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Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

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"Ordinary Men" chronicles the rise and fall of Reserve Police Battalion 101, one of several units that took part in the Final Solution to the Jewish Question while in Poland. During the course of their stay, they were responsible for the shooting of 38,000 Jews, while also deporting 45,200 to the Treblinka Concentration Camp. The book argues that the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, and other units like it, were comprised of ordinary men. It begs the question: How did ordinary men become the cold-blooded killers of the Holocaust?
Author Christopher R. Browning does a tremendous job of covering the ground. He also presents a strong case that these people were indeed ordinary men, who came from ordinary backgrounds, only to end up being transformed into the murderers of thousands. However, the book also stresses that some of the men, including several officers, could not be considered "ordinary," as they were trained in Hitler's Nazi organizations from youth. Browning also does something nearly impossible: He humanizes these people without excusing their horrendous actions. Their defense that "they were just following orders" just doesn't fit the bill, as some refused to take part in the actions, and asked to be relieved. If a few men could get themselves relieved from doing the killings, why did so many more not? That is the main question the book gives.
"Ordinary Men" is an extraordinary book that chronicles just one unit that took part in the murder of innocent Jews, while also presenting a good case of how ordinary men can become killers. I highly recommend this book to all students of the Holocaust.
Grade: A+

Browning's book came as a welcome relief after trudging through much of Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. It is interesting that he and Goldhagen approached Battalion 101 from diametrically opposite directions. Browning does not try to assess blame, but rather focus on the circumstances which led to the notorious killing spree of this battalion in Poland. Well researched with some very interesting case studies, Browning illustrates how ordinary men can be made into seemingly ruthless killers. Stalin used many of the same tactics in the Soviet Union, pitting one ethnic group against another, knowing that there would be little identification between ethnic groups in times of war.

Browning provides the background of the men that comprised the battalion and the early vascilation and indecision that took place before finally being used as an execution squad in the months leading up to the Final Solution. He takes the readers through the horrific scenes, showing just how easy it was to succumb to the dictates being handed down through a long chain of command. Browning sees it is a fault-line that runs through humanity and is not specific to any one racial or ethnic group, but is an outgrowth of the devastating conditions of war.

Browning has written a very important book. He looks at the Reserve Police Battalion 101 from Hamburg made up of mostly middle-aged men mostly of artisans and working class non-career police reservists. The kind of men that were either too old for normal front-line service and those who had no desire to persue a career in the police outside their role in this reserve unit.

Browning uses incredible documentation from postwar German interrogations of men of this unit involved in wartime attrocities. He had access to more than 400 testimonies of the over 500 men that made up this unit during the war. As such he is able to analyse the actions and thinking in greater detail than most other German units.

He describes the insidious use of these units as first guards on trains to transport Jews to extermination camps, to their eventual use in rounding up Jews in the Polish Ghettos, and their use as actual shootes in the extermination of whole villages.

That this unit of 500 men --- made up of police reservists, not trained in combat, and seemingly tangential to entire holocaust programme --- could be directly responsible for the shooting deaths of 38,000 people and the transportion of 100,000s of thousands of others to their deaths, makes depressing reading indeed.

Unfortunately, although Browning documents the horror of this representative small unit, he does not really answer his question of how a father with loving kids in Germany, with no combat experience could one day, be ordered to a village in Poland and in the small hours of the morning kill women and children just because they are Jewish.

Browning may be begging the question when he says "ordinary men" --- one thing that may have made them far from ordinary was the corroding and infective influence of racialist Nazi claptrap that came to be accepted truth in German society in the years leading up to the war. Browning's book does not go into this question, and it is not covered by the interogators, nor certainly not volunteered by those who were interogated. It is however the central question of how an ordinary husband could walk up to children, women and old men and shoot them on the spot with little remorse or, at best, a casuistic reasoning. It is the central question that needs answering: how much can racialist ideology, condoned and encouraged by society, lead to turning ordinary men into extraordinary monsters. That is the horror of this book and one that one should be encouraged to find out the answer to.

