Christopher R. Browning, Ph.D.
Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence
2017-2018

Christopher R. Browning is the Frank Porter Graham Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research concerns the decision-making and policy-making behind the Nazi Final Solution, analyzed in his books The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office (1978), Fateful Months : Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution (1985), Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992), The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution(1992) and The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (2004). 

 

Professor Browning is one of the world’s most renowned Holocaust scholars and a proponent of the “moderate functionalist” school of thought in the origins of the Holocaust debate. During his lecture, “Holocaust History and Survivor Testimony: The Case of the Starachowice Factory Slave Labor Camp at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Browning discussed the changing attitudes about witness testimony and how the process of gathering it has changed since the end of World War II. He also focused on the value – as well as some of the misconceptions – of witness accounts of history. 

 

Read Professor Browning's Shapiro lecture summary here.


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Christopher Browning's Lecture on the Use of Testimony in Genocide Research

Christopher Browning, the 2018 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research, talks about the changing attitudes about witness testimony and how the process of gathering it has changed since the end of World War II.