New York Newsday

March 25, 1992

A Monster Inside The Average Man

Review of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, by Christopher R. Browning. HarperCollins, 231 pp., $22.

On a family in the English Channel Islands when I was just entering my teens, I went into a secondhand bookstore and found a volume that dealt with the forgotten period when the Islands were the only part of the United Kingdom to be occupied by the Nazis. I sort of knew the story—Jews handed over by the Lord Lieutenant, Resistance fighters executed, Nuremburg Law written into the local code—but I have never forgotten the book's cover. It showed a British bobby in his blue helmet, standing on duty beneath a huge swastika flag on the town hall. One of those things they don't teach you in school.
           Regular obedience to orders by people who are just doing their job and don't make the rules is one of those chilling banalities that keep on coming up. Christopher Browning's short history of the life and times of a German police unit is designed to reinforce in our minds something of which we are already uneasily aware. Given the "right" circumstances, average humans are capable of doing pretty much anything.
           Unit 101—Orwell's dystopia had not yet been written, so the hieroglyphic significance is fortuitous — was mustered across the Polish border in 1942. By this time, a fully mobilized Hitlerite Germany was reaching fairly deep into its manpower reserves and deploying the usual assortment of over-age family men for menial duties in support of the war effort.
           As Browning points out, most of these men had not grown up under the Third Reich and had been too old for Hitler Youth indoctrination. Moreover, they came for the most part from Hamburg, a city which had a long record of voting for the workers' parties opposed to Hitler. As a "control experiment," then, they make a good test of the human subject.
           What, I wonder, is the antithesis of "grace under pressure"? It is not exactly cowardice, because no ordinary definition of bravery was called upon. Instead, the spirit of mediocre compromise and conformism spread through the ranks. I will spare you the details of the "actions" in which the unit was made to take part except to say that the photographs tell a familiar story in an amazingly graphic way. Here are the well-fed and well-clad Germans posing laughingly for the cameras as they make Jews kneel in the mud, mocking elderly rabbis in between submitting women to strip searches before dispatching them. Never forget the element of Saturnalia and fiesta in events of this kind, where bored and resentful men can suddenly, with complete impunity, have the time of their lives.
           Other events were never photographed, and for good reason. The roundup of the Jews of the Polish town of Jozefow was the "blooding" of the unit, and it is reconstructed in appalling detail from local records and from the transcripts of postwar trials. (Following the war, the battalion commander was executed in Poland, for a reprisal shooting against Poles. A subsequent trial in Germany led to two officers being sentenced to terms of 3 1/2-years and four years, respectively.) After selecting the able-bodied "work Jews" to be turned into capital as slave labor at some future date, the Order Police unit drove the remaining civilians out into the woods and began shooting them. This takes longer than it sounds, and longer than some of the killers had bargained for. In very striking personal testimonies, several of them recall the overpowering nausea and revulsion with which they reacted. Some could not go on; other faked illness or tried to fire wide. Not even the thoughtful breaks for cigarettes and alcohol were enough to steady the nerves. But their objections, even in retrospect, were prompted not by ethics but by sheer disgust. Blowing out people's brains was revolting work for the perpetrator; the effect on the victim seems never to have been a consideration.
           Another absorbing fact intrudes itself at this point. No German who objected to taking part in "actions" of this kind, or who declined to do so, was ever punished. The work of extermination was regarded by the High Command as something between a high honor and a strenuous obligation. It was "the cowards" and "shirkers" who failed to "rise" to the occasion. The task was best done, in other words, by enthusiasts and volunteers. The fact that those who were nauseated at Jozefow went on doing their foul work for several more years — the unit of fewer than 600 men was ultimately responsible for the deaths of at least 38,000 Jews by direct massacre and the deportation of at least 45,000 Jews to the death camps — is attributable not to intimidation but to peer pressure and the fear of seeming weak or "unmanly." This is almost enough to make on conclude that banality is evil. But the interviews and documents so brilliantly assembled here fully warrant Browning's awful conclusion: "If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?"