Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

And you thought only the Jewish were persecuted.

Very easy to assume only the Jewish were persecuted, as it's only been well publicized for the past century. But after reading this short book; the reader will eventually easily question, that during those times, how could one be sure that they were only targeting the Jewish based on the rudimentary few nonstandard information collected during this time? (ie. Very few Census records were present during this time.) Can only guess that those persecuting the Jewish during this time period, were very likely using some very rudimentary and very assumptive investigative techniques!

And further more after reading the witness accounts, that many many more were slaughtered without documentation. (ie. Who wants to document their own illegal activity anyways?) I would find it more natural that, those responsible were simply digging holes and dumping, versus spending any time documenting names.

I pretty much concluded after reading this book, Germany was playing a game of tic-for-tat with Poland and others' religious values. This book pretty much centers around the evils of operating within a group, and being or becoming unknowing (or arrogant, uninformative) of the main objective(s) or knowing the real intentions of the leaders. (ie. Slippery slope effect Wikipedia.)

2014.06.12 - Wow. Although I've written this review quiet some time ago and performed some genealogy work since then, seems some people are very opinionated about this conflict even to this date. Although the person providing very recent feedback on my review looks to have deleted their comment (or it was deleted or filtered by the store administrators) it would be nice to see some factual data when providing negative feedback! Eye witness accounts appear to be highly regarded by (most) law. What further substantiates the witness accounts, if I'm not mistaken, is the level of apparent honesty within the witness accounts versus just hearsay.

Prompt and courteous service from the vendor. Book was as offered.

Ordinary Men portrays and explains how it was possible for "good Germans" to become "good Nazis" exhibiting the bestiality that would have reviled all those giants of Germanic culture who could not have conceived that their countrymen have descended so low on the scale horrifying and deliberately evil
behavior. The explanation offered, while cogent and thoughtful, nonetheless defies all reason.

I've read several books elaborating the murderous liquidations in the East, and so Browning's explorations were not especially uncommon, but then the thesis of the book is not to spotlight spectacularly iniquitous atrocities.
The unqualified highlight of this book is the magisterial Afterword where Goldhagen's hysterically tangential indictment against Germany and in particular of course its armed forces, is dismantled. Mr. Browning is an impeccable researcher and scholar.

Had a hard tome getting through this account. I look at the smiling image of one of the assumed shooters on the cover and wonder if his smile came after seeing a posting of the group's 38,000 killings.

Giving this a number doesn't feel right. This book is very well written and morbidly fascinating, but I couldn't bring myself to finish it.
This was assigned as one of the readings for a world wars class, and it seems credible and intelligent. But parts left me so distressed that I was unable to finish sections. It's very much the point that ordinary, every day people can and did cause attrocities, but the common place treatment of action was impossible for me to stomach.
It's a good book, excellently done, but for me it was too disturbing.

I found this book very intriguing due to the claim. I am somewhat well-versed in Holocaust books and had never heard of the reserve police battalion. However some of the shootings credited to them by the author are questionable in my opinion. The idea that the battalion would go from shooting only 6500 to a mass shooting of 45,000 sounds ludicrous. Especially when other sources cite credit to another unit. Also I wished the author had gone into the psychological reasoning behind the men's actions. But he could only do the best he could with the evidence he located. But a good read to anyone curious about what men of the 3rd Reich were like.

Book arrived quickly and in beautiful condition! Book is very intiguing and chilling - it adds a lot of detail that I had not known about, even after studying WWII for years! A++ seller - would love to do business again! Thank you so much!

The author spends far too much effort debunking his academic rival Goldhagen instead of polishing the history. A profoundly disturbing and thought provoking narrative, a sadly compelling read with, unfortunately, a quite distracting squabble in the final chapter.

Book arrived quickly and in beautiful condition! Book is very intiguing and chilling - it adds a lot of detail that I had not known about, even after studying WWII for years! A++ seller - would love to do business again! Thank you so much!

The author spends far too much effort debunking his academic rival Goldhagen instead of polishing the history. A profoundly disturbing and thought provoking narrative, a sadly compelling read with, unfortunately, a quite distracting squabble in the final chapter.

The Nazi "ordinary men" who did the work of killing the Jews is a powerful story. It goes to show that in the right circumstances ordinary men could do this kind of dirty work. It could happen here, but not for the Jews, but for us white ant-Obama conservatives.

Christopher R. Browning, in his book ORDINARY MEN, describes the atrocities committed by a German Reserve Battalion 101 in occupied Poland during World War II. It is very dismaying to read how a unit of five hundred ordinary, middle-aged, conscripted reserve policemen, became brutal murderers of thousands of Polish Jews. It is indeed repugnant to read how 700 Jews had been collected, pushed into a synagogue, gasoline was poured at the entryways and then a grenade was tossed into the building, igniting an inferno.

