Review : Ordinary Men

As promised last time I'm going to do a more thorough review of Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men. I already mentioned the Netflix documentary, which is excellent (if you want a counter to this, see the extraordinary movie One Life with Anthony Hopkins). The book of course is even more nuanced – and terrifying. It covers the actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101's role in the Nazi holocaust. If that's not your thing, you should stop reading immediately.

I previously described this as horror beyond horror, and that's exactly what it is. Unlike other books I won't even try to rate this one; to do so feels disrespectful. Like One Life, this is in a category all of its own, the kind of book everyone needs to read but not necessarily more than once. Rather than review it, instead I'll try to just summarise the author's main conclusions : a task made easier because Browning lays them all out very clearly and directly. Quite properly, he first covers the history purely as a factual series of events, and this makes up the bulk of the book. He reserves his wider thoughts almost exclusively to the final two chapters, where he sets out his findings in some detail.

In large part Browning presents his arguments as in direct opposition to another work, Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, which claimed that it took extreme anti-Semitism for the holocaust to happen. Browning shows, I think all too convincingly, that this is far from the whole story. In this particular case it seems abundantly clear that it can be all too easy to turn ordinary, educated, middle-aged, happily-married men into the most brutal sort of killers. This is much, much more disturbing than ascribing it to a horrific but uniquely peculiar happenstance of history.

The book in brief

First some preliminaries. Ordinary Men is a work that must have truly taken nerves of steel to compile. In fact I think I've never read anything that made me so viscerally, deeply angry that human beings could ever act like this. I've read of the ghastly practises of the Aztecs and Vlad the Impaler and so many other historical nasties in lurid and highly graphic detail, and I'm not easily disturbed by reading about such things. Yet the actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were, in their own uniquely terrifying way, worse than all of them.

Part of it is lack of distance. One expects the distant past to be a different place, for extinct cultures to have radically different values and beliefs to us. That's a large part of the appeal in studying it, like visiting another world, safe and secure behind the impregnable mental shield provided by the lens of the text. Ordinary Men is different. While of course there have been enormous cultural changes in the course of the intervening 90-odd years, there are unnerving similarities. It is after all still within living memory, an age of cars, electricity, medicine, global travel, cinema and television, not the almost alien realm of medieval feudalism or or even a Victorian stately home. And the main subjects of the book were, as Browning makes clear, men who were in no significant way different from us. They were recognisably normal.

The book begins with a rather dry documentation of the policing system, how the Nazis sent the reserve police forces (mostly men in their forties, married with children and who had been policemen for many years) into occupied countries to enforce German rule. It's a rather tedious list detailing exactly who went where, who gave which orders to whom, etc. Tedious but necessary : Browning wants the readers to know exactly much unique detail we have about this case, that this is documented thoroughly and actually provably happened. There isn't any doubt about it, as there is in many of the more ancient historical atrocities.

I won't go into the full gruesome details. Browning justifiably does do this, not for the sake of some ghastly titillation but because the public has the right to know and because the full horror of it is necessary to have any hope of understanding it psychologically : to comprehend how such ordinary men could behave so profoundly abnormally.

What happened ?

Nevertheless, I must necessarily lay out the basics. The police battalions were used to supplement the military forces in rounding up Jews for the holocaust. Primarily this consisted of forcibly deporting them on trains to extermination camps but it also involved a very great deal of direct murder. There was overlap between the two : transportation could often involving shooting Jews in the street if they refused to move, leaving the bodies where they lay. On the trains alone, hundreds or thousands died from heat exhaustion. 

But the direct actions were the most disturbing of all, marching men, women and children into the forest and shooting them at point-blank range with high powered rifles. As I said, horror beyond horror, and I need not go into the full grim detail as Browning does. 

Browning estimates the number of Jews shot by Reserve Police Battalion 101 alone at 38,000. The number they crammed onto trains to the Treblinka extermination camp was about 45,000. In some individual actions each policeman shot on average 14 Jews, with that figure rising to about 80 for their whole period of deployment in Poland. The great majority of them quite literally became serial killers. Unlike soldiers fighting armed opponents, they were virtually never under threat : their victims were unarmed civilians.

