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Example research essay topic: Perpetrators Of The Holocaust Police Battalion 101 - 2,853 words

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Perpetrators of the Holocaust, Police Battalion 101 One of the ugliest events during the World War 2 was the Holocaust period when Nazis were torturing Jews and other people that they thought were not worthy to live. Many psychological effects caused by the Holocaust forever changed the way the Jewish people view the world and themselves. The world's biggest desolation that caused the murders of millions of Jewish people took place during WWII. The Holocaust orchestrated by the Nazi Empire destroyed millions of lives and created questions about humanity that may never be answered. Many psychological effects caused by the Holocaust forever changed the way the Jewish people view the world and themselves. The Jewish people have been scarred for generations and may never be able to once again associate with the rest of the free world.

Further, these scars have now become the looking glass through which the survivors and their children view the world. Through narrow eyes, the survivors relate everything to the experiences they endured during the Holocaust. Likewise, these new views on the world shapes how the survivors live, interact, and raise a family both socially and spiritually. In Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning attempts to answer two questions about the Holocaust in Poland; how the Nazis organized and carried out the destruction of Poland's Jewish population, and where they found the manpower necessary to carry out their evil. Browning bases his book on the testimonies of the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, which was a unit of the German Order Police. These testimonies come from the German governments investigation of Nazi war crimes, and were given in the 1960 s.

Ordinary Men provides a graphic portrayal of Police Battalion 101 s involvement in the Holocaust. The major focus of the book is upon reconstruction of the events this group of men participated in. Browning utilizes first-hand testimonies to paint a picture of the brutality these men inflicted upon the Polish Jews. He reconstructs and summarizes their activities in Poland during the war, from shooting innocent men, women, and children to clearing out the ghettos of all Jews and ensuring they board trains to concentration camps. 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. Trapp joined the Nazi party in 1932, but never became an office in the SS. His two captains, Hoffmann and Wohlauf, were SS trained officers.

The reserve lieutenants, all seven of them, were drafted into the Order Police because they were ordinary. They were middle class, educated, and successful in their civilian lives. Five of them were members of the Nazi party, but none were in the SS. Of thirty-two remaining officers twenty-two were Party members, but none were members of the SS. Sixty-three percent of the rest of the battalion were blue-collar workers. About thirty-five percent were lower-class workers.

The remaining two percent were middle-class but not greatly successful. Many were in their late 30 s, too old for active army duty, but just right for police duty. They were old enough to know of political ideology other than that of the Nazi party, even though most were members. Without a doubt, the men of this battalion greatly contributed to the final solution.

The first action the 101 st Battalion was ordered to do took place in Jozefow. They went into the town and were ordered to shoot anyone trying to escape and those that were too sick or frail to walk to the marketplace, as well as infants and anyone offering resistance or attempting to hid, were to be shot on the spot. (Browning, 57) They then trucked or marched the Jews they found into the woods just outside the village. When the first truckload of thirty-five to forty Jews arrived, an equal number of policemen cams forward and, face to face, were paired off with their victims. (Browning, 61) The shear atrocity of this was too much for many of the policemen, so alcohol was provided to calm the mens nerves. Only a dozen men stepped out and refused to shoot at all.

As the day went on, however, many could not continue. They even had a special technique dubbed the neck shot. The men were told to place the end of their carbines on the cervical vertebrae at the base of the neck, but here too the shooting was done initially without fixed bayonets as a guide. The results were horrifying. The shooters were gruesomely besmirched with blood, brains, and bond splinters. It hung on their clothing. (Browning, 65) The task at hand would seem daunting at first, but as time went on the 101 st Battalion would refine their methods, and the shooting would come much easier to them.

This scarred the men and they tried to justify what they were doing. I made the effort, and it was possible for me, to shoot only children. It so happened that the mothers led the children by the hand. My neighbor then shot the mother and I shot the child that belonged to her, because I reasoned with myself that after all without its mother the child could not live any longer. It was supposed to be, so to speak, soothing my conscience to release children unable to live without their mothers. (Browning, 73) The author goes on to further explain what the soldiers actually meant. The full weight of this statement, and the significance of the word choice of the former policeman, cannot be fully appreciated unless one knows that the German word for release also means to redeem or save when used in a religious sense.