I had been a captive in camps for three years. 123 members of my extensive family were murdered, because of an evil Hitler and his cohorts. Nazi laws defined me; a Jewish boy a as a son of a lame people; as genetically subhuman. I experienced and witnessed Germans routinely looting, deporting, beating, torturing, shooting and hanging. The perpetrators carried out those atrocities with impetuosity and enthusiasm; they didn't cringe. I saw many German guards evincing pleasure (shadenfreude) when seeing us, captives, suffering. Hatred against my people prospered because the German civilians and military had been incessantly indoctrinated by Hitler and his cohorts, like Joseph Goebbels. I believe that diversity is a virtue, in faith as well as race. . Love for fellow man can conquer evil, but the Nazis' motto was love hatred. Poland, my native land, is saturated with blood, of millions of innocent Jewish victims and others, shed by the German invaders.

ORDINARY MEN was published in 1992. Today, the Holocaust is rarely discussed and seldom taught in many countries. In the United States teaching the Holocaust is mandatory only in six States (CA, FL, IL, NJ, NY & PA). I am unable to forget the dark landscape; I am unable to cross the river of grief. I still carry the physical and mental scars of the Holocaust every day; it is out of sight but never out of mind. Physical pain is a personal burden; it can't be shared with others. The emotional pain inflicted by the Holocaust should be shared with others. People do express appreciation for my contribution to perpetuate the Holocaust legacy. I am being told that sharing my personal experience in the Holocaust is my moral obligation, my mission.
I am frequently being asked: "where all the German guards sadists? Didn't any German show sympathy for your suffering?" Yes indeed, in my autobiography "From a Name to a Number" on page 46, I mention how a German guard threw me a brown bag with a piece of bread. On page 48, how a German woman risked her life by hiding sandwiches for me. I was aware that some German soldiers refused to be a part of execution squads. It is indeed important to know that any German soldier or policeman who had told his commander that he would like to be excluded from taking part in carrying out the atrocities of his battalion, would be excused and transferred to another unit. This available option is well described in "Worse than War" by Jonah Goldhagen, (page.149): "During the Holocaust no German perpetrator was ever killed, sent to a concentration camp, imprisoned, or punished in any serious way for refusing to kill Jews. Many knew they did not have to kill, because their commanders explicitly told them so. Some men accepted their commander's offer and removed themselves from the task of killing civilians. Nothing happened to them; they were given other duties." In The Good Old Days" we read (page 77) a statement from a policeman: "I was very disturbed by the sight of the execution areas. I therefore refused to take part in the execution. Nothing happened to me as a result of my refusal. No disciplinary measures were taken; there were no court-martial proceedings against me because of it." Still, ordinary Germans murdered innocent Jews by mass shootings, as reflected in "The Holocaust by Bullets" by Father Patrick Desbois. Later on, Jews were murdered by industrial-scale murder, mass gassing. It was not killing, per se, but premeditated murder in both processes. This was not a war between two nations or two ethnic groups; this was an official tyrannical government policy to exterminate the Jewish people. I still cannot make sense of what has happened to me during the Holocaust; I am haunted by its fathomless dimensions of unspeakable atrocities. There is no punishment, no judicial process, no retribution that will bring back to life members of my family and my community. The killing at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, several weeks ago, again breaks my heart. It brings revulsion to my soul drenched in so much pain. On the other hand, I am always stressing the fact that "Every Jew was a victim but not every victim was a Jew. Every Nazi was a German but not every German was a Nazi." The Holocaust is not a graveyard of history; it is living history.

I applaud Christopher R. Browning, a professor of history at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, for his efforts to research and obtain pertinent material from primary sources pertinent to certain events during the Holocaust. ORDINARY MEN is well written. The simple language will let young people understand and absorb. The pictures, in this book, Browning had obtained from several Holocaust Museums, are compelling and self-explanatory. This book is easily readable, informative and engrossing. I intend to recommend ORDINARY MEN during my presentations at schools, churches, libraries etc

