Books I read in school as a Holocaust history major
I am so very proud of myself for attending one of the world’s top universities, University of Michigan. I made amazing friends, got involved with school groups, and learned so much invaluable information. Not to toot my own horn, but I also received a presidential scholarship.
My initial goal was to major in Pre-Law before advancing to the prestigious law school across campus. I was destined to strudy human rights law in an effort to bring more justicce to the world. However, there is no Pre-Law major. Sent back to the drawing board, I decided if I was planning to make a career in human rights I should study the worst of atrocities, genocide.
From there, my fascination for the topic has kept with me years later. I graduated in 2022 with a double major of History and Judaic Studies with a specialization in the Holocaust.
I recently came across several short reviews of readings from Dr. Jeffery Veidlinger’s Holocaust history course. I believe now would be as good a time as any to recommend some heavy reading.
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101
and the Final Solution in Poland
by Christopher R. Browning
Extensive research has gone into the psychology of becoming a killer, extending from the Viking age to modern gang membership. The events of Browning’s book is especially straightforward if the reader has studied the psychological science behind war.
It is said that there are only four options for individuals faced with killing: submission to the enemy, actively participating in combat despite agreeing with the goal, fleeing the engagement, or actively fighting the enemy with an expectation of death.
According to psychologists, humans will avoid killing at all costs, even if specifically trained to, or in the case of the Reserve Police Battalion 101, under severe pressure. These “ordinary men” chose to fight on the side of the Nazi party in an effort to maintain the status quo and their livelihood.
“Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking
and is committed by ordinary people is
the norm, not the exception.”
Browning’s major argument is that social pressure was enough to corrupt men of ordinary backgrounds into complicit mass killers in times of genocide. This pressure cannot be overstated as humans have complex reasoning skills, internal and external influences, and innumerable simulations which lead to actions of complacency or resistance.
Browning also cites intense nationalism and submission to authority as psychological factors for the battalion’s actions. To many policemen of the time, the execution of Polish Jews was simply seen as a job, potentially a job with no moral repercussions, much like any other “ordinary” job a middle aged German man would have held.
For example, in 1940 the battalion was ordered to guard the Jewish ghetto in Lodz. The men were given “a standard order to shoot ‘without further ado’ and Jews who… came too close to the fence.”
The order was upheld by men who saw their part in genocide as a mere paycheck. Much like taking a break from a particularly difficult work shift, the men were told that if the eldest among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, only he was allowed step out.
“Perpetrators did not become fellow victims (as many
of them later claimed to be) in the way some
victims became accomplices of the perpetrators.”
As the third wave of German invasion, R.P.B. 101 followed the German army (Wehrmacht) and the killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) through Poland, killing leftover Jewish civilians. As time passed, the role of the police changed to guarding ghettos, mass extermination, and resettlement actions—placing victims onto transport trains.
According to psychological findings on the fragility of the human psyche, being pressured to kill is easier when pressure is strong and effective, but being cruel to living victims is much more difficult.
However, officers of Battalion 101 began showing unnecessary force against the Jewish populations quickly and efficiently during the loading of Jews onto transport cars during the deportations to Treblinka. Riding whips and physical force was used by the officers against any Jewish person who did not move fast enough onto the parked cars.
The men were also trained to "hunt” and “taunt” victims who resisted capture through attempting to hide on the spot, leaving their bodies unburied as they moved onto the next known hiding spot or town.
“What the conservatives conceived of as
sufficient measures overlapped with what were,
for the Nazis, scarcely the first steps.”
Humans are capable of heinous crimes against humanity, as has been evident throughout history, specifically in the case of the two world wars and the Holocaust. However, these atrocities were not only committed by evil genocidal sociopaths with no shred of regard for human life.
Ordinary people participated in the mass killing of Jews in a state-sponsored genocide. One could also argue that the younger Germans of the Wehrmacht were also taught to kill in an easier introduction into the Nazi regime through lifelong propaganda and normalization of aggression against Jewish Germans.
The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were raised before the rise of Nazism in Germany, likely children during the Weimar Republic or before. These men needed more intense pressure and psychological persuasion to accomplish the amount of killing seen in Browning’s book.
Why?: Explaining the Holocaust
by Peter Hayes
When it comes to the study of the Holocaust, there are two major camps of thought: functionalism and intentionalism.
Functionalism refers to the belief that the atrocities of the genocide occurred as a process of causality primarily derived from competing Nazi elites which escalated the methods of the Nazi party to extermination.
Contrarily, intentionalism is the belief that Hitler knew what he desired from the final outcome as early as his writing of Mein Kampf and subsequent events were specifically orchestrated to move forward the mass annihilation of European Jews.
In Peter Haye’s book, the historian takes the angle of a functionalist view on the Final Solution. Through his detailed explanations of the Aktion T4 euthanasia program—the development of the gas used in killing camps, what the author calls “a direct forerunner for the Holocaust.”
