Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

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 powerful argument Browning makes—a chilling case study in social psychology—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 of military history with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today.  

This landmark study provides a harrowing analysis of:

• The Psychology of Conformity: An examination of the group dynamics, peer pressure, and deference to authority that led average, middle-aged men to commit mass murder.
• A WWII Case Study: The true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of the German Order Police responsible for the mass shootings of Polish Jews in 1942.
• The Spectrum of Complicity: How three distinct groups emerged within the battalion: the eager killers, the obedient followers, and the few who dissented.
• Essential Holocaust Reading: A meticulously researched and vital contribution to our understanding of the perpetrators, moving beyond the myth of monstrous fanaticism.