These averages reflect the disturbing fact that the "smallest group comprised the non-shooters". Some did object to the action, though only one single individual made a stand on moral principles : the rest tried to excuse themselves on grounds of illness or by making themselves scarce. Perhaps 10 or at most 20% managed to avoid personally killing anyone. At the other extreme there were of course traditional sadists and psychopaths who actively enjoyed murder and torture. But crucially :

The largest group within the battalion did whatever they were asked to do, without ever risking the onus of confronting authority or appearing weak, but they did not volunteer for or celebrate the killing. Increasingly numb and brutalised, they felt more pity for themselves for the "unpleasant" work they had been assigned than they did for their dehumanised victims. For the most part, they did not think what they were doing was wrong or immoral, because the killing was sanctioned by legitimate authority. Indeed, for the most part they did not think, period. As one policeman stated : "Truthfully, I must say that at the time we didn't reflect about it at all. Only years later did any of us become truly conscious of what had happened then." Heavy drinking helped : "most of the other men drank so much solely because of the many shootings of Jews, for such a life was quite intolerable sober."

Few of them actually wanted to take part, let alone enjoyed it, yet the majority committed the worst of atrocities. In the initial actions most were sick afterwards, physically disgusted with what they had done. One officer in particular expressed no emotional or intellectual disapproval (if anything the opposite) with the actions but still fell ill every time a killing was ordered. As time went on this subsided, with Browning speaking of a group who massacred elderly Polish villagers (importantly, not Jews, as I'll return to) by day and relaxing in the cinema in the evening.

After the war, none of them did anything remotely like this ever again. They were "willing executioners" in that they followed orders, but they were also hardly enthusiastic genocidal maniacs in the way Hitler was* : had they not been ordered to, it's doubtful any of them would every have killed anyone. This is in spite of them brutally murdering entire families.

* 75% were not Nazi Party members, though Browning notes that the 25% who were is an unusually high fraction for a police battalion.

Why did they do this ? How could it happen ?

The obvious explanation : racism

Browning takes us through this point by point. While he firmly rejects demonization of the killers, trying to see them as real, multi-layered, complex individuals, that doesn't mean he has any sympathy for them. "Explaining is not excusing. Understanding is not forgiving."

Why does he so firmly reject the obvious, simple demonization of people who carried out unarguably evil and monstrous acts ? The afterword of the book is a prolonged rebuttal of Hitler's Willing Executioners, which Browning quotes Goldhagen as describing the perpetrators' "Jewish blood lust" and "killing for pleasure". This is an obvious explanation, but as Browning notes, there are many arguments against it. Without doubt, anti-Semitism must surely be the driving factor behind the "desk murderers" who formulated policy and strategy, but this is not Browning's remit : he wants to know about the people pulling the triggers.

Undeniably some of them were simply evil sadists, but most were not. They were willing to kill but hardly enthusiastic about it. Even the battalion commander Major Trapp hated the whole prospect, openly weeping when he gave the initial orders. In fact Trapp not only allowed anyone who wanted to freely excuse themselves, but actively protected those who did.

At the larger scale, Browning draws a picture of a more complex relation between anti-Semitism and Naziism than is usually given (but for an intelligent counter-argument, see Niall Ferguson's The War of the World). To discriminate against something, he says, is not the same as wanting to stop it entirely, especially when that concerns people. He quotes another historian as saying that "Ordinary Germans knew how to distinguish between an acceptable discrimination... and the unacceptable horror of genoicde." 

This is an important point, one which is often difficult to keep in mind. On reading some chapters I felt a physical level of disgust and outrage at anyone agreeing with even the mildest form of racial or xenophobic policies, because why would you ever want to take even a single step down this road ? And yet, if they were really so closely linked, human history would be far more bloody than it already is. This is in fact something I've pointed out previously, though I have to admit it was very hard to maintain any sort of rational perspective while reading the book.