Christopher Browning's "Ordinary Men" begins with these three sentences: "In mid-March 1942 some 75 to 80 percent of all victims of the Holocaust were still alive, while 20 to 25 percent had perished. A mere eleven months later, in mid-February 1943, the percentages were exactly reversed. At the core of the Holocaust was a short, intense wave of mass murder." As Browning goes on to explain, "the center of gravity of this mass murder was Poland..." And within the Polish borders of that time, the Lublin District was the principal killing ground, containing the extermination camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, and Belzec. "Ordinary Men" traces the activities of the 500 man Reserve Police Battalion 101 in this area at this time and catalogs in detail the direct responsibility of this unit for the deaths of at least 83,000 Jews.
In the course of his researches in Germany, Browning happened upon the records of the 1962-1972 investigation of Battalion 101 by the Office of the State Prosecutor in Hamburg. Due to the diligence of this "Staatsanwaltschaft", Browning gained access to the interrogations and testimonies of 210 members of Battalion 101, 125 of which provided substantial details of each individual policeman's experiences in the Lublin District in this time-frame. "Ordinary Men" is the fruit of Browning's analysis of these records, and it provides an unusually detailed anatomy of the Holocaust in this time and place from the perspective of its perpetrators. It is a tale of the gradual desensitizing of many of these policemen to the brutalities of their daily "work," though a number of surprising aspects emerge.
Reserve Police Battalion 101 was a unit of just under 500 men in their late 20s, 30s, and 40s (the commander was over 50 years-old) who were thus past the prime fighting age for soldiers and who were consequently assigned to a "police" unit which was responsible for the territory which had already been conquered by the advancing fighting units of the German Army. Many of these "policemen" had served in law enforcement in Hamburg prior to WWII, and a good portion were husbands and fathers.
Browning's narrative shows what was happening where on a local level and is thus important as an historical record of the Holocaust. Among several interesting revelations it is shown that many men of Battalion 101 were sickened by their initiation into mass killing at the execution site of Jozefow in July 1942. Moreover, prior to this action Battalion 101's commander had hinted at the nature of the day's assignment and offered any member the option of sitting out that day's activity without any sanction. A few policemen availed themselves of this opportunity, and a good number later dropped out as the reality of shooting prostrate Jews in the back of the neck at close range set in. The commander himself broke down in tears as the day progressed.
Over the next months the majority of the men of Battalion 101 became inured to this killing so that by November 1942 most had no problem participating in a months' long "Jew Hunt" of small groups of Jews who had managed to hide out in forests or small villages. However, to the end there were those members of Battalion 101 who found ways of escaping killing duty by loitering behind their comrades or feigning illness, and generally these dropouts suffered no real consequences. Indeed, Browning cites the finding by German scholar Herbert Jager "that no one could document a single case [in WWII] in which Germans who refused to carry out the killing of unarmed civilians suffered dire consequences" (pg.192).
In addition to the direct shooting of at least 38,000 Jews, Battalion 101 rounded up and deported 45,000 Jews to the extermination camp of Treblinka, and Browning's narrative provides details of this this as well, including the often multi-day train transports in which the boxcars were nailed shut, no food or water was provided to the Jewish "passengers," while the surprisingly small number of escorting guards of Battalion 101 complained of their butter and sausage rations spoiling.
"Ordinary Men" is indeed a chronicle of a representative cross-section of ordinary, middle-aged, working class German men who were placed at the spear-point of the Holocaust and of how most of these men overcame initial revulsion to become seasoned killers.
This paperback volume of "Ordinary Men" also contains an afterword in which Christopher Browning replies to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 1996 book "Hitler's Willing Executioners." I have not read this book, although I have read a number of Goldhagen's pieces in "The New Republic." To my mind, Browning does a good job of systematically refuting Goldhagen's thesis that anti-Semitism was such a core trait of German history and culture from the Middle Ages that Hitler's Germany was just the natural culmination of this particularly virulent historic German ant-Semitism. Among other points, Browning asks how an eliminationist anti-Semitism so central to a thousand years of German history suddenly, by Goldhagen's own account, evaporates from Germans after WWII?

Christopher Browning sought to find out how the Germans turned into genocidal mass murderers in World War 2. He used as his sample set the post-war testimonies given by men of the Reserve Police Battalion 101 out of Hamburg and placed them against the back drop of official Nazi records of the time. These guys were "ordinary men," who had signed up as a reserve policeman either before the war or to stay out of the war. They just wanted to stick around Hamburg and work there, but like our National Guard, they were needed in Poland, behind the lines, not in combat with the Red Army, to prepare Poland for the expansion of Germany in it's blood purity. Eventually, over the next 16 months, all the men participated in mass murder, facilitating Himmler's Final Solution. Directly, the 500 men of this reserve police battalion, shot to death at least 38,000 Jews. (For all the Holocaust deniers out there, this number is from the Nazi's own records.) Indirectly, they herded onto trains headed to the Treblinka gas chambers and furnaces, another 45,000 Jews.

Browning follows their duty stations and actions chronologically. It was so gut wrenching that I had to take breaks every chapter or so, to breathe and clear my mind by reading another book or watching a movie or a TV show. As I learned from Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder, there were not that many Jews in Germany, but Poland was the epicenter of European Jewry. Most of the genocidal gassing centers were built by the Nazis in Poland. In fact, one reason the gas chambers were needed was that direct murdering demoralized the Germans doing it, up and down the ranks.

