Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

"Ordinary Men is a real classic of Holocaust and genocide studies. Christopher Browning is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina. He examines the history of the Hamburg Reserve Police Battalion 101 – as reconstructed primarily from the later trial materials of its members – and demonstrates that these individuals who committed mass murder were not necessarily vicious racists or active Nazis. They were mostly apolitical, middle-aged men of working class background who, on the whole, were not heavily influenced by Nazi propaganda. On the eastern front, a small minority even chose not to kill Jews and suffered no punishment as a result. But the overwhelming majority gradually became accustomed to their tasks of conducting mass murder and participating in the Holocaust. The essential lesson of Ordinary Men is that genocide is not the exclusive preserve of fanatics, racist thugs and homicidal maniacs. It is part of the human condition, especially of humans living in society. It is far too easy to go along with authority and social norms, even when undertaking morally reprehensible deeds, rather than to refuse to participate – despite the fact that, as in the case of Reserve Police Battalion 101, it was unlikely that punishment would accompany a refusal to comply. This kind of conclusion is backed up by earlier social-psychological studies, like the Milgram experiment at Yale and the Zimbardo experiment at Stanford. The sheer power of authority figures and the need for social conformity among humans can turn otherwise peaceful and humane individuals into aggressive criminals. I have no problem with thinking about Hitler and his chief helpmates as evil men. Their ideology was morally reprehensible and was used to justify their application of German state power to destroy the Jewish people – a criminal act of unprecedented proportions, for which they were responsible."

"It’s horrendously difficult reading because it takes you through the psychological transformation from ordinary, middle-aged men into killing machines, almost. I remember, when I studied history at university, that it was one of the books—out of all the hundreds of thousands of history books out there—that really stayed with me. It was so vividly written. We know a lot about the Holocaust and how it happened but less about what the killers themselves felt about what they were doing. And understandably it has been quite a taboo topic. In the book, there are descriptions of these men shooting people at close quarters. They end up with brains and blood on their faces. 20% of their battalion drop out because they found it too distressing, but 80% percent carry on. Browning talks about how they drank a lot of alcohol to keep going. There’s some comfort to be had in knowing that this behaviour didn’t come naturally in some way. Alcohol was a crutch that they needed to get through. It’s one of those things we wonder about the Nazis and the Holocaust—are these people other from us or are they just humans too? And Christopher Browning gives them a very human face. I had a student who was quite disengaged and wasn’t sure whether he’d made the right choice studying history. He did an essay on the Holocaust and he read this book. It was a defining moment. He wrote me a letter, at the end of his degree, to say thank you. He cited this book as the reason that he carried on doing history. I think that’s a question that runs through all the projects that I’ve done—what would you have done in the situation? If you grew up in Nazi Germany, what would you have done? Obviously, the state had set up a system that made it very hard to resist. There were great costs to doing so. They tried to make people feel powerless to resist. The way Browning brings that to life and breaks it down to the nitty gritty of day-to-day life is both vivid and moving. I’m not sure there’s just one, that would be a bit simple. But he shows just how much Nazi propaganda was effective in dehumanising Jews. When Germans talked about a Jewish neighbour, or the doctor, or someone that they knew, they talked about Jews in normal, friendly terms. But then there was “the Jew”—this theoretical monster that was an enemy of the German people, who was going to be responsible for the destruction of Germany if they didn’t get there first. That was very effective and it was media-controlled. You can see how subtly the state managed to drip feed anti-Semitism in a dehumanising fashion. That was the real point, when you follow these average middle-aged men and their descent."

