Ordinary Men

Ordinary Men

by

Christopher Browning

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Themes and Colors
Freedom of Choice  Theme Icon
Peer Pressure, Conformity, and Acceptance Theme Icon
Normalization of Violence Theme Icon
Nationalism, War, and Ethnic Cleansing Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Ordinary Men, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Normalization of Violence Theme Icon

Between July 1942 and the end of World War II, the majority of the men in Reserve Police Battalion 101 transformed from benign, well-meaning policemen to brutal killers, starting with the mass execution of Jews in the Polish town of Józefów. At Józefów, the men—and even some of their commanders—were horrified by the order to kill more than a thousand civilians. This battalion was mostly run-of-the-mill, middle-aged men with families—not young, bloodthirsty members of the SS—and nobody had been trained for such violence. Still, over time, the initial horror that the men experienced at Józefów gradually gave way to an acceptance of murder as normal, making these men callous and indifferent to human life. In detailing this rapid and extreme transformation from ordinary men to murderers, Browning suggests that anyone, no matter how mild-mannered or kind, can be become desensitized to extreme violence and murder.

Major Trapp, the commander of RPB 101, was initially horrified that his unit—a police unit that expected only to be enforcing laws—would have to carry out a mass execution at Józefów. However, he quickly became accustomed to giving such orders, showing one way in which German officers became desensitized to violence: by separating themselves from the action, allowing death to remain abstract. At Józefów, Trapp didn’t kill anyone; he gave the orders and then “wept like a child” at a distance from the shooting area, experiencing tremendous distress from merely giving such horrific orders.

After this massacre, Trapp continued to put distance between himself and violence; before an order to round up and deport Jews to an extermination camp, for instance, Trapp “indicated ‘indirectly’ but without ambiguity” that the men must kill the elderly right away. By “indirectly” giving orders to kill, Trapp could deny, to some extent, the bloody reality of what he was demanding—a reality that he would never have to confront, since his men did the actual killing. Over the next few months, Trapp had to deliver even more horrific orders, but it became easier for him to do so as he felt more and more separate from the reality of death. In fact, during one retribution killing, Trapp ordered more deaths than his own commanding officer explicitly requested—in this moment, Browning writes, “the man who had wept through the massacre at Józefów […] no longer had any inhibitions about shooting more than enough Jews to meet his quota,” showing how desensitized to violence he became, merely through denial and distance. This distance from death also allowed other officers to order sweeping, horrific massacres and roundups without really confronting the reality on the ground. Browning calls some of these other men “desk murderers,” because their orders (often issued from behind a desk) led to thousands of deaths, but they themselves didn’t have to grapple with the gruesome physical reality that this entailed.

Unlike Trapp and the “desk murderers,” the men of RPB 101 became habituated to violence and murder through direct engagement with death; they never had the luxury of distance. Initially, these men were unprepared for mass murder. Many of them joined RPB 101 because they thought this meant they wouldn’t have to deploy to war—they were not, in other words, men who sought violence or expected to have to massacre civilians. Furthermore, these were family-men for whom killing Jewish women and children was, at first, especially difficult, because it reminded them of their families at home. After the first massacre, the men were profoundly ashamed and disturbed—they drank to calm themselves and many refused to speak of the violence they had just perpetrated. However, “Having killed once already, the men did not experience such a traumatic shock the second time.” In the following months, they took part in more mass murders, roundups, and violent deportations, to which they reacted differently than they had at first. Due to their continued exposure to violence, Browning writes, “many had become numbed, indifferent, and in some cases eager killers.” In other words, continuous proximity to violence made murder somewhat normal; they were no longer ashamed afterwards, and could eat, joke around, and sleep like they’d had a regular day.

Browning suggests that the deterioration of the RPB 101’s sense of humanity and their increasing desensitization to violence could happen to anyone in the right circumstance, not just soldiers and policemen. With this in mind, Ordinary Men can be seen as a cautionary tale. The conditions that helped transform the men into killers—proximity to violence, dehumanizing rhetoric, actions whose effects are unseen—exist everywhere in society. In his final line, Browning chillingly suggests that any average person can become a cold-blooded killer: “If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?”

