However, although the ingroup-outgroup differentiation and the role of fear are largely applicable to many perpetrator groups in the Holocaust, there are some aspects of the killings were the account falters. Although the Jews were seen as the chief enemy by the Nazis, there were many outgroups that began to take form. They persecuted Romani people, Slavs, people with disabilities, lesbians and gays as well as political enemies, particularly Communists. For example, under the SS Totenkopfverbdn, they enforced labour as a way of inscribing political identity. The Guards would often reserve the hardest labour for those whose policies were on the far left. (Allen 1997:263) The Nazis had many groups of ‘them’, which may have blocked the sense of …show more content…
At the forefront of this account is Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment. The experiment saw a learner on one side of the wall and the teacher, the subject of the experiment, on the other. The subject was instructed by the experimenter to meet any wrong answers from the learner with electric shocks of increasing intensity from 15 up to 450 vaults. The subject was given a shock of 45 vaults in order to experience the intensity of the treatment. (Jones 2006:271) Milgram reported that 26 out of 40 subjects obeyed the orders of the experimenter right until the end, despite the learner pounding on the wall at 300 and at 315 vaults. (Jones 2006:271) These results led Milgram to believe it to be possible for a subject to obey orders passively and dutifully, and slip into an ‘agentic state’, where they are simply an instrument of authoritative orders. (Helm and Morelli 1979:324) Lifton offers a thesis of doubling to support this claim. He suggests that people may divide themselves into two fully functioning wholes and use part of themselves to act as an entire self. (Glass 1997:73) Furthermore, Milgram saw his findings as largely inline with Arendt’s banality of evil thesis. (Blass 2002:99). He believed the sequential nature of the shocks to be key as it worked to “bind a subject to his role”. (Milgram …show more content…
German children would read cautionary tales such as ‘Struwwelpeter’ or ‘Shock-headed Peter’ where disobedience was seen to lead to bad consequences. (Blass 1993:34) Furthermore, the first of twelve commandments used to teach Nazi youth was ‘The leader is always right’. (Blass 1993:33) Christopher Browning explores the applicability of Milgram’s findings to the members of the Reserve Police Battalion 101. In terms of geographical and social background, the men were not likely future mass killers. (2001:164) Milgram’s findings on obedience to authority are convincing applied to the men of the battalion. Despite the authority at Józefów being far more complex and multifaceted than in the experiment, it does hold considerable support for Milgram’s conclusions. Their orders for massacre were received from high yet distant authority that bound both the men and their immediate superior, Major Trapp, to kill.
Christopher Browning’s book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 explains the story of the most infamous mass killing in modern history and the ordinary men who participated in this genocide. In this book Browning provides insight into who these ordinary men really are and their horrendous acts. The Police Battalion 101 became a mass-execution squad in Poland in 1942-43. Surprisingly every single one of these men were able to make the decision to avoid partaking in the killings with no repercussions, some left, while some stated that they were given no such choice and that they didn’t hear that part. When given the orders to take out these innocent Jews, some of the men pleaded that the reason they were hesitant to kill was the fact that they were simply just too weak.
Christopher R. Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and The Final Solution in Poland is seen as one of the most influential book in Holocaust studies. The book traces the Reserve Police Battalion (hereafter RPB-101), a single German unit, throughout their military duty. These soldiers were instructed to kill innocent Jewish men, woman and children in Poland. Most of the men in the RPB-101 were originally deemed not suitable of conscription. When massacres in history occur, it is in the nature of human beings to think of the culprits as being different from normal people; savages or villains that kill for pleasure or have no remorse.