The psychological burden was serious and extended even to Bach-Zelewski himself. Himmler's SS doctor, reporting to the Reichsfuhrer on Bach-Zelewski's incapacitating illness in the spring of 1942, noted that the SS leader was suffering "especially from visions in connection with the shootings of Jews that he himself had led, and from other difficult experiences in the east." p. 25

But until those genocidal sites could be brought on-line, men like those of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were given the orders to clear towns of Jews, bring them into the woods, line them up in front of pits dug to receive their bodies, and place the bayonets of their rifles in the right location on the neck for the most efficient kill shot, one at a time, hundreds per town, all ages, all genders, no exceptions. The commanding officer wished he did not have to give such orders to his men, in fact, he even let those who asked the freedom to any assisting job instead of the actual murdering. Despite his own misgivings, he was an ordinary man, he did not want to disobey orders. "He said something like, 'Man,...such jobs don't suit me. But orders are orders.'" p. 58 He was sure what they were doing was wrong, "'If this Jewish business is ever avanged on earth, then have mercy on us Germans.'" p. 58 He knew it was wrong, but acted as if the greater wrong was to disobey the orders. The Final Solution needed absolute genocide, so the reserve police were ordered to go on "Jew hunts" in all possible hiding places, in basements and barns or in hand-dug bunkers in the forests, even in a hollowed out hay stack.

...the "Jew hunt" was not a brief episode. It was a tenacious, remorseless, ongoing campaign tn which the "hunters" tracked down and killed their "prey" in direct and personal confrontation. It was not a passing phase but an existential condition of constant readiness and intention to kill every last Jew who could be found. p. 132

What enables ordinary men to become hunters of other humans, able to converse with them in one moment about shared experiences, some Jews they killed were German Jews who had left Hamburg, before sticking a gun at the back of their heads in the next moment and killing them? Browning discusses some of the theories offered, but he seems to agree with the one I also agree with, and I suspect Iris Chang would have also. She wrote about the same level of cruelty and genocide by the Japanese in The Rape Of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust Of World War II. Chang says the veneer of civilization is thin. I believe we are all subject to our sin nature to one degree or another. Browning quotes the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman.

Bauman argues that most people "slip" into the roles society provides them, and he is very critical of any implication that "faulty personalities" are the cause of human cruelty. For him the exception - the real "sleeper" - is the rare individual who has the capacity to resist authority and assert moral autonomy but who is seldom award of this hidden strength until put to the test. p. 167

We know what happens to courageous people, Jesus, Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Bonhoeffer. Not all courageous people are assassinated, but it only takes a few examples to overpower our moral duty with our will to live, and if not that bad, our will to live comfortably. Courageous soldiers lay on live grenades to save their friends. Courageous people choose to enhance the lives of others at their own expense, quite the rarity. Courage involves tremendous self-sacrifice, which is not ordinary. Browning focuses more on peer pressure, which I consider more the excuse than the ultimate cause.

Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets the moral norms. If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot? p.189

I agree with his implied assertion that most of us cannot. But I think so few of us are able to assert moral autonomy at great personal sacrifice. I thought of my Jewish friends as I read these pages and wondered how many more of them are missing because of the Nazis, and would I be a courageous friend if faced with the choices the Reserve Battalion did? I hope I am one of those "rare individuals."

In 1942 a reserve battalion of Hamburg police -- mostly comprised of unexceptional middle aged men -- was ordered to shoot hundreds of Jews in Poland. Some refused, while the ones who took part in the massacre said it revolted them. The commanding officer spent much of the day in tears. Yet within a year the unit had been involved in several mass killings and found the task easier each time. So what happened? The answer is tawdry and depressing and saps what little faith you might have had in humanity. They shot dead civilians at close range because they were told to, because they were afraid of looking like cowards, because this was war, for a number of reasons that make little sense to us many decades after the fact. Browning makes the point that the men were not pure-bred psychopaths or rabid anti-Semites when the war started, even though they had been exposed to the usual German propaganda. The author's conclusion is that we could all turn into these ordinary men under the same calamitious circumstances. I give the book four stars because in the revised version I have, Browning devotes a long chapter to taking swipes at Daniel Goldhagen, whose Hitler's Willing Executioners is based in part on the same research. This name calling detracts from what is otherwise a powerful book.

An essential book for our times and even more relevant in the era when a cult has formed around an American leader who sits in the Oval Office. The manner in which evil could be rationalized during the 1930's and 1940's is both riveting and repugnant. I read this book when it first was published and the truth within it is frighteningly applicable to today and the separation of children by uniformed officers representing the government. We must never forget and change "never again" to "not today or ever."

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.

