Christopher R. Browning

Rating:
4.5 Stars

Editors Foreword:

Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of  RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever.

While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition.  

Ordinary Men is a powerful, chilling, and important work with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today. 

Ultimately, the Holocaust took place because at the most basic level individual human beings killed other human beings in large numbers over an extended period of time.

Normality itself had become exceedingly abnormal.

The policemen in the battalion who carried out the massacres and deportations, like the much smaller number who refused or evaded, were human beings. I must recognize that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader—both were human—if I want to understand and explain the behavior of both as best I can.

What I do not accept, however, are the old clichés that to explain is to excuse, to understand is to forgive. Explaining is not excusing; understanding is not forgiving.

After explaining the battalion’s murderous assignment, he made his extraordinary offer: any of the older men who did not feel up to the task that lay before them could step out.

As important as the lack of time for reflection was the pressure for conformity—the basic identification of men in uniform with their comrades

I made the effort, and it was possible for me, to shoot only children. It so happened that the mothers led the children by the hand. My neighbor then shot the mother and I shot the child that belonged to her, because I reasoned with myself that after all without its mother the child could not live any longer. It was supposed to be, so to speak, soothing to my conscience to release children unable to live without their mothers.

The full weight of this statement, and the significance of the word choice of the former policeman, cannot be fully appreciated unless one knows that the German word for “release” (erlösen) also means to “redeem” or “save” when used in a religious sense. The one who “releases” is the Erlöser—the Savior or Redeemer!

activities I already knew many Jews.”15 The resentment and bitterness in the battalion over what they had been asked to do in Józefów was shared by virtually everyone, even those who had shot the entire day.

Like much else, killing was something one could get used to.

On this evening an entertainment unit of Berlin police—so-called welfare for the front—was our guest. This entertainment unit consisted of musicians and performers. The members of this unit had likewise heard of the pending shooting of the Jews. They asked, indeed even emphatically begged, to be allowed to participate in the execution of the Jews. This request was granted by the battalion.

“In summary one could perhaps say that in small actions, when not so many shooters were needed, there were always enough volunteers available.

A number of such shooters were assigned to each grave. Today I can no longer provide details about the number of graves. It is possible that there were many such graves where shooting took place simultaneously. I definitely remember that the naked Jews were driven directly into the graves and forced to lie down quite precisely on top of those who had been shot before them. The shooter then fired off a burst at these prone victims. . . .

I myself and my group had guard duty directly in front of the grave. The grave was a big zigzag-shaped series of slit trenches about three meters wide and three to four meters deep. From my post I could observe how the Jews . . . were forced to undress in the last barracks and surrender all their possessions and were then driven through our cordon and down sloped openings into the trenches. SD men standing at the edge of the trenches drove the Jews onward to the execution sites, where other SD men with submachine guns fired from the edge of the trench. Because I was a group leader and could move about more freely, I went once directly to the execution site and saw how the newly arriving Jews had to lie down on those already shot. They were then likewise shot with bursts from the submachine guns. The SD men took care that the Jews were shot in such a way that there were inclines in the piles of corpses enabling the newcomers to lie down on corpses piled as much as three meters high.

and a minimum estimate of 30,500 Jews shot at Majdanek and Poniatowa,

discretion—under a provision of the 1940 criminal code that governed the trial, so as to avoid the criticism leveled at the Nürnberg trials of applying ex post facto law

The whole business was the most gruesome I had ever seen in my life, because I was frequently able to see that after a burst had been fired the Jews were only wounded and those still living were more or less buried alive beneath the corpses of those shot later, without the wounded being given so-called mercy shots. I remember that from out of the piles of corpses the SS [sic] men were cursed by the wounded.

WHY DID MOST MEN IN RESERVE POLICE BATTALION 101 become killers, while only a minority of perhaps 10 percent—and certainly no more than 20 percent—did not?

As John Dower has noted in his remarkable book, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War,

War, a struggle between “our people” and “the enemy,” creates a polarized world in which “the enemy” is easily objectified and removed from the community of human obligation.

Did any similar policy of selection, the careful choosing of personnel particularly suited for mass murder, determine the makeup of Reserve Police Battalion 101? Concerning the rank and file, the answer is a qualified no. By most criteria, in fact, just the opposite was the case. By age, geographical origin, and social background, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were least likely to be considered apt material out of which to mold future mass killers. On the basis of these criteria, the rank and file—middle-aged, mostly working-class, from Hamburg—did not represent special selection or even random selection but for all practical purposes negative selection for the task at hand.

