Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Ordinary Men, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Freedom of Choice
Peer Pressure, Conformity, and Acceptance
Normalization of Violence
Nationalism, War, and Ethnic Cleansing
Summary
Analysis
Early on the morning of July 13, 1942, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101—most of whom are middle-aged family men from Hamburg’s lower-middle- and working-classes—wake up in Biłgoraj, Poland and prepare to go to a town called Józefów. They aren’t sure what they will have to do there, but it is home to around 1,800 Jews. The town is eerily quiet as the men pull in and gather around their 53-year-old commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, whom some affectionately call Papa Trapp. With tears in his eyes, Trapp explains that the battalion will have to do a “frightfully unpleasant task,” and that even though he doesn’t like this assignment, it came from the highest authorities and must therefore be done. To motivate his men, Trapp reminds them that, back in Germany, there are bombs killing women and children.
The men are initially unsure why they’re being called to the town and what they could possibly have to do there, which shows that the kind of killing that is about to happen is new in the course of the war. Furthermore, Trapp’s emotions betray how unusual an order like this is and how disturbing he finds it. His tears and his personal commentary on how distasteful he finds the task at hand show that–at least initially—Trapp has a moral intuition that to carry out this order would be wrong. In light of this, it’s interesting to see how he justifies it to himself and his men: he says that they must follow orders (thereby appealing to their sense of hierarchy and patriotism) and then he rouses them by mentioning bombs falling in their home country (albeit without mentioning that those doing the bombing were neither Polish nor Jewish—the bombs have nothing to do with the battalion’s soon-to-be victims). Already, Browning is painting a picture of ordinary people shoving aside their strong moral objection to harming others by distorting the truth and casting the blame on others (they are just following the orders of their commanders, after all).
Themes
Trapp says that the town’s Jews are working with resistance groups to undermine the German war effort. Because of this, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 are to round up all the Jews in town, separate the healthy working-age men so they can be taken to work camps, and all the remaining Jews (women, children, the sick, and the elderly) are to be executed. After explaining these orders, Trapp does something extraordinary: he tells the battalion that if any of the older men don’t think they can take part in this assignment, then they can opt out.
In the preface, Browning notes that part of what makes the testimony of this battalion so illuminating is that it shows the extent to which ordinary people chose to commit egregious acts of violence. Here, readers see the first instance of such a choice: the older men in the battalion can opt out of the order to murder the town’s Jews if it disturbs them too much. By showing this offer, Browning makes clear that the moral responsibility for the murder and imprisonment of the town’s Jews falls entirely on the men of the battalion who chose to participate. Furthermore, this moment is ironic because of Trapp’s invocation (just moments before) of German women and children being bombed back home. The suggestion here is that killing German women and children is morally beyond the pale, whereas killing Jewish women and children is simply their job, which (even if they might individually find it unpleasant) still needs to be done. This shows that—even while the men maintain some moral sense that this is wrong—they fundamentally do not see German and Polish/Jewish lives as equal.
Themes
