Memory left behind by tumultuous time. You know, for this conversation. Alex ritchie comes to us from warsaw. But shes also served as a as this fellow with our institute. And so, you know, shes an insider, even though shes an outsider outsider. Hows that for fun . The dr. Browning. For those unaware, youll see, has the longest bio in the program, the easily the hes a he was the Frank Porter Graham professor of history at the university of north. From 1999 to 2014. Prior to that spent 25 years at Pacific University in tacoma, washington the author of eight books, but his latest book, you receive the advice International Book prize for holocaust. He serves as an Expert Witness in war crimes. But today the conversation will also center along around his book, ordinary men. Alex is characterized a book everyone should have on their bookshelf. So she didnt say that publicly. I said that publicly. So that over it. Lets give a warm welcome to alex and dr. Brown. Well, im very happy to say that publicly. Its just such an honor to have you here. Anybody whos had any thing to do at all with holocaust studies, indeed, World War Two, history must certainly have come across chriss books. Im Holding Ordinary man, which is going to be the basis of our discussion, simply because chris has done so much work this field and and has written so much and lectured so many places and so on, that it would be impossible to actually even begin to cover his contribution to this field of study. I think ordinary men is one of those turning points and fact, we have a lot of scholars and amazing people, speakers who come through the world watching museum and theyve many of them written books but its very rare that you get a book that has really utterly changed the the field study and ordinary man is one of those books im just going to do a quick quote from your one of your lectures about the holocaust so stepping back just a little before we go into, ordinary men, you wrote, i believe that the holocaust was a watershed event in human history, the most extreme case of genocide that has yet occurred. What distinguishes it from other genocides are two factors. First, the totality and scope, the intent, that is, the goal of killing last man, woman and child throughout the reach of the nazi empire and second mean is employed, namely the harnessing of the administer of bureaucratic and technological capacities of a modern nation state and western scientific culture. Well, thats incredibly well and beautifully stated, but but tell us a little bit about how you came to holocaust studies and and some of the changes, generally speaking that have happened since the postwar, when it was barely known as a subject of inquiry and now. Yes. Well first of all, thank you very much for having me here. I was supposed to be here in 2005, but katrina said. No, and then i came in 2000, 12 to 1 earlier rendition of this meeting. And im very glad to back again. The history, the holocaust the history of World War Two have not always run parallel at the nuremberg trials. Of course there was focus on the atrocities of the nazis and the crimes against humanity, of which one part was the holocaust. But it wasnt fully understood how much of a priority that was of the nazis, the degree to which how central that was to hitler. And so it kind of faded from the picture. And while writings on nazi World War Two and histories of the third reich continued the holocaust more or less dropped out in its 1979. There was a major meeting german and british historians, german instructors who put on outside of london and the great hitler biographer kershaw. As a young student last june, he was just the beginning of his profession, went to hear this because he was in all of these senior people and he later wrote, you know, it didnt occur to me at the time. Only later that for two days they talked about the third reich and the structure of, the nazi germany, and nobody talked about the holocaust. It was just at the late seventies that this was beginning to change. Thats when we had decision to create the Holocaust Museum. Thats when the docudrama of the holocaust by the nbc came. Thats when the holtzman legislation to create an office of special investigations to finally begin to judicially pursue nazis in nazi collaborators in the states came so the late seventies was the turning point really place in 1969 i went to my professor in wisconsin and i was had read Ralph Hilbert book structure. The european and that was for me that was the conversion experience. I had an academic conversion. This is a topic too important not to study and so i went back to my my professor and said i would like to change focus, would like to do something. We didnt use the word holocaust. I did something on the nazi persecution of and i what topic it was, which was look into of these midlevel of bureaucratic groups who were so essential for they this bureaucratic administrative persecution. And his answer was, well, thats a very good topic, but i should warn you that no professional future. So in 1970, if you tried to look at any college catalog, any campus in our states, and you cannot course on the history, the holocaust, i think Ralph Hilbert, vermont, taught it in 1972 for the first time. I taught my first course on it at the Christian University in 75 and only in the eighties and nineties did this begin to pick up. And it was in the eighties when finally even german historians and others accepted that holocaust and World War Two are absolutely intertwined. You cannot understand the one without the other that they are a intertwined history and since then, of course, the field has burgeoned and the history, the holocaust history, World War Two have enriched each other in the sense that we realize how linked they are. But that was not the case for decades, World War Two. But its interesting you mentioned course, the great work by ronald holbrook, and he had trouble getting his work published and out in the open as back then and its such an incredible book but i think before with the exception of all hillgrove and maybe the the trials which changed where that a little bit before your work ordinary men the the sort of