Christopher Browning

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Christopher R. Browning
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Christopher Browning
Browning in 2019
Born
Christopher Robert Browning

(1944-05-22) May 22, 1944 (age 79)
NationalityAmerican
OccupationHistorian
Academic background
Education
  • BA, Oberlin College, 1967
  • MA,
    University of Wisconsin-Madison
    , 1968
  • PhD,
    University of Wisconsin-Madison
    , 1975
Thesis"Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland and the Jewish Policy of the German Foreign Office 1940–1943" (1975)
Academic work
EraThe Holocaust
Notable worksOrdinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992)
WebsiteChristopher R. Browning,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Christopher Robert Browning (born May 22, 1944) is an American

Holocaust, Browning is known for his work documenting the Final Solution, the behavior of those implementing Nazi policies, and the use of survivor testimony.[1] He is the author of nine books, including Ordinary Men (1992) and The Origins of the Final Solution (2004).[2]

Browning taught at Pacific Lutheran University from 1974 to 1999 and eventually became a Distinguished Professor. In 1999, he moved to UNC to accept the appointment as Frank Porter Graham Professor of History, and in 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[3] After retiring from UNC in 2014, he became a visiting professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.[4]

Browning has acted as an expert witness at several Holocaust-related trials, including the second trial of Ernst Zündel (1988) and Irving v Penguin Books Ltd (2000).[5]

Early life and education

Born in

St. John's Military Academy and for two years at Allegheny College. He was awarded his PhD from UW in 1975 for the thesis "Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland and the Jewish Policy of the German Foreign Office 1940–1943." That became his first book, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office: A study of Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland, 1940–43 (1978).[2][6]

Browning married Jennifer Jane Horn on September 19, 1970 and had two children: Kathryn Elizabeth and Anne DeSilvey.[7]

Work

Ordinary Men

Browning is best known for his 1992 book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, a study of German

Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland in 1942. The conclusion of the book, influenced in part by the famous Milgram experiments popularized in the 1970s, was that the men of Unit 101 killed out of obedience to authority and peer pressure.[9]

As presented in the study, 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 to be ineligible for regular military duty. After their return to occupied Poland in June 1942, the men were ordered to terrorize Jews in the ghettos during Operation Reinhard and carry out massacres of Polish Jews (men, women, and children) in the towns of Józefów and Łomazy.[10] In other cases, they were ordered to kill a certain number of Jews in a town or area, usually helped by Trawnikis. The commander of the unit once gave his men the choice of opting out if they found it too hard, but fewer than 12 men did so in a battalion of 500.[11] Browning provides evidence to support the notion that not all of the men were hateful antisemites
. He includes the testimony of men who said that they begged to be released from the task and to be placed elsewhere. In one instance, two fathers claimed that they could not kill children and so asked to be given other work. Browning also tells of a man who demanded his release, obtained it, and was promoted once he had returned to Germany.

Ordinary Men achieved much acclaim but was criticized by Daniel Goldhagen for missing what he called a specifically German political culture, characterized by "eliminationist anti-semitism" in causing the Nazi genocides. In a review in The New Republic in July 1992, Goldhagen called Ordinary Men a book that fails in its central interpretation.[12] Goldhagen's controversial 1996 book Hitler's Willing Executioners was largely written to rebut Browning but ended up being criticized much more.[13]

Irving v. Lipstadt

When

gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp, and Browning wrote a report on the evidence for the extermination of Jews.[14] During his testimony and a cross-examination by Irving, Browning countered Irving's suggestion that the last chapter of the Holocaust had yet to be written (implying there were grounds for doubting its reality) by saying, "We are still discovering things about the Roman Empire. There is no last chapter in history."[15]

Browning countered Irving's argument that the absence of a written Führer order from Adolf Hitler to carry out the genocide of the European Jews constituted evidence against the standard Holocaust history. Browning maintained that such an order need never have been written since Hitler had almost certainly made statements to his leading subordinates indicating his wishes regarding the Jews, which rendered irrelevant the question of an extant written order.[16] Browning testified that several experts on Nazi Germany believe there was no written Führer order for the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" but that no historian doubts the reality of the Nazi genocide.[17] Browning noted that Hitler's secret speech to his Gauleiters on December 12, 1941 alluded to genocide as the "Final Solution."[18]

