Ordinary People: The 101st Police Battalion and the Final Solution to the Jewish Question

The main events of the Holocaust, when about half of its victims perished, took place from March 1942 to February 1943 in Poland. How did the Nazis manage to organize such mass killings in such a short time? Where did the human resources come from during a difficult period of war for Germany? In search of answers to these questions, historian Christopher Browning studied the archives of the Federal Center for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, where he found a court ruling on the case of the 101st Reserve Police Battalion, which participated in the mass extermination of Jews in the Lublin District. The case was based on a large number of testimonies, striking in their candor. According to Browning himself, he had never before witnessed a picture of the horrifying crimes of the Holocaust, through which the human faces of the killers were so clearly visible. This book was written based on the study of the case materials. In it, Browning tells the story of the unit and describes how the most ordinary people voluntarily became professional murderers.