Christopher Browning
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Christopher R. Browning (born May 22, 1944) is an American historian of the Holocaust.
Browning received his bachelor's degree from Oberlin College in 1966 and his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin at 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.
He is best known for his 1992 book Ordinary Men, a study of German Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) Reserve Unit 101, used to massacre and round up Jews for deportation to the death camps in 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 as the title suggests, ordinary middle-aged men of working-class background from Hamburg, who had been drafted but found unfit for military duty. These men were ordered to round up Jews and if there was not enough room for them on the trains, to shoot them. The commander of the unit gave his men the choice of opting out of this duty if they found it too unpleasant; the majority did not. Browning argued that the men of Unit 101 killed due to peer pressure not blood-lust. The implication of the book is that most people forced into a group and given the choice between killing and belonging to the group or not killing and not belonging, will choose the former.
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 April 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 1996 book Hitler's Willing Executioners was largely written to rebut Browning's book.
At the 2000 libel trial of Deborah Lipstadt (sued by David Irving) Browning was one of the leading witnesses for the defence. The American journalist D.D. Guttenplan considered Browning to be more the effective witnesses for Lipstadt.
Browning is a functionalist in the origins of the Holocaust debate. He is a "moderate functionalist", in that he believes Adolf Hitler had a role in causing the Holocaust but that most of the initiative for the Holocaust came from below. Browning has argued that the Final Solution was the result of the "cumulative radicalization" (to use Hans Mommsen's phrase) of the German state, especially when faced with the self-imposed "problem" of 3 million Jews (mostly Polish) whom the Nazis had forced into ghettos between 1939 and 1941. The intention was to have these and other Jews resident in the Third Reich expelled eastward once a destination was selected. Browning has been able to establish that the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", first used in 1939, meant until 1941 a "territorial solution". Owing to the military developments of World War II and to turf wars within the German bureaucracy, expulsion lost its viability such that by 1941, members of the bureaucracy were willing to countenance the destruction of that population.
Browning divides the officials of the Government-General of Poland into two factions. One the "Productionists", favored using Jews of the ghettos as a source of slave labor to help with the war effort. The other, "Attritionists" favored letting Jews of the ghettos starve and die of disease. At the same time, there were struggles between the SS and Hans Frank, the Governor-General of Poland. The SS favored the "Lublin Plan" of creating a "Jewish Reservation" in Lublin, Poland into which all of the Jews of Greater Germany, Poland and the former Czechoslovakia were to be expelled. Frank was opposed to the "Lublin Plan" on the ground that the SS were "dumping" Jews into his territory.
[edit] Work
- The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office : a study of Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland, 1940–43, New York : Holmes & Meier, 1978.
- Fateful Months : Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution, New York : Holmes & Meier, 1985.
- Ordinary Men : Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York : HarperCollins, 1992.
- The Path to Genocide : Essays on launching the Final Solution, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1998, 1992.
- Nazi policy, Jewish workers, German killers, Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2000.
- Collected memories : Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony, Madison, Wis. ; London : University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
- The Origins of the Final Solution : The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942, Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
[edit] References
- Bauer, Yehuda Rethinking the Holocaust, New Haven [Conn.] ; London : Yale University Press, 2001
- Guttenplan, D. D. The Holocaust on Trial, New York : Norton, 2001.
- Marrus, Michael The Holocaust in History, Toronto : Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1987
- Rosenbaum, Ron Explaining Hitler : the search for the origins of his evil New York : Random House, 1998.