* Note this is not a light read. It will turn your stomach at times and wrench your heart.

Some psychological research by Milgram and Zimbardo and others shows it is disturbingly easy to get ordinary people to torture and brutalize somebody and/or to kill them. This happens so often and so easily in the laboratory that it can be deeply troubling to see it.

I think what these personal histories (like "Ordinary Men") go on to show is that people can also "get used to it" that is, torture and murder while they seem in many ways still to be rather ordinary.

(American GIs and law enforcement officers, two groups I've lived with, can all too easily get into the thousand-mile-stare, just-another-day-at-the-war, kill-them-all-let-God-sort-them-out frame of mind).

Even more disturbing is the tendency for some "ordinary" people to go even further. They come to like the killing. Fighter pilots get the "hunter disease." Serial killers really do get a taste for it. So, they do not stay truly ordinary. For the most part, they are never "the same" again. But they don't grow horns either.

As a man, I'm not at ease that almost all of what we are discussing is a "guy thing." Women share some of this, but (certainly statistically) not much.

I've come to believe in the myths. Man has both the light side and the dark side of the force within. Which come to the fore depends on a great deal.

Both the very best and worst of us, the angels and the killers, were, I believe, somehow, somewhere, once just "ordinary men."

One of the things that I remember about this particular dark period of history is what my father used to say about it. He felt, and stated, that the thing that was most upsetting was not what happened. But, that the people who did it, "were just like us."

This book shows us the monsters of the Holocaust were truly just like us. This is a book about being a team player. It is about consensus and doing just a little more for the unit. In other words, it is entirely applicable today.

The moral lesson of this book is clear. Today we are pressured to do things that we know are a little wrong in order to get along. Doing something that is a little wrong is only a matter of degree.

I work in an industry where one of the interview questions is, "are you willing to do things, required of you in this job, that may, or do, violate your own sense of ethics or morality." I work here; so you know how I answered.

This is a very disturbing book if you read it and in any way relate to the many police officers that it is about. These reserve police are a true cross section of society and reflect a culture and value system very similar to our own.

Christopher Browning describes how the Reserve Police Battalion 101, like the rest of German society, was immersed in a deluge of racist and anti-Semitic propaganda. Browning describes how the Order Police provided indoctrination both in basic training and as an ongoing practice within each unit. Many of the members were not prepared for the killing of Jews. The author examines the reasons some of the police members did not shoot. The physiological effect of isolation, rejection, and ostracism is examined in the context of being assigned to a foreign land with a hostile population. The contradictions imposed by the demands of conscience on the one hand and the norms of the battalion on the other are discussed.

Ordinary Men provides a graphic portrayal of Police Battalion 101's involvement in the Holocaust. The major focus of the book focuses on reconstruction of the events this group of men participated in. According to Browning, the men of Police Battalion 101 were just that--ordinary. They were five hundred middle-aged, working-class men of German descent. A majority of these men were neither Nazi party members nor members of the S.S. They were also from Hamburg, which was a town that was one of the least occupied Nazi areas of Germany and, thus, were not as exposed to the Nazi regime. These men were not self-selected to be part of the order police, nor were they specially selected because of violent characteristics. These men were plucked from their normal lives, put into squads, and given the mission to kill Jews because they were the only people available for the task. Surprisingly, these ordinary men proved to be completely capable of killing tens of thousands of people. In fact, their capacity to murder was so great, they overwhelmingly surpassed the expectations of even the Nazi leaders.

This book was very informative and compelling as it showed a believable depiction of the atrocities of genocide throughout the Holocaust. The book revealed truths such as these policemen were given many opportunities to get out of killing Jews. However, many did not take the opportunity to walk away and instead committed themselves to becoming specialized experts in the "resettlement" of Jews. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the Holocaust and the reasons why many of these men became killers.

