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

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Instead, the result is a far more disturbing view of humanity - one which also has powerful implications for society today. The takeaway from reading this horror-filled book is that depredations on the scale of those that Browning describes can be perpetrated anywhere and by anyone. The already enlarged battalion was deployed to Poland again in May 1940, and for the next five months, conducted mass expulsions of Poles [18] to make room for the German colonists brought in Heim ins Reich from the areas invaded by their Moscow ally as well as from Nazi Germany.

Ordinary Men – HarperCollins

However, according to the Treaty of Versailles, Germany could not have an army more than 100,000 strong so the group was forced to disband. Many of the men who opted out of shooting after executing at least one person cited physical revulsion, but Browning believes that there may have been underlying ethical or political opposition that they simply couldn’t articulate. That said, he argues the interviews were carried out by skilful attorneys, who drew out some gruesome testimony. He introduces us to cheerful, friendly, ordinary men who killed without hesitation or apparent remorse for years on end, in docile obedience to an authority theyhappily accepted as legitimate.They went through their formative period in a pre-Nazi era, came from Hamburg one of the least Nazified cities in Germany, they belonged to social class that had been anti-Nazi, just how could these non-conforming end up killing innocent women, childern and men with little compulasion? At the same time, however, the collective behavior of Reserve Police Battalion 101 has deeply disturbing implications.

Reserve Police Battalion 101 - Wikipedia Reserve Police Battalion 101 - Wikipedia

The intention was to have those and other Jews resident in the Third Reich expelled eastward once a destination was selected. At the same time, there were struggles between the Schutzstaffel (SS) and Hans Frank, the Governor-General of occupied Poland. Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. With most of the ghettos cleared out and hundreds if not thousands of Jews killed in the judenjagd, only a few Jews remain in small ghettos and work camps in the battalion’s district. It is very graphic in the description of the executions in it's brutality and one cannot fathom how the majority of these men carried out such heinous crimes.At the time, he attributes this to a bad dysentery vaccine he received in 1942, but later he says it was induced by the stress of the murders and violence that surrounded him. From Radzyń 6,000 prisoners, then from Łuków (7,000), Końskowola (2,000 coupled with the massacre at the hospital), Komarówka, Tomaszów; all those unable to move or attempting to flee were shot on the spot. After retiring from UNC in 2014, he became a visiting professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.

The Men Who Pulled the Triggers - The New York Times The Men Who Pulled the Triggers - The New York Times

At its centre, whether they wanted to or not; liked it or abhorred it, was the account in their own words of Ordinary Men killing, mostly by shooting, tens of thousands of men, women and children in their beds, houses, streets or woods and pits standing naked to make Poland Juden Frei. Il libro di Browning è anche un’accurata ricostruzione documentaria degli eccidi di massa e delle deportazioni avvenute in Europa dell’Est in quel periodo, a opera non soltanto del Battaglione 101, ma anche di altri reparti militari tedeschi. Major Trapp is an Alte Kämpfer (“old Party fighter”) and World War I veteran, but the Nazis don’t consider him to be SS material when they give him command of RPB 101.Here the years of anti-Semitic propaganda (and prior to the Nazi dictatorship, decades of shrill German nationalism) dovetailed with the polarizing effects of war. The bodies of their victims carpeting the forest floor at the Winiarczykowa Góra hill (about 2km from the village, pictured) [36] were left unburied.