UBC: Ordinary Men
Jan. 24th, 2009 02:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyBrowning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993.
There's a way in which reading this book, for me, forms a ring composition with Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, because Goldhagen spends a great deal of time and energy passionately arguing with Browning.
Now that I've read Ordinary Men, I can see why.
But first I want to talk about what this book does well, because there are things it does very well indeed.
Ordinary Men is about a reserve battalion of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei) sent into Poland in 1941-43 to assist in the Final Solution. Mostly their duties consisted of rounding up Jews to be deported to Treblinka, Sobibor, and other extermination camps, but they were also directly involved in several massacres. In all, Browning puts the total body count for these roughly 500 German men at a minimum of 83,000 Jews; of those, at least 38,000 were Jews whom members of the battalion personally shot.
Browning is very good at laying out the progress of Reserve Battalion 101 through their assigned area of Poland, at making a coherent historical narrative from the testimony of battalion members taken in the 1960s. He's very good at describing exactly what these men participated in, and very good at showing the persistence of the Nazis in their self-appointed task. Jews might escape from the initial deportation, but escaping once wasn't enough. One of Reserve Battalion 101's principal duties was the Judenjagd, the "Jew Hunt": going out into the countryside and the Polish forests, hunting down, and shooting every last hidden Jew. Browning describes these routine atrocities vividly.
There are, however, problems. The first is a global judgment call about the testimonies of the members of Reserve Battalion 101: "many of these testimonies had a 'feel' of candor and frankness conspicuously absent form the exculpatory, alibi-laden, and mendacious testimony so often encountered in such court records" (Browning xvii). In other words, Browning has decided to believe that these men are telling the truth about everything. But as a reader, I found much of the quoted testimony to be exculpatory and alibi-laden, and I had grave doubts about the truthfulness of the men who claimed to have avoided killing Jews. They were giving this testimony in the 1960s, in the context of prosecutions for the genocidal crimes their battalion committed. Browning doesn't give any further evidence or explanation for this "feel" of candor and frankness, and without that evidence, without something other than Browning's claim to authoritative judgment, I don't understand why we should believe these claims of (even relative) innocence.
A second problem, closely related: although Browning admits fully that the vast majority of Police Battalion 101 did not resist their orders to kill Jews, he spends most of his analysis focusing on the very small minority who did resist (or who claimed to have resisted). Thus the impression of his analysis of battalion member testimony--as opposed to the impression of his narrative account of the battalion's actions--is based on those who resisted killing Jews. Now there's nothing inherently wrong with that--if, for instance, this were a book about the resistance to the Final Solution among the Order Police. But it argues that it isn't. It claims to be a book about the participation of the Order Police in the Final Solution, and the impression Browning gives is that that participation was reluctant. But again, by his own account, for roughly 90% of Reserve Battalion 101, that was not the case. Browning focuses on those he finds sympathetic, those who tried, even minimally, to resist. This allows readers to enter a kind of empathic community: even if they failed, they tried. We can accept that they are like us.1 And I think, in some measure, that's part of Browning's project: hence his aggressive insistence on the "ordinariness" of his subjects.) But it ducks the larger and uglier question: what about the 90%? They, too, are "ordinary men." Aren't they, too, "like us"?
The third problem is the one that Goldhagen was most incensed about, and I can understand why. Browning writes about the ideological pressures on these men as if the Nazis had invented anti-Semitism, describing "years of anti-Semitic propaganda (and prior to the Nazi dictatorship, decades of shrill German nationalism)" (186). Goldhagen goes into exhaustive detail to chronicle the endemic and virulent anti-Semitism in Germany before 1933. The Nazis didn't make that weapon; they just picked it up from where it was lying on the ground.
The fourth problem is the one I actually find most disturbing. On several actions, Reserve Battalion 101 was assisted by "Hiwis" (Hilfswilligen), units of POWs from Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania "who were screened on the basis of their anti-Communist (and hence almost invariably anti-Semitic) sentiments, offered an escape from probably starvation, and promised that they would not be used in combat against the Soviet army" (52). Browning describes the drunkenness and cruelty of the Hiwis (from the testimony of the Germans); he never seems to consider that they, too, were "ordinary men." In a creepy way (and although he explicitly rejects this with regard to Poles), he accepts the Germans' evaluation of the Hiwis as untermenschen.
Throughout this book, then, Browning constructs anti-Semitism as coming from "outside"--either from above (the Nazi leadership, and we all know Hitler is both evil and crazy anyway) or below (the Hiwis, certain members of the battalion who are also tagged as drunkards and sadists). It is never inherent in the "ordinary men" who are his subjects.2 This is a very comforting construct, and it greatly assists his project of claiming likeness between his "ordinary" subjects and his "ordinary" readers (not to exculpate his subjects, for Browning is in fact very clear about their crimes and their responsibility, but to encourage his readers to try to understand them instead of demonizing them), but it is untrue. And I think it leaves a critical gap in Browning's study, a critical aspect of the situation that he does not address and that therefore we cannot understand.
