The average age of the 500 men in the battalion was in the upper 30s, meaning that they had come of age before the Nazis came to power, and they were working- and lower middle class men from Hamburg, an area and the social classes famously antipathetic to National Socialism-facts which, taken together, suggest these men would have been among the least likely to be drawn to fascism. 1942 was the darkest year in Jewish history Browning examines one example of the men who perpetrated that darkness. The book begins with a sobering statistic: in March 1942, 70-80% of the eventual victims of the Holocaust were still alive, and 20-30% had been murdered by February 1943, the proportions were reversed. (Browning has written a thoughtful essay for the 25 th anniversary edition, bringing the latest research, especially concerning the photograph record of the unit, to bear on his original conclusions.) Not Ordinary Men, which remains as eye-opening now as then. Sometimes books you feel just have to have read disappoint. Browning – Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992/98) This Holocaust scholar could have won plenty of rounds of Humiliation for not having read Browning’s classic microhistory of the actions of Order Police Battalion 101 near Lublin in 1942. Yiyun Li – Where Reasons End (2019) Sad, funny, wise, painful. March is a long time ago now, but I wanted to say a few words about my monthly reading.
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