The one who releases is the Erloser the Savior or Redeemer! (Browning, 73) After the effects on the men of the outright massacre were seen, two changes took place. First, the 101 st Battalion was assigned to clearing the ghettos and loading people on trains destined for the Treblinka death camp. Second, the real dirty work was to be carried out by SS-trained soldiers. This helped remove them mentally from the deaths, and made their work much more efficient. They went on through a number of towns, clearing out ghettos and loading people on trains. By mid-November 1942, following the massacres at Jozefow, Lomzay, Serokomla, Konskowola, and elsewhere, and the liquidation of the ghettos in Miedzyrzec, Low, Parczew, Radzyn, and Kock, the men of Reserve Battalion 101 had participated in the outright execution of at least 6, 500 Polish Jews and the deportation of at least 42, 000 more to the gas chambers of Treblinka. (Browning, 121) Now that that was done, they had to go back through and make sure the towns and ghettos were truly judenfrei (free of Jews).

Hence, the Jew Hunt began, and the soldiers would be faced with mass executions. This was quite significant because the men were face to face with their victims, only this time many were hardened killers and would handle the situation quite differently. Although there are no numbers as to how many Jews were killed by the 101 st during this sweep, there are numbers for other similar groups. For a group near Lublin, the total was 1, 695, or an average of nearly 283 per month, and in Warsaw, ... reflect a total of 1, 094 Jews killed by his unit, for an average of nearly 14 Jews per policeman. (Browning, 131) Browning points out that many of these men had participated in ghetto clearing, but few had, up to this point, been involved in such personal killings. It was a tenacious, remorseless, ongoing campaign in which the hunters tracked down their prey in direct and personal confrontation.

It was not a passing phase but an existential condition of constant readiness and intention to kill every last Jew who could be found. (Browning, 132) There last final, and most brutal sweep was the Harvest Festival. Here they were to wipe out the remaining Jews in the work camps. The men here were now ordered to kill the cooks and servants they had working for them. This sweep was led by the SS and involved digging mass graves that the victims were rounded up into. Once stripped naked, they were ordered to lie down into the grave, where they were sprayed by machine gun fire. The next round was ordered to lie down on those who were already shot.

This was even more inhumane then the previous killings because there were no neck shots, the victims were often only wounded. The wounded wouldnt die instantly, but would be crushed by the next wave of victims being ordered to crawl onto the bodies of their wounded friends and family. Did Police Battalion 101 significantly contribute to the genocide? With a conservative estimate of 6, 500 Jews shot during the earlier actions like those at Jozefow and Lomazy and 1, 000 shot during the Jew Hunts, and a minimum estimate of 30, 500 Jews shot at Majdanek and Poniatowa, the battalion had participated in the direct shooting deaths of at least 38, 000 Jews. With the death camp deportation of at least 3, 000 Jews from Miedzyrzec in early May 1943, the number of Jews they had placed on trains to Treblinka had risen to 45, 000.

For a battalion of less than 500 men, the ultimate body count was at least 83, 000 Jews. (Browning, 142) At this time, one must wonder what drove these dock workers, bankers, and businessmen, ordinary men, to kill so many people. Just after the Holocaust had ended and Jewish Survivors found their way back to the towns, they returned only to find everything they had once owned seized by the Nazi empire and their Christian neighbors who they had trusted. This made the Jewish people feel abandoned and worthless. Because of these feelings, it was exceptionally tough to find the will to start a new family. However, for the Jewish people to completely triumph over the Nazis, they had to restructure.

This means beginning new families and having children. The survivors had not expected this task to be so difficult but they found it very hard to stay together with someone that was also part of the Holocaust. Thus, divorcees were high and suicide was higher. In addition many survivors could not cope with living with what they had witnessed.

To make things easier many found they had to marry outside of the Jewish religion because both partners in the marriage would not be as tormented by the memories and reminded every day of the pain they had endured. This would in turn make raising a family and joining society again much easier. The Jewish survivors found marriages to be very hard to maintain but what was even harder was raising children. Children of survivors became a difficult task because of the exceeding amount of pressure placed on the child to replace the lost loved ones taken away because of the Holocaust. The survivors child was no longer a child or individual but was a relic of the past, an object to fill the parents empty lives.

