Name: Ordinary Men
ISBN: 9780060995065

Ordinary Men

Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews. 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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ProllyInfamousSep 2025

This book's cover/spine features swastika — definitely controversial on a bookshelf, but can lead to some aggressive questioning ["why own this?" e.g.]. Unfortunately this detracts from the truths within this book (that National Socialist Ideology is attractive to the majority in a fascist regime change-over; you cannot fault ill-informed "nazi citizens" for their patriotism).

Instead of me rambling on about this for the dozenth time, I'm just going to provide some of my favorite passages from the book:

>"My faith found that of God in my ten Nazi friends ... they were each of them a most marvelous mixture of good and bad impulses, their lives a marvelous mixture of good and bad acts. I liked them. I couldn't help it." —xiii

>"Only one of my ten Nazi friends saw Nazism as we—you and I—saw it in any respect. This was Hildebrandt, the teacher. And even he then believed, and still believes, in part of its program and practice, 'the democratic part.' The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it." —p47

>"In good times, you work with reward. But in bad times and good, you work. These are good times. The regime?—the regime promised the people bread, and I bake the bread." —p32, quoting a 51 baker, Nazi party manager, in 1933

>"When I asked Herr Wedekind, the baker, why he had believed in National Socialism, he said, 'Because it promised to solve the unemployment problem. And it did. But I never imagined what it would lead to. Nobody did.' " —p47

>"The lives of my nine friends—and even of the tenth, the teacher—were lightened and brightened by National Socialism as they knew it. And they look back at it now—nine of them, certainly—as the best time of their lives; for what are men's lives? There were jobs and job security ... what does a mother want to know? She wants to know where her children are, and with whom, and what they are doing ... so things went better at home, and when things go better at home, and on the job, what more does a husband and father want to know?" — p48

>"...'in 1938, during a Nazi festival ... the entusiasm, the new hope of a good life, after so many years of hopelessness, the new belief, after so many years of disillusion, almost swept me, too, off my feet. Let me try to tell you what that time was like in Germany: I was sitting in a cinema with a Jewish friend and her daughter of thirteen, while a Nazi parade went across the screen, and the girl caught her mother's arm and whispered, `oh, Mother, Mother, if I weren't a Jew, I think I'd be a Nazi!` No one outisde seems to understand how [attractive Nazi ideology] was.' " —p51, quoting an anti-Nazi German imprisoned for hiding Jews

>"The German community—the rest of the seventy million Germans, apart from the million or so who operated the whole machinery of Nazism—had nothing to do except not to interfere." —p56

>"You look every man in the eye, and, though your eyes may be empty, they are clear. You are respected in the community. Why? Because your attitudes are the same as the community's. But are the community's attitudes respectable? That's not the point." —p60

>"Adolf Hitler was good for Germany—in my friends' view—up until 1943, 1941, or 1939, depending upon the individual" –p69

>"All ten of my friends gladly confess this crime of having been Germans in Germany." —p164

>" 'Many of the students—the best of them— understood what was going on in all this. It was a sort of dumb-show game that we were all playing, I with them. The worst effect, I think, was that it made them cynical, the best ones. But, then, it made the teachers cynical, too. I think the classroom in those years was one of the causes of the cynicism you see in the best young men and women in Germany today ... the young people, and yes, the old, too, were drawn to opposite extremes in those [earlier] years ... it is a very dangerous mistake, to think ... that Germans came to believe everything they were told, all the dreadful nonesense that passed for truth' " —p192, a teacher reflecting on students

>" 'Understand, I was proud to be wearing the insignia. It showed I belonged ... still—I didn't want those Jews from our town to see me wearing my insignia ... it hurt me to have Jews see me wearing them.' " —p200

>" 'It is easy these days to say anti-Nazi and even to believe it. Before 1933 I certainly was, but then—only again after the war.' " —p201

>" 'You say Totalitarianism. Yes, totalitarianism; but perhaps you have never been alone, unemployed, sick, or penniless, or, if you have, perhaps never for long, for so long that you have given up hope; and so it is easy for you to say, Totalitarianism—no. But the other side, the side I speak of, was the side that the people outside Germany never saw, or perhaps never cared to see. And today nobody in Germany will say it. But believe me, nobody in Germany has forgotten it, either.' " —p223

