Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland. London: Penguin Books, 2001.
Christopher Browning’s book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, studies the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101. These ordinary men, plucked from mundane daily jobs, remain responsible for the murder of approximately 80,000 Jews in occupied Poland. These men were not hardened SS officers, nor were they the well organized, inherently anti-Semitic men of the Einsatzgruppen. They were not the sort of men one would expect to commit mass murder. Browning seeks to understand why this titular group of ordinary men became the perpetrators of the worst genocide in human history. His answer is disturbing. The men of the reserve battalion could have been anyone. They responded to the pressures of conformity, and to the desire of upward mobility, along with months of desensitization. In doing so these men became that which we all fear.
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They must be “other” in our minds, in much the same way the men of the Reserve Battalion 101 needed to see the Jews they murdered as others. If others can be blamed, if the reader can placate themselves by believing these killers were somehow different, somehow inherently bad people, susceptible to great evil, then the reader does not have to look their own intrinsic nature. Other historians, including Daniel Goldhagen support this idea. He hypothesized that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were inherently anti-Semitic, that they were Nazified. Further, that the Holocaust was the result of these unusual circumstanced. Browning dispels this idea right in the title of the book. These were ordinary men, not monsters. They were not caught up in battlefield blood lust, not viciously anti-Semitic. Nor were they evil. They were average
The French SS division, led by General Carl Aldrecht Oberg, was known for being particularly ruthless and unsettlingly efficient. Despite having one of the highest capture rates, approximately 3000 Jews a week, in all of Europe, Oberg’s superior, and the executive officer in charge organizing the capture and deportation of
In December 1939, Poland was being torn apart by the savagery of the Holocaust. Oskar Schindler took his first faltering steps from the darkness of Nazism towards the light of heroism. “If you saw a dog going to be crushed under a car,” he said later of his wartime actions, “wouldn't you help him?” Poland had been a relative haven for Jewish people and it numbered over 50,000 people, but when Germany invaded, destruction began immediately and it was very harsh. Jews was forced into crowded ghettos, randomly beaten and humiliated, and continuously murdered for no reason.
During the time of 1933-1945 the Nazi’s implemented a series of dehumanizing actions towards the jewish. In the book “Night” by Eliezer Wiesel, Wiesel discusses his life before being deported to a concentration camp, his experience in concentrations camps, and how he was finally liberated. Through Wiesel, we are able to witness the way these unfortunate jewish people were stripped of their rights, experimented on and objectified. First of all, there were many laws that were being established that were specifically targeting the Jewish population as time was progressing in Nazi Germany. These laws made a huge impact and made it more difficult for the jewish community to live as “normal” human beings.
Prompt 3 In the story the Nazis make the jews feel as if they are no longer men by treating them like they are no longer men. First off they take away their freedom by making them do whatever they say and if they don’t they will be killed. It’s hard to feel like a man when your freedom has been taken away. They also stop calling them by their names.
Many lives were lost during the German’s attempt to wipe out all Jews, and those who lived lost a part of their life during this time. The young boys lost their childhood and ‘innocences’. They witness more death and suffering than anywhere in the country. Today, there is still death and violence against others.
Jewish civilians offered armed resistance in over 100 ghettos in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union” (Jewish Resistance, USHMM). The constant fear of Nazi terror caused resistance in the ghettos very difficult and dangerous to follow through with.
The Holocaust of Nazi Germany, World War I created a new stigma about warfare. During WWI Adolf Hitler the German leader created what is known as the Final Solution, (252). This Final Solution was the creation of a system of camps that were specially build for the incarceration or extermination of the European Jews, (252). Hitler’s mission was to rid Germany of Jews and eventually the rest of Europe. Jews were captured and forced into camps where they faced horrific treatments and many times death.
In Night one of the ways that the Jews were dehumanized was by abuse. There were beatings, “I never felt anything except the lashes of the whip... Only the first really hurt.” (Wiesel, 57) “They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs.
It’s difficult to imagine the way humans brutally humiliate other humans based on their faith, looks, or mentality but somehow it happens. On the novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel, he gives the reader a tour of World War Two through his own eyes , from the start of the ghettos all the way through the liberation of the prisoners of the concentration camps. This book has several themes that develop throughout its pages. There are three themes that outstand from all the rest, these themes are brutality, humiliation, and faith. They’re the three that give sense to the reading.
1. “They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs. Without passion or haste, they shot their prisoners, who were forced to approach the trench one by one and offer their necks. Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns.”
From the small town of Sighet in Transylvania to the huge concentration camps of Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel, the author and victim of the book Night, the horrifying experience of the Holocaust. Wiesel is a 15 year old Jewish boy who was captured by the Germans or “Nazis” during WWII. He went through an overwhelming amount of trauma, like when he got separated from his mother and sisters and watching his father suffer an unbearable amount of pain that eventually killed him. The fact is, power is a tool that can corrupt itself and others, it can ruin people’s lives and it can do that without people even realizing it.
Eli Wiesel, the author of Night, demonstrates dehumanization by illustrating how the Nazis tortured the Jews. The foreign Jews of Sighet were being deported out of their homes. Moshe the Beatle tells Elie of his time in Galicia with great emotion. Elie shares what the Nazis did to the Jews, “Without passion or haste, they shot their prisoners, who were forced to approach the trench one by one and offer their necks. Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for machine guns” (Wiesel 6).
For instance, they are compared to dogs, tattooed with numbers, and starved to the extent where they would kill one another for a piece of food. A German officer dehumanizes the Jews when he forces them into a cattle car. He states, "There
Over 70 years ago, one of the most appalling occurrences in history arose, the holocaust. The holocaust was the mass murdering of many Jews, gypsies, Slavs, and dissenters during World War II. In elaboration, the genocide was implemented by former German dictator Adolf Hitler, who devised a plan in order to create a superior race and boost nationalism in his country. While his intentions seemed to have been a potential solution to revitalize the German nation, they emerged an infamy instead, resulting in the deaths of approximately six million Jews. Through his memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel depicts the horrors of the holocaust.
Let this essay be a reminder to the world that totalitarian ideologies will bring forth catastrophe just as National Socialism did in Nazi Germany. The memoirs of Rudolf Hoss, Death Dealer, is one of the most detailed accounts of a man who was the Commandant of Auschwitz, and is known as one of the greatest mass murderers in history. In the forward Primo Levi wrote to Death Dealer, he stated that even though this autobiography is filled with evil and has no literary quality, it’s one of the most instructive books ever published because it describes a human life exemplary in its way (Hoss, 3). In this essay, I will argue that Primo Levi thought Death Dealer is one of the most instructive books because it seeks to explain how ordinary men