In short, Reserve Police Battalion 101 was not sent to Lublin to murder Jews because it was composed of men specially selected or deemed particularly suited for the task. On the contrary, the battalion was the “dregs” of the manpower pool available at that stage of the war.

“Nazism was cruel because Nazis were cruel; and the Nazis were cruel because cruel people tended to become Nazis.”

Zygmunt Bauman has summed up this approach as follows: “Nazism was cruel because Nazis were cruel; and the Nazis were cruel because cruel people tended to become Nazis.”

Ervin Staub accepts the notion that “some people become perpetrators as a result of their personality; they are ‘self-selected’.” But he concludes that Steiner’s “sleeper” is a very common trait and that under particular circumstances most people have a capacity for extreme violence and the destruction of human life.13 Indeed, Staub is quite emphatic that “ordinary psychological processes and normal, common human motivations and certain basic but not inevitable tendencies in human thought and feeling” are the “primary sources” of the human capacity for mass destruction of human life. “Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.”

Zimbardo’s spectrum of guard behavior bears an uncanny resemblance to the groupings that emerged within Reserve Police Battalion 101: a nucleus of increasingly enthusiastic killers who volunteered for the firing squads and “Jew hunts”; a larger group of policemen who performed as shooters and ghetto clearers when assigned but who did not seek opportunities to kill (and in some cases refrained from killing, contrary to standing orders, when no one was monitoring their actions); and a small group (less than 20 percent) of refusers and evaders.

Quite simply, in the past forty-five years no defense attorney or defendant in any of the hundreds of postwar trials has been able to document a single case in which refusal to obey an order to kill unarmed civilians resulted in the allegedly inevitable dire punishment.19 The punishment or censure that occasionally did result from such disobedience was never commensurate with the gravity of the crimes the men had been asked to commit.

“ideological justification is vital in obtaining willing obedience, for it permits the person to see his behavior as serving a desirable end.”29

“Race as the Basis of Our World View,” followed the second week by “Maintaining the Purity of Blood.”34 Beyond basic training, the police battalions, both active and reserve, were to receive continued military and ideological training from their officers.

The only other article devoted entirely to the Jewish question, on the back page in December 1941, was entitled “A Goal of This War: Europe Free of Jews.” It noted ominously that “the word of the Führer, that a new war instigated by the Jews would not bring about the collapse of anti-Semitic Germany but on the contrary the end of the Jews, was now being carried out.” “The definitive solution of the Jewish problem, that is, not only depriving them of power but actually removing this parasitical race from the family of European peoples,” was imminent. “What appeared impossible two years ago was now becoming reality step by step: at the end of this war there would exist a Europe free of Jews.”

Question of Blood.”45 A large combined issue in 1943 was devoted to “The Politics of Race.”46 Beginning with the 1942 special issue on the question of blood but above all in the 1943 issue “The Politics of Race,” the treatment of racial doctrine and the Jewish question became very thorough and systematic. The German “people” (Volk) or “blood community” (Blutsgemeinschaft) was comprised of a mixture of six closely related European races, the largest (50 to 60 percent) being the Nordic race. Shaped by a severe northern climate that ruthlessly eliminated weak elements, the Nordic race was superior to any other in the world, as could be seen from German cultural and military achievements. The German Volk faced a constant struggle for survival ordained by nature, according to whose laws “all weak and inferior are destroyed” and “only the strong and powerful continue to propagate.” To win this struggle, the Volk needed to do two things: conquer living space to provide for further population growth and preserve the purity of German blood. The fate of peoples who did not expand their numbers or preserve their racial purity could be seen in the examples of Sparta and Rome.

The partisan struggle is a struggle for Bolshevism, it is not a people’s movement. . . . The enemy must be totally destroyed. The incessant decision over life and death posed by the partisans and suspects is difficult even for the toughest soldier. But it must be done. He behaves correctly who, by setting aside all possible impulses of personal feeling, proceeds ruthlessly and mercilessly.

