Christopher R. Browning

The shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews.

Ordinary Men

Trish

Of all the books on the reading list for my Ideologies of the Holocaust class, this one is undoubtedly my favorite. 

It's a must read for anyone intrigued by the Holocaust, especially, in the "ordinary men" who carried out Hitler's orders and committed the infamously heinous crimes.

A very hard and unpleasant read. I had to put down the book several times, as it in itself seems to replicate in its narrative the sort of rational, systematic process of the final solution, and a devoid of emotions matter-of-fact research paper into what made ordinary men into mass-murdering psychopaths, for a time, at least

Ture Strange Nilsson

Mihai Nueleanu

Helen Bright

Widely reviewed and read in hardcover, this is the shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews. "Browning tells us about such Germans and helps us understand . . . how they were transformed psychologically . . . into active participants in the most monstrous crime in human history".--New York Times Book Review, front page. 8 pages of photos; 2 maps.

Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

Kemie G

D VA

Lexi Kilmartin

Joline Hordijk

AJSingh

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—now with a new afterword and additional photographs. 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. “A remarkable—and singularly chilling—glimpse of human behavior...This meticulously researched book...represents a major contribution to the literature of the Holocaust."—Newsweek

amelia osullivan-finch

Michael W

Gaurav Verma

Luuk Hackeng

Pedro Pinheiro 

Stijn C

Rachel Cooper

Sander

Robbie Bell

Frederik Van den Bril

Jack Robinson

Tells how a German reserve police batallion rounded up 1,800 Jews from the Polish village of Jozefow, shooting all but a few hundred of them

Joseph Aleo

Lloyd Dalton

Roos Kuijper 

Owen Kraft

Ordinary Men

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