At the center of Ordinary Men is the argument that human beings are responsible for their choices, no matter the circumstance. Historian Christopher Browning comes to this conclusion after examining the testimonies of a group of German soldiers who perpetrated some of the most barbaric violence in the Second World War: the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101. In telling their story, Browning shows how even the most ordinary of men can choose to become cold-blooded killers. These men were regular citizens—working-class, middle-aged family men, not Nazi zealots or hardened killers. Despite this, the majority of them chose to commit mass murder, even after their commanding officer, Major Trapp, gave them a choice not to participate (and then protected the men who chose to abstain). By examining the choices these men made to either kill others or abstain from violence, Browning determines that the frequent excuse that German soldiers participated in genocide because they were simply following orders is false; every man had a choice, and those who chose to kill are wholly responsible for their actions.
The moral center of Ordinary Men is the moment in which Major Trapp gives his men a choice about whether to participate in the mass murder of Jews at Józefów. This is the first time the battalion has been ordered to kill civilians, let alone in such numbers, and Trapp clearly finds the task abhorrent; when he relays the orders to his men, he is visibly distressed and he makes his discomfort with the situation known. At this point, Trapp and his men are not yet habituated to violence and they retain their moral intuition that such actions are wrong. Despite this, only a small number of men choose to take Trapp up on his offer and abstain from the violence; the rest go on to murder more than a thousand people in one day. By framing the book around this moment, Browning demonstrates that the notion that these men killed others only because they were following orders is false. From the very beginning, they had an explicit choice, and those who chose murder are morally accountable for what they did.
Beyond this explicit choice at Józefów, Browning shows that, in every other moment of violence, the men of RPB 101 could have chosen not to kill. At other massacres and roundups, men who objected morally or who simply couldn’t stomach the violence found ways to step out. Some men tried the firing squads but left after finding the job sickening, while others pretended to be busy so that nobody would notice that they weren’t participating. Lieutenant Buchmann, one of Trapp’s men, refused from the beginning to shoot anyone, and he eventually requested a transfer back to Hamburg so that he wouldn’t be around the battalion’s atrocities. Buchmann even wrote letters to superior officers explicitly stating his refusal to take on duties so remote from the normal tasks of a policeman, regardless of the impact on his career. That this minority of men in the battalion found ways to avoid the killing shows that their choice was available to the others, as well; just as abstaining was a choice, every act of violence was a choice for every person who participated.
A sickening irony of Browning’s research is that, while Trapp likely believed that giving his men a choice was compassionate, it actually caused most of them distress. Because Trapp gave them an explicit choice about participating in the massacre at Józefów, those who did the shooting took it quite hard. After the massacre, they were consumed by guilt and shame, unwilling to speak of what they’d done. In part, this was because it was (for most of them) their first time killing another person, but Browning argues that a big part of their distress was simply that—because of Trapp’s offer—they couldn’t deny that what they’d done was their own choice. By contrast, when Lieutenant Gnade led RPB 101’s Second Company in another mass execution in Łomazy, he did not explicitly state that the men could back out. Some men backed out anyway, which showed that, even though the choice wasn’t explicit, it was still available to them. Nonetheless, because Gnade’s men could deny to themselves that they’d murdered by choice, they fared much better psychologically in the aftermath. As Browning writes, “those who shot did not have to live with the clear awareness that what they had done had been avoidable,” as they were able to rationalize what they did as simply following orders.
Clearly, though, this lack of choice was an illusion; at any moment, each man could have chosen not to participate, and some did. Furthermore, all the men who abstained were protected from punishment—in fact, no defense attorney (representing accused war criminals) “has been able to document a single case in which refusal to obey an order to kill unarmed civilians resulted in […] dire punishment.” This demonstrates that the men were always free to choose not to shoot innocent people, which makes them morally responsible for their horrific choice.
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Freedom of Choice Quotes in Ordinary Men
The male Jews of working age were to be separated and taken to a work camp. The remaining Jews—the women, children, and elderly—were to be shot on the spot by the battalion. Having explained what awaited his men, Trapp then made an extraordinary offer: if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step out.
After explaining the battalion’s murderous assignment, he made his extraordinary offer: any of the older men who did not feel up to the task that lay before them could step out. Trapp paused, and after some moments one man from Third Company, Otto-Julius Schimke, stepped forward. Captain Hoffmann, who had arrived in Józefów directly from Zakrzów with the Third Platoon of Third Company and had not been part of the officers’ meetings in Biłgoraj the day before, was furious that one of his men had been the first to break ranks. Hoffmann began to berate Schimke, but Trapp cut him off. After he had taken Schimke under his protection, some ten or twelve other men stepped forward as well. They turned in their rifles and were told to await a further assignment from the major.
When Trapp first made his offer early in the morning, the real nature of the action had just been announced and time to think and react had been very short. Only a dozen men had instinctively seized the moment to step out, turn in their rifles, and thus excuse themselves from the subsequent killing. For many the reality of what they were about to do, and particularly that they themselves might be chosen for the firing squad, had probably not sunk in. But when the men of First Company were summoned to the marketplace, instructed in giving a “neck shot,” and sent to the woods to kill Jews, some of them tried to make up for the opportunity they had missed earlier.
Sergeant Steinmetz of Third Platoon once again gave his men the opportunity to report if they did not feel up to it. No one took up his offer.
When the men arrived at the barracks in Biłgoraj, they were depressed, angered, embittered, and shaken. They ate little but drank heavily. Generous quantities of alcohol were provided, and many of the policemen got quite drunk. Major Trapp made the rounds, trying to console and reassure them, and again placing the responsibility on higher authorities. But neither the drink nor Trapp’s consolation could wash away the sense of shame and horror that pervaded the barracks.
