During the Holocaust, thousands of ordinary German men were drafted to be a part of the police battalions. In Daniel Goldenhagen’s, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Goldenhagen explains that these men willingly took part in the killing of Jews and Polish, and anti-semitism was always a part of an ordinary German. In response to these claims, Christopher Browning wrote Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101, saying that these men did have morals and they were not rampant anti-Semites but rather just ordinary men. He believed that the men coping with alcohol and the flexibility for guard duty because they cannot take it anymore with everything that is going is examples that these men still had moral in them. …show more content…
In Goldenhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, he explains that these ordinary Germans were fine with killing the Jews because of the historic culture of anti-Semitism and that they never had any moral in them in the first place. He starts off saying that when the Germans were drafted into this police battalion that there were three features that should be understood. The first, he says that Germans “were not selected because of military or ideological fitness. In fact, the men were often chose for service in a haphazard manner and were frequently the least desirable of the manpower pool, even considered unfit for military service.” He was saying that these men did not have a background check and they were just randomly picked. The second feature is that these men received below-par training in weapons, logistics, and procedures. The third feature is that, “Police battalions were not “Nazi” institutions” and they not “nazified in an significant sense”. Saying that these men were never trained into becoming Nazified, let alone genocidal killers and would easily become genocidal executioners. He backs up his claims with one of the first slaughters of the genocidal campaign unleashed against Soviet Jewry was started by a police battalion and after
Christopher Browning believes it to be highly unlikely that Nazi officials could have predicted the men of the Reserve Police Battalion would become so equipped to carryout mass genocide do to the fact that the men in the battalion hoped to pursue a career in the Hamburg Police to avoid being drafted into the Army. They were specifically attempting to avoid participating in the atrocities of war. Although the answer may forever be without doubt, Browning argues that the men of the Reserve Police Battalion didn’t want to be rejected, isolated or have the reputation of weak within the battalion. Thus, around 80% of the men successfully carried out their orders, developing brutal tactics and getting more and more comfortable with murder each and every
makes the point that to fulfill this task would necessitate a vast mobilization of soldiers to carry out and fulfill these acts, and that this mobilization of troops for the purpose of carrying out genocide occurred at the same time when a great numbers of German soldiers and material were ready to fight in the battle for Stalingrad. Through the next few chapters, the knowledge that Browning instilled in me is the origins of the Order Police which includes the Reserve Police Battalion 101and the role they played in the Holocaust Genocide. The formation of the ordering police was an attempt from Germany to create a military alike army of police who possesses the same training and equipment soldiers get in the military. After several attempts to destabilize the Treaty of Versailles, the election of the Nazi party into power, and the incorporation of police paramilitary units into the regular army, the Order Police gradually came into being.
It is generally accepted that the German people felt they had been robbed of victory in WWI, and for various reasons the Jews were the reason to blame. Battalion 101 was deployed in 1939 and the average age of the men was thirty-nine. All of the men would have been old enough to be aware of Germany’s social and political situation at the end of WWII in 1918. There is reasonable belief these men truly believed they were fighting to reclaim justice for Germany, from the people who stole it from them. Therefore, the men were epistemically justified in fighting for the Nazi’s.
So, the minor soldiers hold a big part of the responsibility of the Holocaust. This is especially seen in the quote, “Nazis and local police began to empty the ghettos in violent liquidation operations. ”(“How”) This evidence supports the idea that the minor soldiers were a big part of the Holocaust because it says that the soldiers emptied ghettos with a violent operation. It is seen again in the same article, “The Nazi soldiers used a combination of laws and decrees, propaganda, intimidation, and violence to segregate Jews from German society, remove them from the economy, and force them to leave the country.”
They state, “In Germany, many individuals who were not zealous Nazis nonetheless participated in varying degrees in the persecution and murder of Jews and other victims” (“How and Why Did Ordinary People Across Europe Contribute to the Persecution of their Jewish Neighbors?” 1). However, in the passage about SS officers and soldiers, the author explains that “SS men…established killing centers equipped with gas chambers to facilitate assembly line mass murder” (“Perpetrators” 5). Therefore, SS officers developed the places where Jews were killed and without them, the Holocaust would not have been so severe. Thus, SS officers were more responsible for the Holocaust than non-Jewish Europeans. Moreover, according to “How and Why Did Ordinary People Across Europe Contribute to the Persecution of their Jewish Neighbors?”, “They [German citizens] were aware of the risk that outspoken dissidents faced in a police state, where opponents of the regime could be arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps without trial” (12).
