Conformity

The book “Ordinary Men” allows us to take a peak into the minds of the men responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent men and women so that we can try to understand what would possess average human beings to commit these atrocious crimes. I believe, after reading Browning’s book, is that as soon as these men decided to put aside their own free will and be hypnotized by the governments legitimization of this act, they stopped being themselves and became tools that the Nazi regime used to carry out its bidding. The saying that is commonly used by these men was that they were “just following orders.” An interesting reason that Browning puts forth in his book was how big a factor conformity played in fulfilling these acts. This is most evident in a quote from Browning, “At Lomazy following orders reinforced the natural tendency to conform to the behavior of one’s comrades. This was much easier to bear than the situation at Jozefow, where the policemen were allowed to make personal decisions concerning their participation but the ‘cost’ of not shooting was to separate themselves from their comrades and to expose themselves as ‘weak.’ (page 87) In a society where the strength of the German race was glorified, the soldiers of the German army had a certain persona they had to live up to. They had to show no weakness at the risk of being seen as not German enough. So even when the option was provided to them of not being apart of the shooting squad, most of them would not take it even if they wanted to. The firing squads were set up in such a way that the men were not alone in their actions. They took on this task as a group reassuring the men that they were not truly cruel. Instead they were just performing their duty with their comrades. The us verse them mentality, the German race verse the Jews, that was instilled by the Nazi regime provided them with the belief that they weren’t killing innocent civilians but in fact killing the enemy like they would any other opposing soldier. No matter how many ways they spun the situation, however, the truth that they were committing genocide still slipped into some of the soldiers, showing that in the back of their minds they were still humane and felt the pain of their sins.