Christopher R. Browning is an American historian of the Holocaust.

He is best known for his 1992 book Ordinary men which was a study of German Order Police Reserve Unit 101, which was used to massacre and round up Jews for deporation to the death camps in Poland in 1942. The essential argument of the book was that the men of Unit 101 were not demons or Nazi fantics, but rather as the title suggests, ordinary middle aged men of working-class background from Hamburg who were drafted, but found unfit for military duty. The men were ordered to round up Jews, and if there was not enough room for the Jews on the trains, just to take them out and shoot them. The commander of the unit gave his men the choice of opting out of this duty if they found it too unpleasant; the majority choose to opt in. Browning argued that the reason why the men of Unit 101 killed was more due to peer pressure rather then any sort of blood-lust. The clear implication of the book is that if most people, regardless of their nationality, were forced into a group and given the choice between killing and belonging to the the group and not killing and not belonging will choose the former.

Ordinary Men achieved much acclaim, but was denounced by Daniel Goldhagen for missing what Goldhagen considered to importance of German culture for causing the Holocaust. Goldhagen's 1996 Hitler's Willing Executioners was largely written to rebut Browning's book.

Browning is a Functionalist in regards to the origins of the Holocaust debate. Browning has argued that the Final Solution was result of the "cumulative radicalization" to use Hans Mommsen's phase of the German state, especially when faced with the self-imposed "problem" of the 3 million Polish Jews the Nazis had forced into Ghettos between 1939-1941 with the intention of having them expelled somewhere far from Germany. Owning to the way the World War II developed and to turf wars within the German bureaucracy, expulsion was not a viable option, and by 1941, the majority of the German bureaucracy was willing to consider murdering all of the Jews.

Work

• The final solution and the German Foreign Office : a study of Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland, 1940-43, New York : Holmes & Meier, 1978.
• Fateful months : essays on the emergence of the final solution, New York : Holmes & Meier, 1985.
• Ordinary men : Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland, New York : HarperCollins, 1992.
• The path to genocide : essays on launching the final solution, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1998, 1992.
• Nazi policy, Jewish workers, German killers, Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Collected memories : Holocaust history and postwar testimony, Madison, Wis. ; London : University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
• The origins of the Final Solution : the evolution of Nazi Jewish policy, September 1939-March 1942, Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 2004..