This review is not for the faint of heart. The topic of the book is a group of 500 men who participated in the holocaust and their actions are depicted up close and personal.
The book is based upon judicial interviews of 125 men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 from Hamburg, Germany. In 1942 and '43 they were stationed in Poland and participated in the killings and deportation of Jews and some Poles. These men were the foot soldiers of the Final Solution. They did the actual killings and loaded and guarded trains carrying Jews to the camps. This is the holocaust up close and personal.
The book is full of very disturbing images of groups of armed men going through a village and selecting and killing all of the Jews in the village. They also put thousands of Jews into train cars nailed them shut and then shot anyone who tried to escape.
As the title says these were ordinary men. They were simply manpower selected from the city of Hamburg and given the task of making a small portion of Poland judenfrei. Their selection for this task was based primarily on their unfitness for combat. Their unit was called a reserve police battalion but they were not policemen.
I am leaving out the gruesome details but there are many very detailed descriptions of the killings and the deportation process. It is enough to say that the unit participated in the killing of 38,000 people and the deportation of 45,200. After the war four of the unit were put on trial in Poland and two of those were executed. Fourteen men of the unit were indicted in Germany a few of whom received very light prison sentences.
After this book was written Daniel Jonah Goldhagen wrote Hitler's Willing Executioners. Part of his book was based upon the same interviews as the author of this book. The author has added an afterword of thirty pages where he discusses Goldhagen's book. Goldhagen's premise was that these men wanted to be willing executioners because of the virulent anti-semitism present in German culture. Browning agrees on some points but sharply disagrees with Goldhagen's premise. It appears that Goldhagen started with his premise and then built the evidence around his theory. I have avoided reading Goldhagen's book because that was also my perception. Goldhagen has been sharply criticized by others as an extremist and a poor historian. On the other end of the spectrum is David Irving, an historian who denies that the holocaust took place. I think the comment in the book which accurately describes the situation was from the psychologist Stanley Milgram. He did a number of studies to assess obedience to authority and concluded " Men are led to kill with little difficulty".
I think the book is an important study and analysis of how the holocaust happened. Unless you want to be informed on that topic I would advise you to avoid it. The images that remain in my mind and the truth about what ordinary people with just a little push will do make the horror stories of H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King seem like child's play. ( )

I picked this up on a friend's recommendation, based on his claim that the Wehrmacht was not separate from the war crimes that went on and that that was mostly a popular myth. The book is a pretty interesting psychological case; Police Battalion 101 is apparently unusually well-documented in terms of exactly what atrocities were perpetrated, with many interviews with members of the battalion. The book pursues the question of how could ordinary men such as this be driven to kill so casually? How could they make it their job? The conclusions were interesting. ( )

Reviewed May 2006

Wow - very intense book, I only read maybe 6 pages before crying then having nightmares. This book along with “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” is the focus of a paper as well as a quiz for class (I got 100%). the two authors battle back and forth in their respective afterwards. In a nutshell Browning feels that Germans killed because of peer pressure and felf pretty bad about it later. Goldburg feels that Germans killed because they wanted to, were given permission and didn’t feel bad about it later. Both authors agreed that antisemitism played a part. Goldburg feels that it played a much bigger role than Browning does. both men also agreed that ordinary men and women did kill with little encouragement. The debate is healthy, an still waging in the Holocaust field of study and amongst Germans. A good argument can be made for each book.

7-2006 ( )

Book details atrocities of German police operations in occupied Poland during World War II. Examines the psychology of ordinary middle-aged conscripts thrown into extraordinary situation. The police unit in question at first is appalled by the murders they are being asked to commit of mostly peaceful jewish civilians. With a few notable exceptions all the members of the unit are drawn into these atrocities--some becoming more willing in time and others doing what they can to avoid. Browning sorts through the court records and interviews and tries to explain the varieties of psychologies at work of those who survived the war. One of the main ideas he posits is that people are capable of much more than they may think--and under pressure from cultural and authoriatarian forces are much more easily manipulated. It's an interesting read and Browning keeps it moving along. ( )

The ongoing debate that the source material used by Browning is still with us. The issue of how the "ordinary" german, rather than the "Nazi" could transform themselves into mass killers, with out being members of the Nazi party, and therefore already motivated to kill "jews". The fact that ordinary men could and did, lies at the heart of the ongoing debate. Just how German are the killers, just how ordinary. The debate is continued in "The Orgins of the Final Solution". ( )