Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution, Christopher R. Browning relates the horrors and atrocities concerning Adolph Hitler's "Final Solution," being the extermination of the Jewish people from all of Europe through the use of torture, intimidation, imprisonment in concentration camps and outright cold-blooded murder. Some estimates as to the number of Jews exterminated in Europe via Hitler's Third Reich are as high as seven million, with many of these murdered in the death camps by firing squad, gassing and incineration. Thus, Browning's message in this book is to convey to the reader the true horrors of the "Final Solution" in an attempt to force the reader to never forget the past. If this book contains any type of bias, it would have to be positive, meaning that Browning has slanted his story toward exposing what "ordinary men" are truly capable of during times of war.

Basically, Ordinary Men focuses on the Reserve Police Battalion 101, a group of "ordinary" German male citizens from the middle working classes under orders from Hitler's Third Reich to seek out and destroy the Jews, beginning in Poland with the Erntefest massacres. These "ordinary" men, under the command of the Nazis, were quickly changed from typical German citizens to heartless murderers and committed some of the worst atrocities of World War II. Like many similar historical non-fiction books, Browning has broken Ordinary Men down into chapters and sub-chapters that cover in precise detail the progression of Battalion 101 from its first beginnings to the court proceedings of the 1960's, much like the Nuremberg trials of the late 1940's which convicted Nazi members for crimes against humanity. Browning concludes his book by asking how a group of "ordinary men" could lower themselves to cold-blooded murder. Clearly, the reason lies within fervent nationalism and Hitler's mad scheme known as the "Final Solution."

As to the book's strengths and weaknesses, Browning conveys the true brutal face of World War II via his highly-detailed analysis of Battalion 101 and its members; he also very forcefully relates to the reader that the war was fought for many reasons, the most important being the destruction of Hitler's Nazi Germany and its war machine which devastated most of Europe between 1939 and mid-1945. Browning also conveys how "ordinary" men like those of Battalion 101 truly represent all of humanity by being manipulated and in a sense brainwashed into believing that their actions are justified, even when those actions involve murder and torture. Thus, Ordinary Men is a very persuasive philosophical work which underscores the depravity of mankind.