Ordinary Men?

Image right: A German policeman publicly humiliates a Jew in the Zawiercie ghetto by shaving his beard. In 1939 there were approximately 7,000 Jews in Zawiercie. On 2 September 1939 about 2,000 of them fled as German troops occupied the city. During the first days of the occupation all Jewish males between the ages of 17 and 50 were ordered to assemble in the market square. They were detained and tortured for nine days before being released. A formal ghetto was established in Zawiercie in the summer of 1940. That fall about 500 young Jews were deported to labor camps in Germany. In a deportation action that took place in May 1942 approximately 2,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz. The ghetto was finally liquidated on 26 August 1943, when most of the remaining Jews were deported to Auschwitz. During the deportation action 100 Jews were shot on the spot. The 500 remaining Jews were kept at the newly established Zawiercie labor camp, which was subsequently liquidated on 17 October 1943. Image source: USHMM, courtesy of Benjamin Meed.

Read for discussion in class: Bergen, War & Genocide, chapter 8; and
• Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Police Battalion 101 and the Holocaust in Poland [entire]

I. Discussion: Browning, Ordinary Men

Map: The Routes of Einsatzgruppen in the USSR, 1941
Graphic: The Pace of Executions in Lithuania

II. Film: Obedience (1969)

III. The Holocaust and Public Opinion in Germany
A. Who Knew What, and When?
1. Relatively Public Killing—Knowledge of Deportations, Ghettos, and Open-Air Murders
2. Relatively Secret Killing—Gassings in the Killing Centers of Occupied Poland
B. Statistical Analysis: What People Recalled Fifty Years After