This paper examines Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, which investigates how ordinary German citizens became perpetrators of Holocaust atrocities through the lens of Police Battalion 101. Rather than attributing Nazi violence to inherent German evil or monstrous inhumanism, Browning argues that propaganda, nationalistic obligation, economic crisis, and social conformity transformed average men into willing participants in genocide. The paper explores Hitler's rise to power, the role of anti-Semitic ideology, and the dangerous consequences of dismissing perpetrators as uniquely evil — a view that leaves the true lessons of the Holocaust unlearned and future genocides unguarded against.
Christopher Browning applies the theory of elective morality to the perpetrators of the Holocaust, drawing on interviews with and research on the members of Police Battalion 101, which rounded up Polish Jews in brutal fashion by order of the Nazi authority. The violence and cruelty that would become signifiers of the Nazi Party were enabled by the active participation of average members of society. Browning's book reveals that such individuals were made capable of the malice carried out in the Final Solution by the hegemonic influence of the Nazi Party over the cultural, political, and philosophical affairs of the countries it controlled.
Ultimately sending to their deaths 6 million Jews and 5 million more of various ethnicities, the Nazis succeeded in weaving through the eastern European psyche a culture of acceptance for the supposed rightness of the violent "Final Solution" — the full genocide of the Jewish people. It is therefore tempting to explain Hitler's success by pointing to a generalized German mentality of hatred and unthinkable violence. Many historians have been fairly comfortable doing so. But Browning's account of the factors that encouraged regular Germans to take part in Hitler's plan reveals something of great importance about how an event like the Holocaust becomes possible.
Ordinary Men seeks to shift perspective away from the notion that those who perpetrated this greatest of human tragedies were inhuman or innately sociopathic. In doing so, Browning sets a sizable challenge for himself. There is no way to address what the German people participated in without describing some of the most unspeakable acts committed in modern history. To that end, Ordinary Men takes its readers through difficult narratives that reveal behavior so savage it might imply a society wholly impoverished of intellectual, ethical, or moral development. The base and vile nature of the war crimes committed against a people who presented no legitimate antagonism to their aggressors suggests that the German people were inherently "bad" — inclined toward acts of evil and cruelty. This, as Browning acknowledges, is a popular view held by historians who have contended that Germans "were attracted . . . to National Socialism as a 'subculture of violence,' and in particular to the SS, which provided the incentives and support for the full realization of their violent potential" (Browning, 166). But Browning works to dispel such theories by asserting throughout his account that such a claim could be made about nearly all people. Claiming that one possesses the underlying potential for violence is not a satisfying explanation for participation in an act as universally recognized as "wrong" as genocide.
At the crux of Browning's work is the argument that adopting the "monsters" perspective is itself quite dangerous. To attribute the behavior of the German people during the Holocaust to monstrous inhumanism is to produce an explanation that, beyond being a major oversimplification of far more complicated events, creates conditions in which others may perpetrate similar acts of intolerable malice. By dismissing the aggressors as monsters, Browning asserts, we ignore the many factors that allowed them to behave as they did. Failing to recognize the warning signs of a society hijacked by fascism could ultimately render the lessons of the Holocaust unlearned. It is therefore not only useful but essential to engage with Browning's work, wherein he approaches the Holocaust from a perspective once considered unthinkable.
The account that Browning delivers allocates a great deal of its energy to discussing the facts of human nature that allowed such savagery. No matter what explanations he offers, Browning conducts his analysis with an overarching acceptance that the behavior of the German people will always appear untenable to those who consider themselves incapable of that brand of unmitigated evil. Nevertheless, he proceeds to illustrate the vulnerability of human nature. A man bound to the sociological and economic impulses of the larger body — in this case, the state of Germany — is a man without free will. So it was in World War II Germany, where Hitler's methods seem grounded in an understanding of the atrocity he intended to implement.
Hitler's rise to power in the German government was prompted by crisis. Like much of the world in the 1930s, Germany was drowning in an economic depression that had completely devalued the German mark, thrown masses into joblessness and poverty, and proved the existing German government to be fully impotent. It was in this vacuum of effective leadership that Hitler emerged as a man possessed of power. Proud Germans — perhaps more driven by their nation's storied technological and philosophical legacy than restrained by it — were desperate to reassociate their beloved country with strength and prominence. In all of Hitler's words, this promise permeated effectively. It found its greatest resonance, however, in his vehement scapegoating.
"Economic despair enabled Hitler's propaganda and Jewish scapegoating"
"Battalion 101 members chose to kill despite opportunities to refuse"
Unfortunately, when one considers the full weight of evidence detailed in Browning's research, it cannot be denied that genocide of this nature is always possible. The situation in Germany did not illustrate a uniquely evil nation with historically ingrained desires to behave so unfathomably. Nor was it simply a matter of a ruling class intimidating a far larger population of potential free-thinkers. Rather, it was the catastrophic convergence of fate, crisis, and an abusively wielded power. Faced with national crisis, the Germans demonstrated a vulnerability common to nearly all people, who are naturally inclined to defer to governmental authority to see them through. It is difficult to say who may become the next victims of such catastrophic hatred, for Browning's work dispels any preconceived notion that the Nazis were the product of an uncommonly violent and hate-filled society.
Browning, C. (1992). Ordinary Men. Harper Perennial.
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