---
1Who is "us," in this case? Ordinary Men is a book with a strongly implied audience. Without doing a formal analysis of its rhetoric, I still feel fairly certain of my ground in saying that that audience is normative American, i.e., sharing white professional-class values. The implied audience is not Jewish. Nor is it German. Nor is it working-class. It's a little harder to tell about the gender question, because by choosing to study a reserve police battalion, Browning had no choice but to study men. And in general, if you're studying Nazis, you're studying men. (One of the books on my list is about women in Nazi Germany, but fundamentally, everyone in a position of power in Hitler's Germany was male.) But there are some indications that the implied audience is made up of men, too.
2This construct explains some of the very peculiar rhetorical and logical moves he makes, as for example:
1. "political and moral eunuchs"? This is possibly the bizarrest eruption of gender politics into an argument not about gender that I have ever seen.
2. Where did "truth" come from? This is a hypothesis about motivation, nothing more, and it's kind of odd even as a hypothesis. A far more likely one is that, again, as they were testifying to prosecutors, nobody wanted to damn himself by admitting Nazi sympathies. Robert Jay Lifton found in his interviews with Nazi doctors that most of them began by asserting compliance with current societal norms, but the longer he talked to them, the more their old Nazi beliefs would start to emerge.
But Browning's argument makes sense if you assume that no one (who isn't either Hitler--evil and crazy!--or the untermenschen who are only barely human) can really believe in anti-Semitism. Hence the program of Goldhagen's book to insist that, yes, you could. Ordinary people (men and women) did.
There's a way in which reading this book, for me, forms a ring composition with Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, because Goldhagen spends a great deal of time and energy passionately arguing with Browning.
Now that I've read Ordinary Men, I can see why.
But first I want to talk about what this book does well, because there are things it does very well indeed.
Ordinary Men is about a reserve battalion of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei) sent into Poland in 1941-43 to assist in the Final Solution. Mostly their duties consisted of rounding up Jews to be deported to Treblinka, Sobibor, and other extermination camps, but they were also directly involved in several massacres. In all, Browning puts the total body count for these roughly 500 German men at a minimum of 83,000 Jews; of those, at least 38,000 were Jews whom members of the battalion personally shot.
Browning is very good at laying out the progress of Reserve Battalion 101 through their assigned area of Poland, at making a coherent historical narrative from the testimony of battalion members taken in the 1960s. He's very good at describing exactly what these men participated in, and very good at showing the persistence of the Nazis in their self-appointed task. Jews might escape from the initial deportation, but escaping once wasn't enough. One of Reserve Battalion 101's principal duties was the Judenjagd, the "Jew Hunt": going out into the countryside and the Polish forests, hunting down, and shooting every last hidden Jew. Browning describes these routine atrocities vividly.
There are, however, problems. The first is a global judgment call about the testimonies of the members of Reserve Battalion 101: "many of these testimonies had a 'feel' of candor and frankness conspicuously absent form the exculpatory, alibi-laden, and mendacious testimony so often encountered in such court records" (Browning xvii). In other words, Browning has decided to believe that these men are telling the truth about everything. But as a reader, I found much of the quoted testimony to be exculpatory and alibi-laden, and I had grave doubts about the truthfulness of the men who claimed to have avoided killing Jews. They were giving this testimony in the 1960s, in the context of prosecutions for the genocidal crimes their battalion committed. Browning doesn't give any further evidence or explanation for this "feel" of candor and frankness, and without that evidence, without something other than Browning's claim to authoritative judgment, I don't understand why we should believe these claims of (even relative) innocence.
A second problem, closely related: although Browning admits fully that the vast majority of Police Battalion 101 did not resist their orders to kill Jews, he spends most of his analysis focusing on the very small minority who did resist (or who claimed to have resisted). Thus the impression of his analysis of battalion member testimony--as opposed to the impression of his narrative account of the battalion's actions--is based on those who resisted killing Jews. Now there's nothing inherently wrong with that--if, for instance, this were a book about the resistance to the Final Solution among the Order Police. But it argues that it isn't. It claims to be a book about the participation of the Order Police in the Final Solution, and the impression Browning gives is that that participation was reluctant. But again, by his own account, for roughly 90% of Reserve Battalion 101, that was not the case. Browning focuses on those he finds sympathetic, those who tried, even minimally, to resist. This allows readers to enter a kind of empathic community: even if they failed, they tried. We can accept that they are like us.1 And I think, in some measure, that's part of Browning's project: hence his aggressive insistence on the "ordinariness" of his subjects.) But it ducks the larger and uglier question: what about the 90%? They, too, are "ordinary men." Aren't they, too, "like us"?
