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
Historian Christopher Browning explains that more than half of all the victims of the Holocaust were killed between mid-March 1942 and mid-February 1943. A large proportion of that killing took place in Poland where Nazis rounded up the Jewish populations of major cities and murdered them. During this period, however, the majority of Polish Jews did not live in major cities, but in smaller towns and villages throughout the country. Browning wonders about how the Germans dealt with this more dispersed population of Polish Jews, who were logistically harder to round up because they weren’t concentrated in one place.
While the events in this book take place during a conventional war (WWII), it is important to note that the violence and deaths that occurred during the Holocaust are not a part of that war—they were a systematic genocide associated with the separate race war that Hitler launched against European Jews years after his initial invasion of Poland. Browning’s focus on how the Germans dealt with the Jews living in small villages and rural areas indicates that he is specifically interested in the process of carrying out the Final Solution, when the Nazis moved past simply concentrating Jews in ghettos to be sent to work camps and instead began to systematically murder them in mass shootings and extermination camps to create a totally judenfrei (“Jew-free”) Poland.
Themes
While searching for answers in the court records of Nazi war crimes trials, Browning stumbles on the indictment of Reserve Police Battalion 101. Browning has been studying the Holocaust for almost two decades, but he finds this indictment “singularly powerful and disturbing” in that the testimonies on which the indictment is based deal honestly with the fact that perpetrators chose to kill others and reveal the “human face” of the “killers” who destroyed so many Polish Jews. Of the nearly 500 members of this battalion, nearly half have interrogations on record, which allows Browning to reconstruct and analyze how joining the battalion transformed everyday people into “professional killers.”
Browning introduces the primary focus of Ordinary Men: the experiences of the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101. He focuses on this battalion because it helps fill a gap in the historical record (how the Nazis dealt with Polish Jews who did not live in major cities) and because he finds the documentation of the battalion’s crimes to be extraordinarily powerful and disturbing, particularly because the files reveal the humanity of people who committed barbarous crimes. One can therefore assume that Browning’s project is, in part, to communicate to readers the historical and moral reality that regular human beings—not monsters—chose to commit these crimes, which makes their brutality especially disturbing.
Themes
Despite the depth of this source material, it’s difficult for Browning to write with certainty about the history of this battalion. For one, there are few outside sources to confirm the testimonies of the unit’s members. Witnesses to the activities of “itinerant killing units” like this battalion typically didn’t have much contact with the men of the battalion (unlike survivors of ghettos and camps, who often knew the perpetrators well). Because of this, Browning relies heavily on the battalion members’ own testimonies, which are often confusing and contradictory. After all, the testimonies were given in the 1960s, more than 20 years after the events in questions, so these men have faulty or repressed memories and some of them lie.
While Browning will devote his whole book to reconstructing the battalion’s experiences, he acknowledges that this is a complicated task. He has done his best to weigh the evidence, but some of what he will present in this book is based on imperfect sources. This is a common problem in writing about the Holocaust, particularly since the Nazis destroyed many of their records and tried to hide the evidence of their crimes. It is morally complicated to take the perpetrators’ accounts of their activities as fact (as Browning generally does), especially since their testimony was given in a court of law as they faced criminal indictment, which incentivized them to minimize their actions. Perhaps Browning previously noted how candid these testimonies seem in order to justify using them as a foundational source of this book.
Themes
Browning understands that writing a history of the day-to-day lives of men in a Nazi killing battalion might divert attention from the scale of Nazi crimes and the horrors that their victims faced. Nonetheless, he finds it worthwhile to write this book because it helps to illuminate how the Nazi regime’s policies of mass murder became a normal part of everyday life for rank-and-file Nazi perpetrators. Browning is also aware that narrating the everyday lives of these men might engender sympathy for them, because to write this kind of history requires Browning not to demonize Nazi murderers and instead acknowledge that they were human. He rejects, however, the notions that explaining behavior is equivalent to excusing it and that understanding someone means forgiving them; in fact, without explaining or understanding, one can only caricature Nazis, which does not allow for a real moral reckoning with their crimes.
Browning’s insistence that mass murder became normal life for many Nazi perpetrators, who were themselves everyday people following orders at work, echoes Hannah Arendt’s famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem, which chronicled Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann’s war crimes trial. Arendt’s major observation—which was incredibly controversial at the time—was about the “banality of evil,” or her perception that Eichmann was not a sociopath or a devoted ideologue, but in fact a mediocre man who didn’t really think about what he was doing beyond his commonplace desire to get promoted at work. Browning is clearly in agreement with Arendt’s analysis, as he is interested in how banal motives can lead ordinary people to commit monstrous acts. He acknowledges, however, that emphasizing the humanity of mass murderers could have an effect opposite of what he intends: engendering sympathy and minimizing the evil of their crimes. In justifying his approach, Browning makes an important differentiation between sympathy that leads to forgiveness and sympathy that leads to understanding. He is not seeking to forgive these men, but rather to understand their actions and motivations, which is important because it helps readers to understand what made the Holocaust possible (knowledge that might help prevent similar atrocities in the future).
Themes
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