Ordinary Men
By Christopher R. Browning
HarperCollins, 224 pages, $22
Fifty years ago a group of 500 men in Hamburg were recruited by the German government to be reserve military policemen. For the most part, they were not members of the Nazi party or the S.S. but working class citizens who, ”after leaving Volksschule (terminal secondary school) at age fourteen or fifteen,” had been employed in peacetime at regular jobs.
By their own subsequent testimony, they weren`t especially anti-Semitic and had been raised in traditional households as Roman Catholics or Protestants. With the exception of a single World War I veteran, they had never been in armed combat, never seen a fellow soldier killed in battle, never been done personal physical harm by a foreign enemy.
Nevertheless, over a period of some 16 months-from July 1942 through November 1943-these men murdered in cold blood some 38,000 defenseless, mostly Jewish men, women and children in Poland, and participated in the deportation to death camps of 45,200 others.
”Ordinary Men,” Christopher Browning`s documentary study of the wartime and postwar records of Police Battalion 101, is a clear and dispassionate record of the process of dehumanization, a chronicle of progressive emotional emptiness. No fictionalizer of the macabre, no Stephen King or Dean R. Koontz or Thomas Harris can, in his wildest imagination, approach the cold evil that possessed this company of average men transformed into killing machines. Ever efficient, occasionally righteous and pious, sometimes with relish, though rarely, according to their recollections, with rage or hatred, 90 percent of them ”followed orders”-even when offered the option to decline-and became butchers of other human beings.
As Browning points out, ”in mid-March 1942 some 75 to 80 percent of all victims of the Holocaust were still alive, while 20 to 25 percent had perished. A mere eleven months later, in mid-February 1943, the percentages were exactly the reverse.” Those who died were, for the most part, confused peasants, plus a smaller number of deported, terrified members of the German Jewish middle class. Regarded in another way, they were all simply human beings, parents and grandparents incapable of protecting their children from the realization of the worst nightmares.
The 101 was responsible for a relatively minor operation, compared to the assembly-line volume of the large concentration camps. Of the 6,000,000 Jews killed by the Nazis and those who collaborated with them as part of the
”Final Solution,” the Reserve Police Battalion was physically responsible for the deaths of .006 percent. They merely shot the equivalent of a single small city-equal to the population of a Danville, Ill., a Burlington, Vt. or a Vancouver, Wash. However, this fraction, coupled with the particularity and brutality of the deaths documented, makes ”Ordinary Men” a staggering book, one that manages without polemic to communicate an intimation of the unthinkable.
Certainly, a contemporary reader will recoil at every page as the atrocities accumulate and lose, in their ceaseless repetition, their initial ability to shock, just as those acts apparently did for the men who committed them. ”As the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 demonstrates, mass murder and routine had become one. Normality itself had become exceedingly abnormal.”
But do we not have a responsibility to reject the safety-afforded by the brief passage of time and by our geographical distance from the arena-of finding the awful statistics overwhelming, of allowing them to blur the faces of both the individuals who suffered and those who perpetrated the suffering? This happened, we must remind ourselves. This exemplar of the Holocaust was carried out not by a legion of Jeffrey Dahmers or by nameless Hillside Stranglers. The ranks of the 101 were composed of people not so easy to spot or judge or dismiss. There`s no obvious way for us to distance ourselves from them, as they were before the war or as they are now. If we encountered them on the street in 1992, we would find respected retirees who never served a day of their lives in prison, men who, in the sworn statements many made to investigators 20 years after the end of World War II, admitted neither remorse for nor incredulity at their actions. And why should they? Of the 210 members of the Battalion brought to trial between 1962 and 1967 for their crimes, only three received light sentences.
No doubt judges found the explanations of the exonerated to be persuasive, within the amoral context of the ”Judenfrei” mania. Contemplate, for instance, the 35-year-old policeman-formerly a metal worker-who specialized in shooting Jewish children in the back of their heads. He rationalized in his testimony that he did his victims a favor: their mothers were doomed, after all, and had they lived they would surely have been neglected.
Another officer, Captain Wohlauf-young, handsome, ambitious-brought his new bride from the Fatherland to witness the round-up and slaughter of people whose only crime was that they belonged to the wrong ethnic group. And she watched without protest, that blushing bride; she was reportedly diverted, interested. It had nothing to do with her. It was nothing personal. When she wrote to friends and family in Hamburg of her honeymoon, what did she say?
Indeed, enthusiasm for murder seemed contagious: everyone sought to get into the act. The night before the massacre of the Lukow ghetto, an entertainment unit of the Berlin police, consisting of musicians and performers, mounted a show for the men. According to the memory of one policeman, ”they asked . . . even emphatically begged, to be allowed to participate in the execution of the Jews. This request was granted.”
And what of those men who routinely volunteered for ”Jew Hunts,” who scoured frozen forests, tapped at suspicious walls, in pursuit of escapees?
What of the group who demanded that an elderly Polish peasant in Kock surrender his daughter, accused of offering shelter to Jews in the cellar, and then killed her in his sight?
Our minds rebel, dismiss the possibility that ”ordinary” men and women are capable of such dissociation. It could never happen to us, we say. We would have been the exception, the rare dissenter who said ”no,” even though in so doing we might be berated by a superior and lose face with our comrades- the worst consequence for a member of Police Battalion 101 for refusing to participate. (Incredibly, ”in the past forty-five years no defense attorney or defendant in any of the hundreds of postwar trials has been able to document a single case in which refusal to obey an order to kill unarmed civilians resulted in . . . dire punishment.”
Christopher Browning`s meticulous research in German archives, his examination and rejection of the various facile theories of temporary national psychoses that are often cited to ”explain” the holocaust, his unflinching juxtaposition of the deeds carried out by the 101 with their first-person self-justifying remembrances of those events, leads to one overriding conclusion: It is possible for a privileged and powerful group of people to forget or defer their sense of connection to others. And when that happens, when we lose our capacity for empathy and sympathy, when the outer boundary of our identity is defined by race or religion or nationality rather than by shared humanity, civilization evaporates.
If this concept is hard to grasp, simply look at the 1942 photograph from the Lukow ghetto on the cover of ”Ordinary Men.” Look at the smiles of the men who carry the guns. Look at the eyes of those who do not. Look at their eyes.
