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Daniel Goldhagen And Christopher Browning Research Paper

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Why did the German perpetrators of the Holocaust commit such horrific acts? What were their motivations and reasons for murdering thousands of innocent Jewish people? Ordinary men, such as those of Police Battalion 101, greatly believed in the necessity of a judenfrei Europe. This unit alone, murdered more than 30,000 Jews and sent 45,000 to death camps between July 1942-May 1943. The historians Daniel Goldhagen and Christopher Browning have conflicting views over why these perpetrators committed these murders. Browning believes that this was caused by a mix of peer pressure and an obedience to authority figures. Goldhagen believes that this is the cause of a deeply ingrained German anti-Semitism leading those to actively wish to participate in the horrors of the genocide.These interpretations have received large …show more content…

He received a bachelor’s degree from Oberlin college in 1968, a doctorate and a phD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1975. He then became a distinguished professor after teaching at Pacific Lutheran University from 1974-1999. In 2006, he was elected as Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Browning is an author of seven books on the Holocaust. He has written about Nazi decisions and policy making, the behaviour and motives of perpetrators and the use of survivor testimony of the Jewish people. Browning has been an expert witness in multiple trials of Nazi criminals in Canada, the UK, Australia, and the Irving v. Listadt case in London (2000). His best known work is the book, Ordinary Men: Police Battalion 101, which was made in 1992. This book has been praised and very popular but was denounced by Goldhagen for missing the Specifically-German political culture, characterised by ‘Eliminst anti-Semitism’. In 1992, Goldhagen reviewed Browning’s book and concluded that it failed in its central

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Browning ends the book by talking to us about what the Police Battalion 101 did after the fall of the Third Reich. The investigations of 1962-1967 only lead to a few very short prison sentences for three soldiers who were

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The organization wanted to try their best to stop these brutal killings of their people in any way that they possibly can. They believed that they should have consequences for their mass murders. Jews were very scared to be taken by the Nazis during this time. Unfortunately, not many Jews even made it to the camps before dying of starvation or even suffocation from the floor being coated with lime or chlorine and sprinkled with water and from being so cramped in a train with one another (Memorandum). Jews were forced against their will, taken to these camps just to be killed days later by the Nazis.

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Christopher R. Browning, a professor at The University of North Carolina, has spent the majority of his career focused on Nazis and the holocaust. In the book Ordinary Men, Browning proposes that through extreme pressure, desensitization, conformity, and other psychological influences, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were transformed from common citizens, to hardened killers. This argument is contrary to other theories such that it suggests several factors aided the metamorphosis rather than a cultural predisposition to be brutal. Observing the psychological shift of the men allows a new, contradictory standpoint to be formed.

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The Nazis dehumanized the Jews and convinced many that the Jews caused everything that was going wrong, both socially and economically, within Germany and throughout the world. However, these techniques do not entirely explain why the men of Police Battalion 101 participated in the Jews’ mass executions. According to Browning, “the age of the men affected their susceptibility to indoctrination another way as well. Many of the Nazi perpetrators were very young men. They had been raised in a world in which Nazi values were the only ‘moral norms’ they knew.

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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.

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