Christopher R. Browning

This is one of the most instructive books I’ve read, not just for what it reveals about the Holocaust, but for what it shows about how history is actually done.

Browning’s explanation of the German police system and the structure of Reserve Police Battalion 101 forms the backbone of the book. By grounding the reader in who these men were—middle-aged, working-class, largely ordinary—he removes the distance that often exists in discussions of the Holocaust. These were not elite show more ideologues, but men embedded in everyday life, which makes what follows far more unsettling.

The most valuable parts of the book for me were:

the breakdown of the police structure
the composition and nature of Battalion 101
and Browning’s final analysis of why these men participated

His conclusion is not simplistic. Instead, it draws on multiple factors—authority, conformity, war conditions, routinization, and the gradual erosion of moral boundaries—to build a framework that explains how such actions become possible without reducing the men to caricatures.

What elevates this book even further are the later sections. Browning’s engagement with criticism from Daniel Goldhagen, and his willingness to revisit and refine his conclusions, offers a rare look into the historian’s craft. The 25-years-later reflection, in particular, shows how historical understanding evolves with new perspectives and continued scrutiny. These sections transformed the book from a historical account into something more dynamic—a study in interpretation, revision, and intellectual honesty.

That said, the detailed accounts of the battalion’s actions became difficult to process. Browning does not sensationalize or dramatize these events; in fact, he presents them in a restrained, almost clinical manner. But the cumulative weight—the repetition, the scale, the numbers—becomes overwhelming. For me, once the pattern was clear, these chapters felt less analytical and more saturating. This is not a flaw in the book, but a reflection of the material itself.

In the end, Ordinary Men is less about the past as a closed chapter and more about understanding the conditions that make such events possible. It does not offer easy answers, but it provides a framework that remains relevant. Not every man acted the same way, and Browning is careful to show that variation—those who refused, those who struggled, and those who participated willingly. That range is essential to understanding both the limits and the dangers of the systems he describes.

This is a difficult but deeply rewarding read—one that teaches not only history, but how to think about history. show less

And another in our continuing series of depressing books: Christopher Browning examines the motivation of a 500 man police battalion assigned to the rear lines of Germany's Eastern Front. This small group of men was personally responsible for the massacre of over 38,000 Jews and the deportation of some 45,000 more to Treblinka. These were not racial fanatics nor committed Nazis. Their motives were quite ordinary: careerism and peer pressure. Browning's book is based on interviews with the show more participants collected after the war.

Not everyone blindly followed orders. The battalion's commander ordered that anyone not wishing to participate in the shootings could be excused and about 12 were. For many of the others rationalization became the order of the day. One later testified he killed only children because his partner was shooting the mothers and he did not think it was right that children should grow up without mothers.
The horrifying aspect of this account is how little it took for these men to become transformed psychologically from "normal" people into willing participants. These were not atrocities one has come to expect from war during the heat of battle (Malmedy, My Lai, etc.), rather an institutionalized, bureaucratic government policy. That bureaucracy may be part of the cause. It distances people from their actions. Bureaucrats never saw the hideous result of their actions, seeing only their small paper-shuffling role.

That still does not explain the actions of the men who were doing the actual killing. Women and children were marched up to graves they had been forced to dig and were shot point-blank in the head. The shooters were even instructed on the best location on the neck to shoot in order to save ammunition. Occasionally the killer would be splattered with brain tissue and skull parts.

There was a deliberate process of dehumanization abetted by Nazi racial policies. In fact, the soldiers found it much more difficult to kill German speaking Jews, especially those who had fled Germany. They saw them not as the barbarians they had been told they were killing. Euphemisms, (protective reaction strikes) were common: killing became "actions" and shipping to concentration camps became "resettlements." Responsibility was diffused by deferring to orders from "above" and dividing the tasks into different parts.

There was a perversion of ethical outlook, too. Those few who were revolted by what they were doing and who refused to participate were called cowards. We need to cultivate a society where those who follow individual conscience are the heroes and those who follow the crowd are the cowards.

As an aside, before my Dad died, I was talking to one of the aides in his nursing home who came from Argentina. We got to talking about my years in Germany and she mentioned her grandfather had emigrated to Argentina from Germany after the war. (Little tiny red flags waving over my head.) I queried if he had been in the German army. Her response was quite unashamedly, yes, he had been in the SS. (Red Banners now waving over my head.) Then she went on to talk about how the victors rewrite history. I decided then I had to visit the men's room. show less

Ordinary Men is, unsurprisingly, a devastating read. Author Christopher R. Browning meticulously chronicles the development of a group of reservist German policemen sent to Poland in World War Two. These were, as the title of the book says, 'ordinary men'; their formative years pre-dated the rise of Nazism; they had families, careers and were often given the sincere option of refusing 'anti-Jewish' orders. These were not the brutal, square-jawed, foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Semites we have show more been led to believe all Germans were. In fact, as Browning says, "By most criteria, in fact, 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" (pg. 164). And yet, for their very first major 'action' in the East, "at least 80 percent of those called upon to shoot continued to do so until 1,500 Jews from Józefów had been killed" (pg. 74). By the end of their tour of 'duty' in the East, the ordinary men of the battalion had directly executed at least 38,000 Jews (and that is a conservative estimate, and one not including non-Jewish Polish 'collaborators' and 'partisans', or village reprisals) and were responsible for facilitating a further 45,000 on trains to extermination camps; a final total of at least 83,000 Jews (pg. 142).

