Hans Erich Nossack, The End: Hamburg 1943 and Christopher Browning, “One Day in Jozefow: Initiation to Mass Murder.”

Primary Source Essay 3:

Hans Erich Nossack, The End: Hamburg 1943 and Christopher Browning, “One Day in Jozefow: Initiation to Mass Murder.”

Description:

Over the last few weeks, we have been discussing how ideas about colonization, race, and nationalism contributed to the radicalization and intensification of violence seen during World War I, and especially during World War II. Moreover, we have examined how these trends and ideas contributed to the transformation of ordinary people into both perpetrators and victims of mass violence and atrocities. In Nossack’s book, he walks us through the aftermath of the firebombing of Hamburg in 1943, and in Browning’s article, he shows the reader how ordinary men became mass murderers. In both accounts, the author’s focus on how regular people, how ordinary Germans, became implicated in the violence of WWII. Furthermore, both of these sources tell us “the history from bellow,” or the history from the perspective of regular people, not the state hierarchy or “history from above.” In an essay that includes a thesis and argument answer the following questions. You do not need to answer all of these questions, but rather use them as a guide to ask and answer your own question about the history of WWII and the motivations for violence. How do these texts help us think about the role of ordinary people in both the perpetuation of mass violence and the ways in which we record or remember those acts? How do these texts help you think about the subject positions (victim vs perpetrator) that we often (falsely) think as mutually excusive?