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
When the battalion redeploys to the northern part of the Lublin district, Gnade and the Second Company settle in the area of Biała Podlaska. The Final Solution began in this area in June 1942 with the deportation of 3,000 Jews to Sobibór. When Gnade and his men arrive, hundreds of Jews are concentrated in the village of Łomazy. Gnade leads the battalion’s first joint killing action with a unit of Hiwis from Trawniki against the Jews in Łomazy. On August 16, the day before the mass execution, Gnade prepares officials in the town and his own officers for the action—all the Jews are to be shot. Gnade’s men are only supposed to round the Jews up for the Hiwis to shoot, although rounding the Jews up includes shooting the elderly and anyone too sick to walk.
This mass murder will take place just a little over a month after the massacre in Józefów, so the memory of this first massacre is still fresh in the men’s minds. This is also the battalion’s first murderous action that will include the Hiwis. Because the Hiwis are supposed to be the primary shooters in this situation (aside from killing the elderly during the roundup), the men from Reserve Police Battalion 101 will not have to carry as heavy of a psychological burden as they did after the Józefów massacre. However, the men are also going into this situation knowing that they’re capable of killing. This makes it far less traumatic for them when they hear what the orders are.
Themes
After the roundup, about 60 or 70 of Łomazy’s 1,700 Jews are taken into the woods to dig a mass grave. After hours of waiting, about 50 Hiwis come into the town, apparently already drunk and determined to get drunker. When the grave is finished, the Jews, Gnade’s men, and the Hiwis slowly make their way to the forest. The Jews are ordered to undress (the women and some men keep their underclothes on) and then lie on the ground to wait.
From the beginning, the massacre at Łomazy takes a far more sadistic turn than Józefów. A group of Jews is forced to dig not only their own grave, but the grave their family and friends will be murdered in. They are also degraded by being forced to take their clothes off and lie on the ground wearing only their underwear or shifts. This is a humiliating experience that makes their final moments all the more painful.
Themes
Most of the men’s testimonies indicate that Gnade is a virulent anti-Semite with an unpredictable temper that grows steadily worse when he drinks. On the day of the massacre in Łomazy, Gnade is very drunk, which evidently brings out his sadistic side. Thus far in the war, Gnade seemed, at best, indifferent to violence, but at Łomazy he forces elderly Jewish men to undress and crawl in the dirt and mud for a while before getting his noncommissioned officers to help him beat the men with clubs. Just before the shooting, Gnade personally chases Jews from the undressing area to the grave.
Gnade seems to undergo an extreme and rapid transformation. Earlier, he was so concerned about witnessing violence that he got his men on a train and left before the Jews they’d just deported were shot. Now, however, he revels in excessive violence and deliberately humiliates the Jews. Gnade doesn’t consider the Jews less-than-human, though. He revels in their very human emotions—humiliation, fear, pain, and despair. He toys with their feelings and derives a real pleasure from it. Given this, it’s no wonder that his men describe him as an anti-Semite.
Themes
The Jews are forced to run into the mass grave in groups and the Hiwis excitedly shoot them, then they force the next group to scramble over a pile of corpses to get into the empty part of the pit. Eventually, the Jews must lie on top of dead friends and family. As the bodies pile up, the blood mixes with dirt and groundwater; soon, the shooters in the grave are standing in a knee-deep puddle of blood and mud. As the Hiwis start passing out from drunkenness, Gnade orders his own men to start shooting. The men are forced to take a different approach than the Hiwis because the pool of blood and mud is too deep and bodies—some of which are still moving—are floating everywhere.
The shooting at Józefów was bloody, but during the Łomazy massacre there are literally rivers of blood and the men are witnessing it all happen up close. The streak of sadism that characterizes the preparatory stage of the massacre continues during the shooting. In Józefów, the men attempt to bring their victims to areas of the forest where they won’t see previous victims’ bodies. During this massacre, however, the men exhibit total indifference to how their victims feel—there is no attempt to make them comfortable, alleviate their fear, or treat them with any dignity or respect. The men don’t even make sure they are actually killing the Jews as they shoot, as shown by how many continue moving in the grave.
Themes
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Gnade’s men continue shooting until the Hiwis wake up enough to resume their task. Once the execution is over, the work Jews cover the grave with dirt and then the Hiwis shoot them as well. The thin layer of dirt over the grave continues to move. A few days later there’s a sweep of the town to root out any Jews who evaded the initial execution and Gnade sends orders for them to be shot.
Gnade’s men are willing to shoot as long as there’s no other way to get the task at hand done, but once the Hiwis wake up they willingly stop and let them finish. This implies that, at least at this point, they’re not as enthusiastic and eager to commit violence as their commander seems to be. The number of Jews who survive the shooting and are buried alive indicate that the shooters during this massacre are unconcerned with making sure their victims die quickly and without suffering. In other words, it seems like the men who take part in this massacre are finding it easier to put the suffering of others out of their minds.
Themes
The massacre at Łomazy differs from the one at Józefów in a few important ways. For example, more Jews try to escape, and the men steal their victims’ valuables and clothes. This massacre is easier for the men of Gnade’s company to deal with psychologically because the Hiwis do most of the shooting. Even the men who do eventually shoot seem to find it easier because they don’t pair off with their victims, thus depersonalizing the process. Also, it doesn’t take as long to finish the massacre, and the men are already somewhat habituated to violence because of their participation in the killing at Józefów.
Browning says that, at this point, the men are already habituated to violence, but it seems like they’re also becoming habituated or even enthusiastic about other morally reprehensible things. They plunder their victims’ belongings for fun, which indicates a growing callousness about the lives that are lost. No longer consumed with shame, the men see these murders as an opportunity to enrich themselves. Furthermore, they don’t feel the same connection to their victims because they’re not paired off with them face to face with time to have conversations and get to know more about them as they did at Józefów.
Themes
Another major difference between the two massacres is that the men experience a sort of “psychological relief” because Gnade did not explicitly give them the option to opt out of shooting the way Trapp did at Józefów. Without this option, the men assigned to firing squads are not burdened with the knowledge that they chose to do something terrible. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the men didn’t have a choice; some slipped off, but in small numbers. Most didn’t even try to avoid shooting, because following orders falls in line with their natural desire to conform to the majority.
The men do not want to be confronted with the reality that they all have a choice here. Having a choice implies personal responsibility for their actions, and as willing as the men are to murder other people when they are ordered to, they still have some sense that it’s immoral and that people back home will likely condemn them for the part they played in these massacres. By not offering a choice, Gnade frees them from the burden of admitting that they’ve consciously chosen to kill unarmed Jews. From now on, they can say that, in this event, they simply followed orders, thus placing the blame on someone else instead of accepting it for themselves.
Themes
Trapp didn’t just offer to excuse men from participating in violence, he set a tone for the massacre at Józefów—he didn’t want to hurt those who had to die, and his own pain at just giving the orders was evident. For this reason, the massacre was far more emotionally draining than later ones. Later “Jewish actions” are led by company or platoon leaders and they get to set the tone for those events. In this case, Gnade’s sadism seems to have rubbed off on his men, and it helps them take an important step towards becoming truly callous killers.
One of the primary themes in Ordinary Men is how powerful the desire to conform is. In this case, the men seem to be conforming and reacting to the tone their commanders set. When Trapp showed his despair, the men felt that it was okay for them to feel the same thing and they expressed it. Gnade expressed enthusiasm and sadism, so the men adopted those feelings (at least to some degree) and had far less trouble doing cruel and sadistic things (and experienced far less guilt afterwards).
Themes
