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Ordinary Men Audiobook Summary

“A remarkable–and singularly chilling–glimpse of human behavior. . .This meticulously researched book…represents a major contribution to the literature of the Holocaust.”–Newsweek

Now available in audio for the first time, Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews–now with a new afterword and additional photographs.

Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever.

While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition.

Ordinary Men is a powerful, chilling, and important work with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

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Ordinary Men Audiobook Narrator

Kevin Gallagher is the narrator of Ordinary Men audiobook that was written by Christopher R. Browning

Christopher R. Browning is professor of history at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. He is a contributor to Yad Vashem’s official twenty-four-volume history of the Holocaust and the author of two earlier books on the subject.

About the Author(s) of Ordinary Men

Christopher R. Browning is the author of Ordinary Men

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Ordinary Men Full Details

Narrator Kevin Gallagher
Length 10 hours 0 minutes
Author Christopher R. Browning
Category
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date April 07, 2020
ISBN 9780062981486

Subjects

The publisher of the Ordinary Men is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Europe, Germany, History

Additional info

The publisher of the Ordinary Men is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780062981486.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

Paul

July 04, 2020

This is one of the essential books of Holocaust literature. When I read it, some years ago now, it changed me. It's about a Reserve Police Battalion in Poland. This was a bunch of middle-aged German guys who were unfit for military service, so they were given an easier job, which was to shoot Jewish people and bury them in woods (okay, the last bit could be hard, but generally you could get the Jewish people to do all the digging before you shot them).This was the pre-industrial phase of the Holocaust, before the purpose-built death camps at Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec were opened for business. Who rounded up these Jewish families from their little villages and marched them into the forests and gunned them down and then came back the next day and drove to a new village and did it all over again, week after week? As I say it wasn't the steely-eyed fanatical SS psychos barking "schnell! schnell!" with the big Alsation dogs at all, it was these middle-aged police reserve guys, your local baker, pharmacist or gardener, just your regular guys. Now some of them found it - well, frankly, a little too disturbing, shooting men women and children in cold blood week after week. So Browning points out that they could ask to be transferred to other duties and that was okay, they'd be transferred, no hard feelings. No problem.Now Browning was influenced by the famous Stanley Milgram electric-shock experiment. But I was thinking that maybe the conclusions Milgram and later experimenters have come to aren't quite right. I'm not a psychologist so I'm probably wrong, but here goes. Milgram et al have said that the presence of an authority who normalises certain actions which in other contexts would be considered sadistic and criminal explains the actions of the randomly-selected people who applied the fake fatal electric shocks. But considering the grim evidence presented in this book, not to mention many examples from elsewhere (Srebrenitsa, Rwanda, Cambodia, the witch craze of the middle ages), maybe its this : that there are a large number of people in every society who just don't have a moral sense at all. They go along with convention, so you don't notice them, they're not psychopaths, they don't crave power, but if you ask them to shoot a family of seven on a beautiful summer day and bury the bodies in the woods they'll just say okay, but I got to get back by five, my wife will be expecting me.

Tariq

May 27, 2019

'I reasoned with myself that after all without its mother the child could not live any longer. It was supposed to be, so to speak, soothing to my conscience to release children unable to live.'They went through their formative period in a pre-Nazi era, came from Hamburg one of the least Nazified cities in Germany, they belonged to social class that had been anti-Nazi, just how could these non-conforming end up killing innocent women, childern and men with little compulasion? The answer lies with the ideology of the German volk, which faced a constant struggle for survival ordained by nature, according to whose laws “all weak and inferior are destroyed” and “only the strong and powerful continue to propagate.” To win this struggle, the Volk needed to do two things: conquer living space to provide for further population growth and preserve the purity of the German race over all other types of ideologies propgating equality of mankind like Christianity, Liberlaism and Marxism.Jews were deemed responsbile for Liberalism and Marxism. The vast majority of unit 101 choose to conform y breaking ranks, nonshooters were leaving the “dirty work” to their comrades. Since the battalion had to shoot even if individuals did not, refusing to shoot constituted refusing one’s share of an unpleasant collective obligation. It was in effect an asocial act vis-à-vis one’s comrades. Those who did not shoot risked isolation, rejection, and ostracism—a very uncomfortable prospect within the framework of a tight-knit unit stationed abroad among a hostile population, so that the individual had virtually nowhere else to turn for support and social contact.Much more work needs to be undertaken not to repeat such bevauoirs in future culture, all the dangerous signs have to be listed and graded with clear red lines so that all future ideologies can be vetted for any repeat of murder of such scale.

