Christopher R. Browning - Author of Ordinary Men
Christopher R. Browning is the author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. The author, an American scholar, was born on May 22, 1944. He received his bachelor degree from the Oberlin School in 1968 and his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1975. After publishing this work, Browning was selected in 2006 to join the US Academy of Sciences and Arts. The reprint edition of the book Ordinary Men was formally released on April 24, 1998, by Harper Perennial. The novel is 271 pages long and is written in US English. Christopher’s book has the purpose of achieving genocide texts which other books have not achieved. The tome tries to give an insight of who are the real perpetrators of genocide. In the past, individuals would hardly visualize a middle-age working group of people, and this is exactly what the description of reserve police battalion 101 is mainly revealing. The battalion consists of men who are seen as normal people, but they are not young as described since their social status is typical. The men characterize every person in the society. The literature describes that if the battalion can commit mass murder, then any other individual out there can do the same. Further, the volume reveals what happens in a war in many societies. Combat is not fought by the leaders or the royal classes of people but by the poor populace and men from lower classes are the people who fight. The lower classes tend to fight each other, although they are always not the real cause of the fights. The reasons why a war emerges is incitement from leaders and rich people. People from lower classes take such incitement seriously and start fighting each other. Brownian's book portrays what exactly happens in the society.
Success of the Purpose
The author successfully achieves the purpose intended for writing this book. The conclusions flow well with the better part of the volume content. The author concludes that when a nation turns genocidal, the mission falls to the ordinary individuals of the nation. No one would imagine a friend or a neighbor attacking him or her. In genocide, the friends and neighbors behave exactly like the reserve police battalion. Therefore, genocide is a personal sin which can attract anyone when it comes and its reality requires to be acknowledged before other killings can be avoided.
Writing skills
The author has placed the thesis statement at the end of the book as a writing skill. The writer applies this technique so as to communicate the purpose of which he wrote the book at the end. Writing the thesis statement at the end of the tome enables a reader to continue reading the book up to the end where he or she will find the thesis. Any reader of a manuscript is certain about the presence of a thesis statement and will continue reading until he or she gets the location of it.
Originality
The author is a believer in the start of the Holocaust discussion leading from the moderate functionalist school of deliberation that aims at the institution and organization of the Third Reich and Hitler. Most functionalists view the execution of Jews as a type radicalization and improvisation of the polycratic rule. Such people can absolve Hitler, but they consider that various factors may have been considered in the last resort. They then consider Adolf Hitler as a wise man basing their argument from reasoning such as he was able to rule the countrymen wisely. In the book, Browning has argued that the last resort was as a result cumulative radicalization of Germany.
Personal Observations
The police will always follow orders regardless of their conditions. Any set of a law enforcement unit tends to follow orders for their leaders regardless of whether the orders are good or bad. In the conclusion of the book, blood-lust and primal hatred are revealed due to the murders committed by the reserve police force. The murder orders were directed by the leaders who could commit the actions themselves. The reserve officer battalion found themselves killing people due to the orders and peer pressure among them. In a set of bad people, there will always be good individuals among them. Brownian gives a notion that not all individuals were horrible anti-Semites. He gives a proof of persons who begged to be fled from their killing roles and to be relocated to some other place. In one situation, fathers said they could not be in a position to kill children, therefore, they requested to be assigned to other tasks. The book is well planned and provides the clear picture of what happens during fights and genocides.
Bibliography
Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Harper Perennial, 2017.
