Christopher Browning - Work

Work

He is best known for his 1992 book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, a study of German Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) Reserve Unit 101, used to massacre and round up Jews for deportation to the Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland in 1942. The conclusion of the book, which was much influenced by the experiments of Stanley Milgram, was that the men of Unit 101 were not demons or Nazi fanatics but ordinary middle-aged men of working-class background from Hamburg, who had been drafted but found unfit for military duty. In some cases, these men were ordered to round up Jews and if there was not enough room for them on the trains, to shoot them. In other, more chilling cases, they were ordered to merely kill a specified number of Jews in a given town or area. The commander of the unit gave his men the choice of opting out of this duty if they found it too unpleasant; the majority chose not to exercise that option, resulting in fewer than 15 men out of a battalion of 500 opting out of their grisly duties. Browning argued that the men of Unit 101 killed out of a basic obedience to authority and peer pressure, not blood-lust or primal hatred. While the specifics of this book deal with killings performed by otherwise average men, the general implication of the book is that when placed in a coherent group setting, most people will adhere to the commands given, even if they find the actions morally reprehensible. Additionally the book demonstrates that ordinary people will more than likely follow orders, even those they might personally question, when they perceive these orders as originating from an authority, a hypothesis also studied in the Milgram Experiment.

Ordinary Men achieved much acclaim but was denounced by Daniel Goldhagen for missing what Goldhagen considered the importance of German culture for causing the Holocaust. In an extremely hostile book review in the July 1992 edition of The New Republic, Goldhagen called Ordinary Men a book of no scholarly value and accused Browning of manufacturing his evidence. Goldhagen's controversial 1996 book Hitler's Willing Executioners was largely written to rebut Browning's book, but ended up being criticized much more vehemently than Ordinary Men.

When David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt for libel in 2000, Browning was one of the leading witnesses for the defense. Another historian, Robert Jan Van Pelt, wrote a report on the gassing facilities at Auschwitz, and Browning wrote a report on the evidence for the extermination of the Jews on a wider scale. During his testimony and a cross-examination by Irving, Browning countered Irving’s suggestion that the last chapter of the Holocaust has yet to be written (implying there were grounds for doubting the reality of the Shoah) by replying: "We are still discovering things about the Roman Empire. There is no last chapter in history."

Browning countered Irving’s argument that the lack of a written Führer order disproved the Holocaust, maintaining that no such order need ever have been written down, given that Hitler had almost certainly made statements to his leading subordinates indicating his wishes in regards to the Jews of Europe during the war, thus rendering the question of an extant, written order irrelevant. Browning went on to testify that several leading experts on Nazi Germany believe that there was no written Führer order for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”, but no historian doubts the reality of the Holocaust. Browning noted that Hitler’s secret speech to his Gauleiters on December 12, 1941, strongly alluded to genocide as the “Final Solution”.

Browning categorically rejected Irving’s claim that there was no reliable statistical information on the size of the pre-war Jewish population in Europe, or on the killing processes; he asserted that the only reason why historians debate whether five or six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust is a lack of access to archives in the former Soviet Union. Likewise, Browning argued that it was possible to become soaked in human blood after shooting people at close-range, and dismissed Irving’s argument that accounts of German personnel being soaked in blood were improbable because it is not possible to have a blood-splattered uniform after shooting people at close range. The American journalist D.D. Guttenplan, who covered the trial, considered Browning to be the most effective of the witnesses for Lipstadt.