Christopher Browning and the Use of Oral History

 With Saul Friedländer (b. 1932) and Raoul Hilberg (1926-2007), Christopher Browning (b. 1944) belongs probably to the most influential historians of the Second World War when it comes to the study of the “final solution”. He has published many books since the end of 1970s, the best well-known being Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992). On 18 October 2012 he was invited to give a lecture entitled “Holocaust History and Survivor Testimony: the Case of the Starachowice Factory Slave Labor Camp” at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI), which was created in 2009.

Browning was simply brilliant. He spoke during 80 to 90 minutes, almost without looking at the two pages of notes he had put on his lectern. The material of his talk was taken from his last book, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp (2010).

The story starts in the early 1970s. The historian found in 1987 that in a process against Walter Becker, during the war the German chief of police in the Polish city of Starachowice, all the eye witnesses were dismissed by the judge.