This boo, about how one police battalion was turned into a Nazi killing machine, is disturbing. While I do recommend it purely as a way to educate your mind, I would caution against reading it while you are going through any kind of sadness. Ordinary Men is an important Holocaust account. Those who serve in law enforcement and the military are trained to obey and not to question commanding officers. This can be a powerful weapon for bad men in power.

It is almost impossible to understand how a human being, specifically those directly responsible for the mass murdering and deportation of millions of Jews during the Holocaust, could possibly commit such atrocities. Christopher R. Browning approaches this exact question and provides insight into how the men of the Reserve Police Battalion 101 were once ordinary, and were then transformed into the cold-blooded killers that took part in the Final Solution in Poland. Using more than 400 testimonies of the men that were part of this unit, Browning chronicles their assignments and actions from their first task at Jozefow to the Erntefest massacres. These men were middle-aged family men of working- and lower-middle-class background who were considered too old to be of use to the German army. Instead, they were drafted into the Order Police and would eventually be held accountable for the shooting of 38,000 Polish Jews and the deportation to death camps of over 45,000. In Ordinary Men Christopher Browning gives valid arguments proving that these men were in fact ordinary, and provides several logical reasons as to why they would subject to participate in such actions.
Browning is a professor of history at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington and presents no evident biases throughout the course of this book. His research for this topic relied solely on the interrogations of these "ordinary men" that went on during the 1960's, although he warns that these types of sources portray different perspectives and memories. An important aspect of this piece of writing is his persuasion that the men of the Reserve Police Battalion 101 were ordinary for many reasons. Besides the fact that there was no special selection process for the men of this unit, Browning points out that the reservists "all went through their formative period in the pre-Nazi era" and "the majority came from a social class that had been anti-Nazi in its political culture" (Browning 48). Through Browning's evidence there is no reason to doubt that these men were normal, as opposed to the inhuman beasts that the Holocaust might've made them look like. Just before their first killing assignment at the village of Jozefow, the battalion's commander--Major Wilhelm Trapp--allowed any man that felt unable to complete the task to step out and not participate. The recurring question then, is why did most of the men of Battalion 101 continue to shoot Jews when they could've chosen not to?
Christopher Browning suggests many intelligent theories that could explain this question. In his own opinion, Browning believes that the best explanation for the behavior of the willing killers is the urge to conform--and this makes sense. Sure there were other suggestions such as theories of obedience, the persuasiveness of anti-Semitic propaganda, and the shock that the order created. However, the pressure to conform seems like the most logical explanation and Browning backs up this reasoning. A lot of men acted out of fear of alienating the group. Some Nazi criminals claimed that they could not disobey such orders without risk of execution or imprisonment, even though Browning proves this wrong through his research. After the order at Jozefow was carried out and completed, many of the reservists justified their actions by claiming the death of the Jews was inevitable, and it may be possible that a select few of the men actually believed in what they were doing. Nevertheless, when it came down to it most of the men were simply doing what they saw the peer members in their group doing.
After Jozefow, German command started implementing methods that made the killings less personal for the reservists, such as being responsible for the transport of Jews to death camps rather than "on the spot" murder. Psychologically, this reduced the burden on the killers because it seemed harmless when someone else did the actual killing. Also, as the jobs changed and operations grew the men of this unit became accustomed to their roles. According to a review written by Edward Alexander, Browning also "introduces several psychological studies to further his point that ordinary people can be conditioned to do things that they would normally find offensive". Christopher Browning does an extraordinary job accounting for the transformation of the men in Reserve Police Battalion 101, and helps a reader better understand that "we are looking in a mirror at ourselves and not through a looking glass when we read tales of the Holocaust in books like Ordinary Men."

This book bring up many cognitive problems with morality and cultural victory in times of conflict david Livingston smith speaks a lot about it with his book that came out three years ago. It's a book my grandmother spoke to me about in person. Turning young men into followers who don't lead but instead assimilate into a problem that creates a double mental bind. Has an ability to explain some serious dark aspects of the human condition. Yet help prevent it all at the same time. No one is a victim.

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.

