An Analysis of Christopher R. Browning's Ordinary Men by Tom Stammers

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An Analysis of Christopher R. Browning's Ordinary Men by Tom Stammers

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Summary

Before Browning’s 1992 book, most Holocaust scholarship focused either on the experience of the victims or on the Nazi political ideology driving the slaughter. Browning investigates something else: the men who carried out acts of extreme violence. Who were they? How could they end up committing such unspeakable acts?

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An Analysis of Christopher R. Browning's Ordinary Men by Tom Stammers

Of all the controversies facing historians today, few are more divisive or more important than the question of how the Holocaust was possible. What led thousands of Germans – many of them middle-aged reservists with, apparently, little Nazi zeal – to willingly commit acts of genocide? Was it ideology? Was there something rotten in the German soul? Or was it – as Christopher Browning argues in this highly influential book – more a matter of conformity, a response to intolerable social and psychological pressure? Ordinary Men is a microhistory, the detailed study of a single unit in the Nazi killing machine. Browning evaluates a wide range of evidence to seek to explain the actions of the "ordinary men" who made up reserve Police Battalion 101, taking advantage of the wide range of resources prepared in the early 1960s for a proposed war crimes trial. He concludes that his subjects were not "evil;" rather, their actions are best explained by a desire to be part of a team, not to shirk responsibility that would otherwise fall on the shoulders of comrades, and a willingness to obey authority. Browning's ability to explore the strengths and weaknesses of arguments – both the survivors' and other historians' – is what sets his work apart from other studies that have attempted to get to the root of the motivations for the Holocaust, and it is also what marks Ordinary Men as one of the most important works of its generation.

Dr James Chappel completed his PhD in Modern History at Columbia University and is currently teaching at Duke University. His work focuses on the intellectual, political and Religious History of Modern Europe.

Dr Thomas Stammers is lecturer in Modern European history at Durham University, where he specialises in the Cultural History of France in the age of revolution. He is the author of Collection, Recollection, Revolution: Scavenging the Past in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Dr Stammers’s research interests include a wide range of historiographical and theoretical controversies related to eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe.

SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9781912127474
ISBN 10 1912127474
Title An Analysis of Christopher R. Browning's Ordinary Men
Author Tom Stammers
Series The Macat Library
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Paperback
Publisher Macat International Limited
Year published 2017-07-05
Number of pages 98
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note Unavailable