The shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews.

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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.

98 of 113 found the following review helpful:

Ordinary Men, Extraordinary MonstersJul 29, 2002
By R. J Szasz "Rod Szasz"
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.

21 of 23 found the following review helpful:

May the Force be with USMay 14, 1998
By Dr. Frank Stech
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."

13 of 13 found the following review helpful:

A look at Ordinary MenDec 10, 2009
By Walter Zapotoczny
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



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