Preview

Persuasive Essay On Ordinary Man

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1647 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Persuasive Essay On Ordinary Man
Enter here Envision a middle aged man that the night before had sat down with his family for dinner. This same man is now being told to do horrific things in the name of his country. Is this man a monster or is he just an ordinary man. This is what is up for debate in Bowing’s book Ordinary Man. Browning state that he believes that these are just ordinary men and throw a variety of different reasons they were forces and overall persuaded to commit awful acts against fellow human beings. There is proof that he was correct that these were just ordinary men. It also might be surprising that this book would show that most if not all men could ultimately come to do the awful actions described thought out the book.
Enter here These men grew up before the Nazi’s ideas and morality was pushed on everyone. Most of these men came from Hamburg one of the least Nazified places. Also they had come from social classes that were anti-Nazi. It would have seemed that this group of men would not have been the ideal group of men, to carry out these acts (48). There were those that were anti-Semites and were racist toward the
…show more content…
When Trap first came to them and told them what they had to do they were just ordinary men. The first mass killing would be a turning point for these men, because after that the killing that would follow would be easier. As the Battalion killed and witness more death, the easier it was to dehumanize the Jews. The Jew hunts were significant because it showed the change in the men’s attitude, change from men to monsters (127). The men went from the first mass killings and being somber to the Jew hunts and joking around after the hunts (128). These huts were gruesome as the men would hunt them like animals in the woods. It also would show how some men had problems with killing the Jews as they would either let the Jews go or purposefully let the Jews

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Better Essays

    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.…

    • 1305 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Essay on 'Everyman'

    • 311 Words
    • 1 Page

    Everyman is considered as the greatest medieval morality play written by an anonymous author. Because of its religious content and moral message, poets assumed that a priest wrote it. The author of this masterpiece made it allegorical, which means that each figure represents abstract characteristics.…

    • 311 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    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…

    • 875 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The reason The German Soldiers and some of Germany’s populations consider Jews as their problem, was because they were people that would be considered an escape, even though they didn’t do anything. The text states “Many times over the years, leaders had turned the Jews into scapegoats.” (3) It’s unfair to turn people into a solution for a problem. Many people thought this was true but since Hitler and his Nazi army were too powerful they couldn’t do anything to stop him. The boys were fighting for their freedom by speaking against the Nazi’s and making it known to the german people what Hitler was doing. They did this by spreading the truth around Hamburg. The text states “It was this mission that had brought Karl onto the blacked-out streets of Hamburg that night in 1941. His job was to distribute those leaflets throughout the city, to stuff them into mailboxes and leave them on park benches.”…

    • 679 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Christopher Browning describes how the Reserve Police Battalion 101, like the rest of German society, was immersed in a flood of racist and anti-Semitic propaganda. Browning describes how the Order Police provided indoctrination both in basic training and as an ongoing practice within each unit. Many of the members were not prepared for the killing of Jews. The author examines the reasons some of the police members did not shoot. The physiological effect of isolation, rejection, and ostracism is examined in the context of being assigned to a foreign land with a hostile population. The contradictions imposed by the demands of conscience on the one hand and the norms of the battalion on the other are discussed. Ordinary Men provides…

    • 981 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Bergen's War And Genocide

    • 928 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Goldhagen explains the German’s instinctive, demoralizing attitude towards the Jewish people that had been simmering and majorly progressed in the nineteenth century. The Germans endorsed this elimination themed antisemitism which easily turned into an extermination themed antisemitism once Hitler came to power. Goldhagen refers to this as “a demonological antisemitism [that] was the common structure of the perpetrators’ cognition and of German society in general.” The use of trivial excuses to justify the enormity of the abuse and murder further supports how little they valued a Jewish life and how easy it was for them to carry out these acts. The fact that this hatred toward a group of people was already their culture’s norm helped shape the extreme mentality where you can kill someone with the excuse of proving one’s masculinity or not wanting to be an…

    • 928 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    And in fact, many historians have been fairly comfortable to do so. But Christopher Browning’s account of the factors that encouraged regular Germans to take part in Hitler’s hideous plan reveals something of great importance where an event like the Holocaust is concerned. His Ordinary Men seeks to shift perspective away from the notion that those predisposed toward the behavior that perpetrated this greatest of human tragedies were inhuman and accustomed to operating in fashions more sociopathic than militarily appropriate. In doing so, he sets a sizable challenge for himself. Truly, there is no way to address why the German people participated in without elaborating upon some of the most unspeakable acts committed in modern history. To that end, Ordinary Men takes its readers through some difficult narratives that reveal brutal, amoral behaviors that would imply a society impoverished of intellectual, ethical or academic development to that point. Moreover, the base and vile nature of the war crimes committed against a people unprepared to defend themselves and presenting no legitimate antagonism to its aggressor, suggests that the German people themselves were inherently bad people, inclined toward acts of evil and…

