They Were Ordinary Men

In response to:

Ordinary Germans from the March 27, 2025 issue

To the Editors:

Neal Ascherson’s review of Richard J. Evans’s Hitler’s People [NYR, March 27] references my book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Ascherson says that according to Evans, later research “has weakened some of Browning’s conclusions.” He cites Evans’s statement that the German policemen like those I studied were volunteers, not conscripts, and quotes Evans that “they were carefully selected according to ideological crite’ria…. Their training included heavy doses of Nazi ideology and antisemitic indoctrination.” He continues with Evans’s argument that they were not primarily from the working class but rather from the middle class (which was, of course, the social core of the Nazi movement). I am a great admirer of Evans’s voluminous scholarship on German history and remain very grateful that he invited me to join the team of historians he organized to serve as expert witnesses in Deborah Lipstadt’s defense against David Irving’s libel suit in London in 2000. But I must argue that this portion of his recent book, which Ascherson correctly recapitulates, needs qualification.

When Ordinary Men was published in 1992, historians knew relatively little about the participation of the Order Police in the Holocaust. In the following decade both individual battalions and the Order Police in general were extensively researched. This research revealed that there were three generations of battalions. The first generation was composed of volunteers who were born between 1902 and 1909 and recruited into the Order Police in the period 1937–1939. The second generation of battalions was formed in 1939–1940 and selected from a pool of young, even more Nazified men born between 1909 and 1912. Both groups were subjected to intense training and indoctrination and were brutalized by tours of occupation duty in conquered territories prior to the Final Solution. In late 1941 the maximum age for men owing some form of compulsory service during the war was raised from thirty-five to forty-five, and the rank and file of Reserve Police Battalion 101 was completely restocked not with volunteers but rather with conscripts whose average age was thirty-nine and a half. Two thirds of them were unskilled working-class men. These conscripts were the dregs of a diminishing manpower pool, and there is no evidence that they were carefully vetted other than to exempt skilled workers essential to the war economy. There was not sufficient time for extensive indoctrination and training before the battalion was dispatched to Poland in late June 1942, where it carried out its first major massacre of Jews at Józefów on July 13.

In short, the men in the first two groups of police battalions fit Evans’s description. But a third group of battalions like RPB 101 continues to pose the frightening proof that a group of randomly selected and ill-suited conscripts—truly ordinary men without careful selection, Nazification, training, indoctrination, or prior brutalization—can be transformed into mass killers in a shockingly short time. RPB 101, though it did not come to the killing fields until the summer of 1942, a full year later than most of its counterparts, nonetheless became the fourth most lethal battalion in the Order Police. Therefore I do not think subsequent research has “weakened” this aspect of my conclusions.

Concerning the wider question as to whether Nazi perpetrators can best be described as “ordinary men” or “ordinary Germans,” Ascherson summarizes Evans that “the Nazis were not ordinary people; they were ordinary German people, living in the firestorm of hatred and delusion ignited after World War I.” Evans finds the key “specificities of the German situation” not in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s culturally embedded “eliminationist” antisemitism unique to Germany but rather in Germany’s collective traumas of the early twentieth century.¹ Evans’s discussion of how Germans were shaped by their recent history is eloquent. Here I do not disagree, but I would also note recent scholarship—particularly the contributions of Harald Welzer and Thomas Kühne—that has added a more universalistic dimension, recalling Helen Fein’s dictum that genocide is enabled by placing its victims “outside the universe of obligation.”²

In his study of RPB 45, Welzer argues that the “normative frames of reference” changed quickly after 1933, as the Nazi regime succeeded in redefining the “community of obligation” from one of inclusion based on Enlightenment notions of humanity to one of exclusion based on racism and antisemitism. This new “Nazi morality” decoupled the dispossession and murder of Jews as well as other marginalized and dehumanized victims from any sense of criminality or immorality.

Kühne shows how the notions of “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) and comradeship, so powerfully resonant in German culture, were appropriated and transformed by the Nazis from socially inclusive to racially exclusive concepts. The Nazis were thus able to preside over a “moral revolution,” in which the Western tradition of universalism, humanity, and individual responsibility based on a guilt culture was replaced by a shame culture that elevated loyalty to and standing within the group to the new moral fulcrum of German society. Whether the “racial community” at large or a small police unit such as RPB 101, “the group claimed moral sovereignty.”

The coercive power of what Kühne calls the “morality of immorality” can be seen in an incident involving an Austrian general, Wehrmacht rather than SS perpetrators, and Serbian rather than Jewish victims. In reaction to the initial successes of Tito’s partisan uprising in Yugoslavia in the summer of 1941, reinforcements were dispatched to carry out a “punishment expedition” in which “the entire population had to be punished, not only the men.” Accordingly, General Franz Böhme warned his men, “Anyone who wishes to rule charitably sins against the lives of his comrades.”³ Sadly, this moral inversion, in which killing a population outside the community of obligation was a duty and not killing was a sin against one’s comrades, is a group dynamic that was not only prominent in Nazi Germany but also present in other genocides.

Christopher R. Browning
Tacoma, Washington