“Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland”, by Christopher R. Browning

271 pages, Harper Perennial, ISBN-13: 978-0060995065

How does a group of average men become brutal killers in a short period of time? This issue has been talked about, examined, tested and retested by men of science, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, to say nothing of historians, political scientists and other people in the field of the social sciences, but the answers have always proven rather unsatisfactory. Where these men born this way? Did these men just cave in to peer pressure? Did they really hate the people they killed? In Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland Christopher R. Browning disproves the long-held contention that the holocaust of WWII was the work only of a savage Nazi SS which terrified ordinary Germans into watching the destruction of their Jewish neighbors. The truth is most of the killing was done by ordinary men, like those of the Reserve Police Battalion 101 from the City of Cologne and made up of men too old to have made careers in the Nazi armed services. It was their way of doing their part for the war effort. Browning has tried to shed some light on this issue in this book, and I have to admit that after having read a great deal of material on this topic, his findings in this book really did not surprise me; nor did I get a lot of new information from it – but if you are relatively new to the topic yourself, then Ordinary Men should open your eyes to Man’s inhumanity to Man.

The strongest sections of Browning’s book are when he is narrating the accounts of the men involved and how they went about their various tasks: it is here that he draws out the frailties of the human condition and exposes the thinness of our social and moral belief systems. Concentrating on the how rather than the why makes these sections starkly real (and difficult to read). The cumulative effect is a growing disbelief and despair in the reader, especially as the numbers of men, women and children killed continues to rise unrelentingly, and the final numbers stand to condemn these men for all time. Browning’s moderate functionalist approach exposes the flaws of the Nazi regime and the way it shifted and changed as it built towards the Final Solution, though the idea that this unstable structure provided the main driving force behind the holocaust is less convincing; less convincing, too, is the reliance on Stanley Milgram and his controversial experiments on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale. Yes these men largely reported they were “just doing their jobs” and took their responsibility lightly, but it is a painfully inadequate explanation for the scale and ferocity of the Holocaust or, indeed, the multitude of innocent people the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 killed in Poland.