Anti-Semitism is now of course the main thing associated with the Nazis, but at the time it wasn't their main selling point. Achieving no more than 37% of the vote, it seems very unlikely that all those who did vote for them were of the same order of evil as the party leaders. Browning suggests that the primary attractions of economic policies, authoritarianism and nationalism acted as the draw to anti-Semitism, rather than the other way around. And as he sets out at length, there were plenty of killings of non-Jewish people that were just as horrific as those of the Jews. Furthermore, the non-German peoples participating in the holocaust behaved much the same despite lacking a supposedly uniquely-German anti-Semitic cultural brainwashing.

The biggest role anti-Semitism may have played was not in causing ordinary people to actively and personally shoot Jews, but in apathy. The general population might not have actually wanted to kill anyone or even wanted anyone else to kill on their behalf, but they were open to the idea of "limiting, or even ending, the role of Jews in German society." Indifference may have allowed the holocaust to happen but anti-Semitism wasn't the reason that ordinary middle-aged policeman would murder entire families in the forest. As Browning says, the relationship between discrimination, hatred and actual cruelty is more complex :

But we are still left with an unresolved question that cannot be solved by simple assertion : is a culture of hatred the necessary precondition for such a culture of cruelty ? Goldhagen has posed an important question. I do not believe that we have found a satisfactory answer.

If anti-Semitism is not the explanation for why hundreds of policeman committed acts of barbarity, then what is ? Browning carefully and systematically addresses many suggestions before settling on a single likely root cause. 

The calculated banality of evil

First, this was atrocity by policy, not a series of barbarous acts committed in an uncontrolled frenzy. Like the extermination camps it was a coldly calculated procedure which actively and deliberately accounted for the natural human tendency not to want to murder each other. The amount of direct shootings the policeman were ordered to undertake was (with some exceptions of the truly sadistic commanders) "minimised" and their roles limited as much as possible to loading the Jews onto trains – this was itself a barbaric process, but a step removed from direct murder; or limited only to cordon or other duties. The policemen were not told in advance of their tasks so not given a prior opportunity to withdraw, but if anyone asked to be excused (such as for being unable to shoot women and children), they were allowed. After the first shootings, volunteers were requested or policeman chosen who were already known to be willing to carry out further killings.

All of this was anticipated by and accounted for by Nazi High Command :

Being too weak to continue shooting, of course, posed problems for the "productivity" and morale of the battalion, but it did not challenge basic police discipline or the authority of the regime in general. Indeed, Heinrich Himmler himself sanctioned the toleration of this kind of weakness in his notorious Posen speech of October 4, 1943, to the SS leadership. While exalting obedience as one of the key virtues of all SS men, he explicitly noted an exception, namely, "one whose nerves are finished, one who is weak. Then one can say : Good, go take your pension."

This was a regime which was absolutely focused on its goal. They knew they were asking things fundamentally opposed to basic (or rather, civilised) human nature but they didn't demand making men into "mad dogs". Rather, says Browning, brutalisation was the effect, not the cause, of the killings. In fact while the policeman were no less indoctrinated with anti-Semitism than everyone else at the time, they were not especially more so either. While they were given some additional propaganda materials, none of it was designed to appeal to middle-aged married men with families, and none of it was designed to excite them to such bestial acts.

Instead, the killings themselves brutalised the men. They became inured to it, initially witnessing horrific injuries caused by their tendency to aim too high (quite possibly so as to subconsciously try and miss), and then adjusting to point-blank, careful shots aimed along the bayonet to guarantee a kill. Likewise, some of them justified killing entire families as a "kindness" as opposed to the cruelty of leaving the children alive. 

Nor were the policeman an especially unusual bunch. If anything, says Browning, they were the dregs, the only source of manpower available for their assigned task, and not the sort anyone would normally choose for something like this. There was certainly no deliberate selection on the part of the government nor any self-selection at work in who joined up, because they weren't told in advance as to what they would do, only learning of their initial duties on the morning of the first massacre. Officers certainly weren't selected for their sadistic tendencies either, with their being no indication of Major Trapp's open weeping as being anything other than sincere.

Another key point is that they weren't "only following orders".

