History of Nazi Germany: Reserve Police Battalion 101

History of Nazi Germany – Paper

Topic

Choose one of the following topics and write a four-to-six-page essay (double-spaced, with normal margins and font size).

You should support your argument with evidence drawn directly from the book mentioned in the question. And when you use a direct quotation, or when you refer to a specific piece of information from the book, you need to give me a citation: either a footnote or a page number in brackets at the end of the sentence.

1. In Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood gives us a portrait of German society in the closing years of the Weimar Republic. His characters are drawn from all of the different social classes, and they have varying backgrounds and experiences. Assuming that Isherwood has given us an accurate depiction of the period, do you think that the Weimar Republic was doomed? Was this society simply too unstable and internally divided to survive? Some topics you might want to look at: What are the working class characters worried about? What do the middle and upper classes fear (or hope for)? Which of Isherwood’s characters are most attracted to Nazism? Why? Which ones are attracted to communism? Does anyone in the book seem enthusiastic about the existing system? Are any of the characters anti-Semitic? What reasons do they give for their dislike of Jews? How do the Jewish characters in the story respond to an increasingly hostile environment?

2. In his book Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning describes the genocidal activities of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Poland during World War Two. He argues that many of the German soldiers and police who carried out the Nazi policy of mass murder of the Jews were not psychopaths or hardened killers, but were in fact “ordinary men.” Discuss Browning’s thesis. What kinds of men were recruited for this police unit? What techniques were used by commanders to convince the men to perform their bloody work? How were they taught to hate the defenseless people that they were murdering? What tactics made the work “easier” for the men? Did many of the men disobey orders? Or find ways of avoiding the task? Would the men have been severely punished if they had refused to participate? Were there other reasons why men might voluntarily take part in such grisly work? Finally, do you think that Browning is right? Were the members of Police Battalion 101 really “ordinary men”? Would mass murder committed by “ordinary men” be more (or less) horrifying than crimes committed by obviously evil men?

3. In his book, My German Question, Peter Gay describes his life as a Jewish boy growing up in Nazi Berlin in the 1930s. Gay touches on a tragic and perplexing question: why did so many of Germany’s Jews remain in the country years after Hitler came to power? After all, Hitler came to power in 1933 as a notorious anti-Semite, but like most German Jews, Gay’s family did not flee the country until the end of the 1930s, on the eve of the Second World War. Why did Gay’s family remain in Germany so long? Why didn’t they flee sooner? Were they foolish to think that they might be able to survive in Nazi Germany? Did they think of themselves as German? Seen from the vantage point of the Gay family, was Nazi Jewish policy before 1938 all that coherent or predictable? Did they see the Holocaust coming? Why were the events of Kristallnacht so important in convincing the Gay family that they needed to flee the country? What were the practical constraints that made emigration so difficult? In the end, was the reluctance of families like the Gays to flee Germany foolish, as some have argued, or understandable, given the situation?