Holocaust scholar serving as Class of 1943 Wells Professor

How do ‘ordinary men’ become purveyors of evil?

By Ryan Piurek

‘What is it about our societies, ways of life and structures of authority that sometimes lead us into cruel behavior?’

—Scott Russell Sanders

Historian Christopher Browning will deliver the lecture, “Decisions for the Final Solution: The Current State of Research in Holocaust Studies,” on Tuesday (March 4) at 8 p.m. in Woodburn Hall, Room 120, on the IU Bloomington campus.

Browning, the Frank Porter Graham Professor of history at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, will be visiting IUB as the Class of 1943 Wells Professor. His appearance is being sponsored by the Wells Scholars Program in collaboration with the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program, the IUB Department of History and the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Browning is the 2002-03 Ina Levine Scholar at the museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. He is currently writing a two-volume study of Nazi Jewish policy during World War II, as part of Yad Vashem’s multi-volume comprehensive history of the Holocaust.

During his visit to Bloomington, he will participate in the Wells Senior Seminar, being taught this semester by IUB Chancellor Sharon Brehm. The major text for the class is Browning’s book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992). Based on post-World War II interviews with more than 200 members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Hamburg, Germany, the book provides a detailed account of the ways in which the men engaged in horrific atrocities against Polish Jews.

“‘Ordinary Men’ is one of the great social psychological documents of all time, as it forces us to confront the dreadful fact that ordinary people can engage in extraordinary evil,” Brehm said. “The book is deeply troubling not only because of what it says about others, but also because it inevitably raises the question about what each one of us would do in similar circumstances. The students and I have discussed Browning’s book at great length. We are eager to talk with Browning about his work and his view of human capabilities for good and evil.”

In 1993, Browning received the National Jewish Book Award in the category of Holocaust studies for Ordinary Men. Browning concludes that the German police officers were not motivated by the ideology or racial hatred that consumes most cold-blooded killers, but “by such common things as peer pressure, loyalty to their superiors and the desire to advance professionally,” explained Alvin Rosenfeld, director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program.

Browning also is the author of Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (2000); The Path to Genocide (1992); Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution (1985); and The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office (1978). As the Ina Levine Scholar, Browning is examining the factory slave labor camps in Starachowice, Poland, from the perspective of its Jewish inmates, utilizing a collection of survivor testimony.

“Professor Browning’s research has centered on the question of why human beings periodically abuse one another,” said Scott Russell Sanders, director of the Wells Scholars Program and Distinguished Professor of English. “What is it about our societies, ways of life and structures of authority that sometimes lead us into cruel behavior? I can’t imagine a timelier question.”