As important as the lack of time for reflection was the pressure for conformity—the basic identification of men in uniform with their comrades and the strong urge not to separate themselves from the group by stepping out. The battalion had only recently been brought up to full strength, and many of the men did not yet know each other well; the bonds of military comradeship were not yet fully developed. Nonetheless, the act of stepping out that morning in Józefów meant leaving one’s comrades and admitting that one was “too weak” or “cowardly.” Who would have “dared,” one policeman declared emphatically, to “lose face” before the assembled troops. “If the question is posed to me why I shot with the others in the first place,” said another who subsequently asked to be excused after several rounds of killing, “I must answer that no one wants to be thought a coward.” It was one thing to refuse at the beginning, he added, and quite another to try to shoot but not be able to continue. Another policeman—more aware of what truly required courage—said quite simply, “I was cowardly.”
One other factor sharply distinguished Łomazy from Józefów and may well have been yet another kind of psychological “relief” for the men—namely, this time they did not bear the “burden of choice” that Trapp had offered them so starkly on the occasion of the first massacre. No chance to step out was given to those who did not feel up to shooting; no one systematically excused those who were visibly too shaken to continue. Everyone assigned to the firing squads took his turn as ordered. Therefore, those who shot did not have to live with the clear awareness that what they had done had been avoidable.
This is not to say that the men had no choice, only that it was not offered to them so openly and explicitly as at Józefów. They had to exert themselves to evade killing.
Most of the policemen, however, seem to have made no effort to avoid shooting. At Łomazy following orders reinforced the natural tendency to conform to the behavior of one’s comrades. This was much easier to bear than the situation at Józefów, where the policemen were allowed to make personal decisions concerning their participation but the “cost” of not shooting was to separate themselves from their comrades and to expose themselves as “weak.”
This figure needs to be put into some wider perspective in order to show the ferocity of the Międzyrzec deportation even by the Nazi standards of 1942. About 300,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw between July 22 and September 21, 1942. The total number of Jews killed by gunfire over this two-month period was recorded as 6,687. In Warsaw, therefore, the ration between those killed on the spot and those deported was approximately 2 percent. The same ration for Międzyrzec was nearly 9 percent. The Jews of Międzyrzec did not march “like sheep to the slaughter.” They were driven with an almost unimaginable ferocity and brutality that left a singular imprint even on the memories of the increasingly numbed and callous participants from Reserve Police Battalion 101.
Major Trapp immediately reported to Lublin that 3 “bandits,” 78 Polish “accomplices,” and 180 Jews had been executed in retaliation for the ambush of Jobst in Talcyn. Apparently the man who had wept through the massacre at Józefów and still shied from the indiscriminate slaughter of Poles no longer had any inhibitions about shooting more than enough Jews to meet his quota.
But the “Jew hunt” was different. Once again they saw their victims face to face, and the killing was personal. More important, each individual policeman once again had a considerable degree of choice. How each exercised that choice revealed the extent to which the battalion had divided into the “tough” and the “weak.” In the months since Józefów many had become numbed, indifferent, and in some cases eager killers; others limited their participation in the killing process, refraining when they could do so without great cost or inconvenience. Only a minority of nonconformists managed to preserve a beleaguered sphere of moral autonomy that emboldened them to employ patterns of behavior and stratagems of evasion that kept them from becoming killers at all.
Growing callousness can also be seen in the post-shooting behavior of the policemen. After Józefów and the early shootings, the men had returned to their quarters shaken and embittered, without appetite or desire to talk about what they had just done. With the relentless killing, such sensitivities were dulled. One policeman recalled, “At the lunch table some of the comrades made jokes about the experiences they’d had during an action. From their stories I could gather that they had just finished a shooting action. I remember as especially crass that one of the men said now we eat ‘the brains of slaughtered Jews.’” Only the witness found this “joke” less than hilarious.
Though the “Jew hunt” has received little attention, it was an important and statistically significant phase of the Final Solution. A not inconsiderable percentage of Jewish victims in the General Government lost their lives in this way. Statistics aside, the “Jew hunt” is a psychologically important key to the mentality of the perpetrators. Many of the German occupiers in Poland may have witnessed or participated in ghetto roundups on several occasions—in a lifetime, a few brief moments that could be easily repressed. But the “Jew hunt” was not a brief episode. It was a tenacious, remorseless, ongoing campaign in which the “hunters” tracked down and killed their “prey” in direct and personal confrontation. It was not a passing phase but an existential condition of constant readiness and intention to kill every last Jew who could be found.
Orders were orders, and no one in such a political climate could be expected to disobey them, they insisted. Disobedience surely meant the concentration camp if not immediate execution, possibly for their families as well. The perpetrators had found themselves in a situation of impossible “duress” and therefore could not be help responsible for their actions. Such, at least, is what defendants said in trial after trial in postwar Germany.
There is a general problem with this explanation, however. Quite simply, in the past forty-five years no defense attorney or defendant in any of the hundreds of postwar trials has been able to document a single case in which refusal to obey an order to kill unarmed civilians resulted in the allegedly inevitable dire punishment.
The battalion had orders to kill Jews, but each individual did not. Yet 80 to 90 percent of the men proceeded to kill, though almost all of them—at least initially—were horrified and disgusted by what they were doing. To break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behavior, was simply beyond most of the men. It was easier for them to shoot.
What, then, is one to conclude? Most of all, one comes away from the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 with great unease. This story of ordinary men is not the story of all men. The reserve policemen faced choices, and most of them committed terrible deeds. But those who killed cannot be absolved by the notion that anyone in the same situation would have done as they did. For even among them, some refused to kill and others stopped killing. Human responsibility is ultimately an individual matter.
