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mburnamfink 's review for:
Ordinary Men
by Christopher R. Browning
How did the Holocaust happen? Not the antisemitic ravings of Hitler, or the careerist banality of Eichmann, but the physical labor of liquidating the Jews of Poland. Someone had to round up the Jews in ghettos, herd them onto trains to the death camps, shoot the ones who couldn't walk or evaded. Ordinary Men asks what happens to the people who perpetuate a genocide.
The 'someone' in Ordinary Men were the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, about 500 middle-aged, working-class men from Hamburg. Most of them had ambitions in local policing, writing traffic tickets, dealing with drunks, and other very ordinary policework. About a quarter were Nazi party members. And while deployed away from home, Poland in 1942 was hardly facing Zhukov's armored shock armies on the Eastern Front. At the start of 1942, they were not by any standards, killers.
That would change. The first massacre was at Józefów in July 1942. It was a fiasco. The Jews of the town were marched into the woods, paired up with Nazis from the 101, and executed with shots to the neck. The men did poorly. Offered a chance to refuse, a handful did. Others dodged behind trucks or otherwise out of sight of NCOs. Major Trapp, the commander, apparently broke down weeping.
Blooded, the 101 became a group of hardened killers. The methods became more efficient, more impersonal, the worst tasks handed over to the death camps or local HiWi volunteers, who tried to out-Nazi the Nazis. A handful of men were truly enthusiastic, delighting in the sadism of the exercise. Another handful evaded. Most concluded it was a dirty job, but that someone had to do it, and the military virtue of 'toughness' meant it was them. None resisted. By the time the unit left Poland for Russia 18 months later, they had been party to something like 80,000 murders.
The point is not that Reserve Police Battalion 101 was made of monsters. The point is that if they could commit a genocide, so could almost anyone, given only a few minor tweaks to an authoritarian and racist worldview that is not terribly far out of the mainstream today. Decide that the tough thing to do, the necessary thing to do as a group, is to shoot a defenseless human being in a shallow grave, and ordinary men will do it, and do it gladly.
Oh, and what happened to the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101? Many died on the Eastern Front, as safe Jew hunts became something more like actual combat. Major Trapp and another officer were deported to Poland in 1946 and executed. And the survivors of the unit were tried in an unusually honest and thorough investigation in the 1960s, which saw five men out of over 120 imprisoned for sentences under 10 years. The rest of these ordinary men went on to lead ordinary lives, many of them collecting police pensions in Hamburg.
The 'someone' in Ordinary Men were the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, about 500 middle-aged, working-class men from Hamburg. Most of them had ambitions in local policing, writing traffic tickets, dealing with drunks, and other very ordinary policework. About a quarter were Nazi party members. And while deployed away from home, Poland in 1942 was hardly facing Zhukov's armored shock armies on the Eastern Front. At the start of 1942, they were not by any standards, killers.
That would change. The first massacre was at Józefów in July 1942. It was a fiasco. The Jews of the town were marched into the woods, paired up with Nazis from the 101, and executed with shots to the neck. The men did poorly. Offered a chance to refuse, a handful did. Others dodged behind trucks or otherwise out of sight of NCOs. Major Trapp, the commander, apparently broke down weeping.
Blooded, the 101 became a group of hardened killers. The methods became more efficient, more impersonal, the worst tasks handed over to the death camps or local HiWi volunteers, who tried to out-Nazi the Nazis. A handful of men were truly enthusiastic, delighting in the sadism of the exercise. Another handful evaded. Most concluded it was a dirty job, but that someone had to do it, and the military virtue of 'toughness' meant it was them. None resisted. By the time the unit left Poland for Russia 18 months later, they had been party to something like 80,000 murders.
The point is not that Reserve Police Battalion 101 was made of monsters. The point is that if they could commit a genocide, so could almost anyone, given only a few minor tweaks to an authoritarian and racist worldview that is not terribly far out of the mainstream today. Decide that the tough thing to do, the necessary thing to do as a group, is to shoot a defenseless human being in a shallow grave, and ordinary men will do it, and do it gladly.
Oh, and what happened to the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101? Many died on the Eastern Front, as safe Jew hunts became something more like actual combat. Major Trapp and another officer were deported to Poland in 1946 and executed. And the survivors of the unit were tried in an unusually honest and thorough investigation in the 1960s, which saw five men out of over 120 imprisoned for sentences under 10 years. The rest of these ordinary men went on to lead ordinary lives, many of them collecting police pensions in Hamburg.