Ordinary Men Study Guide

Christopher Browning was born in Durham, North Carolina in 1944 but grew up in Chicago. His father was a philosophy professor at Northwestern University and his mother was a nurse. Browning earned a B.A. in history from Oberlin College in 1967 and an M.A. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1968. Browning taught history at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania and St. John’s Military Academy before going on to earn his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1975. Since 1978, Browning has written or co-written 10 books on the Holocaust and the history of Hitler’s Final Solution. Browning taught as a professor at Pacific Lutheran University for 25 years and has been a guest lecturer or professor at several prestigious institutions, including Princeton University and Cambridge University. Browning has been called as an expert witness in the trials of accused Nazis in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Browning won his first of three National Jewish Book Awards in 1994 for his book Ordinary Men, and in 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1999, Browning began working at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, where he is currently the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History Emeritus.

The German invasion of Poland began on September 1, 1939. The German army rapidly swept through Poland, bombing airfields and attacking Polish naval forces. This invasion sparked outrage and, two days later, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, thus beginning World War II. At this time, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had control of the German government and soon developed a plan to exterminate all the Jews in Europe to make way for a German “master race.” This is part of the reason that Reserve Police Battalion 101, the group at the center of Browning’s book, were ordered to carry out mass executions of Jews. This genocide or ethnic cleansing was part of the “Final Solution” to permanently eradicate the European Jewry. Reserve Police Battalion 101 also helped oversee the forced deportation of Jews from several districts in Poland to Treblinka, one of the Nazis’ extermination camps in which an estimated 700,000 to 900,000 Jews were gassed to death in addition to about 2,000 Romani people. The period of time Ordinary Men covers was one of the deadliest and most violent for the Jews living in countries that had been invaded by the Germans. Jewish ghettos, extermination, and work camps sprung up all over Continental Europe and many innocent Jewish men, women, and children were simply shot in the street. The tide of World War II changed in 1944 after the American and English invasion at Normandy (called D-Day). By 1945, Allied Forces (namely American, English, and Russian armies) were closing in on Germany. Hitler and several high-ranking Nazis committed suicide and Allied Forces captured Berlin, effectively ending the fighting in Europe. Allied Forces then helped liberate Jews and other prisoners from the camps.

When Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men was first published, it garnered a lot of attention and some controversy. Another historian, Daniel Goldhagen, was particularly critical of Browning’s work and, using many of the same historical documents as Browning, provided a different interpretation of events in his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. The orders and executions Browning describes in Ordinary Men were part of Hitler’s infamous Final Solution. For more on the Final Solution and what it meant, try Browning’s other nonfiction book The Origins of the Final Solution. In his extensively researched book Life and Death in the Third Reich, Peter Fritzsche examines the immense ideological grip Nazis had over ordinary Germans before and during World War II. Another book with clear parallels to Ordinary Men is Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, an account of Adolph Eichmann’s war crimes trial. In that book, Arendt coins the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe how many Nazi war criminals weren’t zealots or sociopaths, but rather ordinary men who were just trying to get along at work. For those interested in learning more about Jewish life in Europe during World War II, try The Diary of Anne Frank, which was written by Anne Frank while her Jewish family hid in a secret annex and then published by her father, Otto Frank, after the war. Although Anne Frank did not survive the war after being sent to one of the Nazi’s notorious concentration camps, many others did. Corrie ten Boom’s memoir The Hiding Place details the part her family played in trying to safe Jewish lives, her arrest by the Nazis, and her experience in a concentration camp until the end of the war. Similarly, Władysław Szpilman’s The Pianist recounts how he survived life in the Warsaw Ghetto when he was forcibly relocated there after the German invasion of Poland.