Ordinary Men

Christopher Browning, a professor of history at Pacific Lutheran University, wrote a book focusing on the Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland and named it Ordinary Men. Browning states the historical problems he hopes to solve with his book "the fundamental problem is to explain why ordinary men- shaped by a culture that had its own particularities but was nonetheless within the mainstream of western, Christian, and Enlightenment traditions - under specific circumstances willingly carried out the most extreme genocide in human history". Browning starts out with the approach of recognizing the background and organization of the Reserve Police Battalion 101. This gives the reader to allow time to build up knowledge without making any biased decision just yet to answer the problem given. The author then focuses on the development of brutality amongst the departments of the Order Police and provides the aftermath of the war and to what he believes to be the answer to the historical problem.

The Reserve Police Battalion 101 was a unit of German Order Police, which consisted of middle to lower class men from Hamburg, who did not want to be drafted into the army. The original participation of the order police in the final solution was to focus on the Nazi mass murder of European Jewry (9). The Police Battalion were playing a central role by enforcing the round up of Jews, Poles and Gypsies, guarding ghettos / camps, such as Lodz ghetto (41), they were responsible for the deportation to the concentration camps and the mass amounts of shootings of the minor civilians, such as the Jew Hunt in the early 1940s.

Browning opens up Ordinary Men, with a scene vividly describing how character Major William Trapp, a m...

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...icemen. Secondly, after the first murder, the Battalion no longer had the chance to leave. They were forced to shoot from there on out. Even still, members were still hurt by what they were doing. I believe, if members walked out after the war and could shoot someone without their feelings being hurt, they would be a killer.

My view on the Holocaust hasn't changed because of the book. Having read Night by Elie Wiesel and Ordinary Men, both hit touch the theme on inhumanity towards human beings but there's the innocent Jews who never had the chance to pull out and not participate in the any of the shootings. The victims being dropped off at Auschwitz and all concentration camps get there with process of selection from immediate death and being stripped of their names and get given a barcode for a name by the camp. The whole idea to me is inhumane and disgusting.