Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

by Christopher R. Browning

Ultimately, the Holocaust took place because at the most basic level individual human beings killed other human beings in large numbers over an extended period of time.

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.

There is no indication whatsoever that even the officers suspected the true nature of the duties that awaited them.

A few policemen made the attempt to confront the question of choice but failed to find the words. It was a different time and place, as if they had been on another political planet, and the political values and vocabulary of the 1960s were useless in explaining the situation in which they had found themselves in 1942.

I reasoned with myself that after all without its mother

the child could not live any longer. It was supposed to be, so to speak, soothing to my conscience to release children unable to live

without their ...

With few exceptions the whole question of anti-Semitism is marked by silence.

“one whose nerves are finished, one who is weak. Then one can say: Good, go take your pension.”

Some stressed Jewish passivity, occasionally in a very exculpatory way that seemed to imply that the Jews were complicit in their own deaths.

By 1942 standards of German-Jewish relations, a quick death without the agony of anticipation was considered an example of human compassion!

Polish misdeeds could be spoken about quite frankly, while discussion about Germans was quite guarded. Indeed, the greater the share of Polish guilt, the less remained on the German side. In weighing the testimony that follows, these reservations must be borne in mind.

wartime brutalization, racism, segmentation and routinization of the task, special selection of the perpetrators, careerism, obedience to orders, deference to authority, ideological indoctrination, and conformity.

War, and especially race war, leads to brutalization, which leads to atrocity.

“Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.”

that people far more frequently invoke authority than conformity to explain their behavior, for only the former seems to absolve them of personal responsibility.

Controlling the manner in which people interpret their world is one way to control behavior, Milgram argues. If they accept authority’s ideology, action follows logically and willingly.

The German Volk faced a constant struggle for survival ordained by nature, according to whose laws “all weak and inferior are destroyed” and “only the strong and powerful continue to propagate.”

To win this struggle, the Volk needed to do two things: conquer living space to provide for further population growth and preserve the purity of

German ...

The main threat to a healthy awareness of the need for territorial expansion and racial purity came from doctrines propagating the essential equality of mankind. The first such doctrine was Christianity, spread by the Jew Paul. The second was Liberalism, emerging from the French Revolution—”the uprising of the racially inferior”—instigated by the Jew-ridden Freemasons. The third and greatest threat was

Marxism/Bolshevism, authored by the Jew Karl Marx.

To break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behavior, was simply beyond most of the men. It was easier for them to shoot.

Why? First of all, by breaking ranks, nonshooters were leaving the “dirty work” to their comrades. Since the battalion had to shoot even if individuals did not, refusing to shoot constituted refusing one’s share of an unpleasant collective obligation. It was in effect an asocial act vis-à-vis one’s comrades. Those who did not shoot risked isolation, rejection, and ostracism—a very uncomfortable prospect within the framework of a tight-knit unit stationed abroad among a hostile population, so that the individual had virtually nowhere else to turn for support and social contact.