Essay on "Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men"

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Chrisopher Brownings "Ordinary Men"

Cristopher R. Browning explains in the introduction to his book: Ordinary Men:Reserve Police Battalion 101 and Final Solution in Poland the circumstances that led him to writing a book about these German battalions that carried one job alone: to come after the German armies and wipe out tall the Jews from the eastern occupied territories. He pays particularly attention to the testimonies of almost a half of those five hundred that formed the battalion and were sent to Poland in 1942 to carry out the Final Solution: the execution of all Jews. The fact that 125 testimonies were detailed and large enough to asses the dynamics of the group, the author can form opinions regarding the psychological circumstances that led to such an incredible transformation.

In his assessment of the motives some ordinary men had in fulfilling such a hideous and inhumane job, Browning is starting from the very simple consideration that, above anything, those people who formed the Reserve Police Battalions were "human beings." The Reserve Police Battalion 101 was formed of freshly recruited middle aged men, considered too old to be drafted in the army. They came from working, lower-middle-class families, with no prior experience to working abroad. They were stationed at first in the Polish town Bilgoraj. Their first action takes place on July 13, 1942. Commander of the battalion was Major Wilhelm Trapp - 53-year-old career policeman (Papa Trapp) (Browning, 1). The way he introduces the first action of executing the Jews from the Polish village Jozefow, where there lived 1,800 Jews is like a camera that runs in slow motion. The deliberate slow movement toward the climax is destined to make the ordinary human beings watching that film to freeze in horror. The sharp contrasts between the softness of the first images, the way the members of the battalion gather around their commander, called Papa Trapp, who sheds some tears when he informs them about their mission are all techniques to make the reader understand the way those who were involved in the mass murder jobs. Their daily jobs over months and, sometimes years, were assigned to ordinary people who were less or not at all subject to fierce indoctrination and special preparation.

The Nazi propaganda was a machine that worked almost perfectly in indoctrinating a whole nation over the years, but Browning dwells in his book more on the effects such a propaganda could have had on people who were dispatched in some foreign place, for the first time in their lives and ordered to shoot in cold blood tens of thousands of men, women and children, as their main daily duty.

An extraordinary situation in the case of the Reserve Police battalion 101 was that at their first mission in the Polish village, they were actually given the chance of stepping aside and not caring the orders of killing the Jews. Only few of them did so. Hey did not rsk any repercussions from their superiors, only the mockery of their peers and accusations of being unmanly. From the point-of-view of today's reader, the risk of being laughed at by your comrades unless you are not carrying out orders of shooting innocent people from a few feet seems like a hallucinatory hypothesis. On the other hand, as Browning, points out, they were ordinary men; the selection process was only based on their condition as being too aged to be enlisted in the military. They did not appear to have been brain washed by the Nazi propaganda, although at some point in the first pages of the book, Browning mentions some of the justifications and encouragements their commander is presenting the inexperienced men with, before taking them to the place were they were supposed to kill people taken from their beds, people they have never met before in their lives. The reasons given for carrying on with their unpleasant task were: bombs falling in Germany on women and children, Jewish conspiracy with the Americans to ruin Germany; the Jews in the village involved with the partisans. These are the main reasons some of the participants in the murders recollected during their trial.

Yet, they appear incredibly weak as arguments for justified murder. The total number of Jews the reserve Police Battalion killed with the hands of its members or sent to the gas chambers in the concentration camps arose to 83,000. Such numbers appear incredible when considering the origins, education and training of these ordinary men coming from the working or lower middle class in Hamburg. Initailly, a minor fraction of them were members of the Nazi Party and another insignificant part belonged to the SS. However, the author shows that some of them joined the Nazi Party after their missions in Poland.

Trapp is reported by one of his men as not participating in the action of murdering the Jewish women, children and old men in the Polish village and saying to himself: "Man.... such jobs don't suit me. But orders are orders" (Browning). The enormous cruelty and the fact that their "jobs" were anything but ordinary triggered the curiosity and the quest for answers in Browning.

The phenomenon leading to the transformation of what appears to be ordinary men is also acting in the cases of all those villagers and then, later, all the foreigners who were to replace the Germans for the actual execution of the Jews, under the supervision of the former executioners. The circumstances were, of course different, because fear appears to be the main and most powerful motivator in the case of those who were under German occupation. But those villagers in the small village of Jozefow who voluntarily point out to the Jews that did not show for the round up are less susceptible of having acting only because of the fear of repercussions.

The Nazi propaganda, although the former members of the reserve Police Battalion 101 do not appear to have been brain washed succeeded, as Browning lets the reader understand with every report form the war diaries or testimony of those on trial. The jobs of killing civilian men, women and children from close range loose the atrocity associated with premeditated crime because they do not appear to be aware of the human condition of those they are ordered to kill. Although, as the author points out, during the interrogations, matters regarding the Nazi main ideology, that of anti-Semitism is not discussed and only marked by silence, the weight placed on it is very heavy in the book. "What is clear, is that the men's concern for their standing in the eyes of their comrades was not matched by any sense of human ties with their victims. The Jews stood outside their circle of human obligation and responsibility. Such a polarization between "us" and "them," between one's comrades and the enemy is, of course, standard, in war" (Browning, 73). The Nazi propaganda regarding the Final Solution the Police battalion were responsible to carry out, at the orders of the highest commander, the Fuehrer, is proven to be partly of blame. Browning explains that rather than being consciously acting out of blind conviction, the men of the Police battalion 101 were combatants in a war and saw their task as killing their enemy a something rather normal in the case of war.

On the other hand, their enemy was completely different than what one is expecting n the battle field. The fight they were in was resembling a hunting campaign and not a front line in any war. The reports and the diaries of any of the Order Police Battalions that executed tens of thousands of Jews in Russia and Poland, during 1941 and 1942 are repeatedly stating that the action of killing went "smooth" and that no one opposed any resistance. These people are clearly using a very different kind of logic in their actions, one that is difficult to understand under the circumstances of the twenty first century, in a democratic country. Although, the atrocities of war are still present world wide, genocide was not left as a relic once World War II ended, but perpetrated into the second half of the twentieth century.

Browning's reflections on those few men who stepped out right from the beginning or later, after having shot a few people, show that, as expected, he finds the Nazi propaganda very effective up to a point. Those who were unable to start shooting or to resume shooting, even two decades later, could only testify that they were repulsed by the act. Browning concludes: The absence of such does not mean that their revulsion did not have its origins in the humane instincts that Nazism radically opposed and sought to overcome. But the men themselves did not seem to be conscious of the contradiction between their feelings and the essence of the regime they seved. Beeing too weak to continue shooting, of course, posed problems for the "productivity" and morale of the battalion, but it did not… READ MORE

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