Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland is a nonfiction account of the genocidal journey of a police battalion conscripted into Hitler’s Final Solution, mostly from first-hand accounts of the men themselves (from their interrogations when they were put on trial in the 1960s). The term “ordinary men” refers to the types of men they were before they became part of the war effort. Many (if not the majority) were cigarette salesmen, bakers, metropolitan police officers, and bankers. They were middle-aged men deemed too old to be conscripted into the regular army. In short, they were not the kinds of people you might expect would go on to become mass-murderers.

The first mass murder takes place in a Polish town called Jozefow. The commander of the unit was teary-eyed and choked up when he gave the order to his men. Accounts hold that he even gave them a way out, stating that if any man didn’t think they were up for the challenge (of murdering thousands of Jews on that day), they were free to step down. About twelve men (among hundreds) decided to step down and opt out of the killing. As a side note, these are the men we should really be studying, because if every man had their courage, we may have avoided the Holocaust altogether. Nevertheless, 1,500 Jews were shot in the back of the head and neck that day. Many were killed on the spot, and many were gravely injured, but left in the mass grave to suffer a slow, more painful death, being suffocated by their friends and family as they fell on top of them.

The book follows the battalion through other such mass killings, Judenjagd (“Jew Hunt”) in the Polish countryside, and their participation in gathering up and deporting Jews to Treblinka (a literal death sentence). Ultimately, these bakers, salesmen, and police officers were directly responsible for the deaths of 38,000 men, women and children through mass-shootings, and another 45,200 through collecting people from the ghettos and forcing them onto trains for Treblinka (a Nazi extermination camp).

Browning offers up a variety of reasons that these ordinary men participated in genocide, some more pertinent than others. Among those reasons are deference to authority, psychological need for conformity, fear of a brutal regime, fear of looking “weak” in front of other members of the battalion, detachment from the people they were killing, and indoctrination via the Nazi propaganda machine. None of these individual reasons would have been enough to drive ordinary men to mass murder, but altogether, the reasons became enough for many of them.

“But those who killed cannot be absolved by the notion that anyone in the same situation would have done as they did. For even among them, some refused to kill and others stopped killing. Human responsibility is ultimately an individual matter.” -Christopher Browning via Ordinary Men Chapter 18

While reading Browning’s conclusions, I couldn’t help but think about the conclusions of other men who have grappled with the evil deeds of men. In their own ways, both Jung and Solzhenitsyn tell us that we all have the inherent capability for malevolence. Jung adds that being hyper-aware of that fact is essentially our only shot at preventing us from acting upon it.

“The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn via The Gulag Archipelago

“…inasmuch as I become conscious of my shadow I also remember that I am a human being like any other.” -Carl Jung

Final say: 4/5 stars. This is a very powerful book that is difficult to read at times due to the (necessarily) graphic depictions of violence. If you are at all interested in human nature or World War II, read this book.

I find societal reactions to atrocities and large scale tragedy throughout history to be fascinating, as such I have read many books on genocide and the Holocaust in particularly. While I always find these sorts of thing horrific and evil, they don't surprise me as much as they should because I have become a bit jaded due to my research. Ordinary Men smacked my jaded nature upside the face. Typically a book like this about the Holocaust would take me two to four hours to read and digest. Ordinary Men took three days. It isn't that the actions are more appalling or the descriptions are more graphic, it is just an extremely uncomfortable book to read. The author does an excellent job explaining how men who were once "ordinary" were turned into mass killers without exonerating them for their crimes. I found myself at times ready to weep out of pity for these men while at the same time completely outraged by their actions and cowardice. The most telling passage for me of the complete disillusionment and desperation for some sort of justification of these men was from an incident describing the Józefów Massacre. A man explained that while his friend shot the mothers, he shot the children afterwords, because they wouldn't be able to live without a mother. That bizarre and disturbing rationalization is the central theme of this book. The book isn't just about how ordinary men can do terrible things, it is also about how those same ordinary men try to live with themselves afterwards. A fascinating and disturbing read, I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the subject, but be prepared to be very uncomfortable.

It's easy to write off the Nazis as monsters and psychopaths, even the ones who committed some of the most heinous crimes against humanity. This book is equal parts terrifying and liberating. Terrifying because it shows, especially through empirical studies such as the Stanford Prison Experiment, that we have this murderous program lurking somewhere in our DNA. And liberating because the knowledge of these programs arms us to resist committing horrors.

For example, this book presets graphic accounts of babies being slaughtered, but it presents them in the context of a commander who allowed men to sit out if they were unable to commit such atrocities, and some of them did sit out. By inserting human elements like this (which is really just giving appropriate context), the horrors feel more real, and the reader is challenged to imagine how he or she would react in a similar situation. Our daily choices may not involve murder, but our smaller choices, when aggregated, can amount to similar horrors.

Do you think people are inherently good or bad. Perhaps our desire to adapt and survive in even dire cultures or circumstances is a better way to understand how an individuals civil roles can decay into barbarism. This book touches on that, how a man could abstain from killing unarmed people under orders and then later enjoy the process of hunting defenseless people for the purposes of genocide.

An important book for anyone who is interested in how the mechanics of mass murder on an industrial scale could possibly have taken place. This is a very well researched and written book. Although the onslaught of grim events can be overwhelming at times, the author does a fine job of description without sensationalizing. And, I especially was impressed by the analysis at the end of the book, in which he connects the behaviors of these "ordinary Germans" to research into social behavior performed in later years by Zimbardo, et al. It is important to remember that not all violence is ideologically prompted, but can be the result of peer pressure, authority complexes, and the numbing of violent acts themselves. Valuable reading for students of history, WWII, the Holocaust, genocide, and human behavior in group dynamics.