After reading Teens Who Fought Hitler, by Lauren Tarshis, describes that ben’s family had to go throw all these challenges to fight hitler and get out of there but they could not all the jew’s got shoved into a ghetto so ben got out and started to get food for his family so they would not starve to death They had many challenges and historical background. First we are going to talk about historical background, One historical background “Germans were struggling since 1918, when it was defeated in world war 1.” Pg (6). Another historical background is “In the day’s before world war 2, when cams were happy and comfortable,nobody could conceive of such horrors.
These individuals had to follow their orders and ignore their own moral laws to prevent disobeying the law. This shows how people need to focus more on following their
Could Hitler happen again? When you hear holocaust you probably think of Hitler and so do most people. Hitler was the leader of a group called The Nazis that caused World War 2 and killed millions of Jews. There has been some conversation if Hitler could happen again or not,but the truth is that someone like Hitler could happen again.
“Of course I know, mother! They are the Jews! Our teacher has often told us about them.” This excerpt from the story suggests that children often were taught to be wary of and avoid Jews. As such, they taught children Jews were “bad for society.”
During World War II, Hitler and his Nazi Party exterminated many groups of people throughout all of Europe in different concentration camps. One of the most famous concentration camps was Auschwitz. This is where he deported over a million people between 1940 and 1945, ranging from Jews, Poles, Soviet soldiers, Gypsies, homosexuals, etc. and killing about 1.3 of the 1.5 million. About 90% of the people Hitler targeted were Jews. Hitler’s way of rule was inhumane in many different ways.
The German officer shouted, “There are eighty of you in the car, if anyone goes missing, you will all be shot, like dogs” (Wiesel 24). This shows that the Germans thought nothing of them. Instead the Germans compared the Jews to being like “dogs”, which showed that the Germans thought Jews were not worthy of being treated like a human. In conclusion, in World War II, the Jews were dehumanized because of their beliefs, they were treated as unworthy objects that are a burden to
When they found out Hitler was bad they would anything to stop even though they could go to jail. For example, Kristin lewis says, “ His job was to disturbed those leaflets throughout the city, to stuff them in mailboxes and leave them on park benches. He expected the Gestapo - terrifying Nazi police- to jump out of the shadows at any moment.” This proves that they risked their lives because of what they were doing. This shows that the police would arrest them if they get caught then they could then they could go to jail, a labour camp, or get shot and killed.
"Eyewitness Auschwitz" by Filip Muller is a true eyewitness account of his life in Auschwitz. Filip Muller is originally from Sered,Slovakia and was transported over to Auschwitz concentration camp. The Memoir began with Filip Muller in the Auschwitz I main camp where he was by Vacek to the cap off and cap on drill until exhaustion. (Pg. 1-3) The next location in Auschwitz that he was brought to was called the Crematorium where he would have the generators declickered; the dead dragged to ovens for cremation, coke had to be brought in; ashes had to be raked out, and finally the Crematorium had to be cleaned and disinfected.
Josef Mengele Josef Mengele once said,“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.” Josef Mengele said this quote meaning the more experiments he did on people, the less they would realize what he is doing. During WWII Josef worked in Auschwitz, a concentration camp. His job was very secretive and vicious. Josef Mengele was a very evil Auschwitz physician.
As Milgram states in his “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” “these inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only be carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of persons obeyed orders.” What Milgram is saying is that the unethical cases, like the Holocaust, cannot and would not happen without obedience. Furthermore, if people had not listened to Hitler, concentration camps and gas chambers for the purpose of slaughtering millions of Jews and any other human considered unclean would never have existed. The same concept applies for the Capos. If they had not blindly followed the orders of the SS men and tortured others in the hope of survival, causing what another researcher would call “a full disruption of an evolving, humanistic, ethical sense” (Martin 43), the Capos would not have lost their humanity nor would so many innocent people have lost their lives to monsters overwhelmed with