Serene it is not beyond the reading of the book by Christopher Browning called "ordinary men"! This book is indeed supplement the knowledge of the Holocaust that should be our contemporaries. They often think in fact that the atrocities committed during World War II against Jews were only the fact of the concentration camps. Now it is not so and this book, although showing the atrocities committed in Poland, suggests that he went along with the "Einsatzgruppen" in Russia on the back of the German troops, particularly in Ukraine. The "ordinary men" of 101 ° Reserve Battalion of the German police were engaged in Poland where they were, among others, the actors of the "final solution" in the country. The first 16 chapters of the book describe the abuses of these "ordinary Germans" which have sometimes participated Poles and other no less "ordinary" Lithuanians .... Chapter 17 explains this participation, while the last chapter of the book invites to understand the motivations of these "ordinary killers" .. Browning defends the thesis that many reasons have pushed these men of a certain age to their torment similar and stresses that not all were by far antisemitic convinced, contrary to what Goldhagen writes, another historian who was also interested exactions of 101 ° Battalion, an approach especially under the socio- psychology. Browning has also felt obliged to question at length the thesis of Goldhagen in an afterword, which takes a bit of settling of paces between historians and which the reader might think it had been less developed! A difficult book not to put in the hands of fragile souls, but a book that raises questions on the ability of man to turn into executioner.
