908. Simon was a Jew trapped in 7 different concentration camps. He drew pictures of what he saw to recount the horror. Simon was liberated in May 5, 1945. Simon started a club/program to bring Nazis to justice. His main target was Adolf Eichmann; a Nazi who wanted to kill all the Jew’s and used little kids for lab experiments. Simon located him in Argentina. Adolf Eichmann was at trial and pleaded he was not guilty. After the trial Simon wrote a book about Eichmann. Simon didn’t spend time with his daughter since he was

In the video “The Confessions” presented by Frontline, a murder of a women that was committed by one man, quickly resulted into a false gang murder-rape scene committed by eight men. The victim, Michelle Bosko, was seen to be raped and killed in her apartment in Norfolk, Virginia. From the video, it has been proven that seven out of the eight men that confessed were innocent, but somehow they all received an unequal punishment. Because the innocent men admitted to a murder that they didn’t commit out of fear, they were all sentenced to some time in prison. The head detective, Glenn Ford, intimidated the men so much that they either were convinced that they were at the crime scene or they told him every detail that he wanted to hear.

Synopsis – Hitler’s Willing Executioners is a work that may change our understanding of the Holocaust and of Germany during the Nazi period. Daniel Goldhagen has revisited a question that history has come to treat as settled, and his researches have led him to the inescapable conclusion that none of the established answers holds true. Drawing on materials either unexplored or neglected by previous scholars, Goldhagen presents new evidence to show that many beliefs about the killers are fallacies. They were not primarily SS men or Nazi Party members, but perfectly ordinary Germans from all walks of life, men who brutalized and murdered Jews both willingly and zealously. “They acted as they did because of

When Adolf Hitler first came to power in pre-WWII Germany, all of Germany was ready for a new Fuhrer to lead them into success and overcome the recent depression. Among his supporters was Adolf Eichmann, who began as just another German citizen, but transformed into something even he could not have imagined. “On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism” (Arendt 5). Eichmann was tried for crimes against humanity, but before deciding for oneself whether he was guilty of this charge, we must question whether he was acting out of service to his country or out of his own self-interest. After reading deeper into the results and proceedings of the trial, it is only logical for one to conclude that although he may have joined forces with the Nazi party as a patriot, his motives for continuing to assist in carrying out genocide on an unimaginable scale was largely self-interest.

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,

War crimes are committed in every war, whether it be the mass murder/rape of civilians/noncombatants or the mistreatment of POWs, war crimes show war's worst effects on people’s morals and humanity. After the end of World War 2 there were the Nuremberg trials which tried the members of the nazi party that had committed war crimes throughout the war. However most allied war crimes were not brought to the public and in the soviets case, blamed on the nazi's. This is the result of how “history is written by the victors” and while the nazi war crimes were closely documented, judged and sentenced the allied war crimes were swept under the rug away from the public eye as it wouldn’t of been popular to publicly lock up and persecute the men that had

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

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

Peter Fritzche’s book, Germans into Nazis, contends that, “Germans became Nazis because they wanted to become Nazis and because the Nazis spoke so well to their interests and inclinations…however, voters did not back Hitler mainly because they share his hatred of the Jews…but because they departed from established political traditions in that they were identified at once with a distinctly popular form of ethnic nationalism and with the basic social reforms most Germans counted on to ensure national well-being.” (8-9) His argument rests on the notion that the Nazis had a vision for Germany that incorporated Germans into a national community, throwing off the restraints of a tired government, and propelled them towards a future that would

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

Yesterday, a 17 year old boy named Helmuth Hubener was convicted of deliberate listening to foreign radio stations and willfully distributing that news, which of course is forbidden for us German citizens of this time to keep us all safe according to Hitler, and he was also convicted of conspiracy to commit high treason. Hubener, after listening to the foreign radio stations, made leaflets of what he considered to be the truth and spread them all around town. What he thought was the truth was truly just what Hitler calls corrupted information from our enemies of the United Kingdom, but Helmuth Hubener didn’t work alone. He had help from his friends Karl-Heinz Schnibbe, Ruddi Wobbe, and Gerhard Duwer. Hubener was sentenced

This paper seeks to canvass the legacy of the Nuremberg Trial; the legal justifications and procedural innovations that were once controversial and which through the turn of the century have now come to be regarded as a milestone towards the application of principles of international law, establishment of a permanent international criminal court enshrined under the Rome Statute and setting new precedents for the international community. Furthermore, the author seeks to juxtapose the legal and political justifications given for the

Hart, a legal positivist, believes that “law is law,” and argued against Radbrunch’s theory in servings as a solution to fix Germany’s judicial system. He argued against his theory and wanted a separation of law and morality because he thought that it would only “cloak the true nature of the problems,” and encourage a “romantic optimism,” rather than addressing the dilemma that the courts had in deciding on convicting Nazi criminals. Though Hart acknowledges that this case poses a difficult situation for the law, he does propose his own solution to the problem. With his positivist approach to the law, saying that the laws are the rules expected of us, and enforced at a particular time, he proposes that the “grudge informer” should be punished through a different and ‘new’ set of laws. These laws he deems “retrospective laws,” would entail punishing acts such as revenge and duplicity. However, this dilemma between choosing if the “grudge informer” was innocent