Ordinary Men

The "Forgotten Holocaust" and the banality of sin

Eighty-five years ago today, Nazi-orchestrated pogroms in Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and virtually every other center of the Third Reich moved Europe a terrifying step closer to Adolf Hitler’s “final solution” of “the Jewish problem.” Called Kristallnacht or the “Night of the Shattered Glass” for the thousands of Jewish small businesses that had their windows smashed, November 9-10, 1938 also left Jewish synagogues burned and Jewish cemeteries desecrated. Hundreds of Jews were killed, and 30,000 more were sent to concentration camps.

Less than a year later, German forces invaded Poland, home to 3.3 million Jews. Fewer than 400,000 of them were still alive when the war ended in 1945.

As the home of SS extermination camps, Poland was also the final resting place for the nearly 3 million European Jews murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Another million died from what Browning calls “conditions of incarceration” (e.g., being worked to death in slave labor camps, or starved to death in ghettos).

But in a new Netflix documentary inspired by his most famous book, Ordinary Men, historian Christopher Browning points out that the final third of the six million Jewish dead perished via what he calls the “Forgotten Holocaust,” the one primarily perpetrated by Germans and their collaborators behind the lines of battle in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic Republics, and Poland, with weapons as modern as rifles and as primitive as clubs. This slaughter was not en masse, mediated via the industrialized facilities of the gas chambers, but manual, personal, and all the more brutal for being so intimate.