The child was supposed to vindicate all the suffering the parent had endured. Furthermore, the parents put unusual amounts of stress on a child forcing undeserving discipline, molding them into a lost loved one. In addition the discipline was not necessary for the child's development and was often not related to any of the childs needs but of those from the parents. Therefore the children tended to be a little unbalanced. Browning goes into a deep analysis of the possible causes for these men to become hardened killers. He dismisses propaganda because many of the men were older, and had seen life before the Nazi regime.

He also does not believe the men were specially chosen to be killers. 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 killers. (Browning, 164) So, what did actually drive them to kill? He attributed much of it to out of site, out of mind. Not only was the killing done by others, but it was done out of sight of the men who cleared the ghettos and forced the Jews onto the death trains. (Browning, 163) There have been a number of tests performed by psychologists that studied the effects of pressure from authority figures on human behavior. By examining one of the most famous, Milgrams electric shock test, it is hard not to draw some parallels. Milgram noticed that if people did not have direct contact with the people they were inflicting pain on, two-thirds of the subjects inflicted what was considered extreme pain.

If they had visual and voice feedback, only forty percent obeyed orders. The number fell to thirty percent if they were in direct contact with the person they were shocking. Browning attempts to figure out how a group of Ordinary Men could become mass murderers. To gain insight into this question, Browning investigated the background of these men. Were they specially selected or trained? Were they of superior intellect?

What Browning discovers is that these men were in fact ordinary. They were mostly middle aged, working class men with little or no advanced schooling. Most were old enough to have grown up before the rise of Fascism, and knew perfectly well the moral norms of German society before the Nazis. Almost none of these men received any type of special training. Browning ultimately concludes that if a member of this group refused to kill he was refusing his share of an unpleasant collective obligation.

Those who didnt kill risked isolation, rejection, and ostracism. This was a highly unfavorable prospect for these men given their situation, Browning argues. The Battalion was stationed abroad among a hostile population. The individual within the group therefore had nowhere else to turn for support and social contact if he chose not to kill.

Most of these Ordinary Men therefore chose to kill innocent people. Browning uses his conclusions about the reasons why these men killed to raise a warning flag to us all. While acknowledging that those who did kill cannot be absolved by the notion that everyone in the same situation would have done as they did (some of the men did refuse to kill), Browning warns that If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot? Ordinary Men provides the reader with a rather in-depth narrative of actual events during the Holocaust. Its usefulness as a Sociological work is limited, however. Very little is written about the interactions between members of the Police Order, mainly because little such information is available.

While Browning does spend time exploring the possible societal causes of Ordinary Men becoming cold-blooded killers, the book is mainly a narrative of the events which actually occurred in Poland during 1942 and 43. It is a microscopic look into a horrifying whole, and as such is a good historical source for those interested in how the Nazis accomplished their goal of a Judenfrei Poland. Although Browning does state that the social and peer pressures eased the Germans transformation into being mass murderers. Even if theses pressures are powerful, it doesnt account for the actions of all the Germans in every aspect of the war. The soldiers and reservists couldnt have been all that opposed to the killings when given the option to remove themselves from the killings and they didnt. To take things to another extreme they actually volunteered for killing missions which goes to show to what point they believed in the justification of murdering the Jews without exception and without any compassion as if they enjoyed watching them suffer.

It isnt like the Jews had ravaged the German population and the Germans were taking out their revenge on them, these murders are horrible because they took place in massive numbers without provocation whatsoever. The Jews were slaughtered because they had different beliefs and Browning does an incredible job at depicting this throughout the book. The only downfall however minor it is the inaccuracy of his information because it does find it's sources in personal testimony of people being accused of war crimes with their lives in jeopardy and his lack of visible primary documents. Bibliography: Christopher Browning. Ordinary Men.

New York: Viking Press, 1997. Gold hagen, Daniel J. Hitlers Willing Executioners. New York: Alfred A.

Knopf. 1996. Braham L. Randolph, Ed. The Psychological Perspectives of the Holocaust and of its Aftermath. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Robert, Prince.

The Legacy of the Holocaust: psycho historical themes in the second generation Ann Arbor MI: Use-research press, 1975.


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