Harper Perennial paperback
Occupation & resistance
Ordinary Men
Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
Christopher R. Browning studies a German police battalion’s participation in the murder and deportation of Polish Jews. He examines the roles of conformity, authority, and individual choices in turning members of the unit into perpetrators.
On This Shelf
The machinery of occupation at the level of individual perpetrators, and the question of responsibility within a group.
World War II: The Eastern FrontISBN 9780062303028
Selected Passages
From Ordinary Men
The fundamental problem is to explain why ordinary men—shaped by a culture that had its own particularities but was nonetheless within the mainstream of western, Christian, and Enlightenment traditions—under specific circumstances willingly carried out the most extreme genocide in human history.
As important as the lack of time for reflection was the pressure for conformity—the basic identification of men in uniform with their comrades and the strong urge not to separate themselves from the group by stepping out.
Once the killing began, however, the men became increasingly brutalized. As in combat, the horrors of the initial encounter eventually became routine, and the killing became progressively easier. In this sense, brutalization was not the cause but the effect of these men’s behavior.