Ordinary Men Essay

If one were to take anything from Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men it is that even the most ordinary, normal men have the capacity to kill. The 101st Reserve Police Battalion executed at least 6,500 Jews at the Polish cities and villages of Jozefow, Lomazy, Serokomla, Lukow, Konskowola, Parczew, Radzyn, Kock, and Miedzyrzec and participated in the deportation of at least 42,000 Jews to the gas chambers in Treblinka (Browning, chapter 14, page 121). There were most likely even more killings that

emphasizes in Ordinary Men are based on his beliefs about the Holocaust. His argument touches base on the idea that regular citizens of Germany could commit such horrible acts without being coerced into doing so. He examines the side of the Reserve Police Battalion 101 and tries to figure out just why these gentlemen participated in the mass shootings and deportations of the Holocaust. In fact should these "gentlemen" even be called gentlemen enlight of the acts they committed upon other men? The men

Browning’s “Ordinary Men” chronicles the rise and fall of the Reserve Police Battalion 101. The battalion was one of several units that took part in the Final Solution to the Jewish Question while in Poland. The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, and other units were comprised of ordinary men, from ordinary backgrounds living under the Third Reich. Browning’s premise for the book is very unique, instead of focusing on number of victims, it examines the mindset of how ordinary men, became cold-hearted

Book Review: Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning is subtitled Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. This title is a perfect overview of the subject of the book. Browning discussed Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the part it played in the World War II during the Holocaust, especially in the “Final Solution”, which was the attempted eradication of Jews. Not only does Browning discuss Battalion 101, but he uses them as an example of how

"There are no extraordinary men... just extraordinary circumstances that ordinary men are faced to deal with" (William Halsey). The same can be said about volatile men. This is the quote Christopher R. Browning thought of when he named this book. The men of the 101st battalion were rarely faced with decisions. Even if it had been proposed by Trapp the morning of Jozefow that "any of the older men who did not feel up to the task that lay before them could step out" (Browning, chapter 7, pg. 57), he

Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution, and Jan Gross’s Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedbwabne, Poland, all provides a different perspective on how ordinary people felt about their experiences in the Holocaust both perpetrators and victims. Art Spiegelman’s Maus: a Survivor’s Tale is particularly unique in that it is a graphic novel, not typically a genre used for writing about the horrors

Analysis of “Ordinary Men” What do you see when you think about the Holocaust? What are things you associate with it? Personally I think about the absolute evil of the Nazis and the horrible things that the Jews had to endure. I think about how gut wrenchingly terrible of a life style every one of those people had to live through and what it would be like to have been in their place. What I don’t think about and had never even considered before reading the book Ordinary Men is what it was like to

Ordinary Men by Browning The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were just ordinary men, from a variety of backgrounds, education, and age. It would appear that they were not selected by any force other than random chance. Their backgrounds and upbringing, however, did little to prepare these men for the horrors they were to witness and participate in. The group was made up of both citizens and career policemen. Major Wilhelm Trapp, a career policeman and World War I veteran headed the battalion

evil, they are dehumanized. This is dangerous, as it doesn’t allow us to obtain wisdom, perspective, and empathy for those involved. Ordinary Men allows an opportunity to see these events from the eyes of the perpetrators and their journey that led to what seems to people today as ruthless, unscrupulous murder. When in fact these people were literally ordinary men who were introduced to unordinary circumstances which caused them to abandon their humanity. If we discredit these people as inhuman we

In the novel Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning there contains a thesis in which the novel is centered around. This thesis is the theory that these ordinary people could commit these atrocities in the Holocaust because of the pressure from their peers and country that were participating in these appalling acts of violence and massacres of innocent people. The basis of this novel relies on the need to show that these men were not necessarily physically forced to commit these heinous acts, but that