Sweetwilliam

May 21, 2017

This is not an easy read. First, it reads like a scholarly thesis paper that someone wrote for a doctoral thesis. Second, the subject matter is awful and there are no heroes. Having said this, Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men is an integral read for those of us trying to make sense of the Holocaust. I decided to read Browning’s book because I wanted more insight into the psyche of the monsters that were ordered to carry out Hitler’s final solution. According to Browning, for the most part, the men of Battalion 101 were just ordinary men. I read the title of the book prior to buying it so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Browning’s analysis is clear: These men were not SS troopers and they had not been subjected to intense indoctrination or any type of brainwashing. There were very few party members. I can only remember Browning mentioning one officer that was a former member of the Hitler youth. I believe that only a few were ever in the SS prior to deployment in Poland. They were certainly not front line troops suffering from any type of combat fatigue. In fact, they hadn’t heard a shot fired in anger and there wasn’t anything frontline about them. Browning argued that they were the dregs of the Wehrmacht and they were deemed not fit for frontline duty. Most importantly, these men didn’t even seem to harbor a grudge against the Jews. With scarce exception, they hardly seemed to enjoy their task. So why did they do it? According to Browning’s interpretation of events, they did it because they were ordered to. They knew this was wrong. The Battalion Commander, Major Trapp, was a decorated combat veteran from WWI. Trapp told the enlisted men that they could be excused if they could not take part in the firing squads and then he went to an office and bawled like a baby. I took some solace that about 14 men and one officer refused to take part in the massacre and that several men refused to continue after taking part in the initial firing squad but at the end of the day, somehow the deed was done. Future actions were easier to handle in part because the killing grew more routine. Also, the policemen found ways to farm out the killing to others. They recruited Hiwis (foreigners) to do the dirty work. This included Russian prisoners (Trawnikis) who would have starved had they not been given the option to serve the Nazis. Also, the Policemen didn’t mind loading the Jews on railcars so that they could be shipped off to a death camp where others could execute them. This was much more preferable than rounding up families and personally killing them. The worst thing was to have to kill innocent people face-to-face. The author compares and contrasts the massacres committed by the Policemen to other war crimes committed during that period By US units in the Pacific and even later in Vietnam. Browning mentions that some US units in the Pacific had boasted of taking no prisoners and that there were units that collected ears etc. However, Browning makes the point that at the time these men were under duress due to combat fatigue and they had reacted to it. These policemen, on the other hand, hadn’t heard a shot fired in anger so the policemen could certainly not use this as a mitigating factor. I also personally believe that the massacres of the Polish Jews are very different than the massacres of the Chinese citizens of Nanking. