Christopher R. Browning
| Christopher Browning | |
|---|---|
| Born | Christopher Robert Browning May 22, 1944 |
| Occupation | Historian, author |
| Notable works | Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland |
Christopher Robert Browning (born May 22, 1944) is an American historian, known best for his works on the Holocaust. Browning received his bachelor's degree from Oberlin College in 1968 and his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1975. He taught at Pacific Lutheran University from 1974 to 1999, eventually becoming a Distinguished Professor. In 1999, he moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to accept an appointment as Frank Porter Graham Professor of History. Browning was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. Browning retired from teaching in Spring 2014.
Browning 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, which used to commit massacres and round-ups of Jews for deportations to the Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland in 1942.
The conclusion of the book – influenced in part by Milgram experiments popularized in the 1970s – was that the men of Unit 101 killed out of a basic obedience to authority and peer pressure, not blood-lust or primal hatred.
In the story he recounts, the men of Unit 101 were not ardent Nazis but ordinary middle-aged men of working class background from Hamburg, who had been drafted but found ineligible for regular military duty. After their return to Poland in June 1942 these men were ordered to terrorize Jews in the ghettos during Operation Reinhard, and in notable cases, committed wholesale massacres of all Polish Jews – men, women and children – as in the towns of Józefów and Łomazy. In other cases, they were ordered to merely kill a specified number of Jews in a given town or area usually helped by Trawnikis. The commander of the unit gave his men the choice (once) of opting out of this duty if they found it too hard. Almost all of them chose not to exercise that option. Fewer than 12 men opted out in a battalion of 500 willing executioners.
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