The Holocaust In Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men

The Holocaust is still a heavily reviewed subject and is debatably one of the worst if not the worst atrocity that has happened on this Planet up to date. To think that the Nazi’s were able to kill millions of people it has made us question what kind of people they were and if they were anything similar to us. It is hard to think of a perpetrator to be a normal human being. The Holocaust has made us question if the Nazi’s had any sense of moral sensibility when killing innocent and defenseless Jewish men and women. In the book Ordinary Men, Author Christopher Browning argues that these Nazi’s especially referring to the Reserve Police Battalion 101 were normal people who had instructions given by Hitler and their government to follow through with by devaluing all Jewish life. Although these Nazi’s were placed outside of their regular comfort zone, the mass murder that underwent during the Holocaust was more of an act for the soldiers to continue out with to avoid any sort of alienation from their own country. Many sources were used as Browning tries to back up his argument. Browning utilizes throughout his book one specific German unit, which is the

Raul Hilberg wrote, Perpetrators, Victims and Bystanders, which is similar to Ordinary Men because both historians put a lot of research into finding the motivation behind a perpetrator. Trying to find empathy for any perpetrator whether it is during the Holocaust or not has kept most historians away from taking on such a subject. Historians make a good case for not wanting to get into the same topic as Browning to not cause any confusion about the Holocaust with its readers since there are still millions of people who are descendants of the victims. Although it is critical that Browning was trying to fairly outline the difference between forgiving and empathizing while writing his