Book Review - Washington Post

[johnkarls]

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ ... 33f379ad0/


SOLDIERS OF GENOCIDE
Review by Peter H. Merkl - Political Science Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara and author of "The Making of a Stormtrooper."
June 9, 1992


This may be the grimmest book yet on a significant part of the Holocaust. Even the most gripping accounts of human suffering and death have been suffused with a deep sense of the human essence in extremis. But "Ordinary Men" is a view of systematic mass killings from the vantage point of the organizers and perpetrators. The author, Christopher R. Browning, a well-established historian of the "final solution," describes in clinical detail and with chilling thoroughness the fateful year 1942-'43 when most of the genocide described in this book took place.

His focus is on the "ordinary men" of Reserve Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, mostly men between 30 and 45 who were too old for the regular army. Their last scruples -- to the extent that they had any -- were sloughed off progressively as they proceeded from their first horrid assignment -- the face-to-face execution of some 1,500 Jews, mostly the elderly, women and children, from the Polish village of Jozefow -- to further mass murder and the "clearing of ghettos" for transportation to the way stations of death.

Browning selected these particular killers because their descent from hell to worse could be traced, largely through judicial investigations in the 1960s, and because their experience affords some revealing glimpses of the mentality of the executioners and their reactions to their grisly tasks. The author carefully explains the origins and transformation of the Order Police from an anti-revolutionary police army of the early 1920s into Heinrich Himmler's killing auxiliary, especially but not only for the massacres preceding the establishment of the death camps. In occupied Poland during 1942-'43, their duties included the systematic mass executions of the Jewish population unsuitable for slave labor, clearing ghettos and brutally herding people onto the trains for transportation to their eventual death.

"Ordinary Men" chronicles the impact, in the Jozefow case, of a commander with scruples, who actually invited his men to avoid their assignment by openly opting out, malingering or pleading they could not go on with the killings they began. Fifteen to 20 percent of his middle-aged reserve policemen seem to have taken up his offer, especially men of status and independent resources who had less reason to count on a future police career.

The other four-fifths, predominantly Hamburg working-class men (the author makes too much of their socialist workers' movement traditions) were of the same militant post-World War I generation that provided such a fertile ground for the recruitment of all kinds of paramilitary fighting organizations, from the Nazi storm troopers to the communist Red Front and the republican guard (Reichsbanner). They were the "ordinary men" who carried out the "orders from the highest levels," though at first not without some grumbling. Later mass executions, however, saw less and less evasion of the gruesome duties, especially as command and peer pressures increased and the process became routinized, with the actual killings being mostly delegated to Lithuanian or Ukrainian volunteers from POW campus, or to the distant death camps. The author is at great pains attempting to explain what made the overwhelming majority of these policemen carry out such horrifying tasks. He cites the literature on wartime brutalization in other armies, antisemitic ideology and racism, the "authoritarian personality" (Adorno), bureaucratic routinization (Hilberg) and even the astounding experiments of Stanley Milgram about obedience to authority in inflicting pain. The obscurity of their murderous dedication is hardly relieved by their own notions of an all-out "war against the Jews and Bolsheviks," the rare instances of scrupulous hesitation, or the alleged complicity of other East European ethnics, least of all by the utter passivity of many of their victims. Far from having to be "steeled to be superhumanly inhuman," these "older reservists" even had to be officially assured that their murderous contributions to the heroics of the "total war" were appreciated. Neither the exhortations to exterminate communist partisans and "suspects" nor Nazi racial ideology quite begin to explain the killing of unarmed women and children.

Were the killers really just "ordinary men"? Browning rightly blames the authoritarian group conformity and male bonding of this police unit, in which the fear of being thought "weak" was stronger than human revulsion at the diabolical orders. Ordinary as they may have seemed, this "is not the story of all men," although it deeply disturbs our sense of the human potential for good. It may be true that opportunities to say no to an immoral order are few and far between in a totalitarian system. But these ordinary men, at least at the first execution order, were given a real choice by their commanding officer. That most of them chose to kill the innocent profoundly shocks the human spirit.