The wars between the Axis Power and the Allied and the dropping of atomic bombs in Japan were usually what come into a discussion about World War II. Besides those events, the most horrific and considerably inhumane time was the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a period time during World War II, when Adolf Hitler launched a “movement” to kill all the Jews and anyone he deemed as lower than him in his territories. Most people now looked back at history around this time and believed that the SS and policemen killed the Jews because of brainwashing and forcing. But, in the book Ordinary Men, Christopher R. Browning argued that it was not the case. He argued that these police officers were ordinary men just like everybody else and they were not forced…
Major Wilhelm Trap was given orders to carry out the executions of Jewish women and children which were rounded up. Browning makes it evident that the Major is breaking down emotionally at the order as he “sheds tears and offers to alleviate those who felt unable to carry out the order” (p. 57). But few took advantage of his offer. The men which remained didn’t have an easy task at all… killing helpless and unarmed human…
In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, both the german SS soldiers and their fellow Jews act in a variety of ways to dehumanize those laced into the concentration camps.…
Early in the Holocaust, German army units participated in the massacre of the Jews in Eastern Europe. Among these, the Reserve Police Battalion 101 was made up of civilian police men, German men, and volunteers subject to the military draft. They were middle-aged working family men with a lower middle class background. Their main purpose was to be an essential source of manpower in holding down German-occupied Europe. In 1941, they were told that they had to perform a gruesome and undesirable task executing the Jewish population in the area they patrolled. My paper will be focusing on factors that lead up to how these “ordinary men” allow themselves to be a part of a systematic genocide. In trying to understand the factors that made these men’s crimes possible the factors that are central to their actions are several: peer pressure and conformity, the roles, the developing of a rationale for killing, and the environment they were in. Without these elements, the men of Police Battalion 101would not have become executioners.…
In 1992, Christopher Browning published his book Ordinary Men, a work in which he narrates the experiences of the men in the Reserve Police Battalion 101. Browning begins by classifying the men as ordinary people, as his title suggests, but quickly reveals not only how easily these men succumbed to the vicious acts they were expected to carry out, but how swiftly they began to take extra measures that were unnecessary as a result of their loss of morality. Based on this, Browning’s account of this Battalion allows him to explain that the Holocaust was made possible…
During world war II, the people known as, Jews, were targeted for deportation to concentration camps and execution. The term, “Inhumanity” was expressed in many different ways during this period of time. Inhumanity can scar people emotionally and mentally. Inhumane people tend to act very cruel towards other people, animals, and the environment. In the story, “Night” by Elie Wiesel, there were many merciless examples of how inhumanity was shown during World War II.…
The responses by the American people to the Great Depression varied over the 1930s. From the years 1929-1933 when President Hoover was in power, there was a deep sentiment of cynicism within the country. Hoover failed to properly attend to the needs of the populace and was subsequently replaced by President Roosevelt in 1933. Roosevelt’s charismatic and optimistic demeanour helped set a new national tone of hope, persistence and courage. The American people were known to have taken on this positive spirit throughout the 1930s despite the adversities they faced.…
The men do not care at all about the Jews. On pg 1, line 51, a man says, “You shut your trap, you filthy swine, or I’ll squash you right now! You’d have done better to have hanged yourselves where you were than come here. Didn’t you know what was in store for you at Auschwitz? Haven’t you heard about it? In 1944?... Do you see those flames? Over there-that’s where you’re going to be taken. That’s your grave, over there. Haven’t you realized it yet? You dumb bastards, don’t you understand anything? You’re going to be burned. Frizzled away. Turned into ashes.” This shows that the men in the camp couldn’t care less about the Jews that were being sent there. The men also are killing a lot of Jews. On pg 1, line 25, Eli says, “Behind me, an old man fell to the ground. Near him was an SS man putting his revolver back in it’s holster.” This shows that these men aren’t good at…
Beowulf reading journal Entry 1 Lines 703-1250 Kennings: God-cursed Grendel (true kenning) Cloud-murk (half-kenning) Hell-serf (true-kenning) Wound-slurry (half-kenning)…
I was sitting with my family at the breakfast table drinking milk and eating a piece of burnt toast; that was when I heard the feint sound of sirens coming from the east end of the block. My dads face grew pale and my mother quickly stood up and grabbed my brother and mines hand. She guided us towards the back of the house through a small opening in the floor. Once we reached the hole, she took my brothers hand and placed it in mine, telling him to watch over me. We were put into the hole and she kissed our heads, then covered the little light we had with a rug. I started to panic, unaware of the destruction and persecution that lay before me on a silver platter. We spent a week in that ditch, although it had felt like a lifetime. All the while, I thought of my parents: where had they gone; would they soon return? One day while we were there, with cramps building up in my legs, I heard footsteps coming from above my head. My brother hoping it was our parents returning to save us from the forever darkness that we faced slid the rug over and peered up with squinting eyes. The rough man standing above us, however, was not our father, but a man I would soon come to know as, Nazi soldier. The reasons of our taking were not because of crime, but because of my ethnicity, the way I looked, the way I spoke, and even my religion.…
“Which is worse? Killing with hate or killing without hate?” –Elie Wiesel. One of the most prominent themes in the novel Night is the topic of dehumanization. Throughout the Holocaust the Jews suffered the act of dehumanization, or being deprived humane treatment. From the beginning the Jews were forced to endure the horrible conditions of the Ghettos. They were killed by the thousands in the gas chambers. And some even faced wrath of Dr. Mengele and his torturous experiments.…
In the excerpt from Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 1010 in Poland”, Browning told us of the elite killing squad of less than 500 men, that killed around 83,000 Jews. (215) Not just men, ordinary men, like the ones you see every day. Most of the men were involved in white collar jobs, just trying to support their family when they were chosen for the group. What caused these men to commit outrageous acts against humanity? Can anyone be brainwashed to execute deeds like these men? If you grew up your entire life being told a certain group of people were evil and bad, and you had the opportunity to help your country and kill these people, would you, could you? These were the questions Browning was trying to uncover.…
It’s simple to say that the Holocaust was bad. I don’t think it was third grade and I already knew that. In A Good Day from Survival in Auschwitz, an autobiography by Primo Levi, and Night, an autobiography by Elie Wiesel, I learned the very different first-hand experiences of two young men who dealt with persecution from the Nazi Officers, during the time of the Holocaust. Now although these stories are very different, in truth, they both share similarities as well.…
As we look deeper in to the facts of this event the deeper some are compelled to look from a sociological perspective. To this day the holocaust is used as an example of the worst man can do to man as we try to establish international laws to prevent things like this ever happening again.…
"There are no extraordinary men... just extraordinary circumstances that ordinary men are faced to deal with" (William Halsey). The same can be said about volatile men. This is the quote Christopher R. Browning thought of when he named this book. The men of the 101st battalion were rarely faced with decisions. Even if it had been proposed by Trapp the morning of Jozefow that "any of the older men who did not feel up to the task that lay before them could step out" (Browning, chapter 7, pg. 57), he didn't actually allow them any time to truly think about it. He brought it up moments before they were about to go out to the slaughter. They were blind-sided and the men who didn't want to risk the future of their jobs as policemen or the men that didn't want to look weak in front of their peers were ushered into a massacre unlike that they could have ever imagined. But because they were all basically forced to give killing a shot, it only allowed them to adapt to war easier. The job that the men of the 101st had to carry out continued to get easier as they adapted to the climate of the war by creating rules for themselves. These ordinary men were no longer in an ordinary situation.…