Summary Of Ordinary Men By Christopher Browning

Understanding the psychological motivations of the perpetrators of the Holocaust is a daunting task for historians and one that has been argued over for decades. One of the most important considerations when considering this questions is that of what sources to use and how one should interpret them. While a variety of sources may be available to study the Holocaust, all of them are not appropriate or helpful in attempting to understand perpetrators. For those sources that are used for this purpose, it is important to evaluate them and acknowledge possible moderator variables that might impact interpretation. The diary of Felix Landau is quite a different source from those used for Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, and these sources, and

- Felix Landau, when describing his position and goals, used very utilitarian language. For instance, he wrote on the tenth of July 1941 that he had been “officially assigned as ‘Judengeneral’ (‘General to the Jews’),” and that he was immediately most concerned about his living arrangements, not about the state of the people he had just been put in charge of (Landau, 1941/2015, 193). He also repeatedly referred to his work with Jews as an expedient to try and make it to his girlfriend, Gertrude. The mix of horrific statements with mundane things is common throughout his diary. On the fourteenth of July, he most willfully volunteered to guard fifty prisoners from Vienna who were to be shot the next day, which made him think of Vienna but not feel any empathy for the Jewish prisoners; the following morning he was recruited to handle an execution and his response was “Fine, so I’ll just play executioner and then gravedigger, why not?” (Landau, 2941/2015, 193-194). This is significant in light of the way that the testimonies used for Ordinary Men seem to focus on the atrocities the men committed throughout the passages used in the book, rather than normalizing them with the things of everyday life and usually made each individual’s role seem small (Browning, 1998). This is partially due to the fact that

- Browning describes Reserve Police Battalion 101 in a way that distinguishes them from the expected. He says, “By age, geographical origin, and social background, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were least likely to be considered apt material out of which to mold future mass killers” (Browning, 1998, 164). This was because they were middle-aged, working-class men from Hamburg, most of whom were not part of the Nazi party particularly since Hamburg was notably less engaged in Nazi policy. In contrast, Landau was a long-time member of the Nazi party and even suffered for it. He joined the SA in 1933 and the SS in 1934, and then he went on to help attempt a Nazi coup in Vienna and was incarcerated for three years (Landau, 1941/2015, 187, 202). He was also a young man in his 20’s at that time, which made him a more typical candidate for Nazi party participation. This distinction is important to consider when look at perpetrator psychology from these sources because, while there were similar processes happening, different individual perpetrators and groups of perpetrators had very different origins that informed how they thought about the world and other people. The men of the battalion had mostly had their formative years before the