THE BOOK FAIR

Review:

Christopher Browning’s investigative study, “Ordinary Men”, lays out the research compiled on the Reserve Police Battalion 101.  Battalion 101, a group of 500, ordinary middle-aged men, is assigned to commit atrocities upon civilian populations.  The subject matter reveals that ordinary people can be brought to commit terrible, horrendous crimes.

In 1933, Hitler’s regime initiated the forming of a police action force that would be merged into Germany’s illegal, growing army.  Commanders from the police units were highly trained and easily merged into the army.

Young men and older reservists form the Order Police, some twenty-one units of 500 men each; with the German onslaught in 1939, these civilian units began to work, in different capacities, with the German army.

The men of Battalion 101 knew nothing of their first assignment.  Upon arrival to the village of Josefow, Poland, Major Trapp, the battalion commander, informed the men their task was to round up the Jewish villagers, separate the working men from the rest, and then, to shoot the non workers, men, women and children.  Only a few of the men balked at the assignment; most of the men followed orders.  After the initial killings some refused to kill more civilians, but most did not.  Only a few refused to kill at all.  

Professor Browning describes in detail, how the battalion became complacent about killing, and eventually became a killing machine, involved in the liquidation of several towns and responsible for murdering over 80,000 Jewish victims, including children and infants.  Outstanding is the fact that no man was ever punished by a commanding officer for not following orders to kill civilians.  The policemen, who refused to participate in killing, were allowed other duties.   

The Professor emphasizes that the Battalion 101 was not a group of hardened Nazis or criminals, or Trawniki (men conscripted to help the German’s in the mass extermination of the Jews which included mostly Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Russians who committed the most horrific atrocities against Jewish civilians in the occupied areas so the soldiers and police would not always have to do it alone), but ordinary men from Hamburg, serving in the police, akin to the National Guard in the U.S. 

Christopher Browning, an American historian of the Holocaust, has written three other books on the Holocaust, is a Distinguished Professor and has contributed to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Institute in Israel.  Much of the data in “Ordinary Men” is derived from German Judicial files of interrogations.  The Germans have never denied the Holocaust.

 

Excellent page-turning study.  Recommended.