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

by Christopher R. Browning

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

brutalization was not the cause but the effect of these men’s behavior.

“Nazism was cruel because Nazis were cruel; and the Nazis were cruel because cruel people tended to become Nazis.”

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

Bauman argues that most people “slip” into the roles society provides them,

For him the exception—the real “sleeper”—is the rare individual who has the capacity to resist authority and assert moral autonomy but who is seldom aware of this hidden strength until put to the test.

potentially murderous obedience to a noncoercive authority. An evolutionary bias favors the survival of people who can adapt to hierarchical situations and organized social activity.

conformity assumes a more central role than authority

The fate of peoples who did not expand their numbers or preserve their racial purity could be seen in the examples of Sparta and Rome.

Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms.

Kershaw emphasized the same point with his memorable phrase that “the road to Auschwitz was built by hatred, but paved with indifference.”

Germans were not apathetic and indifferent but “pitiless,” “unsympathetic,” and “callous,” and their silence should be interpreted as approval.