image of the lets say the ss or whatever what was only sort of cardboard cartoon characters almost the character of evil, you know, the black uniform and the deaths head and all this sort of thing and were probably psychopaths so we could easily and sleep in our beds at night because they nothing to do with us. They were they were were nazi horrors. They were a product, this terrible regime and completely from us. And i think the thing that was so terrifying about ordinary men and the reason that everybody must have it on the shelves is because all of a sudden they were ordinary men, you know, all of a sudden youre starting to do research. A group of people that had no there was there seems to be no predictive sense that they were going to turn into these these creatures. And im going to read again a small paragraph of the very beginning of the book. You start off in the early the very early hours of july 13th, 1942, the men of reserve Police Battalion 1 to 1 were roused from their bunks in the large School Building that served as their barracks, the polish town of world war ii. They middle aged family men of working and lower middle class backgrounds from the city of hamburg, considered old to be of use to german army. They had been drafted into the order. Police most were raw recruits with no previous experience in german occupied territory. They had arrived in poland less than three weeks earlier and you point out later, i think that they Police Battalion 1 to 1 turns out to have the fourth highest kill rate of any of the Police Battalions, even though they started later as these older men in terms of the mass murders that start to take place in poland and so on, so how did you come to these men . How did you come to this book . How did this the genesis of ordinary men come about . You know, i guess its to start with, as you say, after initial focus on the perpetrators of the holocaust which of course, the nazi leadership, the ss and the concentration who had been tried at the dachau trials right after the war, so was the the thugs at the bottom and fanatics at the top. And this was our basically image as it was portrayed in all sorts of movies too. This was these types you saw. When i was working, i was trying to in the other layers and certainly i would say in addition to the ideologues at the top, start with hitler and the nazis leadership motivation is a real issue theyre doing it because they believe in it. And you have this consistency of belief to action and then you have the the the experts, people there who the economy, the generals, the concord the territory, the doctors that are organizing the pseudo scientific apparatus behind making a racist official policy. And they all, after the war said, oh, were just apolitical, whatever. We know, in fact, that experts can be both ideologues, some and experts. And then you have these middle the problem solvers. And i did my dissertation on the jewish desk of the German Foreign office a bunch lawyers who were basically in charge of getting allied and satellite countries to align their policies. Germany, they were the liaison between the german embassies in these countries. Eichmann in the ss. So i was working my way down. What was hard for the historian was to find the reality of the grassroots killers at the bottom. These other people. Written records, they file reports, they receive written and so you had a documentary trail for the for the the hands on killers at the very bottom. They didnt write many letters. They didnt leave diaries that they did. People destroyed them after the war, for the most part. So they were anonymous and my great windfall was when i going to the the Central Agency for investigation nazi crimes at limericks berg outside stuttgart. And i was working on a project in poland and i was looking at all of the indictments, all of the verdicts had in their collection of all german trials of sixties and seventies. And i came across the the, the reserve police returned 1 to 1. And what was absolutely striking were two things. First was the fact that clearly choice was given to the men at the beginning of first massacre when they go into the village abuse up to three weeks after they get to poland, they arrive at the village in the early morning. The major summons men around him at the edge of the village. He has to give their assignments and in the speech he has streaming down his cheeks. His voice is choking. Hes struggling to control himself. Body. And he tells his men they have a terrible to do. He would never ask them to do this his own. But these are the orders and above and then he goes on to give some rationales for it and the ending remarkably says those among who do not feel up to it, please step out and anybody who didnt want to kill unarmed women and children that they not have to and in the end about dozen step out openly. Many others later privately to their ncos, get themselves excused. But this was the clearest case id ever come across of choice. And the second thing that was remarkable about it was that the descriptions of the action most the trial records i had worked in, people are lined to cover each other. And thats because in the killing unit trials, einsatzgruppen in particular, and also their attempts at trying order Police Battalions earlier that almost succeeded. They knew who the officers were. They didnt know who the men were. And the officer lied for one another here had the roster of the battalion and they interviewed, interrogated 210 men, most of them rank and they had no interest in covering their officers. They gave the most graphic, horrific, horrifying descriptions of what they had done. They had never seen anything. It and the oral histories that these trial contained. So i went to hamburg and that opened ability to read through 30 volumes of testimonies by 210 men that we simply had never seen any kind collection to get into the minds of the grassroots killers, the people at the very bottom that didnt need written records were so extraordinary about how you how you then look at these groups of men is that you you start to divide them into categories of the of the enthusiastic killers of the people who dont try