Christopher robert browning

His best-known book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion and the Final Solution in Poland , challenges conventional notions about the men who carried out the Final Solution.

Christopher Robert Browning (born May 22, ) is an American historian and is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC).

Analyzing a group of middle-aged men who were members of a reserve unit of Order Police, Browning found that when given a choice the men participated willingly in the round-up and face-to-face killing of Jews. Browning contends that it was not ideology but peer pressure that swayed the ordinary Germans to commit genocide. His work received blistering criticism from Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who worked through the same set of documents and argued that these killers were not "ordinary men but ordinary Germans who moved from eliminationist antisemitism, getting rid of the Jews, to exterminationist antisemitism with relative ease.

He maintained the same posture in a widely publicized lecture at Yad Vashem , which had sponsored his book, The Origins of the Final Solution , whose conclusions differed markedly from the work of the Jerusalem school. Browning served as a consultant to the U. He also gave expert witness testimony in court in several cases, including David Irving vs.

After other programs of expulsion did not work, they resorted to genocide.

SIDELIGHTS: Christopher R. Browning is an expert on the Holocaust.

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