Chilling analysis of how a typical unit of German police actually
operated during the Holocaust, by Browning (History/Pacific
Lutheran Univ.). In March 1942, some 75 to 80 percent of all
victims of the Holocaust were still alive. Eleven months later, 75
to 80 percent were dead - the result, Browning says, of "a short,
intense wave of mass murder," centered in Poland. During 16 months,
Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of just over 450 men from
Hamburg, was responsible in Poland for the shooting of 39,000 Jews
and the deportation to Treblinka of 44,000 more. The horror began
on July 13, 1942, when the unit's commander, one Major Trapp,
ordered his men to round up 1,800 Jews from the village of Jozefow,
to select several hundred as "work Jews," and to shoot the rest -
men, women, and children. Trapp apparently gave the order with
tears in his eyes and gave permission to older soldiers not to
participate. Altogether, 10 to 20 percent of the battalion availed
themselves of this permission. The remaining men carried out the
assignment: "the shooters were gruesomely besmirched with blood,
brains, and bone splinters. It hung on their clothing." What sort
of men were they? Browning bases his answers on the judicial
interrogation in the 1960's of 210 men from the battalion. They
were ordinary men, he finds, on the elderly side, drawn from the
lower orders of German society, and few had an education above
junior-high-school level. And after examining studies dealing with
this phenomenon and evidence of such conduct in other wars,
Browning determines that it's not just Nazism or Germans that
produces such men: There were American units in the Pacific that
boasted of never taking captives. "If the men of Reserve Police
Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances," he
writes, "what group of men cannot?" It is the care with which
Browning examines the evidence, as well as the soberness of his
conclusions, that gives this work such power and impact. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Ordinary Men has been admired all over the world and is now published in the UK for the first time. It takes as its basis the detailed records of one squad from the Nazis' extermination groups and explores in detail its composition, its actions, and the methods by which it was trained to perform acts of genocide on an industrial scale. He introduces us to cheerful, friendly, ordinary men who killed without hesitation or apparent remorse for years on end, in docile obedience to an authority they happily accepted as legitimate. It is a valuable corrective to the idea of German uniqueness and offers a much more chilling picture of human beings as avidly suggestible and desperate for an organising purpose in their lives, however disgusting.
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