"Ordinary Men" By Christopher R. Browning

The Holocaust presented not only the atrocities committed against the Jews in particular; it was more so a testament of atrocities committed against humanity in general. Browning uses as a basis for his story a compilation of documentation gathered on postwar German interrogations of men of comprising this unit who carried out the wartime atrocities. He takes a deeper look at the Reserve Police Battalion 101 from Hamburg composed mostly middle-aged men from artisans and working class non-career police reservists. These men were either too old for normal front-line service or those who had no desire to practice a career in the police outside their role in this reserve unit.

In the book, Browning describes the dangerous use of even these units as first guards on trains that used to bring Jews to extermination camps. These units also participated in the in the rounding up Jews in the Polish Ghettos. Later, they exterminate entire villages.

This unit made up of 500 men broke down further into police reservists that did not have combat skills and were not central to the holocaust activity turned out to be the ones directly responsible for the killing of 38,000 people by shooting them to death. Also, they were directly responsible in transporting 100,000 thousand others to their deaths.

Browning turned back the hands of time by showing us what kind of men made up this unit. They were a diverse class of Party members, members of the SS, working or privileged upper higher classes and others. Their first act of killing was looked into in detail. All members of the Police Battalion 101 unit were not aware that they were to shoot unarmed and utterly helpless Jews.

What could possibly draw supposedly decent people comprising Police Battalion 101 to do such ghastly acts? Some cite the need to do so since they were in battlefield. But many believed this assumption is wrong. Those in the Battalion as a matter of fact were not skilled in combat training since most were older men.

Browning could be creating controversy when he called the book "ordinary men" to refer to the members of the Police Battalion 101. Their extraordinary callous acts could be attributed to the decaying effect of the racialist Nazi that was considered as the accepted truth in German society that brought the war. Browning does not give specific answer to the question as to why the atrocities occurred and why they were committed by seemingly good people. Those interviewed members of the unit did not bother to answer the question themselves. It is however the subject of confusion and the focus of the story as to how an ordinary person could kill children, women and old men with little or no remorse. It causes us to look closely and ask ourselves: how can racialist ideologies turned ordinary men into extraordinary monsters? That is the one question posed by the book which it did not address.