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Was Browning Justified In The Book Ordinary Men

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In general, many believed that the soldiers that killed the Jews as either brainwashed by the Nazi or forced to kill with their life on the line. According to the book Ordinary Men, it was not the case. Christopher R. Browning made it clear that they were not forced to kill the Jews. When the Reserved Battalion 101 was in Jozefow, Major Wilhelm Trapp clearly stated that “if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step down” (2). The claim that these men did not have a choice but to kill was wrong. Their major offered them two choices: kill the Jews or step down. They were not forced by their superiors and they did not receive any death threats from anyone. Yet sadly, not all soldiers chose to …show more content…

If any soldiers under him did not obey his order, being a dictator type leader that despised rebellion, it would only natural that most people think that the only solution for disobedience was dead. Although the fact sounded very convincing, it was also a false one. The soldiers from Reserved Battalion 101 and other soldiers from different battalions did not only had the choice to kill or not to kill, they did not get punish. In the book, Browning said that “ no defense attorney or defendant in any of the hundreds of postwar trials has been able to document a single case [about]...refusal to obey an order to kill unarmed civilians resulted in the allegedly inevitable dire punishment” (170). There were not any types of punishments to any soldiers in the first place. The punishments were not recorded or even bad to the point that it needed any attorneys to help the soldiers. These soldiers got an offer of not committing murder, and even if they refused to disobey the order, there were no punishments or dead threats. There was also another belief that the killers were all “innocent” people who did not know any better because of the propagandas and teachings that the Nazi put in their

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