Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men
Ordinary Men
Christopher Browning describes how the Reserve Police Battalion 101, like the rest of German society, was immersed in a flood of racist and anti-Semitic propaganda. Browning describes how the Order Police provided indoctrination both in basic training and as an ongoing practice within each unit. Many of the members were not prepared for the killing of Jews. The author examines the reasons some of the police members did not shoot. The physiological effect of isolation, rejection, and ostracism is examined in the context of being assigned to a foreign land with a hostile population. The contradictions imposed by the demands of conscience on the one hand and the norms of the battalion on the other are discussed. Ordinary Men provides …show more content…
Browning analyzes the accounts of these men as they were tried 20 years after the events, and he carefully speculates about motives. Overall, Browning exemplifies how truly ordinary the policemen in Battalion 101 were. The book leaves the reader to place him or herself in much the same situation. A systematic pattern continues as the book progresses. Each time Battalion 101 has the assignment of resettlement, the process by which they operate becomes a little more organized and refined. The division of labor among the men becomes more fine-tuned, and the specialization of tasks becomes more efficient. The men have experienced shooting so many Jews that they become experts on how to make the killing as indirect and removed as possible, while remaining efficient. Men are at first in close proximity to their victim, with immediate interaction, but after they become specialized, the men realize that if they just shoot them into mass graves, the Jews become faceless and the men are not as intimately involved with their victims. This allows the men of Battalion 101 to be more efficient killers because the more removed a man was from the killing, the more methodical that man can become when committing
Christopher Browning describes how the Reserve Police Battalion 101, like the rest of German society, was immersed in a flood of racist and anti-Semitic propaganda. Browning describes how the Order Police provided indoctrination both in basic training and as an ongoing practice within each unit. Many of the members were not prepared for the killing of Jews. The author examines the reasons some of the police members did not shoot. The physiological effect of isolation, rejection, and ostracism is examined in the context of being assigned to a foreign land with a hostile population. The contradictions imposed by the demands of conscience on the one hand and the norms of the battalion on the other are discussed. Ordinary Men provides …show more content…
Browning analyzes the accounts of these men as they were tried 20 years after the events, and he carefully speculates about motives. Overall, Browning exemplifies how truly ordinary the policemen in Battalion 101 were. The book leaves the reader to place him or herself in much the same situation. A systematic pattern continues as the book progresses. Each time Battalion 101 has the assignment of resettlement, the process by which they operate becomes a little more organized and refined. The division of labor among the men becomes more fine-tuned, and the specialization of tasks becomes more efficient. The men have experienced shooting so many Jews that they become experts on how to make the killing as indirect and removed as possible, while remaining efficient. Men are at first in close proximity to their victim, with immediate interaction, but after they become specialized, the men realize that if they just shoot them into mass graves, the Jews become faceless and the men are not as intimately involved with their victims. This allows the men of Battalion 101 to be more efficient killers because the more removed a man was from the killing, the more methodical that man can become when committing