It has been very easier for many of the historians and sociologists in the past 50 years to label those that caused the Holocaust as just evil. Certainly they have tried to find motivations behind the atrocities, but for the most part these character studies or even social discourses have just focused on the Nazi leaders or their cronies.
"Ordinary Men" is a bit out of the norm. It is a micro-history of the Final Solution. The author, Christopher Browning, found a Nazi police battalion, stationed in Poland, that was in charge of many of the roundups and executions of Polish Jews. Browning is very careful from the beginning to remind the reader that he intends to understand the "ordinary" men that made-up this battalion, however to understand them does not mean he intends to apologize in any way for their actions. This type of history has been criticized in the past, but for this book the author completes his goal.
This book is necessary, because to understand how a group of men could become cold-blooded murderers. This topic of "ethnic cleansing" is still very alive and well and real today. Hopefully if one can understand how men can be indoctrininated and dehumanized enough that it is acceptible to commit these atrocities and exucutions, then hopefully the practice can be recognized early enough to prevent another despot from committing another Holocaust.
This book is brief enough to be read very quickly. However I recommend taking your time. The author is very meticulous in his use of primary resources. The main reason he chose this particular battalion was simply that there was so many various sources--from letters and reports to court documents. He finally makes use of several psychologist's views and experiments that seem to prove how this type of indoctrinating can take place. He is able to make his point and give his supporting facts concisely and influentially.
The author understands that it is impossible to understand completely the behavior of any human being--in fact he writes that any author who attempts to do so is "indulging in a certain arrogance." In not apologizing for the actions of these men, but still attempting to understand the many of them, he expresses that human responsibility is "ultimately an individual matter." Even under the pressures of career advancement and peer pressure. But he does note in his final line: "if the men of Battalion 101 could become killers under such cicumstances, what group of men cannot?" Indeed.

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."

Christopher Browning has written one of the most important, well researched and written books on the Holocaust and WW II. Browning has a unique gift in that he is an extremely accomplished academic historian that does exhaustive research but also has the gift of making it extremely readable. Browning richly documents the beginnings of the killings in Poland and every killing operation by Police Battalion 101 there after. He also doesn't get caught up in the "numbers" game, so often the sheer numbers of killings can overwhelm a reader and they lose their meaning and focus that each one of those deaths was a human life, with a family and friends. Browning exhaustively documents the numbers killed, but does it in such a way that I believe a reader doesn't "lose themselves" in the numbers. Finally, Browning definately accomplishes his goal of proving that each man of Police Battalion 101 was "just like us" and not some evil abberation of nature. He shows the feelings of the men about each killing operation they are involved in and how some of the men refused to participate, correctly believing the whole operation evil. Browning shows the lengths that many of the men, unwilling to back out, went to to be able to block out what they did, using alcohol as their primary means of escape. They knew what they were doing was evil, they just refused to stop. Even the photograps provided tell a story in themselves, in one of them several members of the battalion are facing the camera, one of them actually has a smile on his face as they're driving Jews off to be killed. For those interested in the beginnings of the "Final Solution" this book is a great place to start, not that overreaching, under documented, badly written unscholarly piece of trash written by Daniel Goldhagen. Additionally, Browning has a new afterward in his book as a response to Goldhagen, it's an education in itself.

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's _Ordinary Men_ deserves the acclaim it has generated during the years since its publication. It is a lucid, probing, and careful account of how a group of Order Police from Hamburg were transformed, in the course of only days, into committed perpetrators of genocide. Contrary to a common assumption, even within the field of Holocaust studies, Browning's book does _not_ provide an overall explanation of what motivated Holocaust perpetrators. Rather, the focus on Battalion 101 and its very particular history allows Browning to exclude or minimize a number of the factors most often cited in work on perpetrator motivation and, in essence, to see what is left. For Browning, what especially is left are certain forces toward group cohesion--what he puts under the rubric of "conformity"--that emerge as most central in his explanation (although not to the exclusion of other factors, particularly the brutalization of war itself, German military culture, careerism, racism, and more).

What remains unknown is the degree to which Browning's findings for Battalion 101 are generalizable. That is, this particular case has enabled him to hightlight an explanatory dimension that we might otherwise have overlooked. But whether what Browning calls "conformity" plays an overriding role in other contexts of Holocaust killing--or in mass murder more generally--requires far more study than this volume provides. To its enduring credit, it has inspired key work in that direction, some of which complements its own findings and some of which does not.

By the way, the the store review is incorrect in saying that this book is based on Browning's own interviews. It is entirely based on court records and desposition, not any interviews Browning conducted personally.

The recent version of this book has an Afterword by the author which is a specific rebuttal of Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, which was based on much of the same research material used by Browning. I think Goldhagen's book is now generally accepted as sensationalist, highly selective and deeply flawed but Browning's criticism of Goldhagen's misinterpretation of the both the source material and Browning's work do a pretty thorough demolition of Goldhagen's thesis, if one were still needed.

This slim book is, in Browning's normal fashion, meticulously researched and lucidly, if somewhat drily, written and was/is a benchmark piece of work in understanding what enabled 'ordinary' Germans, in the context of their times, to carry out multiple acts of mass murder.

I would particularly agree with the comments of one reviewer that despite Browning's research and analysis, no one Great Answer emerges: the gap in our understanding is closed but not altogether eliminated. As more research of high quality emerges on the Nazi era, many issues have become more complex rather than less.