    • 1712 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Concentration camps showed us inhumanity on a scale previously unimagined. However the setting in place of such inhumane behaviour began some years before with the systematic dehumanising of the Jews by breaking down social structures and relationships and taking away their place in civil society. The novel shows that there is great inhumanity displayed from this personal journey of Elie Wiesel. The Jews were tortured every day for no reason at all other than for the SS officers’ own amusement. The SS officers treated the men as if they were animals, making them fight for food. Women, babies, old, sick, and handicapped were put into the crematoriums as soon as they arrived at the camps. The Germans stripped the Jews to nothing and took away everything close to them, separation from loved ones, isolation, transportation and the ruthless, cold actions towards them in the camps such as starvation and selections of the fittest. They killed people for no reason, with no remorse whatsoever. Tortures, being treated like animals, and being burned alive or killed were all things that led to the Jews feeling as if they were not human.…

    • 674 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Brainwashed, heartless Nazis. Many believe these were the kind of men who were involved in the Holocaust, which makes it much easier to dismiss them and believe we could never become like them. However, this was not truly the case for many of those who participated in the Holocaust. These men were not brainwashed, and some were not even Nazis— they were simply ordinary men.…

    • 1427 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Ordinary Men is regarded as seminal in Holocaust studies, as micro-history in its own right, and valuable for studying authoritarianism and indoctrination on individuals and collective groups. Tracing a single German unit, Reserve Police Battalion 101 (henceforth RPB-101) throughout their military duty as they are instructed to kill innocent Jewish men, women and children face-to-face in Poland, Browning documents their transition from men originally deemed unworthy of conscription to efficient killers. Browning tries discover how ‘ordinary men’ could commit such extraordinary crimes by relieving the senseless events in the order the men did. His argument, at its most stripped down, is essentially that ordinary people follow instructions from…

    • 7829 Words
    • 32 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    Ordinary Men

    • 1347 Words
    • 6 Pages

    If one were to take anything from Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men it is that even the most ordinary, normal men have the capacity to kill. The 101st Reserve Police Battalion executed at least 6,500 Jews at the Polish cities and villages of Jozefow, Lomazy, Serokomla, Lukow, Konskowola, Parczew, Radzyn, Kock, and Miedzyrzec and participated in the deportation of at least 42,000 Jews to the gas chambers in Treblinka (Browning, chapter 14, page 121). There were most likely even more killings that were never documented and much less remembered by the members of the 101st. These men had their first taste of death at Jozefow where they massacred 1,500 Polish Jews (Browning, chapter 8, page 74). It was a brutal and harrowing event where men, women, children, and the elderly were all executed, many in their own homes and even more in the forest surrounding the town. But out of this horror and chaos also came a sliver of hope for the souls of the men of the 101st when Major Trapp offered an interesting option; whoever did not have the stomach to participate in the executions could step out before the massacre was underway. Ten or twelve men accepted his offer (Browning, chapter 7, page 57). This would eventually lead to many men stepping away from executions in coming “actions”. Before the war these men were ordinary lower class workers who no doubt enjoyed many of the simple pleasures that we still enjoy today. These were ordinary men who found themselves in an extraordinary situation. They were ordinary men who became extraordinary killers.…

    • 1347 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Persuasive Essay

    • 330 Words
    • 2 Pages

    1930s- In the 1930s money was scarce because of the depression. People tried what they could too to keep themselves happy. They would watch movies, play games, and such. In the great depression the American dream had become a nightmare. The great place that was once called the land of opportunity was now known as the land of desperation. The best place for a better life was California.…

    • 330 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Persuasive Essay

    • 889 Words
    • 4 Pages

    In times like today, people have mixed views on smoking and on the effects it has on the human body. Most people who smoke, feel that non-smokers are against them, and believe in the myths that are portrayed by cigarette companies. They do not realize how addictive cigarettes are, and end up stuck with the burden. I feel that her entire article is truly opinionated and biased about non-smokers and she really doesn’t have the hard evidence, just personal experience.…

    • 889 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Persuasive Essay

    • 1068 Words
    • 5 Pages

    The practice of assisted suicide in the field of medicine is one of the most controversial issues facing us as a society today. Euthanasia of a patient is a taboo that can get a doctor’s license to practice medicine revoked and the doctor can face incarceration for his/her actions which are classified as a homicide. This practice is not something I believe should be looked down upon or tabooed as many other believe. It is a matter of choice, something that should be allowed to any terminally ill patient who wishes it so long as they are mentally competent to make such a decision. There is also a precedent for assisted suicides in the Physician Aid in Dying, or PAD laws in the states of Washington, Oregon, and Montana where patients can be assisted in causing their own deaths. Others may say it devalues human life and that it is an unethical act, which is not true since it is more helping the people by taking the pain away from them during the end of their lives. I don’t believe that euthanasia is just giving the patient the choice of giving up, but rather the choice to be done with the pain and control one’s fate if that pain is too much for them to handle or to keep fighting if they wish to.…

    • 1068 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Persuasive Essay

    • 706 Words
    • 3 Pages

    I have read the funeral homes policies and procedures concerning music played at funerals. However, realizing one's own mortality and understanding that the time I have remaining is reduced to days instead of weeks or months has made me question this policy. I am asking you to make an exception this once and grant me a dying wish. I wish to have a favorite song played that means so much to me, my family and friends. It would be wrong to have my funeral without it. Please consider my request to have the song titled, "You Can't Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones played at my funeral.…

    • 706 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays