Dr. Christopher Browning- "Ordinary Men" of the Holocaust

Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast

David J Puder

Science, Health & Fitness, Medicine

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2023

⏱️ 117 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this interview with historian Dr. Christopher Browning, we discuss his book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. An internationally renowned author and researcher, Dr. Browning is also a professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). He is an internationally recognized expert on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany and has authored over 75 publications.

His focus on Battalion 101 emerged during his research of the Holocaust, when he discovered that this battalion was unlike any other in the German army or police force—it was comprised of ordinary, middle-aged men, not trained soldiers. Despite this fact, they assimilated into the Nazi practices of mass murder with disturbing ease. Dr. Browning examines the psychological and cultural influences that impacted this seeming phenomenon and offers poignant insights from existing historical documents.

We want to thank Jeremiah Stokes, Ed.D., LMHC for being part of this episode and helping with write up available on psychiatrypodcast.com

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy podcast.
0:15.8	We are a podcast that seeks to train mental health professionals to do good psychotherapy,
0:23.0	to do good psychiatry.
0:25.4	This episode is a timely episode.
0:29.8	It is an episode that dives into one of the most horrific stories I've ever heard.
0:36.7	This is the story of the ordinary men of Reserve Police Battalion 101.
0:42.0	It is an interview with Dr. Christopher Browning, who is a lifetime Holocaust researcher.
0:50.2	He spent 50 years diving into the Holocaust during the interview.
0:58.1	He himself breaks down at one point with a motion talking about some of the documents
1:03.0	that he found unearthing the voluntary nature of this police battalion's murders.
1:13.0	He is someone who has looked at this with a lens to try to understand how and why it happened.
1:24.8	We look at conformity in this episode.
1:27.5	We look at studies of conformity, psychological group dynamics.
1:32.1	We look at the dehumanization of a people group and how that was just in the water.
1:39.1	We unfortunately did not have a lot of resistors in Germany who were resisting the murder of
1:48.5	Jews.
1:50.5	That is something that deeply disturbs me and it's like in my mind, as a psychiatrist and
1:56.7	as a therapist, I think to myself, how can we teach people to not conform to groups and
2:02.8	to be able to notice cognitive dissonance and look at their values and say, this does
2:08.5	not align with my values.
2:11.1	How do we create values that humanize every people group, every religion, that we humanize
2:21.7	and don't dehumanize?
	...

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