The third problem is the one that Goldhagen was most incensed about, and I can understand why. Browning writes about the ideological pressures on these men as if the Nazis had invented anti-Semitism, describing "years of anti-Semitic propaganda (and prior to the Nazi dictatorship, decades of shrill German nationalism)" (186). Goldhagen goes into exhaustive detail to chronicle the endemic and virulent anti-Semitism in Germany before 1933. The Nazis didn't make that weapon; they just picked it up from where it was lying on the ground.
The fourth problem is the one I actually find most disturbing. On several actions, Reserve Battalion 101 was assisted by "Hiwis" (Hilfswilligen), units of POWs from Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania "who were screened on the basis of their anti-Communist (and hence almost invariably anti-Semitic) sentiments, offered an escape from probably starvation, and promised that they would not be used in combat against the Soviet army" (52). Browning describes the drunkenness and cruelty of the Hiwis (from the testimony of the Germans); he never seems to consider that they, too, were "ordinary men." In a creepy way (and although he explicitly rejects this with regard to Poles), he accepts the Germans' evaluation of the Hiwis as untermenschen.
Throughout this book, then, Browning constructs anti-Semitism as coming from "outside"--either from above (the Nazi leadership, and we all know Hitler is both evil and crazy anyway) or below (the Hiwis, certain members of the battalion who are also tagged as drunkards and sadists). It is never inherent in the "ordinary men" who are his subjects.2 This is a very comforting construct, and it greatly assists his project of claiming likeness between his "ordinary" subjects and his "ordinary" readers (not to exculpate his subjects, for Browning is in fact very clear about their crimes and their responsibility, but to encourage his readers to try to understand them instead of demonizing them), but it is untrue. And I think it leaves a critical gap in Browning's study, a critical aspect of the situation that he does not address and that therefore we cannot understand.
---
1Who is "us," in this case? Ordinary Men is a book with a strongly implied audience. Without doing a formal analysis of its rhetoric, I still feel fairly certain of my ground in saying that that audience is normative American, i.e., sharing white professional-class values. The implied audience is not Jewish. Nor is it German. Nor is it working-class. It's a little harder to tell about the gender question, because by choosing to study a reserve police battalion, Browning had no choice but to study men. And in general, if you're studying Nazis, you're studying men. (One of the books on my list is about women in Nazi Germany, but fundamentally, everyone in a position of power in Hitler's Germany was male.) But there are some indications that the implied audience is made up of men, too.
2This construct explains some of the very peculiar rhetorical and logical moves he makes, as for example:
To admit an explicitly political or ideological dimension to their behavior, to concede that the morally inverted world of National Socialism--so at odds with the political culture and accepted norms of the 1960s--had made perfect sense to them at the time, would be to admit that they were political and moral eunuchs who simply accommodated to each successive regime. That was a truth with which few either wanted or were able to come to grips.
(150)
1. "political and moral eunuchs"? This is possibly the bizarrest eruption of gender politics into an argument not about gender that I have ever seen.
2. Where did "truth" come from? This is a hypothesis about motivation, nothing more, and it's kind of odd even as a hypothesis. A far more likely one is that, again, as they were testifying to prosecutors, nobody wanted to damn himself by admitting Nazi sympathies. Robert Jay Lifton found in his interviews with Nazi doctors that most of them began by asserting compliance with current societal norms, but the longer he talked to them, the more their old Nazi beliefs would start to emerge.
But Browning's argument makes sense if you assume that no one (who isn't either Hitler--evil and crazy!--or the untermenschen who are only barely human) can really believe in anti-Semitism. Hence the program of Goldhagen's book to insist that, yes, you could. Ordinary people (men and women) did.
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Finkelstein's critique
Date: 2009-01-27 04:26 pm (UTC)Melanie
Albuquerque, NM
Re: Finkelstein's critique
Date: 2009-01-27 04:43 pm (UTC)Re: Finkelstein's critique
Date: 2009-01-27 04:45 pm (UTC)Re: Finkelstein's critique
Date: 2009-01-27 07:50 pm (UTC)Melanie
no subject
Date: 2009-01-28 05:46 am (UTC)2 of the books have been delivered, and I've started delving into them, despite college (I have classes every day)and I find myself on information burn. Some of the things that can be found are written by the victims of Auschwitz. Their words are sort of...echoing in my head right now and yet I'm still reading, still searching.
I suspect this will turn my writing even darker than it already is. Well...actually I'd describe my writing as hard so now it will be hard and dark.
Maybe I should write horror noir, lol.