Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland. London: Penguin Books, 2001.
Christopher Browning’s book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, studies the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101. These ordinary men, plucked from mundane daily jobs, remain responsible for the murder of approximately 80,000 Jews in occupied Poland. These men were not hardened SS officers, nor were they the well organized, inherently anti-Semitic men of the Einsatzgruppen. They were not the sort of men one would expect to commit mass murder. Browning seeks to understand why this titular group of ordinary men became the perpetrators of the worst genocide in human history. His answer is disturbing. The men of the reserve battalion could have been anyone. They responded to the pressures of conformity, and to the desire of upward mobility, along with months of desensitization. In doing so these men became that which we all fear.
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They must be “other” in our minds, in much the same way the men of the Reserve Battalion 101 needed to see the Jews they murdered as others. If others can be blamed, if the reader can placate themselves by believing these killers were somehow different, somehow inherently bad people, susceptible to great evil, then the reader does not have to look their own intrinsic nature. Other historians, including Daniel Goldhagen support this idea. He hypothesized that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were inherently anti-Semitic, that they were Nazified. Further, that the Holocaust was the result of these unusual circumstanced. Browning dispels this idea right in the title of the book. These were ordinary men, not monsters. They were not caught up in battlefield blood lust, not viciously anti-Semitic. Nor were they evil. They were average