Christopher Browning

And we're all saying these were bad things, but every male member of my father's generation and before seemed to have played a part in the state in some capacity.

think that the podcast kind of touches on a little bit but like i mean if you look at the work of like especially christopher browning i think browning and bartov really are the two who kind of put this idea of the clean veramark to rest uh they're the ones who kind of really dig into those archival things and say like no like they're they're there the whole time they're using euphemisms but like the veramark units are deployed constantly around the Einsatzgruppen and the Ordnungspolizei and and all of these kinds of things um and they're they're there the whole time you know you can't tell people that like oh just clearing a village of bandits is a neutral act like it's not like they know what they're doing uh but but Browning I think really is the one that bridges it and and kind of looks at like the mentality of these men.

You know, I'm sure you've read Ordinary Men.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it actually feeds this whole subculture, and then what happens is, last couple decades, great historians like our guest Waitman Beorn, who we had on, and others, uh, Christopher Browning, go, "No, no, no, everyone.

Let's get real here.

Let's really look at the evidence."

I'm not going to try and turn this into a shill piece for my own work product, but I think it's contextually relevant.

There's this book by Christopher Browning, who I used to have a lot more respect for, but then he testified against David Irving, which I thought was really grimy.

But he wrote a good book called Ordinary Men.

It was about this, it was about Ordnungspolizei Battalion 101 in Yotzfal, Poland.