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

This work is primarily about the role of "ordinary" middle-aged German citizens in the murder of Jews. To his credit, and unlike most educational Holocaust materials, Browning does not limit himself to a purely Judeocentric approach to the Holocaust. For example, he also discusses the role of Battalion 101 in the murder of considerable numbers of Polish Christians.

Browning is also careful to screen-out attempts by the German killers to shift the blame for their criminal actions on the Poles: "...the greater the share of Polish guilt, the less remained on the German side." (p. 155). He is also irked by the newfound morality among the German defendants relative to wartime Polish conduct: "The same cannot be said for most others who accused the Poles of `betrayal', never mentioning that it was German policy to recruit such people and reward such behavior." (p. 156).

All in all, Browning departs from the usual simplistic anti-Polish bias of much popular-level Holocaust material. Charges are sometimes leveled about Poles killing Jews, and these accusations are made in a complete contextual vacuum of the actual events. In his FEAR, for example, Jan T. Gross has quoted Browning on Polish killings of fugitive Jews, while leaving out the reason for this conduct. Browning wrote: "Many other Poles volunteered information about Jews in the woods who had stolen food from nearby fields, farms, and villages in their desperate attempt to stay alive." (p. 126). However, Browning could have added that the German policies had reduced the food rations of Polish gentiles to near-starvation levels, so the Poles ALSO faced a "desperate attempt to stay alive." Not surprisingly, Poles saw robbery as a life-and-death matter, and the widely-disseminated German propaganda that portrayed fugitive Jews as bandits (who should be denounced or liquidated) found credibility among parts of the Polish peasantry.

Jan T. Gross, in the wake of the Jedwabne "revelation", has quoted Browning as evidence for the eagerness of Poles to kill Jews. It was the exact opposite. The Germans found so few Poles willing to kill Jews that they were forced to turn to other eastern European nationalities and to bring them on Polish soil. Browning wrote: "Unable to satisfy his manpower needs out of local resources, Globocnik prevailed upon Himmler to recruit non-Polish auxiliaries from the Soviet border regions. The key person on Globocnik's Operation Reinhard staff for this task was Karl Streibel. He and his men visited the POW camps and recruited Ukrainian, Latvian, and Lithuanian `volunteers' (Hilfswillige, or Hiwis)..." (p. 52). Also note that: "...large units of murderous auxiliaries--the notorious Hiwis--were not recruited from the Polish population..." (p. 158).

However, the acts of non-Germans in the Holocaust should not be exaggerated. The Holocaust was a uniquely German invention and project, and such things as locals' anti-Semitism and degree of collaboration played a small role in the degree of German success in exterminating the local Jewish population. See the Peczkis review of The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior.

Despite the wartime privations, many Poles did sacrificially assist the fugitive Jews. The men of Battalion 101 seldom mentioned the latter, but Browning corrects this bias (p. 155), and points out the systematic German murder of Poles who aided Jews. (pp. 156-157).

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

This detailed and harrowing study of a single group of mostly middle-aged policemen from provincial Germany has achieved classic status among histories of the Holocaust. Far from being demonic and hate-filled sadists, most of the group had no history of anti-semitism or of far right politics. Browning explores the motivation of these men and the horribly familiar mechanisms of man-management and group solidarity that reduced a team of "ordinary men" into a bestial instrument of madness. It is a book that offers no comfort to those who seek to explain the Holocaust in terms of German exceptionalism, but it is a significant contribution to the history of World War II.

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

Shocking as it is, this book--a crucial source of original research used for the bestseller Hitler's Willing Executioners--gives evidence to suggest the opposite conclusion: that the sad-sack German draftees who perpetrated much of the Holocaust were not expressing some uniquely Germanic evil, but that they were average men comparable to the run of humanity, twisted by historical forces into inhuman shapes. Browning, a thorough historian who lets no one off the moral hook nor fails to weigh any contributing factor--cowardice, ideological indoctrination, loyalty to the battalion, and reluctance to force the others to bear more than their share of what each viewed as an excruciating duty--interviewed hundreds of the killers, who simply could not explain how they had sunken into savagery under Hitler. A good book to read along with Ron Rosenbaum's comparably excellent study Explaining Hitler. --Tim Appelo

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Customer Reviews

The book never showed up - rmarflir2013 -
The book I ordered never showed up, and I ordered it more than 30 days ago (I think 35 days to be exact).

the purfect way to get school books - Ruth C. Douglas -
I would so much rather get all my text books used. Usually you get some useful insights from their marginalia. My luck was out this time, though- the person underlined stuff and wrote what they underlined in the margins! This was a lot easier to read than Cannibal Island, which has a way better title.

A look at Ordinary Men - Walter Zapotoczny - Los Barriles, B.C. Sur., Mexico
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

Everyone must read this book - -
If I were teaching a class on any topic, this would be part of the curriculum.

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Sunday, September 5, 2010