Talk:Christopher R. Browning

Someone posted Persondata...

with "Do not delete" in comments. The person data was not commented out, so I've removed it from the page; if anyone still needs it, all that I took out is directly below here. Markus Poessel (talk) 10:04, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

|NAME=Browning, Christopher
|ALTERNATIVE NAMES=Browning, Christopher Robert
|SHORT DESCRIPTION=American historian of the Holocaust
|DATE OF BIRTH=May 22, 1944
|PLACE OF BIRTH=
|DATE OF DEATH=
|PLACE OF DEATH=

}}

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I fixed the formatting and restored the Persondata. GcSwRhIc (talk) 12:11, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Untitled

I agree that there should be a separate article about Ordinary Men. I disagree with the person who didn't leave his/her signature claiming that Browning's books lack evidence. 76.125.75.29 (talk) 02:19, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Like all - not most - of these books there seems to be a shortage of evidence. The evidence mentioned appears to be the rest of the books on the subject - which of course seem to lack any hard evidence. Please give some forensic evidence for the claims, something besides this closed loop of opinion and heresay.

His book describes a country - German - made up of mad men who never leave any evidence and then return to perfect sanity after the war is over. Insane people leave evidence - they are nuts not great planners. 159.105.80.141 20:01, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

I'll let your employer, the Vermont Libraries Departmet, know that someone is using their IT resources for neo-Nazi trolling. IP + contributions are all logged, as you know. Thx! HAND! Troll-b-gone 09:10, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Ordinary Men

I think it is unfortunate that there is no article about Browning’s book “Ordinary Men”. Ordinary Men made a significant contribution to Holocaust studies. Randomguy 5:27 (GMT) Oct 2007 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.236.143.177 (talk)

Maybe this is not the best place for this, but Ordinary Men is a deeply flawed book. For those unfamilar with the subject, Ordinary Men was about the activities of Reserve Battalion 101 of the Order Police in Poland in 1942-1943. Browning's book is based on interviews conducted by the prosecutors of the Hamburg State Prosecutors Office between 1964-1972 with the surviving members of the reserve battalion 101. Ordinary Men is much acclaimed book, but it is also garbage. Browning did not understand German law at all when he did his research for Ordinary Men in the late 1980s. Under the West German law, people who killed for the Nazi regime on their volition and/or "base motives" were guilty of murder. People who killed merely because they were following orders were only guilty of being "accomplices to murder". The penalties for being an accomplice to murder (i.e killing because you were ordered to) were much, much lighter than those guilty of murder. This peculiar distinction in West German law between murder and an accomplice to murder explains the often very light sentences that Nazi war criminals usually got from West German courts (assuming that they were even brought to trial in the first place) in the 1950s and 1960s. For an example, most of the people convicted at the famous trial of the Auschwitz guards in Frankfurt in 1964-1965 got sentences of 4 or 5 years in prison because under West German law they were only guilty of being accomplices to murder as they only doing that they told to. One of the guards at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial operated the gas chambers at Auschwitz, killing hundreds of thousands of people, but because he was only doing what he was told to do, he considered of being only an accomplice to murder and got only 4 years in prison. By contrast, another guard at the trial beat a Jewish prisoner to death for kicks and got 25 years in prison because he did that on his own initiative, which made him guilty of murder under West German law. In 1968, the Bundstag changed the statute of limitations for being an accomplice to murder 15 years after the offense and declared this applied retroactively, which gave 90% of all suspected Nazi war criminals living in West Germany total immunity from prosecution.

Getting back to Browning, he did not know about any of this when he did his research. It is rather odd because he published in an article in 1983 entitled "Wehrmacht Reprisal Policy and the Mass Murder of Jews in Serbia" that accused a senior Bundswehr general Johannes Poeppel who as an young officer in the Wehrmacht of ordering massacres in 1941. The Wehrmacht had a simple policy to respond to guerrilla attacks in Serbia by the Partisans on the left and the Chetniks on the right, namely that for every 1 German soldier wounded in a guerrilla attack, 50 Serbs would be shot in retaliation and every 1 German soldier killed in a guerilla attack, 100 Serbs would be shot in retaliation. This policy was laid down in an order by the OKW chief, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel in August 1941, and all of the evidence suggests that Poeppel was merely obeying Keital's orders, which made him only guilty of being an accomplice to murder under West German law. As I already mentioned, the statute of limitations for the crime of being an accomplice to murder was 15 years after the offense, which meant that the statute of limitations in Poeppel's case expired in 1956, which was why he was never prosecuted. Browning in Ordinary Men makes much of the fact that almost none of the men interviewed by the Hamburg State Prosecutor's Office mentioned antisemitism as a motive for their killings. But what Browning failed to understand is that all these men had retained defense lawyers beforehand who had briefed them about this peculiar distinction in German law between those guilty of murder and those only guilty of being accomplices to murder. These interviews are a tainted source. None of the men interviewed would give antisemitism as a motive because that would mean they killed for "base motives", which make them guilty of murder under West German law, and mean long prison sentences. It is not surprising that the men interviewed gave this "go with the flow" argument. Browning makes much of the fact in Ordinary Men that nobody mentions antisemitism as a motive, but he did not understand how the West German legal system worked at the time he did his research. It is possible that these elaborate psychological theories based on the Milgram experiment that he introduces in Ordinary Men might have validity, but to prove these theories requires evidence. The only evidence that Browning has are the interviews conducted by the Hamburg State Prosecutors Office, but as I already noted that the men interviewed between 1964-1972 had every reason to lie about their motives. To prove his theories, he needs better evidence that what he has. These interviews are a tainted source that cannot be regarded as a accurate verbatim account of their actions and motives in 1942-1943 in the manner that Browning presents them in Ordinary Men. I don't mean to sound like a snob here, but Ordinary Men, which is a widely acclaimed book among the general public, is not well regareded by historians for the reasons that I listed above. This should probably be brought into the article. --A.S. Brown (talk) 08:17, 10 February 2023 (UTC)