Ordinary Men
Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
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Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews.
*Ordinary Men* is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever.
While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition.
*Ordinary Men* is a powerful, chilling, and important work, with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today.
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This book paints a very sobering picture to the nature of what humans are. And what can happen at any time to any group of people. Even today. It's an essential read.
I found out about Ordinary Men from Jordan Peterson around the time 12 Rules came out. I think he mentioned it repeatedly in a few interviews and it immediately jumped to my TBR though I got to it only now, years later.
It's a relatively short book, with 220 pages of text it's quick read but a tough one. I've been to Auschwitz, to Sereď where Slovak Jews and others were being deported from and I saw like a dozen documentaries about concentration camps alone. I feel like these executions that were happening before and simultaneously to deportations are being largely ignored by the mainstream. And the numbers are staggering. The scale, the efficiency. It was hard to get through some of the chapters.
I don't consider myself a history buff but I do dare to say I know more about WWII than average person. But this was a blind spot to me, it seems. I knew about executions of Russian POWs and citizens in the conquered territories which the book touches only briefly but I had no idea it was on such scale and done by average people, not sadistic SS soldiers. Doubly so for the main content in this book, public executions of Jews in Poland. Thousands per day. It wasn't 20 people in this town, 30 there in a span of the entire occupation (assuming the rest was deported to camps). No, they were brought to one spot and executed, one group after another, executions going on entire day. Not even ISIS was this efficient and methodical.
And the most depressing thing is that there was zero justice. These people weren't punished. The handful (literally could count them on fingers of one hand) were imprisoned for a few years towards the end of their lives. That's it. No rope. Unbelievable.
As I started reading books about WW2 and the Holocaust, I also started to wonder how these people did what they did. Why did they participate in the “final solution”? I have a lot of whys. That lead me to this book. I was expecting more in depth analysis on how “ordinary men” became mass murderers but overall it was good. It gave me the necessary information to try to think about the “why” myself. The “25 years later” gave a bit of that in depth I was looking for.
