Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

by Christopher R. Browning
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

by Christopher R. Browning

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Overview

“A remarkable—and singularly chilling—glimpse of human behavior. . .This meticulously researched book...represents a major contribution to the literature of the Holocaust."—Newsweek 

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.  

Ordinary Men is a powerful, chilling, and important work with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today.  


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780062303028
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 02/28/2017
Edition description: Revised
Pages: 384
Sales rank: 20,199
Product dimensions: 5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Christopher R. Browning is professor of history at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. He is a contributor to Yad Vashem's official twenty-four-volume history of the Holocaust and the author of two earlier books on the subject.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

One Morning in Jozefow

In the very early hours of July 13, 1942, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were roused from their bunks in the large brick school building that served as their barracks in the Polish town of Bilgoraj.They were middle-aged family men of working- and lower-middle-class background from the city of Hamburg.Considered too old to be of use to the German army, they had been drafted instead into the, Order Police.Most were raw recruits with no previous experience in German occupied territory.They had arrived in Poland less than three weeks earlier.

It was still quite dark as the men climbed into the waiting trucks.Each policeman had been given extra ammunition, and additional boxes had been loaded onto the trucks as well.Theywere headed for their first major action, though the men had not yet been told what to expect.

The convoy of battalion trucks moved out of Bilgoraj in the dark, heading eastward on a jarring washboard gravel road.The pace was slow, and it took an hour and a half to two hours to arrive at the destination—the village of Jozefow—a mere thirty kilometers away. Just as the sky was beginning to lighten, the convoy halted outside Jozefow.It was a typical Polish village of modest white houses with thatched straw roofs.Among its inhabitants were 1,800 Jews.

The village was totally quiet. The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 climbed down from their trucks and assembled in a half-circle around their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, a fifty-three-year-old career policeman affectionately known by his men as "Papa Trapp." The time had come for Trapp toaddress the men and inform them of the assignment the battalion had received.

Pale and nervous, with choking voice and tears in his eyes, Trapp visibly fought to control himself as he spoke.The battalion, he said plaintively, had to perform a frightfully unpleasant task.This assignment was not to his liking, indeed it was highly regrettable, but the orders came from the highest authorities.If it would make their task any easier, the men should remember that in Germany the bombs were falling on women and children.

He then turned to the matter at hand.The Jews had instigated the American boycott that had damaged Germany, one policeman remembered Trapp saying.There were Jews in the village of Jozefow who were involved with the partisans, he explained according to two others.The battalion had now been ordered to round up these Jews.The male Jews of working age were to be separated and taken to a work camp.The remaining Jews—the women, children, and elderly—were to be shot on the spot by the battalion.Having explained what awaited his men, Trapp then made an extraordinary offer: if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step out.

Table of Contents

Illustrations xi

Preface xv

1 One Morning in Józefów 1

2 The Order Police 3

3 The Order Police and the Final Solution: Russia 1941 9

4 The Order Police and the Final Solution: Deportation 26

5 Reserve Police Battalion 101 38

6 Arrival in Poland 49

7 Initiation to Mass Murder: The Józefów Massacre 55

8 Reflections on a Massacre 72

9 Lomazy: The Descent of Second Company 78

10 The August Deportations to Treblinka 88

11 Late-September Shootings 97

12 The Deportations Resume 104

13 The Strange Health of Captain Hoffmann 114

14 The "Jew Hunt" 121

15 The Last Massacres: "Harvest Festival" 133

16 Aftermath 143

17 Germans, Poles, and Jews 147

18 Ordinary Men 159

Afterword 191

Twenty-Five Years Later 225

Appendix: Shootings and Deportations by Reserve Police Battalion 101 293

Notes 295

Index 333

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