Reserve Police Battalion 101 was composed of middle-aged, working-class Hamburg policemen, the majority of whom were not Nazi party members and had no prior history of violence. Browning's blow against essentialist accounts of genocide is that the men who carried out mass shootings in Józefów and the deportations that followed were demographically unremarkable — fathers, husbands, working men drafted into a war zone. This is what makes the case load-bearing for the situational thesis: the perpetrators' ordinariness is the evidence.
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