Last semester, I assigned Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland in my modern Western civilization course. One of the other history teachers assigned it in a summer course, so I decided to keep in on the reading list for the fall. Browning looks at the experiences of men in the Order Police assigned to Nazi-occupied Poland, not as frontline soldiers but as occupiers of conquered territory. Reserve Police Battalion 101 was assigned at first to massacre Jews and later to clear Jewish ghettos and drive the residents onto trains for transport to the extermination camps. Browning believes that this was not a group that would automatically follow along with the fanatical racism of the Nazi leaders. Almost all came from the Hamburg area, where they held working-class or lower-middle-class jobs, and the majority fell in the age range of 37-42. In 1942, only a quarter were Nazi Party members, with very few having joined before the Nazis came to power, and Browning thinks that a decent number of them must have been members of the Communist Party, Socialist Party, or a labor union before 1933. These were not men programmed from birth to be killers:
By virtue of their age, of course, all went through their formative period in the pre-Nazi era. These were men who had known political standards and moral norms other than those of the Nazis. Most came from Hamburg, by reputation one of the least nazified cities in Germany, and the majority came from a social class that had been anti-Nazi in its political culture. These men would not seem to have been a very promising group from which to recruit mass murderers on behalf of the Nazi vision of a racial utopia free of Jews. (48)
And yet they did kill. After introducing the Order Police in general and Reserve Police Battalion 101 in particular, Browning catalogs the atrocities perpetrated by these “ordinary men.” While the men found their first massacres to be horrible, Browning contends that only 10-20 percent of the men refused to kill. Others, he argues, killed by their own volition and increasingly became used to the killing and even volunteered for missions. One man even rationalized killing Jewish children if someone else had killed their mothers; he would never shoot the mother, but felt that her child could not survive without her, which allowed him to kill the child. Even those who refused only seemed to achieve keeping their own hands clean rather than saving the lives of the victims of their comrades.
Browning’s most important sources were interrogations conducted in the 1960s by German prosecutors. He realizes that these sources are problematic because interrogations will produce the incentive to exonerate oneself, and the time between the events and these interrogations leaves time for the imperfections of human memory to do their work. Browning seems to approach the sources carefully, though, cross-checking information and acknowledging uncertainties. One trend that he discerns is that the men tended to avoid any mention of anti-Semitism or anti-Polish feelings, but portrayed the Poles as ruthlessly anti-Semitic. Browning writes that while Polish anti-Semitism and collaboration in the Holocaust was real (but not uniform among Poles), the Germans also were guilty of encouraging it. The men seemed to be trying to exonerate themselves by blaming the Poles and portraying the Jews as passively accepting death.
Ordinary Men is a very carefully argued and documented book. Much of the book, as one of my students pointed out, is simply description after description of the atrocities. These set up Browning’s attempts to explain the men’s behavior at the end. I think that he makes a strong case that the men truly did choose their actions, and were not compelled to kill. Some of my students were not so sure, and raised two main objections. First, although Browning argues that there is no evidence for the claim by some German Holocaust perpetrators that they would be killed if they did not follow orders, some of my students felt that the nature of the totalitarian society of Nazi Germany gave people a good reason to fear for the lives of themselves or their families. Here is Browning’s comment on this objection:
Quite simply, in the past forty-five years [he wrote this in 1991] no defense attorney or defendant in any of the hundreds of postwar trials has been able to document a single case in which refusal to obey an order to kill unarmed civilians resulted in the allegedly inevitable dire punishment. The punishment or censure that occasionally did result from such disobedience was never commensurate with the gravity of the crimes the men had been asked to commit. (170)
To the defense of “putative duress,” the idea that perpetrators truly believed that they would be punished even if they would not have been, Browning responds while some people were pressured into killing, the culture of Battalion 101 was one in which people could dissent without much consequence at all.
The second objection was that Browning did not adequately address the role of anti-Jewish propaganda in Nazi society as preparation for the men to murder. While he argues that the Order Police ideological training was not very rigorous, I think it’s possible that the general character of Nazi society contained a powerful inducement to kill.
Browning reveals a terrifying world in which ordinary people can knowingly do some of the worst things imaginable. In this time after Christmas, it’s good to remember that it’s also the world that God so loved that he sent His Son into it to provide the way to forgiveness and salvation through faith in the suffering Savior and to defeat and someday destroy the powers of evil. This should never be a tritely-expressed answer to the horrors of the Holocaust, but it does give us hope when we stare into the bottomless pit of human evil.