Reviews of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992) and related work
- Adaptation: “Ordinary Men: The “Forgotten Holocaust”” (2022)
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992
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Christopher Browning (writer).
Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) painted a picture of one “normal” man in the bureaucracy of the SS elite. Browning shows, with even more disturbing clarity, what a whole battalion of normal men did when they were asked politely to carry out mass murder.
References here: Inneboende ondska.
‣ “Ordinary Men: The “Forgotten Holocaust”” (2022
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Seen in 2023.
The adaptation abridges Browning’s narrative and interlaces it with Benjamin Ferencz’s role in the Nuremberg trials. It’s a good summary for its runtime, but including Nuremberg and then stopping there feels unnatural. The central problem, of the slippery relationship between ordinary men and mass murder, was more acute in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of the 1960s.