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Japanese perpetrated massacres weren’t sanctioned by high command or the Imperial Government. I remember reading Ira Chang’s Rape of Nanking and reading one of the commanding General’s correspondence that imperial soldiers were acting like Genghis Khan. Iwane Matsui, the commanding General of IJA in China, gave strict orders not to harm Chinese citizens or loot. Ironically, Matsui was a great admirer of China and chastised his officers for what happened in Nanking but ultimately, this did not save him from the hangman’s noose. The implementation of the Final Solution in Poland was the exact opposite. The ordinary men of the reserve police battalion were ordered by Himmler at Hitler’s wishes to kill all men, women, and children and to shoot infants and the infirm on sight. These policemen certainly would not have carried out these massacres without orders to do so. However, they still did it and this bothers me. With a minimum of psychobabble, Browning tries to compare the actions of the Policemen with some University studies where students acting as prisoners were given fake shocks. I’m sorry, but some of this was lost on me. I believe it had little relevance to a reserve policemen being asked to blow a hole at point blank range through a defenseless child’s neck and getting spattered with their brains at times. To me it was a vain attempt to extrapolate data from a few college snowflakes and apply it to something like the Holocaust. The use of this data almost trivialized the Holocaust to some degree. I believe that these Jews would have preferred to have been shocked a few times or even shipped off to Abu Ghraib to live out the war forming naked pyramids. Early on in the book there is a letter from a German official trying to run the local economy in the east complaining about the implementation of what later became known as the Final Solution. The official claimed that his skilled workers at several factories either had fled or were shot or were transported to a concentration camp and how none of the remaining workers (including the White Russians) could concentrate on their jobs because family members were carted off. The implementation of the final solution made the local economy collapse at a time when Germany could least afford it. It makes one take a step back for a moment and wonder what could have been accomplished if the Germans would have used their precious resources (rolling stock, manpower etc.) trying to defeat the Russians? The Jews could have been left alone and even recruited to join the war effort. I wonder if we would all be eating sauerkraut and sausage three times a day.At the end of the day I am still not quite sure why these men went through with carrying out these orders? There were no reprisals if you didn’t take part other than peer pressure. Let us not underestimate the power of peer pressure. Would men today do the same thing if ordered? Would I have done what they did if I had been in their shoes? Would I have grabbed a machine gun and started shooting my fellow officers while yelling to the Jews in my best yiddish "run for the hills while I hold them off?" Probably not. I'm no Joan of Arc. I would more likely have done what Papa Trapp did. At best, I would of had the foresight to resign. As Major Trapp said during the first Jewish action “If this Jewish business is ever avenged on earth then have mercy on us Germans.” Trapp was later hanged after the war for carrying out revenge killings of Polish gentiles after a partisan action. Even this Trapp tried to mitigate. I believe the hangman’s noose may have been good medicine for a man that most likely had lived out a tortured existence knowing what he was ultimately responsible for. In my review of "Our Crime was Being Jewish" I said that the men and women who perpetrated the Holocaust should be hunted down and tried for these crimes until they take their last breath on earth. Christopher Browning’s research indicates all events are not that black and white. You would have to hang several ordinary men that you are probably no better than. Thank God every day that we Americans currently live under a different set of circumstances. Judging others is never that easy.

