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
As Order Police involvement in the mass murders of Jews in Russia begins to wind down, Hitler and Heydrich give Daluege a new assignment: the Order Police must guard deportation trains from Germany into Eastern Europe. Heydrich and Daluege agree that the Security Police will round up Jews for deportation and the Order Police will guard the trains. Between 1941 and 1945, over 710 deportation trains take Jews from countries like Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia to Eastern European ghettos and concentration camps, many of which are in Poland. The Order Police provides guards for virtually all of these deportation trains.
For a long time, Eastern Europe was considered a sort of backward place—less developed, less educated, more primitive. Because of this, Nazis decided to send Jews to Eastern European countries. Furthermore, deporting Jews to different countries reinforced the image of Jews as foreign enemies living on land that rightfully belonged to Germany. Notably, the Order Police were given the less violent of the two jobs in the deportation process—they did not have to round up Jews, shoot those who couldn’t walk, and force the rest to leave their homes behind, since the Security Police did that. All the Order Policemen had to do was keep an eye on the train (although this does include shooting any Jews who try to escape the train cars). This is one example of how the military makes use of the Order Police in nonviolent actions.
Themes
The reports written by Order Policemen who helped guard these deportations provide valuable insight into what the experience was like for both the guards and the Jews they deported. One such report, from a deportation of 1,000 Jews to the Sobibór extermination camp in June 1942, dwells on the lack of adequate rations (most of which went bad due to the heat), but it completely ignores the experience of the Jews (mostly women and children) trapped in overpacked train cars. However, the note about food going bad due to the heat is important because it also means the Jews—who were typically packed into inadequately ventilated train cars by the hundreds—likely suffered from heat exhaustion and dehydration, and were undoubtedly starving on the 61-hour trip.
This deportation doesn’t seem violent and outwardly it is not, but Sobibór was a notorious death camp in Poland. While the Order Police aren’t torturing or beating the Jews, they are still bringing them to their deaths. This makes the Order Policemen who guarded the trains complicit in the deaths of all the Jews on that train. The guard’s lack of concern for the Jews shows that he doesn’t see them as human beings, but merely as cargo that he is responsible for transporting.
Themes
Another report, this one written by an Order Policeman who guarded a transport of nearly over 8,000 Jews from Kołomyja to Galicia, illustrates an even more difficult journey in 1942. Desperate to escape the fate they knew awaited them at the extermination camp, many Jews tried to escape and the guards shot at them. Around 300 more Jews who appeared too weak to survive the trip were executed, and many of them were already suffering after enduring a forced 50-kilometer march to the train station. Jewish prisoners also experienced some “tremendously adverse effects” resulting from extreme heat, overpacked cars, and lack of food. Over the course of three days, about 2,000 Jews died in the cars before they arrived at Bełzec and the Order Police handed them over to the camp’s officers.
The policeman chooses the phrase “tremendously adverse effects” to describe the large number of deaths that occurred due to starvation and thirst in extremely hot, overpacked train cars. His evident concern over losing so much of his cargo is somewhat ironic because he is bringing the Jews to Bełzec, a notorious extermination camp where they are scheduled to be killed in gas chambers anyway. This might be at least partially due to an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality. The man is concerned with the immediate necessity of counting bodies for his report and disposing of them, but he does not seem to have internalized the fact that he is bringing the Jews to their deaths because he will not witness them dying in the gas chambers. The somewhat detached way the guard speaks of the inhumane conditions the Jews live in on the train indicates that he may have become so used to this kind of suffering that it simply does not horrify him anymore.
Themes
These kinds of reports do not provide as much information about the inner workings of the Order Policemen’s minds as Browning would like. The perpetrators he is most interested in are not “desk murderers” who can distance themselves and bury their feelings in bureaucratic paperwork, but those who directly victimize other people (for example, those who participate in firing squads). Browning wants to understand the psychological transformation they undergo over weeks and months of near constant participation in or proximity to extreme violence. To find these answers, Browning must return to the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101.
Browning is more interested in the experiences of the people with direct involvement in the violence (such as shooters, guards, ghetto clearing units, and so on) because they had to leap far more mental hurdles to cope with their actions than a “desk murderer” who simply signs a piece of paper or writes up a report. The general belief behind this is that doing the actual shooting has a different psychological effect than writing up and delivering orders from a distance. Reserve Police Battalion 101 provides an ideal case study because, as Browning has explained, there are numerous firsthand accounts of their actions given by the perpetrators themselves.
Themes
Get the entire Ordinary Men LitChart as a printable PDF.
