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
At some point in the summer of 1941, Himmler tells Globocnik about Hitler’s plan to murder all the European Jews and puts Globocnik in charge of overseeing the extermination of the Jews in Poland’s General Government. There are so many Jews in the General Government area, however, that they decide that they must find a new method of killing them that won’t be as psychologically damaging to German soldiers and policemen as shooting them. This leads to the creation of extermination camps with gas chambers that require little manpower. One camp, Bełzec, is in Globocnik’s district and gassing there begins in March 1942. Globocnik creates two more extermination camps (Sobibór and Treblinka), but he struggles to get enough manpower to run everything. He also needs far more men to help clear ghettos and round up the General Government’s 2,000,000 Jews.
Globocnik already has a reputation for being very cruel, so it’s no surprise that he’s apparently so willing to take on the task of causing the deaths of over 2,000,000 Jews. Creating gas chambers for executions helps depersonalize the process of killing. Instead of coming face to face with victims one at a time and looking at them, men can simply shut a door and pour in a chemical to wipe out hundreds or thousands of people at once. Not only does this make killing psychologically easier for the men to bear, but it also saves a great deal of time and requires less manpower.
Themes
The mass murder campaign against Jews in Poland is dubbed Operation Reinhard to commemorate Reinhard Heydrich who died in Czechoslovakia. Globocnik sets up a special staff to help coordinate the mass killings, deportations, and extermination camps. Additionally, he can use men from the SS, Gestapo, and the Order Police to help carry his plans out. Three battalions of Order Police are stationed in the district of Lublin (including Reserve Police Battalion 101) and they are the largest pool of manpower at Globocnik’s disposal. Additionally, Globocnik gets permission from Himmler to recruit Ukrainian, Latvian, and Lithuanian prisoners of war to help. These units are called Hilfswillige, or Hiwis for short. This is the second largest pool of manpower Globocnik can use.
Globocnik only has a limited number of men to use because at this time Poland wasn’t as active of a war zone as Russia or France. Germany had invaded and conquered Poland several years earlier, so by now they were firmly established there and no longer feared any major trouble from Polish partisan forces or neighboring countries. This shortage of manpower explains why the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 find themselves having to carry out duties that would be more appropriate for the military (namely, conducting mass executions).
Themes
The mass murders begin in March 1942 when 90 percent of the Lublin ghetto is killed, and 11,000 to 12,000 more Jews are sent to extermination camps from nearby towns. The gas chambers at Sobibór begin operating in May. By June 18, about 100,000 Jews from the Lublin district and about 65,000 from neighboring areas have been gassed to death at Sobibór and Bełzec. At the same time, more Jews are being brought in from Germany and other countries. The transports and extermination camp murders halt for about 20 days due to a shortage of rolling stock, and during this lull, Reserve Police Battalion 101 arrives in the Lublin district.
As seen in the sheer number of people killed, the gas chambers prove an invaluable part of the Final Solution. With Globocnik’s limited manpower, there would have been no way for him to exterminate so many Jews in such a short amount of time. It’s worth noting that Reserve Police Battalion 101 enters Lublin during a lull in the violence—they aren’t immediately thrown into massive ghetto clearings or mass murders, nor do they expect that they will be because the area seems comparatively peaceful when they first enter it.
Themes
On June 20, 1942, district officials tell the men in the battalion they will help with a special action in Poland. According to Browning, there is no reason to believe that any of the men know what their orders actually entail and they likely believe that they will just be carrying out guard duty. Upon arrival, the battalion sets up headquarters in Biłgoraj and the units spread out to nearby towns. During the lull in gassings at the camps, the battalion helps move Jews from smaller areas to larger ones that will make it easier to move them to camps when killings resume. However, Globocnik loses patience with this and decides to use firing squads to kill the Jews. He selects Reserve Police Battalion 101 to do this.
The process of moving Jews from smaller areas into a bigger one is called concentrating. This makes it easier for a large number of Jews to be rounded up all at once to be deported to an extermination or work camp. The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 might not totally understand what will ultimately happen to the Jews they are concentrating; remember, the use of gas chambers in this area only began a few months before and the men themselves think they’re in Poland to provide traditional police services, such as guard duty or helping enforce rules.
Themes
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