"This was a book written by Christopher Browning who now teaches at the University of North Carolina. Chris found a collection of documents that were testimonies given at a trial of a group of German police and they talk about their role in the murder of eastern European Jewry. One needs to know that with the invasion of Russia, in the summer of 1941, the Nazis organised a new form of violence, and they called them Einsatzgruppen . There were four groups of men. They were not volunteers, they were assigned to these units. The largest group was a thousand men and there were three slightly smaller units, a total of 3,000 men. And their orders were very simple – to go in right on the heels of the Wehrmacht [the German army], as the Russians retreated and the Nazi army moved forward. They were to go into the large towns first and then the smaller communities, round up all the Jews and murder them. Initially, the order seems to have been for Jewish men, but very soon after, on the direct order of Heinrich Himmler, it turned to the killing of women and children as well. These groups went literally from town to town, rounded up the Jews and either shot them or put them in the synagogue and set it ablaze. Or, for example, as they did in Vilnius in Lithuania, they marched them outside the city, to the wooded areas, made them dig large trenches, lined them up, shot them, then the next group had to go in, get shot, lie down on the first group, and slowly you have a pyramid effect of bodies on bodies. Then it would be covered over. So this murder – which took about a million and a half lives over 18 months – was primarily carried out by these four groups. But they were not alone. They had assistance, both from the Wehrmacht, (though the army would deny it for many years) and from various police battalions. There were local police battalions – Lithuanians, Ukrainians, etc. But other battalions came from Germany, what were called ‘order police’. So this group that Chris Browning wrote about was Order Police Battalion 101. And they describe the extraordinary behaviour that they participated in. Now the reason this is such an important book and raises deep questions is that when you study the Holocaust you ask almost immediately: How could people do this? How could men who had their own children, go out and murder other children? How could men who are fathers take children and smash their heads against a wall? Or husbands take women and rip open their wombs and kill their infants and shoot them behind the ear? So the Browning book raised that question in a very, very strong and powerful way, based on firsthand testimony. He also tries to offer a series of explanations of human behaviour that are more controversial. The story of this battalion was then picked up by Daniel Goldhagen, who wrote the book that caused such an enormous stir, Hitler’s Willing Executioners . That was probably the greatest stir in Holocaust publications since Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. Goldhagen laid the charge against Germans, specifically, of possessing what he called an eliminationist anti-Semitism at the very heart of their character, of their culture, of their society. And that, of course, raised issues of collective guilt, and, also, is there such a thing as a national identity? It set off an enormous controversy in Germany and elsewhere. So the two books together that took the same set of documents as their central evidence, are a vital part of the debate today about the Holocaust, over the behaviour of the murderers. Browning goes through different explanations and I agree with a lot of things, and I disagree with a lot of things. There’s the old explanation that people just follow orders. There have been various experiments done since World War II, especially by a man named Stanley Milgram at Yale, where he experiments with his students to see how far they will go just to get an A in a class. And then there are various discussions by social scientists and others about brutalisation of people in times of war, how values change. And then you get those who emphasise the force of indoctrination and anti-Semitism: that’s the Goldhagen explanation. Browning himself put a lot of weight on the issue of peer pressure. The people in these groups were given the opportunity to step out and not participate. But almost no one did, because they were afraid of being called cowards and losing the respect of other people in the group. Browning puts a special importance on that psychological element, that people are very conformist, very afraid of stepping out and being seen as saying no to the group. Goldhagen found that explanation much too tepid for a crime like this and focused on the profound importance of ideology. So these are the debates that have been going on and I happen to think that ideology was probably more important than Christopher Browning gives it credit for. You don’t have to wait for the Rwandan genocide. Already 200 years ago Hegel referred to human history as a slaughter bench. We have had mass crimes and violence and killing of the innocent since the time of Cain and Abel. What is special about the Holocaust is not that you have violence and killing, but that the core is an ideological drive to make a complete extinction of an entire people. That seems to me to be the central and uniquely ideological element in the Holocaust. “What is special about the Holocaust is that the core is an ideological drive to make a complete extinction of an entire people” So you have to murder all Jewish children, you have to murder all Jewish women who might give birth to Jewish children, you have to forbid all women from being pregnant and if they are pregnant you have to murder them. If by some miracle they give birth, you have to murder the baby immediately. That is something you don’t find anywhere else."

"Browning famously wrote, and here I’m paraphrasing, “If the men of Police Battalion 101 could become killers, what group of men could not?” The takeaway from reading this horror-filled book is that depredations on the scale of those that Browning describes can be perpetrated anywhere and by anyone. Using first-hand accounts and official records, he describes how 500 ordinary men, Germans unfit for the draft, are given a mission to liquidate all the Jews in a village as well as an opportunity to excuse themselves. The vast majority chose to shoot innocent women and children. Over the next two years, they ended up murdering tens of thousands of people. This relates to my worldview in the sense that humanitarian interventionists are guided by the conviction that “never again” should we allow horrors of the type depicted in this book to repeat themselves. Certainly not if we have the means to prevent it and at acceptable cost. The Holocaust looms large in American foreign policy. Unlike during World War II , when we were otherwise consumed, America now has the power to stop slow-motion slaughters. The Holocaust is always part of the debate when American humanitarian intervention comes up. “The Holocaust is always part of the debate when American humanitarian intervention comes up.” Some people attribute that to the over-representation of Jews in American foreign policymaking. But I think the Holocaust stands as an example for non-Jewish and Jewish Americans alike, of what should never be allowed to happen on America’s watch."