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Normalization of Violence Quotes in Ordinary Men

Below you will find the important quotes in Ordinary Men related to the theme of Normalization of Violence.
Chapter 1 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Major Wilhelm Trapp
Page Number: 2
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were from the lower orders of German society. They had experienced neither social nor geographic mobility. Very few were economically independent. Except for apprenticeship or vocational training, virtually none had any education after leaving Volksschule (terminal secondary school) at age fourteen or fifteen. […] By virtue of their age, of course, all went through their formative period in the pre-Nazi era. These were men who had known political standards and moral norms other than those of the Nazis. Most came from Hamburg, by reputation one of the least nazified cities in Germany, and the majority came from a social class that had been anti-Nazi in its political culture. These men would not seem to have been a very promising group from which to recruit mass murderers on behalf of the Nazi vision of a racial utopia free of Jews.

Page Number: 48
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Christopher R. Browning (speaker), Major Wilhelm Trapp, Captain Wolfgang Hoffman, Otto-Julius Schimke
Page Number: 57
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Christopher R. Browning (speaker), Major Wilhelm Trapp
Related Symbols: Marketplaces
Page Number: 61-62
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Christopher R. Browning (speaker), Sergeant Heinrich Steinmetz
Page Number: 63
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Christopher R. Browning (speaker), Major Wilhelm Trapp
Page Number: 69
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

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.”

Page Number: 71-72
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

If Gnade’s drinking was commonplace, the streak of sadism he began to display at Łomazy was not. The previous fall Gnade had put his men on the night train from Minsk to avoid becoming involved in the execution of the Jews he had brought there from Hamburg. At Józefów he had not distinguished himself from his fellow officers with any especially sadistic behavior. All this changed in the forest outside Łomazy as Gnade sought to entertain himself while waiting for the Jews to finish digging the grave.

Related Characters: Christopher R. Browning (speaker), Lieutenant Hartwick Gnade
Page Number: 82
Explanation and Analysis:

Habituation played a role as well. Having killed once already, the men did not experience such a traumatic shock the second time. Like much else, killing was something one could get used to.

Related Characters: Christopher R. Browning (speaker)
Page Number: 85
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Christopher R. Browning (speaker), Major Wilhelm Trapp, Lieutenant Hartwick Gnade
Page Number: 86
Explanation and Analysis:

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.”

Related Characters: Christopher R. Browning (speaker)
Page Number: 87
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Christopher R. Browning (speaker)
Page Number: 95
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Christopher R. Browning (speaker), Major Wilhelm Trapp
Page Number: 102
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Christopher R. Browning (speaker)
Page Number: 127
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Christopher R. Browning (speaker)
Page Number: 128
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Christopher R. Browning (speaker)
Page Number: 132
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

Thus, wartime brutalization through prior combat was not an immediate experience directly influencing the policemen’s behavior at Józefów. Once the killing began, however, the men became increasingly brutalized. As in combat, the horrors of the initial encounter eventually became routine, and the killing became progressively easier. In this sense, brutalization was not the cause but the effect of these men’s behavior.

Related Characters: Christopher R. Browning (speaker)
Page Number: 161
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Christopher R. Browning (speaker)
Page Number: 184
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Christopher R. Browning (speaker)
Page Number: 188
Explanation and Analysis:

At the same time, however, the collective behavior of Reserve Police Battalion 101 has deeply disturbing implications. There are many societies afflicted by traditions of racism and caught in the siege mentality of war or threat of war. Everywhere society conditions people to respect and defer to authority, and indeed could scarcely function otherwise. Everywhere people seek career advancement. In every modern society, the complexity of life and the resulting bureaucratization and specialization attenuate the sense of personal responsibility of those implementing official policy. Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. If the men of Reserve Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?

Related Characters: Christopher R. Browning (speaker)
Page Number: 189
Explanation and Analysis: