Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
Christopher Browning examines the wartime record of Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of about five hundred middle-aged German men, mostly from Hamburg, who were sent to occupied Poland in 1942 and ordered to carry out the mass shooting and deportation of Polish Jews. Drawing on postwar judicial interrogations of 210 members of the battalion, Browning reconstructs the unit's first massacre at Jozefow, where the commander offered any man who could not face the killing the chance to step out, and only a small number did. He then follows the unit across a year in which it shot tens of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children and helped deport tens of thousands more to Treblinka. Browning argues that the killers were not ideological fanatics or sadists but ordinary men shaped by peer pressure, careerism, deference to authority, and the gradual normalization of atrocity. The book has become a touchstone in Holocaust studies and the psychology of perpetrators.
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A historian's reconstruction of how a unit of middle-aged German reservists became frontline killers during the Holocaust in Poland.
Peterson cites Ordinary Men in his lectures on evil and the psychology of atrocity, arguing that Browning's case forces readers to confront the unsettling fact that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were largely unremarkable people, and to ask honestly what they themselves would have done.
Browning and Goldhagen worked from much of the same source material but reached different conclusions; Browning emphasizes situational and group pressures, while Goldhagen emphasizes a uniquely German antisemitism, and the two books are often read together.
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland was written by Christopher R. Browning, published in 1992 by Harper Perennial.
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland is 304 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
