Ordinary Horror: How "Normal" People Could Become Nazis
Michael Hinckley
- Published Content: 47
- Total Views: 1,901
- Favorited By: 3 CPs
The most famous names in the Third Reich are inextricably linked with the German pogroms against European Jewry; Hitler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and Göring to name a few. But what about Karol Bardo, Bronisław Śleszyński, Paul Salitter, and 'Bruno Probst', who are they? These names ar 
e largely unknown in the rogue's gallery of torture, murder and genocide, and perhaps would have remained so without the works of Christopher R. Browning and Jan T. Gross. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland and Neighbors: the Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, by Browning and Gross respectively, demonstrate that the responsibility for genocide in Europe does not fall exclusively upon the shoulders of the Third Reich through an innovative use of sources and unique teleologies.
Gross began his examination of a tiny Polish village after being inspired by a documentary film. He writes that the brutal internecine engaged in by the residents of the small village of Jedwabne had been virtually unknown by most scholars of Poland's World War Two experience. His writing is pithy and deeply troubling, for within the pages of the build-up, culmination, and aftermath of the massacre of Jedwabne's Jews, the reader is granted an insight into a rural European culture of hatred that only awaited the catalyst of Soviet and German occupation to be released. Gross uses not only evidence recorded at various trials in 1949 and 1953, but depositions, oral history, a 1980 memorial book and footage from the 1998 documentary film that set him on his path of investigation. He fully acknowledges that, taken individually, each source has its weaknesses, but that when used to cross-check each other a disturbingly clear - and reliable - picture of the atrocities comes through.
Gross began his examination of a tiny Polish village after being inspired by a documentary film. He writes that the brutal internecine engaged in by the residents of the small village of Jedwabne had been virtually unknown by most scholars of Poland's World War Two experience. His writing is pithy and deeply troubling, for within the pages of the build-up, culmination, and aftermath of the massacre of Jedwabne's Jews, the reader is granted an insight into a rural European culture of hatred that only awaited the catalyst of Soviet and German occupation to be released. Gross uses not only evidence recorded at various trials in 1949 and 1953, but depositions, oral history, a 1980 memorial book and footage from the 1998 documentary film that set him on his path of investigation. He fully acknowledges that, taken individually, each source has its weaknesses, but that when used to cross-check each other a disturbingly clear - and reliable - picture of the atrocities comes through.