N1029676's List: Ordinary Men: Book Review

• Goldhagen argued that Germans possessed a unique form of antisemitism, which he called "eliminationist antisemitism", which developed over centuries prior to the 20th century. Goldhagen contends,

   

   

  The German perpetrators of the Holocaust treated Jews in all the brutal and lethal ways that they did because, by and large, they believed that what they were doing was right and necessary. Second, that there was long existing, virulent antisemitism in German society that led to the desire on the part of the vast majority of Germans to eliminate Jews somehow from German society. Third, that any explanation of the Holocaust must address and specify the causal relationship between antisemitism in Germany and the persecution and extermination of the Jews which so many ordinary Germans contributed to and supported.

• Browning challenges the argument of well-known author Daniel Goldhagen that “pent-up anti-Semitism” that simply was waiting for a Hitler to serve as a catalyst  (and was in some sense distinctive to Germany) explains these events.
• The fundamental problem is to explain why ordinary men–shaped by a culture that had its own peculiarities but was nonetheless within the mainstream of western Christian, and Enlightenment traditions–under specific circumstances willingly carried out the most extreme genocide in human history” (page 222).
• “It would be very comforting if Goldhagen were correct, that very few societies have the long-term, cultural-cognitive prerequisites to commit genocide, and that regimes can only do so when the population is overwhelmingly of one mind about its priority, justice,and necessity. We would live in a safer world if he were right, but I am not so optimistic. I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce ‘ordinary men’ to become their ‘willing executioners’” (pages 222-23).

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• and brains sprayed everywhere and besmirched the shooters” (Browning, 64). After the day’s massacre, the men returned to their barracks and drank heavily, in what would seem to be a vain attempt to repress the memories of the killing in which they participated.
• “There was no forewarning or time to think, as the men were totally “surprised” by the  Józefów action,” Browning writes, “Unless they were able to react to Trapp’s offer on the spur of the moment, this first opportunity was lost” (Browning, 71). Aside from this, the pressure to conform also factors into soldiers’ unwillingness to abstain from the killings at the start.
• some of the Reservists claimed that they didn’t want to be thought of as “cowardly” by their comrades.
• In the remainder of the book, Browning attempts to answer the question: “how do ordinary men commit these sort of atrocities?” He first states that there are two kinds of atrocity which take place in war: those associated with a certain “battlefield frenzy,” in which brutalized and embittered soldiers seek to have revenge on those they deem their enemy, and those which occur as “standard operating procedure,” such as the fire-bombings of German and Japanese cities (Browning, 160-161).
• he makes reference to two very important psychological studies, Milgram’s Obedience Study and Zimbardo’s Prison Study, which explain how normal human beings can be coaxed into perpetrating violence against others out of a natural tendency towards obedience
• Browning’s book has done what few other genocide texts have: given a clear insight into who the actual perpetrators of genocide are. People hardly envision middle-age working class men in this position, and that is why the account of Reserve Police Battalion 101 is particularly unsettling. These men were practically the definition of normal; they aren’t thought of as particularly “young” or “old”; their social standing is pretty unremarkable.
• Genocide becomes a personal sin that we are all capable of, and this is a reality that needs to be accepted before further genocides can be prevented.

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• And yet they did kill.  After introducing the Order Police in general and Reserve Police Battalion 101 in particular, Browning catalogs the atrocities perpetrated by these “ordinary men.”  While the men found their first massacres to be horrible, Browning contends that only 10-20 percent of the men refused to kill.
• He realizes that these sources are problematic because interrogations will produce the incentive to exonerate oneself, and the time between the events and these interrogations leaves time for the imperfections of human memory to do their work.  Browning seems to approach the sources carefully, though, cross-checking information and acknowledging uncertainties. 
• To the defense of “putative duress,” the idea that perpetrators truly believed that they would be punished even if they would not have been, Browning responds while some people were pressured into killing, the culture of Battalion 101 was one in which people could dissent without much consequence at all.

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