and get excused but dont really go out of their way to do much, almost sort of more like bystanders than than those people who try and get out of get out of these particularly violent actions. Although, as you mentioned, dont actually they still help to participate in the sense that they help round people up or do other things as well. That this was the thing that was so interesting because i just met ordinary men when i was doing work in the warsaw uprising following group of a unit from the top cop. Ss that was written again by disinterested politicians xaver, who was a prisoner, and he watched how ss interacted with one another and that with the sort of fanatic nazis who were going to go and kill everybody and they were very proud of themselves that they shot somebody really cleverly. And then there were those who just wanted to get home and, and were defeatist and were accused of defeatism. And then the ones in the middle and, it really struck me, having just read ordinary men when i was looking at this group of people, how, how you so very cleverly defined these these different groups and the other thing i thought was fascinating how you use social psychology in the psychology of, the group, maybe you can tell me a little bit about how you divided these this group into, these different categories. How was how was that process, what that was like . Yeah, certainly the one of the most striking things about the record was the vivid descriptions first day massacre. And it clearly was traumatic mean these men had not been prepared. This came as a surprise nothing had had in their experience for most people. This is the first time they ever fired a gun in another being and so they many of the men break down during the course of the day and. There was organized in the most amateurish in a in a unprofessional way of the were rounded up in the village and then they were taken by truck to the of the forest. Theres no grave already dug. The men in the shooting squads go up to the truck and meet the person theyre going to kill face to, face, pair off, march side by side the forest where the person to be killed has to lie down. And the killer then blows their head apart as short by short with a rifle. So theyre covered in blood and then the brain matter. The people they have just shot at point blank range and then they go back to meet face to face. The next victim that theyre going to kill. I mean, everything the einsatzgruppen learned is that you wanted to get as much distance between and killer. You wanted to make it as impersonal as possible. And here, because they were total amateurs, they had never done this was total improvization. They did just the opposite. They made the most individual face to face killing. And it was a horrific experience for the men. What was even as i say, as shocking as that is how quickly they move beyond that and how soon became routine and that the descriptions then become much more general until finally they cant even keep of which massacre, what town theyre in and what massacre theyre carrying. The first ones are very vividly described. It becomes a blur. But what become clear is as as you referred to, is that the seem to sort them out into these three groups. One group called the eager killers. And sad to say theyre people who learned to enjoy killing other human beings. They volunteer for the firing squads, volunteer for the hunts to go out and for who are hiding and they come back to lunch and they regale themselves with stories of what they had done and joke about this and. They are a core minority, not a majority of the battalion by any that they are the core driving group. Then you have a intermediate group that doesnt volunteer. Ask to do this, but will never. No. When theyre assigned and i call them the accommodate ers they just accommodate themselves to whats going on. And then there is group at the other end which i call the evaders that basically they take up the offer that they dont have to shoot they still are involved in the other actions and the roundups in the ghettos and the cordons around the shooting sites so they enable the shooting but they excuse themselves from the single most brutal part of the killing action which is calling the trigger and shooting somebody directly or interest strongly. I found when the for the evaders the way in which they in a sense didnt rupture the bonds of comradeship of the unit is that they asked to be excused they wouldnt say this a terrible thing were doing they wouldnt criticize policy. They would say, i am too weak. So price they would pay for the small maneuver room to not take part in the shooting with their comrades while not reproach seeing their comrades or criticizing the government early not seeming to want to take on the onus of the reason they cant do it is not that theyre, but that im too weak. And that, of course, insidiously the killers as the tough guys and them as the weak guys. You got this interesting moral inversion. The people with the moral autonomy not take part are the weak things in and the conformist to go along and kill are the tough guys and the models of what considered the exemplar, the norms the exemplary behavior of the battalion. And thats the thing thats thats so striking about the whole nazi regime and particularly you get into the camps or to the ss or things like the killings is the inversion of morality, as we would understand in other novels in auschwitz is in the first the first minutes you go there, you realize that everything you thought you stood for and that was valued was turned on. Its head. And the bad was good and good was bad. But the other thing that weve all seen much after the war and weve seen masses, this is the sort of pretense that, well, i had to do this. I was following orders. I hadnt i would have been in trouble. And you saying in your book, in fact, that that this theres a general problem with this explanation, how were quite simply in the past 45 years know defense attorney or defendant in any of the hundreds of postwar trials has been able to document single case in which refusal to obey in order to kill unarmed civilians resulted in the allegedly inevitable dire punishment s