Term Paper on "Ordinary Men Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning"

Term Paper 5 pages (1730 words) Sources: 1

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Ordinary Men: Genocide and Human Nature

Christopher Browning applies the theory of elective morality to the perpetrators of this Holocaust, working from conversations with and research on the members of Police Battalion 101, which rounded up Polish Jews in brutal fashion by demand of the Nazi authority. The violence and cruelty which would become signifiers of the Nazi party were enabled by the active participation of average members of society. Christopher Browning's book reveals that such individuals were made capable of the malice carried out in the Final Solution by the hegemonic influence of the Nazi Party in the cultural, political and philosophical affairs in the countries that it controlled.

Ultimately sending to their deaths 6 million Jews and 5 million more of assorted ethnicity or crime, the Nazis succeeded in weaving through the eastern European psyche a culture of acceptance for the rightness of the violent 'final solution' that called for the full genocide of the Jews. As such, it is also tempting to write off the success of Hitler's influence on an overall mentality by the German people of hatred and unthinkable violence. And in fact, many historians have been fairly comfortable to do so. But Christopher Browning's account of the factors that encouraged regular Germans to take part in Hitler's hideous plan reveals something of great importance where an event like the Holocaust is concerned. His Ordinary Men seeks to shift perspective away from the notion that those predisposed toward the behavior that perpetrated this greatest of human tragedies were inhuman and accustomed to operating in fashions more sociopathic than militarily appropriate. In doing so, he sets a sizable challenge for himself. Truly, there is no way to address that which the German people participated in without elaborating upon some of the most unspeakable acts committed in modern history. And to that end, Ordinary Men takes its readers through some difficult narratives that reveal a downright medieval behavior that would imply a society impoverished of intellectual, ethical or academic development to that point. Moreover, the base and vile nature of the war crimes committed against a people unprepared to defend itself and presenting no legitimate antagonism to its aggressor, suggests that the German people themselves were inherently "bad" people, inclined toward acts of evil and cruelty. This, as is addressed in Browning's account, is a popular view held by many historians who have contended that Germans "were attracted . . . To National Socialism as a 'subculture of violence,' and in particular to the SS, which provided the incentives and support for the full realization of their violent potential." (Browning, 166). But Browning looks to dispel such theories by asserting throughout his recounting of the events of the Final Solution that such is a claim that could be made about nearly all people. That is, claiming that one has within him the underlying potential to act out of violence is not a satisfying explanation for taking part in an act as uniformly accepted as "wrong" as is genocide.

In fact, at the crux of the novel is the consideration that taking on such a perspective is quite dangerous. To attribute the behavior of the German people during the time of the Holocaust to monstrous inhumanism is to provide an explanation that, aside from being a major oversimplification of matters far more complicated and loaded with implications than such a limited assumption as that, creates the opportunity for others to perpetrate similar acts of intolerable malice. By dismissing the aggressors as monsters, Browning seems to assert, we are ignoring the many factors that allowed them to behave thusly. Failing to recognize the telltale signs of a society high-jacked by the lunacy of fascism could ultimately render the lessons of the Holocaust unlearned. So it is not only useful but essential to endure the experience of Browning's work, wherein he approaches the Holocaust from a perspective at one time unthinkable.

The account that Browning delivers allocates a great deal of its energy to discussing the facts of human nature that would allow such savagery. Inevitably, no matter what explanations Browning offers, he conducts himself with what can only be interpreted as an overarching acceptance that the behavior of the German people during this time will always appear as untenable to those of us who consider ourselves incapable of that brand of unmitigated evil. However, he proceeds to illustrate the vulnerability of human nature. A man bound to the various sociological and economic impulses of the larger body, in this case the state of Germany, is a man without free will. So was it in World War II Germany, where Hitler's methods seem to underlie his understanding of the atrocity he would soon implement.

Hitler's rise to power in the German government was one prompted by crisis to begin with. Like much of the world in the 1930s, Germany was drowning in an economic depression that completely devalued the German dollar, had thrown masses into joblessness and poverty and had proved the German government of Bismarck to be a fully impotent one. It was in this vacuum of effective leadership and long-term resolution that Hitler emerged as a man possessing of power. Proud Germans, perhaps more driven by their nation's storied technological and philosophical developments than restrained by them, were desperate to associate their beloved motherland with power and prominence again. In all of Hitler's words, this promise permeated effectively. It found the most resonance, however, in his vehement scapegoating. If Germany was to be returned to its former glory, he promised, the enemies of the German people would have to be vanquished. This meant not only extending the sway of German nationalism to eastern Europe and eventually the world but it also meant addressing impurities to German strength within her own borders. Here, the Jews served as the ideal shoulderer of blame. While Hitler may have exacted his plan on the basis of ideological self-assuredness, he implemented it with a strict adherence to principles of propaganda. The ideology came a distant second to the mass-marketing of deception regarding the Jews and targeted directly at the average German, Austrian or Polish citizen. Human nature was proving itself most susceptible to the interests of shifting blame.

There is much consideration, in retrospect, of the fear some men within the military ranks faced over the prospect of refusing orders they found too difficult to carry out on a moral basis. However, early in his text, Browning reveals that members of this force were actually explicitly offered the opportunity to step away from assignments which called for the killing of unarmed Jewish civilians. In addition, he points out later that, contrary to popular conception on Nazi policy, there is no documented history wherein German citizens and/or party members were given capital punishment for refusing to directly kill Jews. These facts render the Nuremberg motives for participation in the final solution as an explanation rather than an excuse for such acts of depravity.

In Browning's ethnography of the 101, his subjects are chosen to reveal that the most troubling fact about the Holocaust was the ready willingness of ordinary Germans, many of whom were not predisposed toward killing of any kind before the rise of the Third Reich. While the deeply rooted and methodically intensified hatred for the Jews made it such that there was not a real large aversion within the SS ranks to the final solution per se, there were, within, individual pangs of doubt over acts of enforcement that differed from conventional strategies of law and order. Browning illuminates the complex web of institutional lies, propagandized ideologies and nationalistic obligations that convinced those men that such behavior was necessary under the circumstances, recalling an instant when Captain Trapp informs his men that they will be executing unarmed women, children and the elderly by orders of the fuhrer:

"This assignment was not to his liking, indeed it was highly regrettable, but the orders came from the highest authorities. If it would make their task any easier, the men should remember that in Germany the bombs were falling on women and children. He then turned to the matter at hand. The Jews had instigated the American boycott that had damaged Germany." (Browning, 2)

Clearly, his assertion is a falsehood that, as Browning presents it, Trapp accepts as true. There is evidence herein of something else which, implicitly, Browning's book presents to the reader. Germans at every level made a conscious decision to believe that which was presented to them. The motives for this were numerous, with anti-Semitism firmly instructive but certainly not alone as a cause. The anti-Semitism made acceptable what many Germans believed they had to do in order to maintain contenting social standing. Certainly, with such a sweeping current of hatred for the Jews, opposition could have been a considerable risk which many Germans were satisfied to be ethically absolved of taking.

And though there is evidence of the kind of intimidation in the Nazi Party that threatened job security at… READ MORE

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