the men of Unit 101 were not ardent Nazis but ordinary middle-aged men of working class background from Hamburg, who had been drafted but found to be ineligible for regular military duty. After their return to occupied Poland in June 1942, the men were ordered to terrorize Jews in the ghettos during Operation Reinhard and carry out massacres of Polish Jews (men, women, and children) in the towns of Józefów and Łomazy. In other cases, they were ordered to kill a certain number of Jews in a town or area, usually helped by Trawnikis. The commander of the unit once gave his men the choice of opting out if they found it too hard, but fewer than 12 men did so in a battalion of 500. Browning provides evidence to support the notion that not all of the men were hateful anti-Semites. He includes the testimony of men who said that they begged to be released from the task and to be placed elsewhere. In one instance, two fathers claimed that they could not kill children and so asked to be given other work. Browning also tells of a man who demanded his release, obtained it, and was promoted once he had returned to Germany. Ordinary Men achieved much acclaim but was criticized by Daniel Goldhagen for missing what he called a specifically German political culture, characterized by "eliminationist anti-semitism" in causing the Nazi genocides. In a review in The New Republic in July 1992, Goldhagen called Ordinary Men a book that fails in its central interpretation. Goldhagen's controversial 1996 book Hitler's Willing Executioners was largely written to rebut Browning but ended up being criticized much more. Irving v. Lipstadt When David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt for libel in 1996, Browning was one of the leading witnesses for the defense. Another historian, Robert Jan van Pelt, wrote a report on the gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp, and Browning wrote a report on the evidence for the extermination of Jews. During his testimony and a cross-examination by Irving, Browning countered Irving's suggestion that the last chapter of the Holocaust had yet to be written (implying there were grounds for doubting its reality) by saying, "We are still discovering things about the Roman Empire. There is no last chapter in history." Browning countered Irving's argument that the absence of a written Führer order from Adolf Hitler to carry out the