"When I started my interest in this area, I wanted to look at people who had killed in the context of war or political regimes—men, of whom nobody would say that they were mentally ill, and yet their killing was bizarre and extreme. Hitler’s solution to the ‘Jewish question’ was to eradicate all the Jews in Europe. I might say, of the many odd and dreadful things about the Nazi regime, one of the oddest things is that Hitler was still so so keen on getting this done during a war, which he was fighting on a number of fronts. In the middle of that, he invested a lot of time and effort into killing a subgroup of his own citizenry. This book, which is, Christopher Browning’s study of the interrogation of a battalion of German soldiers sent to take part in the ‘final solution’ in Poland in 1942, is quite astounding in terms of what he found out about ‘ordinary’ human cruelty and viciousness. “These ordinary men participated in absolutely brutal slaughter of completely innocent people” By 1942, the Germans had invaded and were occupying Poland. The German High Command sent a battalion of German soldiers, most of whom had not seen active combat before, to exterminate Polish Jews. These soldiers were not career solders. They were planning to return to their ordinary careers after the end of the war. Yet they were drafted in to kill people in cold blood—thousands and thousands of people. They weren’t investigated until about twenty years after the end of the war. Christopher Browning studied the notes of the interrogations, and what those interviews reveal is something really odd and unsettling. These were ordinary men, as the title suggests. Yet they participated in absolutely brutal slaughter of completely innocent people. This wasn’t even in the context of organised war. They found it very difficult to begin with, but gradually, over the next year or so, they became more accustomed to doing it. What makes it so interesting is that there were really three different groups among these men. Around 20% of them simply refused to do it. They just wouldn’t do that. There was another, maybe, 40% or so who would do it but were ambivalent. They said, well, it’s part of what we are here to do. We have to do it. Then there were the remaining 30% or so who enjoyed it. They were the most brutal. I’m not sure we can generalise like that; partly because it’s not clear whether those men were like that when they were recruited. What Browning was really exploring is what the process of killing does to people. He explores in enormous detail the different motives that might make it possible for people to kill in this particular context. It is one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read. But it is an essential read for anyone interested in political violence, or how people make it alright for themselves to do terrible things."

"The other book I always recommend (and even gave my husband for Christmas one year) is Ordinary Men by historian Christopher Browning . I’ve written about it on the book page linked there, so click for more information, but it looks at the question of how a group of middle-aged men, most not even Nazis, ended up perpetrating some of the worst crimes of the Holocaust. At the end of the day, that seems to me the fundamental question of World War II, how human beings could do such things to one another, and how to keep an eye on the present so that it never happens again. Where was my mother during all this? She should have been safe in Turkey which, after the disasters of World War I, had successfully managed to stay neutral in World War II. Unfortunately, some time after Hitler came to power, her father had taken strongly against some of the things being taught at the German school in Istanbul. It started with a geography book that depicted Holland as part of Germany. When students started having to Sieg Heil , it was the last straw. In 1939, a year before the Netherlands was occupied, my mother and brother arrived in Haarlem in northern Holland to continue their schooling, boarding with a family. As Rotterdam was bombed and the Netherlands surrendered to Hitler, my grandmother, back in Turkey, was devastated. The Netherlands had been neutral in World War I, but this time around, it would not be spared. According to the family story (and as with many family stories, perhaps not entirely true), my grandmother, who had a reputation for turning men’s heads, had known a German staff officer stationed in Istanbul just after World War I called Joachim von Ribbentrop. She now asked his help to get her children out of Holland and back to safety in Turkey. He was happy to help, but my grandfather was opposed. Some German soldiers went around to check on my mother, but she stayed in Holland and would not see her parents again till after the war. It was now the winter of 1944, and because of the outcome of the Battle of Arnhem, northern Holland remained occupied by the Germans. That was Holland’s ‘hunger winter’ , when many people starved to death and ate tulip bulbs to survive. By then, Anne Frank was in a concentration camp. On May 22nd, 1944, she had pondered whether or not Holland would be rescued. “What obligations do the British have towards us? What have the Dutch done to deserve the generous help they so clearly expect?” It was too late for poor Anne, but in the end the Allies did come to the rescue of the Netherlands. On May 5th, 1945, Holland was finally liberated, almost five years to the week after the country had surrendered. That summer, my mother saw her parents again, for the first time in six years. My father took a bicycle and went cycling around France. They would meet five years later, when both were at university."