Walter S. Zapotoczny Jr.
Freelance Writer
Author of For the Fatherland

Christopher Browning tackles the challenge of getting inside of the minds of the men who carried out the worst war crimes of the last century--maybe of all humanity. He paints an intimate picture of the 101st Reserve Police Battalion as they struggle to come to terms with the reality of the Final Solution as it happens. The study reveals that these men were not monsters, as we would like to believe them to be, but "ordinary men" who found themselves in an extraordinary situation. Browning's argument is largely based on recorded testimony from the Neuremberg Trials. Using this testimony he discovers that these men are not driven to kill with an animal rage born of unnatural hatred for Jews, but rather by the pressures of society. This is not to say that anti-semitism was not a factor, or that the crimes commited were somehow less heonous because they were not done out of irrational hate, just that these people were not extraordinary. This idea is frightening because it suggests that the Holocaust was not a product of mass insanity, it was a basic failure in human nature. Browning backs the theory with anectdotal information about the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 on their mission of destruction, and a psychological study on the pressures to conform to peers and recognized authorities. Ordinary Men achieves its purpose with masterful skill. It is an historical work which transcends its field to provide insight not only into an historical debate, but simple human nature. One can not begin to understand the Holocust without first reading this book.

This book (as described by previous reviewers and the product description) details what the men in the Nazi Reserve Police Battalion 101 went through, specifically during the SS Invasion of Poland.

Browning describes in detail the process of dehumanizing the Jews, and writes at length on the style of execution that the Germans refined and perfected in Poland, prior to the widespread use of gas chambers: the person to be killed forced to lie down flat on their face, and then shot at a particular spot in their neck. The accounts of these executions is not just gratuitous violence -- graphic gore for the sake of shock or horror -- but rather, demonstrates that over time, the police officers involved in the executions worked to make the process of mass killing more humane (an idea that was at the root of the gas chambers, as ironic as that seems). It also serves to drive home the point that after so many hundreds of people were shot, the officers were able to completely dehumanize the people they were killing.

What is unique about this book is that it is not just another historical account; the author takes into consideration what the Nazis themselves had to go through, psychologically and emotionally, in order to carry out their orders. Many other historians have analyzed historical events during WWII while still demonizing the Nazi forces ~ but Browning shows us that the troops really were Ordinary Men, and these men suffered tremendous emotional tolls as a result.

And herein lies the Truth that makes this book so chilling: any one of us could have found ourselves in the very same position, carrying out the very same orders, as the German troops in WWII.

Browning describes the various social conditions and governmental policies that effected how the Nazis were able to so completely dehumanize their enemy and rationalize their own involvement -- in part, because the men were assuaged of their sense of responsibility for their actions, and also in part due to the tremendous number of times that the actions had to be carried out. Repetition bred a sense of normalcy.

In the Afterword, Browning addresses another author who has critiqued Browning's work -- Daniel Jonah Goldhagen -- whose work I feel compelled to mention since it directly relates to this book.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is studying modern history, sociology / psychology, or WWII, but keep in mind that it is extremely graphic and very, very hard to read -- not because of the language used, but because of the events that Browning so meticulously describes.

When the Second World War ended in Europe in May of 1945, some six million Jews had been killed in what the Nazis termed the Final Solution. In its barbarity, the Final Solution is unprecedented in this the history of Western civilization. However, some 50 years after the war, the question still remains: what type of person could carry out this genocide? Christopher R. Browning delves into this aspect of the Holocaust in Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.

Like many other such battalions, Police Battalion 101 was organized for the purpose of policing and pacifying territories captured by the advancing German during the early years of the war in the east. Their role in Hitler's quest for new Lebensraum for the German people was significant. They were, however, a non-combat unit. For this reason, the unit was mostly comprised of men in their forties and those unfit for combat duty.