In terms of related reading which attempts to address similar issues I would also recommend David Cesarani's excellent recent biography of Adolf Eichmann and Richard Rhodes' somewhat patchy (by his high standards) study on the Einsatzgruppen, 'Masters of Death'. In terms on Browning's own work on the broader topic of the Final Solution, 'The Origins of the Final solution' is highly recommended.

The focus of Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men is how and why could the seemingly ordinary men of Police Battalion 101 shoot and deport Jews as they did, mostly in Poland's version of the Final Solution. He draws on the interrogations of over 100 members of Police Battalion 101 conducted during the 1960s.
Lurking in the background is the commonly held misconception of the perpetrators of the Holocaust as anti-Semitic, Nazis, and sadistic. Browning suggests that what is striking about the men of Police Battalion 101 is their ordinariness. First of all, they were middle-aged (32-48), meaning that they had been exposed to alternative world views because they had been socialized before the Nazis came to power and they had families. Secondly, with the exception of the officers who were career policemen, they were working-class, one of the groups least inclined to support the Nazis. Only a quarter of the group were members of the Nazi party, most of whom were the officers, and only six had been members of the party before Hitler, most of whom had not gone on to much within the party ranks. Thirdly, they were from Hamburg, which was not known for its support of the Nazis. Fourthly, unlike S.S. men, they were not trained killers, but had been selected because they were too old for the army or because they had volunteered to avoid the draft. Seemingly then, their age, class, region, and reason for selection suggest ordinariness and no indication that these men would become mass murderers.
Nevertheless, we learn that almost all of these men were involved in shootings and deportations to Treblinka. What is most shocking is that on several occasions commanding officers like Major Trapp offered them chances to withdraw themselves from the murder process. According to Browning, only 10-20% accepted such an offer. According to Browning, the only punishment these men faced was the ridicule of their colleagues. He suggests that the men of Police Battalion 101 knew that people were not punished and were reassured by occasional tearful breakdowns by commanding officers. Browning also suggests that these men had untold numbers of opportunities to remove themselves when not under watchful eyes, such as not pursuing their victims mercilessly when scavenging through a forest. Nevertheless, volunteers were always plentiful, even from musicians that accompanied the battalion.
Browning suggests that anti-Semitism and indoctrination had little to do with why the men killed as they did. He goes on to suggest that the amount of indoctrination that the men received was really quite small. Browning also claims that the men of the battalion reported that they were repulsed by the gruesomeness of the killing process. Browning claims that their educational level prevents them from articulating that they were really morally repulsed. In other words, these men were not anti-Semitic, their indoctrination could not have made them so, and they had a lot of problems with what they were doing. So why did they do it? According to Browning, it was pressure to conform.
Browning's case-study approach, i.e. focusing on a specific police battalion, is a refreshing change from the traditional focus on the camps. And some of the individual parts of the book are fascinating, including the Harvest Festival hunt, the person of Major Trapp, the father that turns in his daughter to save his own life, and the Polish husband that chooses to be shot with his Jewish wife. However, there are a number of problems with his work, including its central premise. In hindsight, we can see that perhaps these men faced nothing other than a good deal of verbal abuse from their colleagues if they did not partake in the murders. But, no matter how many people the men saw go unpunished or how many officers they saw in tears, they better than anybody, understood the illogical and unpredictable nature of the Third Reich. In other words, could they really have been confident enough of not been punished to cause them to withdraw in large numbers? Browning relies on the post-war testimony of men who have a pressing interest to downplay their willingness to participate in killing activities and their anti- Semitism. Also, a few hours a week of indoctrination is considerable. The level of indoctrination increases when one considers that just about everything during this time was steeped in anti-Semitic garb. The men may claim that anti-Semitism had very little to do with it and that indoctrination was not a factor, but how can they judge themselves reliably? Not to mention, their enthusiastic participation in search and destroy missions to ferret out hiding Jews and the level of volunteering which characterized this group suggests anything other than an unarticulated moral repulsion. What these men were expressing revulsion at was the blood and guts on their clothes, nothing more. One also has to ask why Browning is unwilling to believe these men when they say that they were repulsed by the gruesomeness and offer his own explanation of moral revulsion, when he is willing to believe them any other time. One also has to wonder how ordinary this group is when many of its leaders were career cops and members of the Nazi Party.
The claim that the men did what they did because of the pressure of conformity is most unsatisfactory. I agree with Browning that it was not a matter of bureaucracy or routine, nor was it a matter of segmentation and depersonalization of the murder process through space. Clearly, the men with brains and guts splattered on them were waist high in the Final Solution. But are we supposed to accept that peer pressure caused men to butcher other men repeatedly, even as they walked with old women and young girls to graves time and time again to shoot them in the back of the head?
There are many weaknesses with Daniel Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners, but his treatment of this Battalion is far more satisfactory that Browning's. There is too much evidence suggesting that these men were enthusiastic murderers.