Hayes hypothesis that the mass killings of Jews in the near future was simply an explanations of the mass killings of mentally and socially handicapped German non-Jews. This explanation loans itself to the functionalist view, stating that the gases used in killing chambers was first experimented on during Aktion T4 which lead to an expansion of its usage, rather than arguing that the Nazi regime knew they wanted to exterminate Jews through gas to start.
“The Holocaust was the product of a particular time and place…
these were the contexts in which ancient hostilities towards
Jews and Judaism… turned into a fixation on removing [them]
from civil society…”
In fact, Hayes notes that an advisory group of pharmacologists suggested the idea of gassing people, rather than this being the intended idea of Hitler or Nazi elites. The Fuhrer’s physician initially opposed using gas and argued for death by “medical means.” Hayes adamantly disregards the causal beliefs of some historians who overinflate the Wannsee Conference.
Moving forward, the experimentation of gas vans as a means of depopulating ghettos is another sign of the functionalist belief. If a regime knew how they wanted to annihilate millions of people, they would have skipped this experimental step completely.
This is a major argument against the intentionalism angle. Discussion of implementing gas chambers for the purpose of killing Soviet prisoners of war and European Jews wasn’t discussed by Nazi elites until 1941, two years after Aktion T4 began.
“Antisemitism became institutionalized in
elite and conservative society rather than in laws.”
According to Hayes, the Nazis were able to commit such massive genocidal crimes because they “perfected a low cost, low overhead, low tech, and self financing process of killing with great speed.” This method of annihilation needed to be developed through small-level experiments beginning in 1931, beginning with small amounts of gas to a greater use as experimentation was proven successful.
This proves that the Holocaust evolved as it unfolded rather than being intentionally planned as far back as Hitler’s imprisonment nearly a decade prior, in 1925. It’s easy to denote Hayes’ opinions on the functionalism argument. The systematic killing of Jewish people began with small trucks before finalizing in the massive chambers within the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.
The Jewish Cemetery at Newport
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Longfellow wrote his poem, “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport” in 1852 while sitting under a tree in the oldest cemetery in the U.S. The main goal he had for his work was to explore Judaism as a dead religion which has so few followers in the new world that it resembles this desolate cemetery setting.
He uses language like “Exodus of death” to imprint images of large swaths of the Jewish dead leaving behind their religion like the Israelites left Egypt. If is arguable, however, that the poet’s desired image is negated in the eyes of modern readers as Judaism gained prominence in the United States.
While arguing for the belief that Judaism is no longer a prominent living religion, Longfellow fives multiple examples of way in which Judaism is as vibrant as ever in midcentury America.
In all of Longfellow’s 60 lines, he paints a desolate picture of an empty synagogue, abandoned by patrons and the holy sermons of rabbis.
“Closed are the portals of their synagogue
No psalms of David now the silence break
No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue
in the grand dialect the Prophets spake.”
Longfellow’s artful words lead the reader to believe that the temple attached to the cemetery is permanently closed. Instead, the meaning at face value is that there is no service on the day which he wrote this poem.
Every house of prayer has days during which “closed are the [doors]” because there is no call to prayer. No psalms or readings from the Decalogue—better known as the Ten Commandments—are heard because no one is there.
Longfellow described the headstones of bygone Jews. Using beautiful prose, he describes the emptiness of the building and cemetery why unconsciously and simultaneously demonstrating the devotion of the living to their past.
These lines completely disassembles Longfellow’s argument succinctly. If a religion were truly dead and abandoned, there would be no faithful members willing to return to the cemetery to clean headstones. While “gone are the living, but the dead remain” is accurate of all cemeteries, the unseen hand is still very much active and alive.
“Gone are the living, but the dead remain
And not neglected; for a hand unseen
Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain
Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green.”
Here, the poem is admitting that by sitting in a cemetery for one afternoon no one will experience the fullness of motion which occurs there. Longfellow shares here that there are still Jewish faithfuls who come to pray and spend their time remembering those who have passed by cleaning and decorating their graves.
“The Jewish Cemetery at Newport” is a piece of his antisemitic values in the sense that he refused to acknowledge the greater population of Jewish faith in the U.S. Rather than spend several days observing the synagogue and it’s members, he sat in the cemetery one afternoon and wrote about the death of an entire religion and people.
If he spent more times among the lives of living Jews, he would easily have seen the vibrance of living religion. By including the subtle lines about the clean headstones, Longfellow proves to his readers that there is much more life in Judaism than the poet believed.
In 2025 with the impending political demise of our nation, it is more important now than ever to fully understand and conceptualize the effects of ancient antisemitism, the steps leading to mass extinction, and how conservative extremism can build.
Similar to the experiments seen in Why?, there are many threats and policy changes which have already begun a snowball effect of future functionalism. While many conservative Americans are ordinary people, they may be pushed to extreme violence as seen in Ordinary Men. Also, it is important to note that the Jewish community is alive and well but may soon look “dead” as more people become afraid to practice in public.
Look out for my recurring selections as I dive deeper into the outstanding History program of the University of Michigan.
