Christopher R. Browning facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Christopher R. Browning
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Browning in 2019
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Christopher Robert Browning
May 22, 1944 Durham, North Carolina, U.S.
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| Occupation | Historian |
| Era | The Holocaust |
| Scientific career | |
| Thesis | "Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland and the Jewish Policy of the German Foreign Office 1940–1943" (1975) |
Christopher Robert Browning (born May 22, 1944) is an American historian and is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). A specialist on the Holocaust, Browning is known for his work documenting the Final Solution, the behavior of those implementing Nazi policies, and the use of survivor testimony. He is the author of nine books, including Ordinary Men (1992) and The Origins of the Final Solution (2004).
Browning taught at Pacific Lutheran University from 1974 to 1999 and eventually became a Distinguished Professor. In 1999, he moved to UNC to accept the appointment as Frank Porter Graham Professor of History, and in 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. After retiring from UNC in 2014, he became a visiting professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Browning has acted as an expert witness at several Holocaust-related trials, including the second trial of Ernst Zündel (1988) and Irving v Penguin Books Ltd (2000).
Early life and education
Born in Durham, North Carolina, Browning was raised in Chicago, where his father was professor of philosophy at Northwestern University and his mother was a nurse. He received his BA in history from Oberlin College in 1967 and his MA, also in history, from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW) in 1968. He then taught for a year at St. John's Military Academy and for two years at Allegheny College. He was awarded his PhD from UW in 1975 for the thesis "Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland and the Jewish Policy of the German Foreign Office 1940–1943." That became his first book, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office: A study of Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland, 1940–43 (1978).
Browning married Jennifer Jane Horn on September 19, 1970 and had two children: Kathryn Elizabeth and Anne DeSilvey.
Work
Ordinary Men
Browning is best known for his 1992 book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, a study of German Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) Reserve Unit 101. The battalion committed massacres and round-ups of Jews for deportations to Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland in 1942. The conclusion of the book, influenced in part by the famous Milgram experiments popularized in the 1970s, was that the men of Unit 101 killed out of obedience to authority and peer pressure.
As presented in the study, the men of Unit 101 were not ardent Nazis but ordinary middle-aged men of working class background from Hamburg, who had been drafted but found to be ineligible for regular military duty. After their return to occupied Poland in June 1942, the men were ordered to terrorize Jews in the ghettos during Operation Reinhard and carry out massacres of Polish Jews (men, women, and children) in the towns of Józefów and Łomazy.
Awards
- 1994: National Jewish Book Award for Ordinary Men : Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
- 2004: National Jewish Book Award for The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942
- 2010: National Jewish Book Award for Remembering Survival. Inside a Nazi Slave-labor Camp
- 2011: Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research for Remembering Survival.
Selected works
- (1978). The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office: A study of Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland, 1940–43. New York: Holmes & Meier. ISBN: 978-0841904033
- (1981). "Zur Genesis der "Endlösung" Eine Antwort an Martin Broszat" pages 96–104 from Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Volume 29.
- (1985). Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution. New York: Holmes & Meier.
- (1992). Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins.
- (1992). The Path to Genocide: Essays on launching the Final Solution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- (2000). Nazi policy, Jewish workers, German killers. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
- (2003). Collected memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony, Madison, Wis. and London: University of Wisconsin Press.
- (2004). The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942 (with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN: 0-803-25979-4
- (2007). Every Day Lasts a Year: A Jewish Family's Correspondence from Poland. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
- (2010). Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN: 0-393-07019-0 . This book earned Browning the 2011 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research.
- (2015), with Michael Marrus, Susannah Heschel and Milton Shain, eds. Holocaust Scholarship: Personal Trajectories and Professional Interpretations. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-1137514189
- (2018). "The Suffocation of Democracy". The New York Review of Books. 65 (16). October 25, 2018.
