However, the thing I found to be most gravitating in this book was that it makes one leave behind the gorgeous dreams of "I would never have done this," our hypocritical belief in ourselves as angels. It makes the reader realize that it only takes the instinct of being in a pack to drag a normal human being into cruelty and murder. Human beings are weak and that is a fact. Nowhere before have I seen a book that illustrated this so well.
It is the same, in this sense, as some research done on the Russian Revolution and the murder of the Romanov family. How could the son of a locksmith possibly have found it within himself to shoot at the Royal Family whom the entire country revered? If people are blinded by an idea, by the security of being in a pack, how far could they go?
Browning uses incredible documentation from postwar German interogations of men of this unit involved in wartime attrocities. He had access to more than 400 testimonies of the over 500 men that made up this unit during the war. As such he is able to analyse the actions and thinking in greater detail than most other German units.
He describes the insidious use of even these units as first guards on trains to transport Jews to extermination camps, their eventual use in rounding up Jews in the Polish Ghettos, and their use as actual shootes in the extermination of whole villages.
That this unit of 500 men --- made up of police reservists, not trained in combat, and seeminly tangential to entire holocaust programme --- could be directly responsible for the shooting deaths of 38,000 people and the transportion of 100,000s of thousands of others to their deaths, makes depressing reading indeed.
Unfortunately, although Browning documents the horror of this representative small unit, he does not really answer his question of how a father with loving kids in Germany, with no combat experience could one day, be ordered to a village in Poland and in the small hours of the morning kill women and children just because they are Jewish.
Browning may be begging the question when he says "ordinary men" --- one thing that may have made them far from ordinary was the corroding and infective influence of racialist Nazi claptrap that came to be accepted truth in German society in the years leading up to the war. Browning's book does not go into this question, and it is not covered by the interogators, nor certainly not volunteered by those who were interogated. It is however the central question of how an ordinary husband could walk up to children, women and old men and shoot them on the spot with little remorse or, at best, a casuistic reasoning. It is the central question that needs answering: how much can racialist ideology, condoned and encouraged by society, lead to turning ordinary men into extraordinary monsters. That is the horror of this book and one that one should be encouraged to find out the answer to.
* Note this is not a light read. It will turn your stomach at times and wrench your heart.
Browning offers a good (and possibly the best-so far) historical interpretation of why ordinary men killed one-on-one during the Holocaust. Yet it is incomplete. The motivations of the men who killed without hesitation or reservation needs to be studied, investigated and interpreted. Until then, "Ordinary Men" is a good start. In addition to Browning's "Ordinary Men", one should consider the following: "Hitler's Willing Executioners" by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, "Masters of Death" by Richard Rhobes, "The Nazi Doctors" by Robert Jay Lifton and finally, "The Quest for the Nazi Personality" edited by Irving B. Weiner for the "Personality and Clinical Psychology Series".
