Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland explores how a group of ordinary, middle-aged German men making up Reserve Police Battalion 101 was able to murder thousands of Jews. Browning ultimately attempts to discover why these men were capable, and willing, to perform such horrendous acts through many descriptions of the various atrocities committed and evidence from interrogations conducted by German prosecutors in the 1960s. He makes a strong argument that the ordinary men were not compelled to kill, but really did chose their actions.
However, it is not as if these men would go and kill Jews without first being compelled by Nazi leaders to do so. Perhaps these men were fully aware of their actions, but they were more than likely forced, at least at first, to murder the Jews. The totalitarian and violent nature of the entire Nazi movement suggests disobedience of higher authority within the battalion or entire movement would not be dealt with lightly. Still, "no defense attorney or defendant in any 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 the allegedly inevitable dire punishment. The punishment or censure that occasionally did result from such disobedience was never commensurate with the gravity of the crimes the men had been asked to commit."(170) Browning points out the problem with the explanation that "disobedience surely meant the concentration camp if not immediate execution," therefore these men "could not be held responsible for their actions."(170) These men bare the responsibility of their actions because though they may have followed orders out of fear, there is no concrete evidence supporting the idea that the consequences of disobedience would be extreme.
Browning also spends some time discussing the "obedience to authority" explanation used by Stanley Milgram. Though Milgram's experiments and conclusions discussed in the book may help explain the men's transition from ordinary to murderer, the experiments conducted and the events of the Nazi regime were significantly different. "The killers of the Third Reich lived in a police state where consequences of disobedience could be drastic...but they also knew they were not only inflicting pain but destroying human life."(173) In contrast to the subjects of Milgram's experiments who "were assured that no permanent damage would result from their actions" and were "under no stress or duress themselves"(173) the conditions of the Third Reich killers were significantly different.
"Pale and nervous, with choking voice and tears in his eyes, Trapp visibly fought to control himself as he spoke... This assignment was not to his liking, indeed it was highly regrettable, but the orders came from the highest authorities." Browning gives us a deep insight into the true "ordinariness" of these men what could've possibly been the catalyst behind them becoming ruthless killers. Uncommon to what we would normally have thought, there is that level of humanness in these men that we can all relate to. And so we are forced to remove that label of cold-blooded murderer from these men.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I agree that there should be a level of responsibility taken on by these men for the deeds that they have done. It really is not reasonable to blame the consequence of their deeds upon the fact that they were simply complying with authorities. Commander Trapp in this instance even "made an extraordinary offer: if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step out." Yet under these circumstances, many of them still felt compelled enough to murder innocent women and children. Browning even writes how 10-20 percent of the men had chosen to refrain from any of these shooting activities. So it begs to ask this question of what about the remaining 80-90 percent of men? What could've possibly pushed them to kill? In order to get a better glimpse into the circumstances in which these ordinary men were placed in, we have to ask ourselves "what would I have done in their shoes." It really is a hard question to answer, but Browning reveals how this is exactly the state of "humanness" that went on in the minds of these men. There is no clear and distinct one answer to the cause of their actions. Yes, there is the strong dictatorship of the Third Reich at hand, but that is only one of the mixes within the complexity of why we humans do anything at all.