Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning is about Reserve Police Battalion 101 and Hitler’s Final Solution in Poland during World War II. This book is….depressing. Which is not surprising. One would not expect a book about the Holocaust to be a giggle. If you do find it funny, you should probably seek help….there’s just nothing funny about the government systematically slaughtering the people. 

The book opens with how the Reserve Police Battalion’s came to play a role during the Holocaust, and it opens with a startling statistic. I mean, we know 12 million people were slaughtered as a result of Hitler’s policies in the time just before and then during World War II. Not including the soldiers. This is just the people who were sent to the camps and died there. The startling thing about those 12 million deaths is that as of March 1942, some 75%-80% of the victims of the Holocaust were still alive while 20-25% had perished. Basically, the industrialized death machine started out with a slow burn. A mere eleven months later, that number had inverted, with 75-80% now deceased. So by February 1943, the bulk of those murdered died in 11 months. 9.6 million people in 11 months. How do you industrialize mass murder?

This book covers that, and asks the more important question of how does your average man come to engage in such activities? Knowingly and voluntarily? Reserve Police Battalion 101 was a prime source for this due to the unusually detailed prosecutorial records of this unit. And Dr. Browning used that testimony to highlight that these were, in fact, just Ordinary Men. There was nothing spectacular about them, they were not ideologues, they weren’t even daily police officers. They were you…me…your neighbor. How did this happen?

The opening chapter covers the first “police action” they engaged in, which was the clearing out of the Polish town of Josefov. Major Trapp gave the men the option to bow out if they did not feel they could partiicate. One man stepped forward and said he couldn’t and when one of the officers started to berate him, Major Trapp said so, don’t berate him, I said there’d be no disciplinary action. And when the men saw that Trapp meant it, several more stepped forward, and they were all given alternate duties for this mission. While the rest engaged in slaughter.

Josefov…July 1942…1,500 jews.

Part of what makes this so fascinating and not a little bit horrifying, is that those who stepped forward and said no, did not remove themselves because they were against the action in and of itself. They did so because they said they were not brave enough to participate. How backwards is that? They had the courage to stand out from their battalions and decline to participate in murder, but said it was because they were cowards.

Dr. Browning describes in excruciating details what happened and at the end of it all, Major Trapp was crying. This is not a bid for sympathy for the long deceased Major Trapp. But it does highlight that ultimately he was human. And wholesale slaughter of his fellow man did impact him, regardless of the ideology that pushed him to do it. Then men were given copious amounts of alcohol and told not to talk about it. Which they had no problem obeying that order because the guilt prodded them to silence.

The rest of the book details this murderous slaughter in Poland. By the time Reserve Police Battalion 101 had been recalled to Hamburg, this one unit, comprised of 500 men, had murdered 38,000 people. They had also ensured the delivery for transport to the death camps of another 45,200 souls. Making them directly responsible for 83,00 deaths. One battalion.

 Of the top twelve most murderous units, Reserve Police Battalion 101 was ranked number 4.

No special training. It had not been exposed to any particular propaganda, or indoctrination, at least no more than the rest of the country had been. So what happened?

20% of the men refused to participate, and continued to refuse throughout the war. 80% did, and by the end of their rotation, they were participating without remorse. Why?

Dr. Browning includes wartime brutalization, racism, segmentation, routinization of the task, special selection of the perpetrators, careerism, obedience to orders, deference to authority, ideological indoctrination, and conformity.

Browning spends a great deal of time exploring all of these but concludes that to some degree, each of these plays a factor in some of the Battalions. Except in Reserve Police Battalion 101. Which did not fit this mold entirely. Wartime brutalization might include men calling those who bowed out cowards for not participating. But the men themselves ruled this out in their own testimony. No member of the Battalion received any disciplinary action for refusing to obey orders. There is no evidence that any of them were ever sent to any camp for declining to follow orders.

Racism definitely played a part. It’s disingenuous to say otherwise. So does ideological indoctrination. But those who declined cited that they knew jews back home, which is why they could not participate. But the indoctrination was no more than what our own kids are exposed to on college campuses with DIE ideology. Germany does not have the institutionalized habit of free speech and rebellion that we in America do, so it’s certainly possible the indoctrination ran deeper for them.

Segmentation and routinization definitely played a part. The men began drinking and were left sleepless. Their final actions in Poland in November 1943 wherein they slaughtered their final 30,000 were conducted without batting an eye. There was no gnashing of teeth, no horror, no sorrow at what they had done.

Careerism, obedience to orders, deference to authority and conformity were all explored in more detail, with Dr. Browning citing the Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram Experiments in detail and putting them in context of the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101. Ultimately, all of the reasons, except possibly brutalization, played a part. It’s easier to see others as less than human when one mobs together with like minded individuals for the “good of all.”

And I believe on some level they believed it was good for Germany. It’s all tragic, obviously. This isn’t a statistical anomaly, this is direct, brutal murder.

In Dr. Browning’s afterword, he does take some time to defend his own work, which had come under attack by another author, who had also been conducting research on Reserve Police Battalion 101. I have not read this other author’s work, so I cannot comment on it here. But the short version is the other author read the source material and determined basically that the entire country of Germany was anti-semitic, and this is why the Holocaust happened. And basically, it did not occur to Germany to NOT be anti-semitic, until the rest of the world told them this was bad. Condemned an entire nation, extrapolated from this one unit’s actions.

Dr. Browning felt this was a wee bit glib and used the author’s own work to further support Browning’s contention that there was nothing unique about Reserve Police Battalion 101 and that if living in a similar circumstance, any one of us would have done the same.

And I think, after all we saw happen during Covid-19…Dr. Browning is right. Far too many people were all too willing to throw their neighbors under the bus for not obeying irrational government dictates. But there is no reason to assume the entire nation would blindly obey. Because a large chunk of us did not.

This was not an easy book to read. It did make me cry. Many times. But it’s important history. It’s important to remember what happened. Because it could easily happen again. Also…I cry during the review. Watch it here on YouTube or here on Rumble. Bye!