In Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, a battalion of middle-aged policemen are ordered to execute all the Jewish women and children living in the village of Józefów, Poland. The leader of the Reserve Police Battalion 101, Major Trapp, gives his men the chance to excuse themselves from participating, and quite a few men decide to abstain from the executions. Still, all told, about 80 percent of the men choose to follow orders from beginning to end, ultimately executing about 1,500 people. In trying to determine how a group of ordinary German men with no particular racist hatred nor ideological zeal became hardened mass murderers, Browning settles on one primary explanation: these men chose to kill essentially because of peer pressure. The choice to follow these orders, in other words, had less to do with respect for the orders themselves than with desire to fit in with the majority of the group.
In every “Jewish action” (massacre, round-up, etc.) assigned to RPB 101, commanding officers made comments implying that those who chose not to be violent would be harshly judged. At Józefów, for example, Sergeant Heinrich Steinmetz informed the men under his command that he “didn’t want to see any cowards,” implying that all of his men should participate in the mass killing or risk his displeasure. After the massacre at Łomazy, Lieutenant Gnade stopped a policeman named Toni Bentheim, asked him how many people he killed, and then mocked him for being Catholic when he said he didn’t kill any. This interaction speaks to the way in which the few men who didn’t participate in the killing were singled out and treated with contempt even by their leaders. Since the men saw and feared this treatment, many chose to commit at least one execution, presumably so they would be seen doing it and could credibly claim to have participated if asked.
In addition to fearing ostracism by their leaders, the men feared that choosing not to be violent would estrange them from their peers. As is characteristic of wartime, the men of RPB 101 experienced “a polarization between ‘us’ and ‘them.’” Because of this, the men had a deep respect for the unity of their battalion and a sense of obligation towards their peers. Violence against those perceived as an “enemy” (including innocent Jewish civilians) strengthened the battalion’s bond,. This is clearest in the way that, afterwards, the men would blow off steam together by playing cards or even making jokes about what they’d done. Those who didn’t shoot, however, were called “weakling[s],” “cowards,” and even “shithead[s]” by the shooters. This sent a message to all the men that they “risked isolation, rejection, and ostracism” if they didn’t follow violent orders along with the majority of the men. As a result, for many of the men, it was simply “easier […] to shoot” and align themselves with the majority. In other words, murdering innocent people was more palatable for some men in RPB 101 than being ostracized and disparaged by their own peers and leaders, which speaks to how intense and all-consuming the desire to fit in can be.
Throughout the book, Browning systematically demonstrates that these men weren’t especially prone to gratuitous violence or ideological zeal about the Final Solution—this isn’t why they chose to kill. Instead, “many policemen admitted [to] responding to the pressures of conformity.” This means the men were more concerned with their social standing within their peer group than with their personal morality, fear of punishment, or even career advancement. Browning concludes that, with “virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms.” Because a large majority of the group took part in the shootings, it became not only morally acceptable to participate in the violent actions, but also an important way to demonstrate belonging within the battalion.
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Peer Pressure, Conformity, and Acceptance Quotes in Ordinary Men
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.
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.
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.”
What is clear is that the men’s concern for their standing in the eyes of their comrades was not matched by any sense of human ties with their victims. The Jews stood outside their circle of human obligation and responsibility. Such a polarization between “us” and “them,” between one’s comrades and the enemy, is of course standard in war.
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.”
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.
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.
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?