Quite simply, in the past forty-five years no defence attorney or defendant in any of the hundreds of post-war trials has been able to document a single case in which refusal to obey an order to kill unarmed civilians resulted in the allegedly dire punishment... even putative duress dot not hold for Reserve Police Battalion 101. From the time Major Trapp, with choked voice and tears streaming down his cheeks, offered to excuse those "not up to it" at Józefów and protected the first man to take up his offer from Captain Hoffmann's wrath, a situation of putative duress did not exist in the battalion.

That is, the men knew they didn't have to kill anyone and no serious consequences would befall them. Yes, they might be shamed by their comrades and yes, shame is unpleasant. But one would reasonably expect that the shame of murder would be infinitely greater. 

So what was going on ?

Group conformity

Browning's answer is group conformity. This is not the same as obedience to authority : rather, the men carried out their orders out of the expectation that everyone else would too. This was a government-approved, legitimate action, so while they might not have believed it to be a good thing (certainly few were ever enthusiastic about it), they did accept that it was necessary. Just as in Milgram's shock experiments, the most successful encouragement to action was not in emphasising that the order was given, but that the action was necessary and beneficial to society.

Browning does a better disection of Milgram's findings than Bregman here (see previous post), acknowledging the differences between the situations. He notes that Major Trapp was a somewhat weak authority figure but invoked the "anything but weak" authority of the Nazi government, and respected by the men. He seems to have been genuinely sympathetic to the men's obvious disturbance at the prospect of their horrifying task, which may have made them respect him more, not less. That they knew they had a get-out option may, ironically, have helped many of them to overcome their discomfort. It wasn't so much fear of being shamed by the group that may have been the crucial factor in compliance, but in the fear that by not doing their fair share of this grisly task, they would be letting their friends down.

The battalion had orders to kill Jews, but each individual did not. Yet 80 to 90 percent of the men proceeded to kill, though almost all of them – at least initially – were horrified and disgusted by what they were doing. To break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behaviour, was simply beyond most of the men. It was easier for them to shoot.

Why ? First of all, by breaking ranks, nonshooters were leaving the "dirty work" to their comrades. Since the battalion had to shoot even if individuals did not, refusing to shoot constituted refusing one's share of an unpleasant collective obligation. It was in effect an asocial act vis-à-vis one's comrades. Those who did not shoot risked isolation, rejection, and ostracism – a very uncomfortable prospect within the tight-knit unit stationed abroad among a hostile population.

For this reason those who objected did so almost entirely on the grounds of "weakness", not moral principles. Weakness, it seems, is excusable, but moral objection meant open defiance of the group. Anti-Semitism and widespread cultural notions of German superiority, of what it meant to be a good citizen, definitely played a role here, even if only a second-order effect. Defying orders wasn't a problem so much out because of the disobedience itself, but because you'd be going against cultural norms. Conversely by obeying these terrible orders, you would, so the perverted reasoning goes, actually be helping your fellow men and wider society.

This story of ordinary men is not the story of all men. The reserve policemen faced choices, and most of them committed terrible deeds. But those who killed cannot be absolved by the notion that anyone in the same situation would have done as they did. For even among them, some refused to kill and others stopped killing. Human responsibility is ultimately an individual matter.

Conclusions 

Perhaps the most disturbing implication of Ordinary Men is not that racism leads to genocide, but that genocide can be perpetrated by those with no great ideological commitments. Yes, it took extreme racism coupled with hatred and a particular kind of evil intelligence for the "desk murderers" to formulate their policy. These men were diabolically evil. The brand of extreme malevolence that ran wild with the Nazi faithful is, fortunately, rare, and to couple this with the analytic intelligence needed to implement its insane policy in a workable, coherent way is rarer still. But the same simply cannot be said of those who actually pulled the triggers. Their motivations were altogether both more subtle and more common.

Circumstance, I think, appears to be very heavily dominant in human behaviour. Whether raising awareness of this helps us to make better choices, to be less swayed by group behaviour which goes against our own moral principles, remains poorly unanswered. Balancing the strengths of our collectivist and individualist tendencies against their respective deficiencies is a formidable challenge, and until we solve this most subtle of problems, I think we will remain forever haunted by the threat of hatred, war, and genocide.