The underlying question of Browning's work becomes frighteningly clear: "If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?" (pg. 189). It is sobering, instructive and deeply chilling to contemplate; it is not for nothing that popular Canadian psychologist Jordan B. Peterson often cites Browning's book when discussing the capacity of regular people for deep malevolence, and how you should take responsibility as an individual and not submit to the one-step-at-a-time path of mindless political or racial groupthink.

Browning is more circumspect with his own conclusions; far from providing a definitive answer on how these 'ordinary men' quickly became such casual mass killers of women and children, he considers all possible factors, from the usual suspects (anti-Semitism, groupthink, coercion, etc.) to more nuanced ones, not discounting the possibility of a blend of all such factors. He offers a "multi-layered portrayal of the battalion" and a "multicausal explanation of motivation" (pg. 216). It is certainly more complex than the 'banality of evil' concept, or mere anti-Semitic sentiment (Browning comprehensively dismantles the arguments of one such proponent of the latter, Daniel Goldhagen, in an extensive Afterword). If the lack of a satisfying psychological conclusion is absent from the work, it is only because Browning is no psychologist but a historian; and in consequence he shows the professional historian's characteristic (and commendable) reticence where facts cannot be completely determined.

Consequently, whilst the book raises far more psychological questions than answers, it is excellent as a piece of reconstructive history. It pieces together obscure events from disparate and sometimes contradictory sources with judiciousness, showing the reader that the Holocaust was even more terrifying than they thought. The narrative is frightening in its implications and its stark reality; the personal details from the massacres are devastating. If the book is a difficult read, this is not only because of its dry academic observations and reproduction of statistics, but because of its lucid descriptions of unimaginable (and sometimes all-too-imaginable) genocidal horror. It is a reality we often shy away from, that world of violence and cruelty; still less do we accept that there are few heroes, and even if we sometimes accept that we could be a victim, very rarely do people acknowledge that they could be a willing perpetrator. The knowledge is almost too much to bear honestly, which is why it is commendable that Browning claims only the role of chronicler rather than pontificator. He claims only the hope that the case "will serve history better than [it has] served justice" (pg. 146). show less

How did the Holocaust happen? Not the antisemitic ravings of Hitler, or the careerist banality of Eichmann, but the physical labor of liquidating the Jews of Poland. Someone had to round up the Jews in ghettos, herd them onto trains to the death camps, shoot the ones who couldn't walk or evaded. Ordinary Men asks what happens to the people who perpetuate a genocide.

The 'someone' in Ordinary Men were the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, about 500 middle-aged, working-class men from show more Hamburg. Most of them had ambitions in local policing, writing traffic tickets, dealing with drunks, and other very ordinary policework. About a quarter were Nazi party members. And while deployed away from home, Poland in 1942 was hardly facing Zhukov's armored shock armies on the Eastern Front. At the start of 1942, they were not by any standards, killers.

That would change. The first massacre was at Józefów in July 1942. It was a fiasco. The Jews of the town were marched into the woods, paired up with Nazis from the 101, and executed with shots to the neck. The men did poorly. Offered a chance to refuse, a handful did. Others dodged behind trucks or otherwise out of sight of NCOs. Major Trapp, the commander, apparently broke down weeping.

Blooded, the 101 became a group of hardened killers. The methods became more efficient, more impersonal, the worst tasks handed over to the death camps or local HiWi volunteers, who tried to out-Nazi the Nazis. A handful of men were truly enthusiastic, delighting in the sadism of the exercise. Another handful evaded. Most concluded it was a dirty job, but that someone had to do it, and the military virtue of 'toughness' meant it was them. None resisted. By the time the unit left Poland for Russia 18 months later, they had been party to something like 80,000 murders.

The point is not that Reserve Police Battalion 101 was made of monsters. The point is that if they could commit a genocide, so could almost anyone, given only a few minor tweaks to an authoritarian and racist worldview that is not terribly far out of the mainstream today. Decide that the tough thing to do, the necessary thing to do as a group, is to shoot a defenseless human being in a shallow grave, and ordinary men will do it, and do it gladly.

Oh, and what happened to the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101? Many died on the Eastern Front, as safe Jew hunts became something more like actual combat. Major Trapp and another officer were deported to Poland in 1946 and executed. And the survivors of the unit were tried in an unusually honest and thorough investigation in the 1960s, which saw five men out of over 120 imprisoned for sentences under 10 years. The rest of these ordinary men went on to lead ordinary lives, many of them collecting police pensions in Hamburg. show less