Summary Of Ordinary Men By Christopher R. Browning

Christopher R. Browning, a professor at The University of North Carolina, has spent the majority of his career focused on Nazis and the holocaust. In the book Ordinary Men, Browning proposes that through extreme pressure, desensitization, conformity, and other psychological influences, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were transformed from common citizens, to hardened killers. This argument is contrary to other theories such that it suggests several factors aided the metamorphosis rather than a cultural predisposition to be brutal. Observing the psychological shift of the men allows a new, contradictory standpoint to be formed. Chapter fourteen introduces the idea of “Jew Hunt,” or when “Reserve Police Battalion 101 was assigned to track down and systemically eliminate all those who

Many of the men became desensitized to the horrors and atrocities they were committing. Countless bombardments of rhetoric from officers, multiple executions, and conformity allowed many men to develop a “callousness”(128) that allowed them to continue their job with ease. In the early days, the men would return “to their quarters shaken and embittered, without appetite or desire to talk about what they had just done”(128). However, “with relentless killing, such sensitivities were dulled”(128). The killing was so frequent brutal that it would be next to impossible to not become desensitized. It appears as though their consciences became numb to actions that had previously contradicted their morals. The men even began to joke about the abominations they were committing. For example, “one of the men said,’now we eat the brains of slaughtered jews’”(128). Making barbaric jokes may have released some of the tension that had built up inside of them, but it still explicitly showed that they were becoming indifferent to their