Browning classifies the men of Police Battalion 101 as being ordinary: he points out that most were conscripted white-collar types from Hamburg and Luxembourg, who, unlike the SS and other German units, were not overtly indoctrinated with Nazi ideology. But, as the reader eventually discovers, regardless of individual variances in belief, the involvement of the majority of Police Battalion 101 in the Final Solution is undeniable.

By mid-1942, Police Battalion 101 was stationed in Lublin District in central Poland. Over the course of the next 12 months they would participate in a series of massacres, deportations, and a lengthy "Jew hunt." The profound psychological transformation that the men of the unit underwent while undertaking these operations is startling.

Some men initially refused to participate in the first killings, with dissension being the norm and, later, an accepted fact even among the officers of the unit. Yet in time most would become willing participants.

By November 1943, the once reluctant Police Battalion 101 would conduct, without hesitation or remorse, massacres at Majdanek and Pontiawa that, in total, took over 30,000 lives.

The majority of the details about the Battalion come from trials held in Germany in the 1960s. Many accounts and testimonies by former unit members were recorded at the time, but Browning admits that their information is limited. He reminds the reader that some 20 years after the fact the participants were in a situation where those testifying could downplay their role by intentionally being ambiguous or forgetful.

"Quite simply," states Browning in the preface to Ordinary Men, "some men deliberately lied, for they feared the judicial consequences of telling the truth as they remembered it. Not only repression and distortion but conscious mendacity shaped the accounts of the witnesses."

Taking this into consideration, Browning's ability to fashion a clear, accurate and consistent account of the horrific conduct of Police Battalion 101 is excellent. Deciphering the ambiguities and willful contradictions made by the testifiers, the author successfully presents the story critically and objectively. The end result is a work that is essential to understanding the perplexing conduct of those supposedly "ordinary men" who participated in the Final Solution.

I came to this book through a graduate seminar on historiography. We were reading "microhistory," that is, the history of single people or events within a limited scope, and while I don't think Ordinary Men fully qualifies, it brought the Holocaust home in a way no other book has. Ordinary Men is an uncomfortable read--uncomfortable because of the grisly events it chronicles, for the terrible acts carried out by the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, but most of all for how "close to home" the book makes those terrible events.

Browning begins his book on the morning of the battalion's first massacre. He then explains how the battalion, mostly made up of older or middle-aged tradesmen from Hamburg, came to be in the Lublin district of Poland and how they were given the terrible tasks that they carried out. The first massacre is terrible--despite Browning's dispassionate, non-exploitative style, I was still upset and disturbed by the continuous, day-long shooting of Jews in the woods.

Through the rest of the book, Browning details the various tasks--guard duty, "Jew hunts," and more than a few massacres--that the battalion undertook, and he also follows the growing callousness of the men to their work. Before the first massacre, the battalion commander had wept and told the men that whoever did not feel up to the task could bow out. Several did immediately, and more quit as the day wore on. But the more massacres in which the battalion took part, the fewer seemed to refuse duty and the more eagerly volunteers were to be found.

Browning concludes his book by attempting to answer the obvious question--why? Why did "ordinary men" voluntarily murder upwards of 30,000 fellow human beings, especially when to refuse carried no penalty? The answer, he shows, lies not only in indoctrination and institutionalized anti-semitism, though those were both forces to be reckoned with, but rather in group psychology, peer pressure, the desire to fit in, and deeply ingrained obedience to authority figures.

The great benefit of a book like this is that, while it rightly condemns the actions of the men who, no matter what pressures were on them, still decided to carry out their orders, it makes clear that this could happen to anyone. Despite their remove in time and space, the Nazis were little different from we "ordinary men" of the 21st century--all we lack is the pressure and the opportunity. If, like myself, you believe all mankind to be capable of any evil, this is old news but still disturbing. But for those who believe man to be inherently good, the implications of Browning's argument are perhaps the most unsettling part of the book.

Highly recommended.