preview

Discovery Of The Nazi Death Camps

Decent Essays

Discovery of the Nazi death camps at the end of World War II sent shockwaves throughout the entire world and brought to question how civilized humans could participate in the atrocity of what is now known as the Holocaust. Although from the beginning, it was clear Nazi’s believed Jews and other races were inferior to the Aryan race, the idea of genocide was not their original intent. How then were German soldiers able to exterminate Jews without question? Christopher Browning in his book Ordinary Men dives into the human psyche to try and recreate the possibilities in which the German soldier were able to carry out these horrifying acts. Easiest of Browning possibilities to understand why the Germans were capable of these terrible acts are the fundamentals of a race war. Initialized by seeing a fellow comrade falling to the onslaught of the enemy and engulfing them with hate, thus allowing the killing of a certain race without empathy for their actions. However, how could this mentality be contributed to the Reserve Police Battalions when they had never encountered combat? Early on in the war “[they] felt the need to provide justification. They were shot, he explained, “because they had been encountered without the Jewish star during roundup…”” (Browning 16) justification described as that is not from men feeling racial hate toward the Jews. These men were not completely morally certain of their actions and in order to justify it in their heads created shaky logic as to

Get Access