This book really makes one shiver. I have read a number of books on the holocaust and World War 2 and this book absolute is the rawest of the books covering the genocide. That is not to say the book had a blow by blow account of the methods of killing, but just the history of this group of solders and the off handed way the mass killing was described. The people doing this killing were just normal guys, not unlike friends, family or myself. That is what was so disturbing to me. It is much easier to think that the mass killing was done by some group of homicidal maniacs let out of the asylum and given guns that that is not the case. I do not think I can recommend this book enough; it really gives you a feel for the tremendous crime that took place. You will not be able to stop reading the book until you have completed it.

If I were given the impossible task of sellecting three essential books to help one understand the holocaust, "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalian 101 and the Final Solution in Poland" would be on the list. If there is any doubt in ones mind that the holocaust did or could occur, or more importantly, be repeated, this book will dispell that doubt. No other book, among the scores I've read on this subject, explains the forces within a fascist state which can turn a civilization in upon itself. The reader will see and understand clearly that the average man can be compelled by the political forces around him to revert to savagery for savagery's sake. If the purpose of civilization is to elevate the human condition...here in these pages you will discover the antithesis of civilization. And you will begin to understand how it could have happened....and how it could happen again.

The thesis is darkness lurks in the hearts of men. But I'm not sure it is that much. Remember the comment about the Nazis--the "banality of evil." Reserve Police Batallion 101 fits the definition. Evil isn't interesting. In that sense it isn't even evil. It is simply cruel, stupid, monstrous without insight or knowlege. As interesting and as evil as a meat grinder. But the Jews were the meat, and the men of the police batallion were the motor that ran the grinder.

Some of the reviews compare the German policemen to the Americans against the Japanese in WWII or in Viet Nam.

Big difference, I would say, between a caculated, deliberate plan to exterminate a race, men, women, children, virtually all non-combatants, and ferocity in war against an armed enemy

The power of "Ordinary Men" is its ability to convey the magnitude of the Holocaust by recounting the activities of a single battalion of German policemen stationed in eastern Poland in 1942-43. Browning keeps his focus on the atrocities committed by this 500-man battalion, without straying to discuss related parties or neighboring geographies. Far from creating a myopic study, this focus serves to underscore the breadth of the Nazis' extermination program during the Second World War. The key strengths of the book are Browning's careful research of German judicial archives from the 1960s, as well as his balanced interpretation of the battalion's crimes and of humanity's capacity for committing organized mass murder. The main shortcoming is that the author's analysis is saved almost entirely for the last chapter, rather than accompanying the relevant passages. This creates a dichotomy which is only a minor drawback to an otherwise extraordinary historical work.

Drawing extensively on primary source material, including transcripts of investigations and war crimes trials, Browning asks how "ordinary men" could have carried out the horrific acts that are described in his book in such detail. His answer is disturbing, because he avoids facile generalizations that would provide a comfortable psychological distance between "us" and "them." Browning convincingly shows that the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were in many ways like the rest of us, both strong and weak, evil but also at times conscience-stricken and conflicted, men caught up in the events swirling around them during the Nazi invasion of Poland, who were personally responsible for their part of that maelstrom. This brings us uncomfortably close to these ordinary men and those events, with its implication that the real danger is the one that lies within. Browning's book is troubling, very compelling, and an important contribution.

This book is difficult to read for two reasons. The first is the large amount of statistical information given and the second is the harsh descriptions of the murder of the Jewish people. If you can get passed these two things this is a great read. It's very informative and give you a different view of the Final Solution that was carried out by the Nazi regime. It follows a group of middle aged men who are part of the German Police Battalion. These men were ordinary people who through some transformation were turned into mass murders. This book looks at what occurred to cause these changes in men who other wise might have never harmed another human being. How could a ordinary German postal worker or school teacher be convinced to kill innocent men, women and children face to face? This book attempts to answer this question. I must warn you it gets quite graphic in some parts so read at your own discretion.

This is a shocking account of how ordinary middle-aged men from Hamburg who were not in the main fanatical Nazi's became para military policement and then supported the SS by acting as death squads and deporters of Jews in Poland. It reveals how the dark side of human nature can come to the fore and how unresistant to authority most people are. The only reason I have given it four stars rather than 5 is that I feel it is dissapointing that Browning did not seek to interview some of the perpetrators and relied solely on the pre-trial statements they had made although these statements and Brownings meticulous background research are very revealing. I would recommend this to anyone interested in the Holocaust or the Second World War. The awful thing is that most of Battallion 101 probably were just ordinary men, living in terrible times. A few resisted, a few were sadists but most just went along.