Original Proposal

[Dr. John Fielder]

Originally Posted by Dr. John Fielder » Thu Jul 10, 2025 10:33 pm – 32 views in Sec. 3 (Possible Topics for Future Meetings) before being transplanted here
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I propose that we read “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 & the Final Solution in Poland” by Christopher R. Browning (Hardcover by HarperCollins 1/1/1992 – 231 pages including notes & index – 12/28/2017 Paperback $15.99 + shipping or 1 of 4 million titles available “free” via KindleUnlimited from Amazon.com).

I am suggesting this book as the best explanation ever of why ordinary people in WWII so easily murdered their neighbors.

I have written the introductions to two English translations of books on homicide authored by a well known forensic psychologist colleague in Barcelona. I found early on that I did not have a taste for homicide cases in particular, or criminal cases in general aside from military courts martial cases that have all involved some kind of sexual crime, although I did testify last year as a defense expert in an L.A. criminal case in which a stepfather had been charged with sexually abusing his stepdaughter.

Respectfully submitted,

Dr. John Fielder, Managing Director
Daubert Institute for Forensic Psychology


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Book Description per Amazon.com

“A remarkable—and singularly chilling—glimpse of human behavior. . .This meticulously researched book...represents a major contribution to the literature of the Holocaust."—Newsweek

Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews—now with a new afterword and additional photographs.

Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever.

While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition.

Ordinary Men is a powerful, chilling, and important work with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today.


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Author Bio per Amazon.com

Christopher R. Browning is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina and the author of Ordinary Men and other outstanding works of Holocaust history. He lives in Chapel Hill.


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Editorial Reviews per Amazon.com

From Publishers Weekly

On June 13, 1942, the commanding officer of Reserve Police Battalion 101 received orders to round up the Jews in the Polish town of Josefow and shoot all but the able-bodied males. Major Wilhelm Trapp, who wept over the order, gave his troops the extraordinary option of "excusing themselves" from the task. Of the 500 in the unit only a dozen did so, and the rest slaughtered 1500 women, children and old people. Thus began the career of one of Nazi Germany's most efficient extermination units. Drawing on postwar interrogations of former Battalion members, Browning reconstructs the 16-month period from the Jozefow massacre to the Battalion's participation in the brutal "Fall Harvest Jew Hunt" in November 1943, during which these ordinary men, mostly middle-aged working-class people from Hamburg, shot to death some 38,000 Polish Jews and sent 45,000 others to the Treblinka gas chambers. In the vast Holocaust literature, this short work stands out with breathtaking impact, for it reveals how average Germans became mass murderers. "If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances," asks the author, "what group of men cannot?" Browning is a history professor at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash. Photos.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Chilling analysis of how a typical unit of German police actually operated during the Holocaust, by Browning (History/Pacific Lutheran Univ.). In March 1942, some 75 to 80 percent of all victims of the Holocaust were still alive. Eleven months later, 75 to 80 percent were dead--the result, Browning says, of ``a short, intense wave of mass murder,'' centered in Poland. During 16 months, Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of just over 450 men from Hamburg, was responsible in Poland for the shooting of 39,000 Jews and the deportation to Treblinka of 44,000 more. The horror began on July 13, 1942, when the unit's commander, one Major Trapp, ordered his men to round up 1,800 Jews from the village of Jozefow, to select several hundred as ``work Jews,'' and to shoot the rest--men, women, and children. Trapp apparently gave the order with tears in his eyes and gave permission to older soldiers not to participate. Altogether, 10 to 20 percent of the battalion availed themselves of this permission. The remaining men carried out the assignment: ``the shooters were gruesomely besmirched with blood, brains, and bone splinters. It hung on their clothing.'' What sort of men were they? Browning bases his answers on the judicial interrogation in the 1960's of 210 men from the battalion. They were ordinary men, he finds, on the elderly side, drawn from the lower orders of German society, and few had an education above junior-high-school level. And after examining studies dealing with this phenomenon and evidence of such conduct in other wars, Browning determines that it's not just Nazism or Germans that produces such men: There were American units in the Pacific that boasted of never taking captives. ``If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances,'' he writes, ``what group of men cannot?'' It is the care with which Browning examines the evidence, as well as the soberness of his conclusions, that gives this work such power and impact. (Eight pages of b&w photographs--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.