The shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews.

'This is a book of exceptional quality - The work of a historian at the peak of his powers, a magisterial study, a profound analysis of how the darkest chapter in human history could come about.' - Ian Kershaw, bestselling author of "Hitler". "The Origins of the Final Solution" is the most detailed, careful, and comprehensive analysis to date of the descent of the Nazi persecution of the Jews into mass murder. Arguing that genocide was not a preconceived plan but rather a discovered possibility, Christopher Browning explains how the decision to murder the Jews en masse emerged in stages and by a process of elimination that gradually foreclosed plans for their expulsion from Europe. Only in the interval between late September and late October 1941 did the desire to 'remove' the Jews intersect with the discovery of acceptable means of killing them on a large scale and with the euphoria of expected victory in Russia, all of which followed on from two years of 'race war' and 'racial imperialism' in eastern Europe that prepared 'ordinary Germans' for this fateful task. Author Bio: Christopher Browning is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His previous books include "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland" (1992); "The Path to Genocide" (1992); "The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office" (1978) and "Nazi Policy, Jewish Labour, German Killers" (2000). Praise for "Origins of the Final Solution":' This magisterial work...An unrivaled account of how the Nazi leadership ended up with a policy of industrialized mass murder of Jews-Probably no one is better qualified for this task than Christopher Browning.' - Mark Mazower in the "New York Times". 'Browning is persuasive because he marshals his evidence with unrivalled skill and writes with awesome clarity.' - "Literary Review".

A remarkable story of survival for almost three hundred Jews who live to recount the brutalities of a Nazi work camp.
In 1972 the Hamburg State Court acquitted Walter Becker, the German chief of police in the Polish city of Starachowice, of war crimes committed against Jews. Thirty years before, Becker had been responsible for liquidating the nearby Jewish ghetto, sending nearly 4,000 Jews to their deaths at Treblinka and 1,600 to slave-labor factories. The shocking acquittal, delivered despite the incriminating eyewitness testimony of survivors, drives this author’s inquiry.
Drawing on the rich testimony of survivors of the Starachowice slave-labor camps, Christopher R. Browning examines the experiences and survival strategies of the Jewish prisoners and the policies and personnel of the Nazi guard. From the killings in the market square in 1942 through the succession of brutal camp regimes, there are stories of heroism, of corruption and retribution, of desperate choices forced on husbands and wives, parents and children. In the end, the ties of family and neighbor are the sinews of survival.

The Nazi Holocaust haunts the modern imagination as one of the most compelling examples of the human capacity for organised atrocity on a mass scale. This authoritative account of the evolution of Nazi Jewish policy from 1939 to 1942 seeks to answer some of the fundamental questions about what actually happened, and why, between the outbreak of war and the emergence of the Final Solution. Christopher Browning assesses the historians' interpretations and offers his own insights, based on detailed case studies uncovering important and telling new evidence.

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Shocking as it is, this book--a crucial source of original research used for the bestseller Hitler's Willing Executioners--gives evidence to suggest the opposite conclusion: that the sad-sack German draftees who perpetrated much of the Holocaust were not expressing some uniquely Germanic evil, but that they were average men comparable to the run of humanity, twisted by historical forces into inhuman shapes. Browning, a thorough historian who lets no one off the moral hook nor fails to weigh any contributing factor--cowardice, ideological indoctrination, loyalty to the battalion, and reluctance to force the others to bear more than their share of what each viewed as an excruciating duty--interviewed hundreds of the killers, who simply could not explain how they had sunken into savagery under Hitler. A good book to read along with Ron Rosenbaum's comparably excellent study Explaining Hitler. --Tim Appelo --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
From Publishers Weekly
On June 13, 1942, the commanding officer of Reserve Police Battalion 101 received orders to round up the Jews in the Polish town of Josefow and shoot all but the able-bodied males. Major Wilhelm Trapp, who wept over the order, gave his troops the extraordinary option of "excusing themselves" from the task. Of the 500 in the unit only a dozen did so, and the rest slaughtered 1500 women, children and old people. Thus began the career of one of Nazi Germany's most efficient extermination units. Drawing on postwar interrogations of former Battalion members, Browning reconstructs the 16-month period from the Jozefow massacre to the Battalion's participation in the brutal "Fall Harvest Jew Hunt" in November 1943, during which these ordinary men, mostly middle-aged working-class people from Hamburg, shot to death some 38,000 Polish Jews and sent 45,000 others to the Treblinka gas chambers. In the vast Holocaust literature, this short work stands out with breathtaking impact, for it reveals how average Germans became mass murderers. "If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances," asks the author, "what group of men cannot?" Browning is a history professor at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash. Photos.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.