Ordinary Men

The famous Hannah Arendt coined “the banality of evil." Not monsters, but ordinary people were able to follow Hitler’s murderess ideology. Ordinary Men clearly shows how men and women from all walks of life were capable of becoming cold-blooded killers. Ordinary Men were the Nazi mobile gas units and death squads responsible for the murder of 1.5 million Jews in Eastern Poland & Ukraine.   

Browning writes about how ordinary middle and working-class people were turned into killers by the Nazis in their war against the Jews. In particular, he raises the question of why the Jews were considered outside their circle of human obligation by those who ordered them to murder men, women, and children. The reader might question who, besides their family and close friends, if ordered to do so, they would feel it necessary to protect in situations like those described in Ordinary Men.

As a child of a holocaust survivor, I keep coming back to this book. Here Christopher Browning investigates the historic circumstances and the personal stories behind one police battalion of cheerful, friendly, ordinary men, who ended up being responsible for over tens of thousands of Jews during WW2. A great historian at work, helping us to comprehend the incomprehensible.

A fascinating look at the men who carried out the gritty day-to-day murders of the Holocaust, particularly the early days. It’s written by a historian, so there is a lot of dry description of source documents and that sort of research-related discussion to back up everything that is discussed. For all that dryness, this book does an incredible job of shining a light on the question everyone asks about the Holocaust… how could ordinary, decent men commit such atrocity?

In this classic work, Browning shows that many of those who perpetrated atrocities during the Holocaust were not monsters or rabid ideologues, but rather were ordinary men, acting without coercion and making their own decisions. The book is terrifying because it does not allow the reader to distance themself from the perpetrators and forces the horrifying question: “what would I have done.” Although the book is set in Poland rather than Ukraine, many of the same dynamics took place to the east.