They were informed of the secret directive for the execution of captured Communists (the “commissar order”)

a vital factor touched upon but not fully explored in Milgram’s experiments was conformity to the group. The battalion had orders to kill Jews, but each individual did not. Yet 80 to 90 percent of the men proceeded to kill, though almost all of them—at least initially—were horrified and disgusted by what they were doing. To break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behavior, was simply beyond most of the men. It was easier for them to shoot. Why? First of all, by breaking ranks, nonshooters

a vital factor touched upon but not fully explored in Milgram’s experiments was conformity to the group. The battalion had orders to kill Jews, but each individual did not. Yet 80 to 90 percent of the men proceeded to kill, though almost all of them—at least initially—were horrified and disgusted by what they were doing. To break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behavior, was simply beyond most of the men. It was easier for them to shoot. Why? First of all, by breaking ranks, nonshooters were leaving the “dirty work” to their comrades. Since the battalion had to shoot even if individuals did not, refusing to shoot constituted refusing one’s share of an unpleasant collective obligation. It was in effect an asocial act vis-à-vis one’s comrades. Those who did not shoot risked isolation, rejection, and ostracism—a very uncomfortable prospect within the framework of a tight-knit unit stationed abroad among a hostile population, so that the individual had virtually nowhere else to turn for support and social contact. This threat of isolation was intensified by the fact that stepping out could also have been seen as a form of moral reproach of one’s comrades: the nonshooter was potentially indicating that he was “too good” to do such things. Most, though not all, nonshooters intuitively tried to diffuse the criticism of their comrades that was inherent in their actions. They pleaded not that they were “too good” but rather that they were “too weak” to kill. Such a stance presented no challenge to the esteem of one’s comrades; on the contrary, it legitimized and upheld “toughness” as a superior quality. For the anxious individual, it had the added advantage of posing no moral challenge to the murderous policies of the regime, though it did pose another problem, since the difference between being “weak” and being a “coward” was not great. Hence the distinction made by one policeman who did not dare to step out at Józefów for fear of being considered a coward, but who subsequently dropped out of his firing squad. It was one thing to be too cowardly even to try to kill; it was another, after resolutely trying to do one’s share, to be too weak to continue.

Nothing helped the Nazis to wage a race war so much as the war itself.

What, then, is one to conclude? Most of all, one comes away from the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 with great unease. This story of ordinary men is not the story of all men.

Everywhere society conditions people to respect and defer to authority, and indeed could scarcely function otherwise. Everywhere people seek career advancement. In every modern society, the complexity of life and the resulting bureaucratization and specialization attenuate the sense of personal responsibility of those implementing official policy. Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?

conclusions of Raul Hilberg’s magisterial and pathbreaking study The Destruction of the European Jews, which first appeared in 1961, that the perpetrators “were not different in their moral makeup from the rest of the population. The German perpetrator was not a special kind of German.” The perpetrators represented “a remarkable cross-section of the German population,” and the machinery of destruction “was structurally no different from organized German society as a whole.”

Anti-Semitism, he argues, varies according to the alleged source or cause (for example, race, religion, culture, or environment) of the Jews’ alleged negative character. It varies in degree of preoccupation or priority, or how important is anti-Semitism to the anti-Semite. And it varies in degree of threat, or how endangered the anti-Semite feels.

they felt more threatened by the Jews than, for example, by the Triple Entente abroad or Social Democracy at home would be a serious distortion. If anti-Semitism was neither the priority issue nor the

The Nazis never gained more than 37 percent of the vote in a free election, less than the combined socialist-communist vote.

As William Sheridan Allen succinctly concluded, even in a highly Nazified town like Northeim, most people “were drawn to anti-Semitism because they were drawn to Nazism, not the other way around.”

1941 two more major factors, the ideological crusade against Bolshevism and “war of destruction,” were added. Is it even plausible to suggest

willingness, and for some even eagerness, to kill Jews? In this regard, it is important to note that before the Final Solution was implemented (beginning on Soviet territory in the second half of 1941 and in Poland and the rest of Europe in the spring of 1942), the Nazi regime had already found willing executioners for 70,000 to 80,000 mentally and physically handicapped Germans, tens of thousands of Polish intelligentsia, tens of thousands of noncombatant victims of reprisal shootings, and more than 2 million Russian POWs. Clearly, as of September 1939, the regime was increasingly capable of legitimizing and organizing mass murder on a staggering scale that did not depend on the anti-Semitic motivation of the perpetrators and the Jewish identity of the victims.

mandated that the Soviet POWs be kept alive and put to useful labor. Nearly 10,000 Soviet POWs arrived in Auschwitz in October 1941 and were sent to Birkenau. By the end of February, four months later, only 945 were alive—a survival rate of 9.5 percent.40 Himmler’s

Nearly 10,000 Soviet POWs arrived in Auschwitz in October 1941 and were sent to Birkenau. By the end of February, four months later, only 945 were alive—a survival rate of 9.5 percent.40

2 million Soviet POWs in the first nine months of the war—far more than the number of Jewish victims up to that point.

handicapped were first gunned down by the firing squads of the Eimann commando before the development of the gas vans and gas chambers, and many infants were simply not fed and left to starve to death.

