Ordinary Men”: the Debate Over Holocaust Perpetrators After Three Decades - a Free Webinar

H-Judaic Revisiting “Ordinary Men”: The debate over Holocaust perpetrators after three decades - A free webinar

Discussion published by Jakub Lysiak on Thursday, October 8, 2020

Taube Center for the Renewal of Jewish Life in Poland is pleased to invite you for the next episode #TJHTalks.

With this series we strive to present our audience with contemporary topics around Polish-Jewish, culture history and preserving its’ heritage. Our guest-speakers are recognized scholars, researchers, and activists. The webinars are targeting a wide audience from academics, scholars, through passionate to amateurs.

In 1992, Professor Christopher R. Browning published his groundbreaking book OrdinaryMen: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. It fundamentally changed how we looked at and studied the Holocaust. Before it was published, most of us thought of the Shoah as a dehumanized, faceless, and almost industrial process, perpetrated by leaders, official subordinates, and collaborators. Professor Browning’s research demonstrated that it was, in fact, often ordinary people who took on the responsibility for the extermination of innocent lives. His book caused an earthquake in Germany and around the world, resulting in a seismic shift in how the Holocaust is discussed, studied, and perceived.

Now, three decades later, we revisit Professor Browning’s seminal work and look at how it has changed the course of Holocaust research. Revisiting “Ordinary Men”: The Debate Over Holocaust Perpetrators After Three Decades || Wednesday, October 14, 2020 || 11:00 a.m. PDT/2:00 p.m. EDT/8:00 p.m. CET

During our next #TJHTalk, eminent historian Professor Dariusz Stola will moderate the conversation. Register here: https://taubejewishheritagetours.activehosted.com/f/77

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Christopher R. Browning was the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill from 1999 until his retirement in May 2014. He is the author of eight books, including The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (2004), Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp (2010), and Ordinary Men: Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992), all of which won National Jewish Book Awards.. Browning has served as the J. B. and Maurice Shapiro Senior Scholar (1996) and Ina Levine Senior Scholar (2002–03) at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. Browning has served as an expert witness in several war crimes trials, as well as in two Holocaust denial cases: the second Zündel trial in Toronto, 1988, and in David Irving’s libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt inLondon, 2000.

Citation: Jakub Lysiak. Revisiting “Ordinary Men”: The debate over Holocaust perpetrators after three decades - A free webinar. H- Judaic. 10-08-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28655/discussions/6540289/revisiting-%E2%80%9Cordinary-men%E2%80%9D-debate-over-holocaust-p erpetrators Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Judaic

Dariusz Stola is the former Director of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. A historian of 20th-century Polish history, Dr. Stola taught at the Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, and was a fellow at the Center for Migration Research, Warsaw University. He has published nine books and more than a hundred articles on international migrations in the 20th century, the Communist regime in Poland, Polish-Jewish relations, and the Holocaust. His book, A Country with No Exit? Migrations from Poland, 1949-1989 received a prestigious book of the year award as the first comprehensive analysis of international mobility in a Communist country.

Related date: October 14, 2020