Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men What Was the Essay

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Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men

What was the situation of the Police Battalion 101 that prompted their actions?

"How did a battalion of middle-aged reserve policemen find themselves facing the task of shooting some 1,500 Jews" in a Polish village (Browning 3). This is the central question of Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men. The policemen were not fit for military duty, but they were subjected to the same political and military propaganda as the more famous perpetrators of Hitler's infamous 'Final Solution.' This solution was not introduced gradually. In fact, it was within eleven months from 1942-1943, that the major casualties of the Holocaust occurred (Browning xv). As the Jewish people began to understand that the repatriation to work camps was actually a death march, the Germans encountered more and more resistance and tried to catch the Jews by surprise as they drove them to their mass graves. "Mass killing on such a scale required planning and preparation...Jewish prisoners were put to work digging trenches," ostensibly intended as "protection against air raids," but were actually intended as burial sites (Browning 137).

While the stench of so many corpses was described as gruesome, by then most of the police had become accustomed to the carnage. Over the course of his narrative Browning describes how the men -- whom were before relatively ordinary people with unremarkable histories -- became mass killers. The men's view of morality became "morally inverted" (Browning 150). It became moral to act murderously and immoral not to do so. Although some men later protested they could do nothing and could not resist for fear of being killed, on some occasions officers did refuse to engage in killing, such as when instructed to kill the Jews who had worked for them. On these occasions, the officers passed the unpleasant duties on to others and did not suffer repercussions (Browning 154). However, the all-encompassing mentality of the Nazi totalitarian mindset was so great, explicitly questioning the Final Solution or anti-Semitic ideology as a whole was untenable in the eyes of the German officers and policemen alike.

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Even when their own, personal feelings contradicted such ideology, they seemed unable and unwilling to resist.

Q 2. What specifically were the actions for which they should be held to moral account?

Although the excuse given by many Germans was that they were merely following orders when they engaged in the mass murders, accounts suggest that even hardened policemen knew right from wrong. "Some of our comrades got sick from the smell and sight of the half-decomposed corpses, so they had to throw up all over the truck" (Browning 141). The men could still be physically sickened by what they witnessed; even through they tried to suggest after the fact that they were automatons who had lost their free will.

In later interviews which Browning admits likely had a self-exculpatory aspect, the men made a distinction between Nazis who were "one hundred and ten percent" and anti-Semites "out of conviction" versus those who, like themselves, did so because of ideological brainwashing (Browning 151). According to one man, "under the influence of the times, my….....

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