Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

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Gordon Williamson (2004). The SS: Hitler's Instrument of Terror. Zenith Imprint. p.101. ISBN 0-7603-1933-2. All the evidence points out that they were average citizens without a specific propensity for violence. It took only several months for these men to turn into mass murderers who considered exterminating thousands of people a routine. This construct explains some of the very peculiar rhetorical and logical moves he makes, as for example:

a b Olga Skorupka; etal. (2014). "Józefów. Lata okupacji". Virtual Shtetl. Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich . Retrieved 1 May 2017.

Soon after the war ended, Major Wilhelm Trapp was captured by the British authorities and placed at the Neuengamme Internment Camp. After questioning by the Polish Military Mission for the Investigations of War Crimes in October 1946, [51] he was extradited to Poland along with Drewes, Bumann and Kadler. Subsequently, Trapp was charged with war crimes by the Siedlce District Court, sentenced to death on 6 July 1948 and executed on 18 December 1948 along with Gustav Drewes. [1] However, with the onset of the Cold War, West Germany did not pursue any war criminals at all for the next twenty years. [52] [53] In 1964 several men were arrested. For the first time, the involvement of German police from Hamburg in wartime massacres was investigated by the West German prosecutors. In 1968 after a two-year trial 3 men were sentenced to 8years imprisonment, one to 6years, and one to 5years. Six other policemen–all lower ranks–were found guilty but not sentenced. [1] The rest lived their normal lives. [54] Summary of genocidal missions [ edit ] Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland and the Jewish Policy of the German Foreign Office 1940–1943"(1975)

But first I want to talk about what this book does well, because there are things it does very well indeed. Who is "us," in this case? Ordinary Men is a book with a strongly implied audience. Without doing a formal analysis of its rhetoric, I still feel fairly certain of my ground in saying that that audience is normative American, i.e., sharing white professional-class values. The implied audience is not Jewish. Nor is it German. Nor is it working-class. It's a little harder to tell about the gender question, because by choosing to study a reserve police battalion, Browning had no choice but to study men. And in general, if you're studying Nazis, you're studying men. (One of the books on my list is about women in Nazi Germany, but fundamentally, everyone in a position of power in Hitler's Germany was male.) But there are some indications that the implied audience is made up of men, too. This book, a staple of Holocaust studies for twenty-five years, has recently risen to fresh prominence due to repeated mentions of it by Canadian psychologist, and superstar, Jordan Peterson. His focus on the book arises from his own decades-long study of evil regimes, and his thought on how we, you and I, would really react if we lived under an actual such regime. Peterson’s basic point is that we are deluding ourselves if we think we would be heroes; the vast majority of us would fall somewhere on the scale of cooperation with evil. "Ordinary Men" shows that principle in application, in the history of a group of German men who saw militarized police service in Poland during World War II. The corollary that one can draw from this micro-historic research is quite scary. Almost any person might under certain circumstances turn into a monster. Peer pressure and natural conformism could negatively influence an individual's personality.Robert Kuwalek, Chris Webb (2007). "Jozefow". Holocaust Research Project.org. Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team . Retrieved 17 June 2014. When David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt for libel in 1996, Browning was one of the leading witnesses for the defense. Another historian, Robert Jan van Pelt, wrote a report on the gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp, and Browning wrote a report on the evidence for the extermination of Jews. [14] During his testimony and a cross-examination by Irving, Browning countered Irving's suggestion that the last chapter of the Holocaust had yet to be written (implying there were grounds for doubting its reality) by saying, "We are still discovering things about the Roman Empire. There is no last chapter in history." [15]