The Hugo Valentin Lecture 2017: Professor Christopher R. Browning

The fifteenth Hugo Valentin Lecture, titled Surviving Slave Labor: The Camp Complex at the Starachowice Factories, was given by Professor Emeritus Christopher R. Browning, University of North Carolina.

Browning is one of the most renowned scholars in Holocaust research with Ordinary Men: Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992) as his best-known work. In the book, he showed, among other things, how five hundred ordinary men from "Police Battalion 101" could choose to carry out mass murder of Jewish men, women and children, even though they were initially given the option not to participate.

Browning has studied the origin and course of the Holocaust in a large number of aspects, with a growing interest in micro-level dynamics and the fates and testimonies of individuals. His most important works include The Path to Genocide (1992), Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (2000), Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony (2003), The Origins of the Final Solution (2004). In his, at the time, latest work, Remembering Survival. Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp (2010), he closely studies life in the Starachowice labour camp in Poland, which was also the subject of the evening's lecture.

Browning has worked and taught at institutions such as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton and Hebrew University. He has also acted as an expert witness in trials regarding war crimes and Holocaust denial, i.a. in the high-profile defamation case between David Irving and Deborah Lipstadt in London in 2000. The trial was recently made into a feature film entitled Denial.