Disturbing topic - graphic concepts - be warned before proceeding
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Plot taken from Amazon.com book for sale -
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.
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My thoughts on "Ordinary Men" start here. I am going to just say that I read this book in one sitting and that is truly telling. This is the kind of book that truly is SCARY. This book opens your eyes and meanwhile keeps you extremely engaged - it is stunning, ruthless, systematic and terrible to the core.
The men in Reserve Police Battalion 101 were carefully conditioned to kill over the course of time. Studies suggest that post-traumatic stress disorder in soldiers is associated with the shock of a soldier that they themselves could commit such a terrible act - like killing another person.
In the attempt to treat this phenomena, which is worse in men or women who have led sheltered lives, they must accept the fact that they themselves are capable of being a monster in order to accept the actions they have done. This is my attempt to paraphrase the concepts I have learned as a base line for understanding the psychology of something as stunning and complex as this.
Here are some of the shocking points in this work:
-THE BURDEN OF CHOICE - In Battalion 101 we see the clearest example of men who HAD A CHOICE. They were actually asked if they wanted to begin killing Jewish people and the majority remained. When the "burden of choice" was removed from the process - it was even easier for them to just blindly follow orders.
-STEP BY STEP KILLING -In Battalion 101, their first killing of Jews is a total shock. The next time they are asked to do it, it is nowhere near their initial shock of the first killing. They became numb, some of them. At some points they were just guarding trains and later bringing Jewish people to gas chambers - the gas chamber was actually designed to relieve the psychological burden of killing from the men and more horrible objectives. After the men had killed it was easier. They new it was wrong but sort of "got used to it."
-CONFORMITY - conformity was the key to start pulling the trigger and to continue. An intense realization of how evil is allowed to grow by those who silently follow is in this study. The men were actually more concerned by how they would be seen by their fellow comrades in the battalion - weak or otherwise incapable - rather than bothered by killing innocent Jewish men, women and children.
- BRAIN WASHING - it is clear that the desperate nature of Germany after World War 1 led the people of Germany to resent their place in the world. Embarrassed by the obedient signing of the World War 1 agreement, the Treaty of Versailles, Germans grew to blame their economic turmoil on many factors. The Jewish populations were dehumanized and it made it easier for these men to kill them. The men of Battalion 101 had no education, no formation of principles and blindly followed orders as they were told or chose to be obedient and destroy innocent lives when given the choice.
"Ordinary Men" is an important historic document, we must understand that this really happened and learn to never again be like these "Ordinary Men."