Jon

January 12, 2023

What makes seemingly normal people commit unforgiveable acts of evil? The men of RPB 101 were just middle-aged German men who participated in mass shootings as well as rounding up Jews for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Even more horrifying is that they were not fanatical Nazis - so how did they come to gaze so deeply into the abyss? Christopher R. Browning presents us with an explanation that is informed, original and disturbing.

Eric_W

January 18, 2010

And another in our continuing series of depressing books: Christopher Browning examines the motivation of a 500 man police battalion assigned to the rear lines of Germany's Eastern Front. This small group of men was personally responsible for the massacre of over 38,000 Jews and the deportation of some 45,000 more to Treblinka. These were not racial fanatics nor committed Nazis. Their motives were quite ordinary: careerism and peer pressure. Browning's book is based on interviews with the participants collected after the war.Not everyone blindly followed orders. The battalion's commander ordered that anyone not wishing to participate in the shootings could be excused and about 12 were. For many of the others rationalization became the order of the day. One later testified he killed only children because his partner was shooting the mothers and he did not think it was right that children should grow up without mothers.The horrifying aspect of this account is how little it took for these men to become transformed psychologically from "normal" people into willing participants. These were not atrocities one has come to expect from war during the heat of battle (Malmedy, My Lai, etc.), rather an institutionalized, bureaucratic government policy. That bureaucracy may be part of the cause. It distances people from their actions. Bureaucrats never saw the hideous result of their actions, seeing only their small paper-shuffling role.That still does not explain the actions of the men who were doing the actual killing. Women and children were marched up to graves they had been forced to dig and were shot point-blank in the head. The shooters were even instructed on the best location on the neck to shoot in order to save ammunition. Occasionally the killer would be splattered with brain tissue and skull parts.There was a deliberate process of dehumanization abetted by Nazi racial policies. In fact, the soldiers found it much more difficult to kill German speaking Jews, especially those who had fled Germany. They saw them not as the barbarians they had been told they were killing. Euphemisms, (protective reaction strikes) were common: killing became "actions" and shipping to concentration camps became "resettlements." Responsibility was diffused by deferring to orders from "above" and dividing the tasks into different parts.There was a perversion of ethical outlook, too. Those few who were revolted by what they were doing and who refused to participate were called cowards. We need to cultivate a society where those who follow individual conscience are the heroes and those who follow the crowd are the cowards.As an aside, before my Dad died, I was talking to one of the aides in his nursing home who came from Argentina. We got to talking about my years in Germany and she mentioned her grandfather had emigrated to Argentina from Germany after the war. (Little tiny red flags waving over my head.) I queried if he had been in the German army. Her response was quite unashamedly, yes, he had been in the SS. (Red Banners now waving over my head.) Then she went on to talk about how the victors rewrite history. I decided then I had to visit the men's room.

Michael

October 20, 2018

This book is difficult to read at times. I recommend reading it anyway.

Bryn

January 06, 2015

The title says it. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.I can’t weigh this against other books on the subject; I came to it as a classic case study that accepts the ordinary person in the perpetrator of historical atrocities, whom we tend to distance, essentialise, and see as inherently ‘unlike us’ by one stratagem or other.

Erik

February 03, 2017

How do normal, law abiding people get into performing abnormal acts of extreme violence? This book takes on that question as regards the members of a German Reserve Police Battalion who participated, often directly, in the murder of over 85,000 Jews, Soviets, Poles and other 'undesirables', many of them women and children, during WWII. Unusually well documented, the activities of these several hundred men are traced from month to month both from the written record and from their own testimonies.Having grown up in the United States and having seen my country commit invasions and atrocities throughout my life, most overtly by our military, and having had most of my elder relatives tell of their experiences under Nazi occupation during the war, I have grown very sensitive about acting like 'a good Nazi' myself. Of course, I do so in the sense that I pay taxes and generally don't think all that much about the violence and criminality committed in my name. And indeed, I have known plenty of persons, some of them counted as friends, who have voluntarily (!) 'served' the armed forces. Although I do my bit, here and there, to try to stop or at least mitigate such crimes, although I work by reading such books as this to remain conscientious, it is never enough.

Regina

January 28, 2018

Since I haven’t had much luck with WWII fiction lately, I chose to read this essential text for 2018 Holocaust Remembrance Day. I had to deduct one star for the Afterward that was added five or so years after Ordinary Men’s initial publication. It amounts to a pissing contest against another scholar who has been critical of the book, and a point-by-point tear down of his differing thesis. Just struck me as an odd way to conclude this reading experience.

Joshua

September 18, 2018

A Thought-Provoking ReadI think more than almost any other book I’ve read in the past year or two, Ordinary Men caused an immense amount of introspection and decision in my life. I highly recommend it to anyone who thinks they are a good person. It will change their mind.

Trish

April 01, 2017

Of all the books on the reading list for my Ideologies of the Holocaust class, this one is undoubtedly my favorite. It's a must read for anyone intrigued by the Holocaust, especially, in the "ordinary men" who carried out Hitler's orders and committed the infamously heinous crimes.

Jay

June 12, 2020

This book could do with a much wider readership.

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