Christopher Browning believes it to be highly unlikely that Nazi officials could have predicted the men of the Reserve Police Battalion would become so equipped to carryout mass genocide do to the fact that the men in the battalion hoped to pursue a career in the Hamburg Police to avoid being drafted into the Army. They were specifically attempting to avoid participating in the atrocities of war. Although the answer may forever be without doubt, Browning argues that the men of the Reserve Police Battalion didn’t want to be rejected, isolated or have the reputation of weak within the battalion. Thus, around 80% of the men successfully carried out their orders, developing brutal tactics and getting more and more comfortable with murder each and every
It is generally accepted that the German people felt they had been robbed of victory in WWI, and for various reasons the Jews were the reason to blame. Battalion 101 was deployed in 1939 and the average age of the men was thirty-nine. All of the men would have been old enough to be aware of Germany’s social and political situation at the end of WWII in 1918. There is reasonable belief these men truly believed they were fighting to reclaim justice for Germany, from the people who stole it from them. Therefore, the men were epistemically justified in fighting for the Nazi’s.
Christopher Browning documents everyday experiences and tribulations of Germany men, who were involved in the tragic events of the Holocaust. Browning tries illustrate the reasoning of all the massacres caused by the Reserve Police Battalion 101, so that people could get a clear understanding of what really was going on with these men, physically and mentally. Looking past all the opposing claims of German men, Browning explains how these men were just regular “middle aged family men” who were taking basic orders from higher authorities (1). Throughout the book Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning explains his reasoning of calling these murders ordinary men, the reasoning behind all the massacres, and how these men later on became killers.
It could be argued that such young men, schooled and formed solely under the conditions of the Nazi dictatorship, simply did not know any better. Killing Jews did not conflict with the value system they had grown up with…” The men of Police Battalion 101 could not use Nazi
Another explanation is that the men were so ‘immersed in a deluge of racist and anti-Semitic propaganda’ that this affected their responses and behaviour. But while Browning accepts that the men in the unit were under no illusions that Jews were the enemy, anti-Semitism does not appear
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.
As the Nazi’s rose to power, many Germans accepted their rule. However, some Germans and other Europeans resisted the movement and spoke out against the Regime. Early opponents to the Nazis were Communist, Socialist, and trade union leaders because they threatened their rise to power because of their different ideologies. Jews and Non- Jews alike resisted the Nazi movement in Germany and in areas controlled by the Nazis during World War II. Even though the Gestapo, the secret police, and the Security Service tried to suppress criticism against the Regime through fear, torture, and executions but a few people resisted and risked their lives to stand up for those who lost their voices because of the persecution.
Grant Myers Professor Mueller WRTR 1313 March 1st, 2023 Zealous Takeover The fourth chapter of the book Why? Explaining the Holocaust, author Peter Hayes highlights the Nazis' concern with racial purity and their belief that the "Aryan" race was superior in his explanation of the Holocaust. The Nazi party came to believe that in order for the German nation to survive and rule, specific ethnic groups had to be eliminated. This chapter discusses Jewish and other targeted communities' reactions to the unfolding events of the Holocaust, including any attempts at evasion or resistance.
Undeterred by “being vastly outgunned and outnumbered” (Jewish Uprising in Ghetto’s and Camps, USHMM), the prisoners of the forsaken camps and ghettos were inclined to resist the anti-Semitic policies enforced by Nazi Germany. “The spirit of these efforts transcends their failure to halt the genocidal policies of the Nazis” (Jewish Uprising in Ghettos and Camps,
Another thing, the Milgram obedience study as where they picked a group of people and they paired them by two types “teacher” or “student”. The things they did in this study were worse that the Zimbardo prison study because the student had to be shocked. The student had to learn for example a list of vocabulary words if they did not learn them they would get shocked with electricity. They would do several rounds to see if they learned and they electricity shock would go up to 450 volts (that is like getting hit by lighting). I learned also about the famous Phineas Gage.
During the 1960’s Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments to test how a person reacts to authority. He started these tests in response to World War Two and the reports of the German soldiers who claimed they were “just following orders’ when asked about
- 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).
Milgram’s experiment brought to light the darker side of human nature, and how they apply to situations across cultures and date back throughout generations, it explains how individuals morality can break down in the presence of supposed authority figures and stressful situations. The Holocaust is the perfect real-life example of Milgram’s statistics. Milgram showed that not all Nazis who were responsible for the acts that occurred during the Holocaust were evil and sadistic. Milgram said “The ordinary person who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation...and not from any peculiarly aggressive tendencies. This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive