Christopher Robert Browning was born on May 22,1944 and is an American historian who is the professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
19 Facts About Christopher Browning
2.
Christopher Browning is the author of nine books, including Ordinary Men and The Origins of the Final Solution.
3.
Christopher Browning taught at Pacific Lutheran University from 1974 to 1999 and eventually became a Distinguished Professor.
4.
Christopher Browning has acted as an expert witness at several Holocaust-related trials, including the second trial of Ernst Zundel and Irving v Penguin Books Ltd.
5.
Christopher Browning then taught for a year at St John's Military Academy and for two years at Allegheny College.
6.
Christopher Browning married Jennifer Jane Horn on September 19,1970 and had two children: Kathryn Elizabeth and Anne DeSilvey.
7.
Christopher 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 Reserve Unit 101, which committed massacres and round-ups of Jews for deportations to Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland in 1942.
8.
Christopher Browning provides evidence to support the notion that not all of the men were hateful antisemites.
9.
Christopher Browning includes the testimony of men who said that they begged to be released from the task and to be placed elsewhere.
10.
Christopher Browning tells of a man who demanded his release, obtained it, and was promoted once he had returned to Germany.
11.
Goldhagen's controversial 1996 book Hitler's Willing Executioners was largely written to rebut Christopher Browning but ended up being criticized much more.
12.
When David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt for libel in 1996, Christopher Browning was one of the leading witnesses for the defense.
13.
Christopher Browning countered Irving's argument that the absence of a written Fuhrer order from Adolf Hitler to carry out the genocide of the European Jews constituted evidence against the standard Holocaust history.
14.
Christopher Browning maintained that such an order need never have been written since Hitler had almost certainly made statements to his leading subordinates indicating his wishes regarding the Jews, which rendered irrelevant the question of an extant written order.
15.
Christopher Browning testified that several experts on Nazi Germany believe there was no written Fuhrer order for the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" but that no historian doubts the reality of the Nazi genocide.
16.
Christopher Browning rejected Irving's claim that there was no reliable statistical information on the size of the prewar Jewish population in Europe or on the killing processes.
17.
Christopher Browning asserted that the only reason that historians debate whether five or six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust was a lack of access to archives in the former Soviet Union.
18.
Christopher Browning is a "moderate functionalist" in the debate about the origins of the Holocaust and focuses on the structure and institution of the Third Reich, rather than Hitler's intentions and orders.
19.
Christopher Browning has argued that the Final Solution was the result of the "cumulative radicalization" of the German state, especially when it was faced with the self-imposed "problem" of three million Jews, whom the Nazis had imprisoned in ghettos between 1939 and 1941.