Ordinary Men, Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution In Poland
Christopher R. Browning
The Amazon blurb is a good summary...
"Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews—now with a new afterword and additional photographs.
Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever.
While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition."
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Browning spends the first 17 chapters reconstructing the actions of Battalion 101, based on testimony given by the policemen during their war-crimes trails in the 60's and early 70s. Chapter 18 is devoted to psychological analysis. Here is the first paragraph...
"Why did most men in Reserve Police Battalion 101 become killers, while only a minority of perhaps 10 percent - and certainly no more than 20 percent - did not? A number of explanations have been invoked in the past to explain such behavior: wartime brutalization, racism, segmentation and routinization of the task, special selection of the perpetrators, careerism, obedience to orders, deference to authority, ideological indoctrination, and conformity. These factors are applicable in varying degree, but none without qualification." [p. 159]
He then spends the rest of the chapter dissecting those influences, citing a number of interesting psychological experiments and historical case-studies. In the end, he concludes that no single influence was strong enough to create cold-blooded killers, but the combination of various factors had enough influence on enough people to catalyze brutal, genocidal behavior. Browning warns us that we are by no means immune to such a thing happening again. The last paragraph...
"At the same time, however, the collective behavior of Reserve Police Battalion 101 has deeply disturbing implications. There are many societies afflicted by traditions of racism and caught in the siege mentality of war or threat of war. Everywhere society conditions people to respect and defer to authority, and indeed could scarcely function otherwise. Everywhere people seek career advancement. In every modern society, the complexity of life and the resulting bureaucratization and specialization attenuate the sense of personal responsibility of those implementing official policy. Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?" [p. 189]
In other words, given the right circumstances, most of us are capable of moral atrocity. Although Browning leaves it at that, I will add my own opinion: a morally upright life begins with the acknowledgment that we have a demon living within us.