Browning rejected Irving's claim that there was no reliable statistical information on the size of the prewar Jewish population in Europe or on the killing processes. Browning asserted that the only reason that historians debate whether five or six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust was a lack of access to archives in the

former Soviet Union.[19]

Browning's interpretation of the Holocaust

Browning is a "moderate functionalist" in the debate about the origins of the Holocaust and focuses on the structure and institution of the

Second World War and to turf wars within the German bureaucracy made expulsion lose its viability such that by 1941, members of the bureaucracy were willing to countenance the mass murder of Jews.[21]

Browning divides the officials of the

The Nisko/Lublin Plan" to create a "Jewish reservation" in Lublin, in occupied Poland, into which all the Jews of Greater Germany, Poland and the former Czechoslovakia would be expelled. Frank was opposed to the "Lublin Plan" on the ground that the SS were "dumping" Jews into his territory. Frank and Hermann Göring wished for the General Government to become the "granary" of the Reich and opposed the ethnic cleansing schemes of Heinrich Himmler and Arthur Greiser as economically disruptive.[22]

An attempt to settle the difficulties at a conference between Himmler, Göring, Frank and Greiser at Göring's

Karinhall estate on February 12, 1940 was scuttled in May, when Himmler showed Hitler a memo, "Some Thoughts on the Treatment of Alien Population in the East," on May 15, 1940, which Hitler called "good and correct."[23] Himmler's memo, which called for expelling all of the Jews of German-ruled Europe to Africa, reducing Poles to a "leaderless laboring class" and Hitler's approval of the memo led, as Browning noted, to a change in German policy in occupied Poland along the lines suggested by Himmler.[22] Browning called the Göring/Frank-Himmler/Greiser dispute a perfect example of how Hitler encouraged his subordinates to engage in turf battles with one another without deciding for one policy or another but hinting at the policy he wanted.[24]

Awards

Selected works

References

  1. ^ "Christopher R. Browning". University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Archived from the original on February 24, 2020.
  2. ^ a b "Christopher R. Browning Papers, 1967–2015". Archives West.
  3. ^ "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved June 21, 2011.
  4. ^ Johnson, Eric W. (October 28, 2015). "UW Welcomes Visiting Professor Christopher Browning". University of Washington.
  5. .
  6. ^ "Christopher R. Browning CV" (PDF). University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Archived (PDF) from the original on February 24, 2020.
  7. ^ "Browning, Christopher R. 1944– | Encyclopedia.com".
  8. ^ The title is a nod to Raul Hilberg to whom the book is dedicated; see Hilberg (2003), The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 992: "Ordinary men were to perform extraordinary tasks."
  9. ^ Browning 1998, pp. 44, 58.
  10. ^ Browning 1992, p. 57.
  11. ^ Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah (July 13/20, 1992). "The Evil of Banality", Review of Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Police Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. The New Republic, pp. 49–52.
  12. ^ Shatz, Adam (April 8, 1998). "Goldhagen's willing executioners: the attack on a scholarly superstar, and how he fights back". Slate.
  13. .
  14. ^ Guttenplan, D. D. (2001). The Holocaust on Trial. New York: W. W. Norton, p. 210.
  15. ^ Guttenplan 2001, p. 211.
  16. ^ Guttenplan 2001, p. 212.
  17. ^ Guttenplan 2001, pp. 212–213.
  18. ^ Guttenplan 2001, p. 213.
  19. ^ Daniel J. Goldhagen; Christopher R. Browning; Leon Wieseltier (April 8, 1996). "The "Willing Executioners" / "Ordinary Men" Debate" (PDF). Selections from the Symposium. Introduction by Michael Berenbaum. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. pp. 1/48. Retrieved June 15, 2014.
  20. ^ Browning, Christopher (1985). "La décision concernant la solution finale", in Colloque de l.Ecole des Hautes Etudes en sciences sociales, L.Allemagne nazie et le génocide juif. Paris: Gallimard-Le Seuil, p. 19.
  21. ^ a b Rees, Lawrence (1999). The Nazis: A Warning from History, London: The New Press, pp. 148–149.
  22. ^ Rees 1999, p. 149.
  23. ^ Rees 1999, p. 150
  24. ^ a b c "Past Winners". Jewish Book Council. Retrieved January 21, 2020.
  25. ^ "Recent Recipients". The Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research.

Further reading

External links