It is not a matter of contention among scholars that postwar perpetrator testimony is highly problematic; it is shaped both by the questions posed by the investigators and by the forgetfulness, repression, distortion, evasion, and mendacity of the witnesses.

In addition to a multilayered portrayal of the battalion, I offered a multicausal explanation of motivation. I noted the importance of conformity, peer pressure, and deference to authority, and I should have emphasized more explicitly the legitimizing capacities of government. I also emphasized the “mutually intensifying effects of war and racism,” as “the years of anti-Semitic propaganda . . . dovetailed with the polarizing effects of war.” I argued that “nothing helped the Nazis to wage a race war so much as the war itself,” as the “dichotomy of racially superior Germans and racially inferior Jews, central to Nazi ideology, could easily merge with the image of a beleaguered Germany surrounded by enemies.” Ordinary Germans did not have to be “of one mind” with Hitler’s demonological view of the Jews to carry out genocide. A combination of situational factors and ideological overlap that concurred on the enemy status and dehumanization of the victims was sufficient to turn “ordinary men” into “willing executioners.”

Many accepted and internalized the role expectation that soldiers must be though and obedient and carry out state policies regardless of the content of specific orders.78 Soldiers and police can willingly obey orders and implement policy that they do not identify as commensurate with their own personal values, even when not supervised, in the same way that soldiers and police often willingly follow orders and are killed in the line of duty, though they do not want to die. They can commit acts in their capacity of soldiers and police that they would deem wrong if done of their own volition, but which they do not consider wrong if sanctioned by the state.79 And people can change their values, adopting new ones that do not conflict with their actions, thus becoming killers out of conviction as the killing becomes routine. The relationship between authority, belief, and action is not only complex, but it is also unstable and can change over time.

The fundamental problem is to explain why ordinary men—shaped by a culture that had its own particularities but was nonetheless within the mainstream of western, Christian, and Enlightenment traditions—under specific circumstances willingly carried out the most extreme genocide in human history.

Why does it matter which of our portrayals of and conclusions about Reserve Police Battalion 101 are closer to the truth? It would be very comforting if Goldhagen were correct, that very few societies have the long-term, cultural-cognitive prerequisites to commit genocide, and that regimes can only do so when the population is overwhelmingly of one mind about its priority, justice, and necessity. We would live in a safer world if he were right, but I am not so optimistic. I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce “ordinary men” to become their “willing executioners.”

highly nazified, intensively trained and indoctrinated young men. In short, part of the significance of RPB 101 as an illuminating case study is not that it was a typical or representative police battalion, but precisely the contrary. It was atypical in terms of age, selectivity, nazification, training and indoctrination, but nevertheless obtained the fourth highest killing record among all police battalions.

In Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, James Waller sought to explain how “ordinary people” committed “extraordinary evil” through a “four-pronged model.”19 First are innate and universal aspects of human nature that have emerged through the evolutionary process, designated by Waller as ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and desire of social dominance. Second are the factors that shape the dispositions of the perpetrators: cultural belief systems, moral disengagement, and rational self-interest. Third are factors that create an immediate social context: professional socialization, group binding, and merger of role and person. And fourth are factors that shape how perpetrators define or perceive their victims: us-them thinking, dehumanization, and blaming the victim.

According to cognitive dissonance theory, discomfort occurs when people are engaged in activities that contradict their beliefs and attitudes. Particularly when people are in a position that makes it difficult to alter their behavior, they tend to reduce the discrepancy between action and belief by altering the latter through devising justifications and rationalizations for what they are doing. People are more susceptible to this when in a position of “induced compliance” (through subtle pressures like conformity and comradeship) rather than outright coercion.

In addition to the fact that behavior can change attitude, another aspect of the dynamic relationship between disposition and situation is that situations themselves are not static or objective but rather subjective, because they are perceived, construed, and interpreted by the people in them. In particular, Newman notes that through a phenomenon he calls “pluralistic ignorance,” numerous individuals could conform to an “illusory norm” that almost everyone else in the battalion endorsed the killing of Jews, even if most individuals would never have harmed Jews acting on their own. The collective behavior of a group is not simply the sum of its individual dispositions but is shaped by how group members perceive the group as a whole, as well as one another and the situation they collectively find themselves in.

These men, when confronted with the task of the mass murder of Jews, passed through a professionalizing and normalizing process that transformed mass murder into “work.” Many of them considered their “work” unpleasant but nonetheless a necessary historic task about which they did not feel guilt either then or later.

“Nothing makes people stick together better than committing a crime together,” Kühne noted.