>"The six [most] extremists all said of the extermination of Jews, 'That was wrong' or 'That was going too far,' as if to say, 'The gas oven was somew2hat too great a punishment for people who, after all, deserved very great punishment.' My ten friends had been told, not since 1939 but since 1933, that their nation was fighting for its life." —p183

>"Men under pressure are first dehumanized and only then demoralized, not the other way around. Organization and specialization, system, subsystem, and supersystem are the consuqence, not the cause of the totalitarian spirit. National Socialism did not make men unfree; unfreedom made men National Socialists." —p277

>" 'It doesn't matter whether you call it a democracy or dictatorship or what, as long as you have discipline and order.' The sensitive cabinetmaker ... and the insensitive bill-collector ... said the same thing. Neither morality nor religion but legality is decisive in a state of perpetual siege. And the attest of legality is order; law and order are not two things but one." —p284

>"There were only people, all of them certainly guilty of something, all of them certainly innocent of something, coming out from under the broken stones of the real Thousand-Year Reich—the Reich that had taken a thousand years, stone by stone, to build ... how could they understand the world of broken stones that once were houses? Houses mean people. The war against houses was a war against people. 'Strategic bombing' was one of war's little jokes; the strategy was to hit ... houses" —p296

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There're dozens of typos above, typed while drinking my morning coffee.I hadn't skimmed through they thought they were free [author's styling] since first reading this extremely challenging book, six year ago.

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Whenever I've recommended to IRL friends (seeing "the book on your bookshelf with a swastika on it!"), nobody wants to read about Nazi's... but this book is about why such ideologies are so attractive, and why ought be avoided.

Read this book, but if the topic interests you Ordinary Men by Chris Rush expands much further on this topic, following a geriatric brigade of conscripted laymen "Nazis."

¢¢

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TomLisankieAug 2025

> I don’t think they want to be doing these things some of them are being ordered to do, and I think that continuing to do bad things is how fascists are able to take hold.

Check out "Ordinary Men" by Christopher R. Browning.

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db48xMay 2025

No, mostly it just reminds us that ordinary people are mostly evil. At best they’re purely self–interested. There’s no dissent there.

There’s a good book called “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” by Christopher Browning which explores this. The Reserve Police Battalions were created by Germany to police captured territory, but they were seen by ordinary Germans as a way to avoid the war and conscription. The members were not Nazis, and almost to a man they joined because it was an honorable way to avoid participating in the evils happening all around them. They were only trained for ordinary honest police work, but in the end many of them were being used to hunt down and murder Jews. They were sent out into forests to comb them for underground shelters. They rounded up Jews and herded them into mass graves.

Almost none of them complained or tried to avoid participating. No one punished them if they didn’t participate. No one coerced them into participating. A few asked for and received transfers, if I recall correctly. The best that can be said about the rest is that many of them are believed not to have actually fired their weapons. Some of them probably went the whole war without actually killing anyone, technically. They were just assigned the job so they did it.

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winridNov 2023

This. If you disagree I suggest reading Ordinary Men.

Only book that ever gave me nightmares.

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neotropeNov 2023

Can you imagine Palo Alto HS running this experiment today? Parents and students would be enraged. The teacher would be fired.

The point was to show how easy it is to get caught up in such movements (all of us are susceptible). There’s a good book that shares this story from an ordinary german citizen:

https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Soluti...

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nonrandomstringOct 2023

Hey, yes I have read Black's "IBM" and it left a huge impression on me. Something I cite from time to time. Thanks for refreshing that pointer.

On that theme of tyranny recruiting willing mild-mannered regulars, Browning's "Ordinary Men" is a horror show, well worth a read. I also dipped into a lot about Rwanda (Hatzfeld's "Laid Bare") while writing a chapter in Digital Vegan about Facebook's role in Mayanmar. What I found fascinating about Rwanda was how fast everybody got sucked in, and the role of the media (mainly radio) in that.

In a "post truth/ post trust" society I think that as techies - with enormous power of influence - we have a duty of intellect to understand and counter the abuse of disinformation, incitement, dehumanisation, and so much of what technology can easily be turned to in the wrong hands.

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