Christopher R. Browning "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland."
Browning reconstructs how a German reserve police battalion composed of German "ordinary men," middle-aged, working class people, killed tens of thousands of Jews during WW II.
Shocking as it is, this book--a crucial source of original research used for the bestseller Hitler's Willing Executioners--gives evidence to suggest the opposite conclusion: that the sad-sack German draftees who perpetrated much of the Holocaust were not expressing some uniquely Germanic evil, but that they were average German men comparable to the run of humanity, twisted by historical forces into inhuman shapes.
Browning, a thorough historian who lets no one off the moral hook nor fails to weigh any contributing factor--cowardice, ideological indoctrination, loyalty to the battalion, and reluctance to force the others to bear more than their share of what each viewed as an excruciating duty--interviewed hundreds of the killers, who simply could not explain how they had sunken into savagery under Hitler's Germany.
New book. Remainder mark on top. See picture.